DISTINGUISHED BARRISTER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 821, 22 April 1955, Page 13

DISTINGUISHED BARRISTER

SOME WERE SPIES, by the Earl Jowitt> Hodder and Stoughton, English price 16/H ERE are, first, some accounts o espionage prosecutions during the last war. The spies were quite undistin guished, minor and inept. If anything they rather command our sympathy as victims of the fumblings of the German bureaucracy. Nor are we told anything of the men themselves or even of their ultimate fate; so that the accounts lack interest and drama. In addition to these trials there is the Youssoupoff libel case | against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (we have | had the other side from Sir Patrick Hastings). There is the Major Rowlandson life insurance case. The Maior shot himself in a taxi in Pall Mall two minutes before his policy expired and the company successfully resisted liability under the nine-year-old contract with a cefence of public policy. When the author prosecuted Lord | Kylsant they were members of the same dining club. After his conviction Kylsant resigned, but on Jowitt’s motion the resignation was not accepted. After servine his sentence, therefore. Kylsant resumed active membership. "I was pleased with this ending," says Lord Jowitt, "for I felt that Lord Kylsant had been, to some extent, misled by the uncertain state of the law." Lord Jowitt mentions that he met and shook hands with Hatry ten years after {continued on next page)

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(continued trom previous page) he prosecuted the findncier, and goes on to say: "There has been some controversy recently as to whether Sir Edward Carson ever met Oscar Wilde after the celebrated trial. I can throw some light on this because Carson talked to me about it. He told me that he had been in Paris and that, walking along the street, he had come face to face with Wilde. ‘Did you stop and talk to him?’ I asked; and Carson replied, ‘Of course not!’ "’ Lord Jowitt was a distinguished barristers Attorney-General, and later Lord Chancellor during the Labour administration. He is also one of the best public speakers in England. But this book adds nothing to his stature. It is often dull and sententious, though in this respect is no worse than other legal memoirs of recent years; our interest is aroused more in the author himself and in the review of some of his more re-

markable cases.

F. J.

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