Where are they now?
I have always been interested in the great advocates of the past as well as those of the present. Advocacy styles change. Therefore what succeeded in court 50 years ago or even 20 years ago might not be the same thing that would be successful today. However like great footballers or great boxers, there is little point in noting that things have changed and they would find themselves in a very different world today. The same could be said of today's advocates footballers or boxers if they found themselves in the past. Those with talent and dedication will always find a way of making those talents relevant and useful in the era in which they live.
Looking at the trials of the past and the careers of great advocates can yield important nuggets of how to go about things as an advocate. Since times change, those lessons always have to be applied carefully, but the lessons are still there. I do not believe any aspiring barrister can ever know too much about great advocates and their performances (assuming of course they do not spend so much time on that that they neither master the law, present-day advocacy skills, or find enough time to have a real life as well).
It is of course inevitable that fame fades. I suspect that this is a trend which of course has always been there, but has been accelerated by television and the "instant celebrity then instantly forgotten" nature of much material, allied to the fact that since history and dates and facts are emphasised so much less in school nowadays this is bound to have a knock-on effect on people's skills for remembering and applying the lessons of history in all sorts of everyday fields whether it be boxing football or advocacy. Perhaps the best illustration of the fleeting nature of fame is one of my favourite poems "Ozymandias" by Shelley. (I doubt many undergraduate readers will have heard of Shelley, still less read the poem, but possibly his one enduring link to fame in popular culture is that his wife Mary wrote "Frankenstein", and albeit in circumstances very different from the book this is a monster which is trotted out from time to time in various fictional works, the name of which has to some extent passed into popular culture).
F. E. Smith was perhaps the most famous of barristers. There is an excellent book about him by John Campbell. I received my copy in 1994 as a gift from another barrister (after I had been best man at his wedding) so I do not know if it is still in print. F. E. Smith spawned so many stories and so many legends about his court performances that it is difficult to work out which ones are true and which ones are apocryphal. They show his supreme self-confidence and ready wit, but I doubt any advocate alive would get away with similar behaviour today.
I once had the opportunity to buy the old numberplate of F. E. Smith (FES 1) but decided not to since I had the number plate with my initials followed by 1 and since I only operate one car couldn't see the need for a number plate I would not use. Moreover it probably saved me having to constantly explain why I had the wrong initials on my car because most of the younger generation of barristers would not even know who he was.
What I was recently surprised about, when speaking to mini pupils at a recent event (largely people presently studying law at university or doing the Bar Finals), was how none of them seem to have heard of even more recent famous advocates. Those are ones from whom even greater lessons can be learned. I shall turn to one striking example next week.