NATIONAL LIFE STORIES CITY LIVES Henry Pickthorn Interviewed by Judy Slinn C409/105

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BRITISH LIBRARY NATIONAL SOUND ARCHIVE

NATIONAL LIFE STORY COLLECTION

INTERVIEW SUMMARY SHEET

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Ref. No.: C409/105

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Collection Title: City Lives

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Interviewee's surname: Pickthorn Title: Mr

Interviewee's forenames: Henry

Date of Birth: 29th

September 1928 Sex: male

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Date(s) of recording: 21/01/1993, 23/02/1993, 02/03/1993

Location of interview: Office of Linklaters & Paines, London

Name of interviewer: Judy Slinn

Type of recorder: Marantz

Total no. of tapes: 5 Speed:

Type of tape: C60 Noise Reduction: dbx

Mono or stereo: Stereo Original or copy: Original

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Additional material:

____________________________________________________________

Copyright/clearance: Full clearance given

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..c I T Y L I V E S"

TRANSCRIPT

TAPED INTERVIEWS

HENRY PICKTHORN

JUDY SLINN

THE OFFICES OF LINKLATERS & PAINESBARRINGTON HOUSE, GRESHAM STREET, LONDON EC2

THURSDAY, 21ST JANUARY 1993

TUESDAY, 23RD FEBRUARY 1993

TUESDAY, 2ND MARCH 1993

[TRANSCRIBED BY DON FERGUSON OF LINKLATERS & PAINES]

Henry Pickthorn F3717/A/Page 1

Tape F3717 Side A

[Interview of HENRY PICKTHORNat

Link1aters & Paines~

Thursday, 21st January 1993)

JUDY SLINN: Can I ask you, first, when you were born and where, and whoyour parents were?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. 29th September 1928. My father was then ahistory don at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He was also SeniorTutor. My mother was the daughter of a barrister. His family hailed,curiously - I don't know why I say 'curiously' - from Swansea, where theyhad a certain amount of property, because his grandfather had been aspeculative builder and had cashed in at the time when Swansea was themining centre of the world.

JUDY SLINN: Where were you actually born, then?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I was·born on the first floor of my parents' house inSelwyn Gardens, which is a little road opposite Newnham College. And Ithink the midwife attended and that was that - all a very simple affair.

JUDY SLINN: Were you the first child (the eldest child)?others?

Were there

HENRY PICKTHORN: No. I was the third child. My sister is the eldestand then my brother and then me. And there was eighteen months betweeneach of us, so we are all fairly close in age.

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Henry Picktborn F3717/A/Page 2

JUDY5LINN: 50 you are in fact the youngest?

HENRYPICKTHORN:I am the youngest, yes.

JUDY5LINN: Yes • And your parents had been living in Cambri dge some

time then?

HENRYPICKTHORN:My father was in the First World War. He had always

wanted to go to the Bar but he was extremely hard up. His father was a

merchant mariner who died at sea in 1916. There is a very moving account

of his death, because he dropped dead just as the ship got into Boston

Harbour and it was the big story on the front of the Boston Times, allvery graphic, about the storm they had come through. And there were

letters waiting for him, from the 'front', from his son (who of coursewas my father).

My father was a passionate politician and he managed to combine being a

history don with politics. He was lucky enough to be elected, at a

by-election, for Cambridge University in 1935. He was the last Burgess

for the University - the seats were abolished by Attlee' s government in

1950. 50 he sat for Cambridge University from 1935 to '50 and

subsequently was adopted for a constituency in Nottinghamshire.

JUDY5LINN: When you say he was passionate about politics, what sort of

politics? I mean•••

HENRYPICKTHORN:I think he really felt very deeply about things. He

wasn't particularly simply an organisational man who liked to win. I

think his politics were deeply rooted in his historical perception of

what was right and what was wrong. And he took the Tory Whip the whole

of his career but he was very much an independently-minded man and I

think he and a few friends in fact provided the only form of opposi tion

mhs/949/d - 2 -


to the Churchill government during the war. This sounds a bitunpatriotic but their opposition was simply in the realms of foreignpolicy. One of the Igangl (of what my father called his Igang') resignedas a Minister at the time of Yalta because he didn't approve of the dealbeing made with the Russians. And my father's speeches largely, duringthe war, were complaints about the behaviour of, first of all, supportingMihailovich in Yugoslavia and then letting him down and supporting thecommunists under Tito and also the sell-out of the Poles, which he foundmost grievous. And I do distinctly remember, very soon after Katyn, whenten thousand Polish officers were slaughtered in the woods by theRussians, his trying to raise that question and being totally choked off(so far as he could be choked off) by Anthony Eden and the likes andbeing told the object was to win the war and not to stir up trouble. Hewas that sort of politician; and, as a result, wasn't exactly popular insome of the high echelons of the party.

JUDY SLINN: Did it make any difference to you - you were old enough,presumably, to recall - when his life changed from being a Cambridge donto being an active politician in the sense of going into the House ofCommons? Did that make any difference to you or to family life?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, it did. We went to a day school in Cambridge,King's College Choir School, and one of the interesting things that I canremember about that, compared with educating one's 'own children thirty orforty years later, was that when we went to the Choir School the feeswere twelve pounds a term and the only extra that my parents paid was forfizzy lemonade, during the summer term, twice a week. And when we leftthe fees were still twelve pounds a term. And so those were the dayswhen you could plan. I don't know why that sticks in my mind but, if youtell the modern parent, they are almost incredulous that there shouldhave been such stability in prices.

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Henry Pick thorn F3717/A/Page 4

But the difference that it made was my mother and father were then awayfor the middle of the week. My father arranged to take his pupils at theweekends and he lectured on Friday and he lectured again on Mondaymorning. And my mother was in the car outside the history school and heleapt into the back of the car and she drove him to the station and theycaught the train up to London. So one didn't see them during the middleof the week •••

JUDY SLINN: Did they have •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: •••for half a year.

JUDY SLINN: Sorry. Did they have a flat in London then, or something -somewhere to stay?

HENRY PICKTHORN: My grandmother (who had been widowed quite young) had ahouse in Sloane Gardens, just by Sloane Square underground, and I thinkthere was quite a comfortable establishment and my parents just firmlytook over the best bedroom and they were there during the week.

JUDY SLINN: Which grandmother was that?

HENRY PICKTHORN: That was my mother's mother.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. And who looked after you three?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well we had - it sounds frightfully grand - but therewas a staff in our house in Cambridge. There was a cook who became oneof our greatest friends, although we never really got to know her untilthe war. I don't know why that should have been - or perhaps we werejust a bit older. But she was a tremendous friend of ours. And we had aseries of I don't know whether you call them 'nannies' or

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'nursemaids'. They didn't seem young at the time, but they were actuallyextraordinarily young people. I think they were just wholesome countrygirls from the villages round about Cambridge. When I say we had aseries of them, I think there were only about three. The first one gotmarried; the second one got married and the third one got married. Andthey were very nice. I think there was one who was less nice, who cametemporarily in the holidays.

So I suppose they were in charge of us. But, with us going to the prepschool during the daytime, there wasn't an awful lot for them to do, andwe were reasonably well behaved, I think - 'untroublesome children I is myguess.

JUDY SLINN: Did you have a lot of friends around in Cambridge?

HENRY PICKTHORN:Yes. One knew almost everybody, really. One certainlyknew one's neighbours extremely well and the neighbours' children wereone's friends. One played in the road; one biked up and down the road.One went and shot pigeons and rooks with one's airgun in Nevnham if onecould avoid being caught, and so on and so forth. And it was all reallywhat would now be called a very jolly community. But one didn't usethose words then.

JUDY SLINN: I suppose it was because - I mean, normally, it seems to me,and from talking to other people, that somebody of your kind ofbackground would probably have gone to boarding school, but I suppose itwas the fact you had good day schools in Cambridge.

HENRY PICKTHORN: My father had been sent to boarding school at the ageof six and he was obviously a very precocious, a very clever, child. Hewas utterly miserable there and I think he also had a theory that littleboys should not be well taught. I think this might have been a mistakentheory because in fact the school we went to was a very happy one but it

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wasn't the sort of school which got top scholarships here, there andeverywhere else, although obviously there were fairly clever children,because - I don't know - on the whole, perhaps, dons are likely toproduce more intelligent children than some other people.

JUDY SLINN: It was mainly - the school was composed mainly of dons'children, was it?

HENRY PICKTHORN: There were quite a lot that came in from the outlyingvillages. I remember we had great friends from Waterbeach, the childrenof a retired army Colonel. Yes, I think by and large it was academiathat sent the children there. For instance, we had friends just up theroad (the Adrian family) - the father went on to become Master of Trinityand my contemporary is now Master (I think he may have just retired) ofPembroke. There was the Hoskyns family: he was an eminent theologian;they were just up the road as well. They all went there automatically.

JUDY SLINN: What about your sister? Presumably she didn't go there.

HENRY PICKTHORN: My sister went to the Perse School until I suppose shemust have been thirteen when she went to a boarding school inBedfordshire.

JUDY SLINN: Did your mother share your father's - you talked about yourfather's character a bit - can you talk a bit about your mother'scharacter? Did she share his interest in politics or was it simply - ordid she just go along with him during the week as a sort of - you know,as a wife would?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think she was a loyal wife and had he been in thearmy she would have followed the drum. I think she felt it was her dutyto be with him. He was always miserable if she wasn't about. And Ithink, quite rightly, she felt she had a greater loyalty to be up in

mhs/949/d - 6 -


London and come and see us, you know, at weekends. I am not saying shewas away every week. She certainly didn't neglect us or anything likethat. She wasn't passionately interested in polltics but I think shejust felt that this was his career, or part of his career, and she mustdo everything she could to help.

JUDY SLINN: Presumably - were MPs paid in those days?

HENRY PICKTHORN: They were paid six hundred a year. And I don't knowwhen the first rise came - there might have been a slight rise in thewar. It was six hundred a year and there was none of these rackets ofexpenses or having your wife as a secretary and so on and so forth. AndI think he felt quite strongly that they shouldn't be well paid. And Imust say I think he was right because our present problems are that thesebeastly MPs play polltics while they are students at university and don'tactually get on· with their work. They then fight a hopeless seat.Everybody thinks, 'How brave'. They are then given a dead safe seat andthey get into the House of Commons, never having done a darn thing orhaving had any experience. And I think that in fact this is possibly ourpresent undoing. If only there was a rule that you couldn't be electedto be an MP until you were forty-five, we would have a better lot ofpeople in the government. But that is digressing, obviously.

JUDY SLINN: Can we come back just to your father's family and yourmother's family. Were they - did they come from big families? Did youhave a lot of aunts, uncles, cousins on either side?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Not a lot. My father's family consisted of - my fatherwas the eldest and I think he was much the cleverest.sister and then a brother and then another sister.

The next one was aSo there were four of

them. They were always extremely hard up, and I mean really hard up,because my grandfather, as I mentioned before, was a merchant mariner. I

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Henry Pickthom F3717/A/Page 8

think he vas an excellent sailor and he vas the captain of a ship,

certainly before my father vas born and until he died, but vork vas

extremely difficult. I think the captains of the shipping industry ",ere

really hard men. Whenmy grandfather died saving his ship, there ",as no

question of a pension for his ",ido", - nothing at all. And that in fact

",as the reason "'hy my father didn't go to the Bar, because he had to get

a quick job, ",here he vas paid, to support his mother and I think his

sisters too.

So vhen he vas offered a Fello",ship just before the First World War, I

think in 1913, he took it like a shot, although it ",asn't really ",hat he

",anted to do.

JUDYSLINN: Did he then go and fight •••

HENRYPICKTHORN:Yes.

JUDYSLINN: ••• in the First World War?

HENRYPICKTHORN:He joined up in 1914, like everybody else. He vas

quite severely vounded, He vas first of all - he joined a TARegiment

called 'The Sixteenth Londoners' (or their other name vas 'The Civil

Service Rifles') and they were rather curious. They wore field grey but

they drilled like riflemen. They ver e attached to the Sixtieth Rifles.

I think he had a pretty beastly time in France and he then volunteered

for the Royal Flying Corps. He vas posted to Salonika, vhere again I

think they had a fairly beastly time. And of course their aeroplanes

",ere much inferior to the Germans'. And on the ground the infantry they

",ere fighting ",ere the Bulgarians, ",ho I gather ",ere an extremely

unpleasant sort of people to fight against. I mean, they ",ould shoot

prisoners and they ",ould torture them and so on and so forth. And again

he ",as quite badly ",ounded. Quite a curious story: "'hen he ",as carried

back to the field aid post he heard the doctor in the tent saying, "I am

mhs/949/d - 8 -


awfully sorry. I am far too tired. I can't look at another patient

tonight." And he recognised the voice of a boy who had been his 'fag' at

school and so he shouted with all his strength and said, "You jolly well

will come and look at me, my man!" And he was patched up and was sent

to Malta and, as luck would have it, they were torpedoed on the way. He

was invalided out at the end of 1917, I think.

Meanwhile, his brother joined the Royal Flying Corps and he was actually

quite an 'ace'. He accounted for ten German aeroplanes shot down. I

wish I knew the family history better but, according to my brother, he

actually twice took on the Red Baron, Baron Richthofen, and fought him to

a standstill. But it is awfully difficult. I would love to find out the

details. You write to the Royal Air Force and they put you in touch with

somebody else. So I can't really vouch for that. He was awarded a

Military Cross. And he, poor chap, contracted illnesses and died of

leukemia about ten years after the war, but it was largely as a result of

the war.

His sister, the first sister, was a nurse during the war (just) and a

nurse afterwards and then got married and that was that. The younger

sister is still alive. She is ninety-two now. Sadly her young man was

killed in the First World War and she went into teaching and then she

took the veil. She converted to Rome and she must have been a nun now

for over sixty years. She became Abbess (for ten years) of a Cistercian

nunnery in Dorset. I always like to think that, if she had still been

there and we were living in the Middle Ages, she would have been the

first Abbess to sit in the House of Lords, but never mind! It hasn't

happened!

So that was their family. But I think, actually, poverty was something

that always stared them in the face.

JUDYSLINN: And your grandmother on that side, did she survive? I mean,

you obviously, presumably, never knew your grandfather.

mhs/949/d - 9 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: No, I never knev my grandfather. My grandmother vas avery strong character. She vas a Scot. Her surname vas Murray. And herfather had gone out to the West Indies to manage the sugar plantation forthe Berkeley family. The Berkeley family pride themselves on being oneof the very fev families that can trace their ancestry backpre-Conquest. They vere very distantly related to the Berkeleys ofBerkeley Castle, you knov vhere Edvard the Second vas murdered and allthat sort of stuff. But of this particular branch, there vas a Berkeleyvho made quite a lot of money out of supplying the troops in thePeninsular War, and he put his savings into a sugar estate in Grenada.And one of my cousins in fact still had an interest in this estate asrecently as the early 1960's, vhen he sold out his (I can't remember)three/sixty-fourth share. Anyway, her father vent· out to manage theirestate and she - I don't quite knov hov - I should think she met mygrandfather vhen he vent there on a ship. And she married at the age ofeighteen. It vas quite a hard life. When my father vas born, he used togo to sea and he vas popped into the draver in the chest-of-dravers inhis father's cabin and that vas his cot, so to speak.

JUDY SLINN: So she actually travelled vith her husband?

HENRY PICKTHORN: She travelled vith her husband quite a lot, yes. Theyhad rented accommodation in Ilford, vhich vas their family home.

JUDY SLINN: In vhere? Sorry.

HENRY PICKTHORN: In Ilford, London.

JUDY SLINN: Ah yes, yes. And she survived until •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: She died during the Second World War. She also becamea Roman Catholic, I should think at the same time as her youngest

mhs/949/d - 10 -


daughter. And there was a wonderful arrangement. She lived in a nunnerywhich was attached to a girls' school and she would do a bit of teachingor cheer up the girls if they were downhearted and so on and so forth.It was an admirable way for a widow to spend her declining years.

JUDY SLINN: So that's your father's family. Now what about yourmother's family?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well my mother's family were a great deal better off.Her mother was the daughter of a High Court judge called Grantham, saidto have had more cases reversed, I think, than any other judge apart fromKekewich (who in fact is a connection of my wife's family). He was •••

JUDY SLINN: Oh, was he? He married a Freshfield, of course•••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Did he?

JUDY SLINN: •••Kekewich.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I didn't know that. Yes. I believe he was not a verynice man, according to his daughters-in-law (my wife's great-aunts). MrJustice Grantham had been a Tory MP for Croydon and I suspect in thosedays, once you were a Tory MP and a barrister, if you wanted to, youcould almost invite yourself on to the Bench, which in those days was insome ways more distinguished than it is now; although it is stillobviously extremely distinguished to be a High Court judge. But therewere only fifteen High Court judges, I think, in the King's BenchDivision and he was one of them. He must have earned quite a lot ofmoney at the Bar because they had a very grand house at Barcombe inSussex.

So that was my mother's grandfather (through her mother); and her father,as I said, came from Swansea where they had been very fortunate. I think

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Henry Pick thorn F37l7/A/Page 12

they had had money for qui te a while. My mother's maiden name was

Richards. They had a bank in Swansea, which went bust - when I think all

banks went bust - in the 1830's and 40's. But the successful member of

the family was the chap who buil t all the terraced houses when Swansea

suddenly became (as I think I said earlier) the centre of the mining

industry - I should have said 'mineralogy', I think. I think it was the

great centre for copper smelting and various other metals were brought in.

JUDYSLINN: Yes.

HENRYPICKTHORN:Tin and so on. And the world price of copper, I am

assured, was fixed in a pub in Swansea. Of course all these workers

needed houses and he ran up some jolly good house for them, which

unfortunately aren't worth as much as they should· be, because we have

still got some of them and we can't sell them. They are all let on long

leases and so on. But there was money there and that's why I am fairly

certain that my mother's father, who was called to the Bar, and I doubt

whether he practised very seriously. I think he simply had a pretty

decent income; he married at the end of Victoria's reign and in Edwardian

days, if you had money, the fashionable thing was not to work.

JUDYSLINN: Yes. Well, if there was no need to work, why work?

HENRYPICKTHORN: Well, I don't know. I think the Protestant 'work

ethic' has now rather come back and I think quite rightly in away. I

think probably not working is a bit bad for the character and pretty

demoralising. You remember Kenneth Clark's memoirs saying that his

parents came from the idle rich and he then wrote, "There may have been

some richer, but certainly there were none idler!"

JUDYSLINN: And was your mother - your mother wasn't an only child, I

presume.

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HENRY PICKTHORN: No. She was the eldest of five. She had two sistersand then two brothers. The sisters all married. One of the brothers wasquite distinguished at the Bar and became Official Referee which I thinkis now equivalent to a High Court Judge, and the other brother never didvery much.

JUDY SLINN: Were there cousins on that side that you •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, quite a lot.

JUDY SLINN: Did you see much of them?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, we certainly did. We saw a lot of one of thefamilies, the next sister, because she married a chap who went out toSudan. I think he ran the public works department, which was ratherdespised by the other government departments. And they spent their lifein the Sudan. They went there, I suppose, in the 1930's and were thereright through the thirties until the end of the war. They did all sortsof noble things during the war. And their children lived with us becauseit wasn't suitable in those days for English children to be in theSudan. It was too hot and so on and so forth. And obviously it wouldhave been very awkward for them to have been there during the war. Sothey really, the two (the brother and sister), were like brother andsister to us, because we all grew up together. So my mother only hadthree of her own but she had a household of five children.

JUDY SLINN: And did you know both the grandparents on that side? Werethey both •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: No. My grandfather had died - again quite young - Ishould think in about 1918. My grandmother survived until about 1945.

mhs/949/d - 13 -


JUDY SLINN: Did you see much of her, as a child?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, quite a lot. We used to go and stay at her Londonhouse for a short while each holiday and she would probably come down toCambridge quite often too. She was a passionate bridge player. I don'tthink she was anything particular, apart from being very good at bridge.

JUDY SLINN: Fine. So now we have got you - did you enjoy - can we goback to your schooldays.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes.

JUDY SLINN: Did you enjoy your time at King's College Choir School?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I think I was a perfectly happy child. I don'tknow that one thought one might like school days to go on for ever. Wehad a headmaster who was a great character, called Fiddian (commonlyknown as 'Fid'). He was ahead of his time in some ways, although hedidn't have grand ideas about the philosophy of how to teach or how boysshould behave. But if we had a cold winter, as for example we had in1940 (a very cold winter), and the fens were covered in ice, he thoughtthis was too good an opportunity to miss. And so the school gave uplessons and we spent the whole time skating. Well that was jolly nice.One looks back on that with very happy thoughts. He also designed a formof canoe which we could build in the carpenter's shop: for a cost, Ishould think, of less than a pound for the raw materials; we all builtour own canoes and we used to have wonderful trips on the Cam.

But it wasn't a school, as I said earlier, where you were pressurised orpushed in the least little bit. It had quite strong discipline; the

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cane was quite widely used without any resentment at all. Of course thereal reason for the school was to provide the choir for King's CollegeChapel. And, of the boys in the school - say there were a total of ahundred and ten - I should think that thirty would have been choirboys orprobationers for the choir and the rest were evenly divided betweenday-boys and boarders who came from anywhere. Some of the boarders werethere because they had hoped to get in the choir but didn't. So when Isaid earlier that it was largely academic in the make-up of the parents,obviously, I don't think it was for the boarders~

JUDY SLINN: And you were there until when?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I was there until - it sounds quite absurd - Francefell, when I think the headmaster's wife had a breakdown and the schoolactually closed down. I think it might have been closed for as long as ayear. Which just shows, I suppose, how shattering the fall of Francewas. Looking back now, it seems extraordinary that the school could justclose down and reopen when things started to look a bit better.

I was then sent to a fashionable boarding school for a year, which was avery different kettle of fish. It was a school which had a greathonours' board and the great thing was to get the top four scholarshipsto Winchester and so on and so forth. I suppose there were abouteighteen boys leaving each year and if they didn't get fourteen withscholarships they thought they were doing badly.

JUDY SLINN: Where was this?

HENRY PICKTHORN: It was called Winchester House. I think it is a verygood school. I mustn't run them down. But, looking back, I think it wasunhealthy, the degree which one was made to work. One went to bed withone's latin vocab under one's pillow and one went on learning the words

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until the lights went out and then you grabbed the thing again in themorning until breakfast because you were frightened you would get intotrouble if you didn't know your stuff. But it certainly was mosteffective. Where I think it was bad was I think it probably did get someboys scholarships who really weren't up to it. I suspect that when theywent on to public school and later life, to have been successful youngand then to find it all rather falling apart could be damaging.

End of Tape F3717 Side A

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Henry Pickthom F3717/B/Page 17

Tape F3717 Side B

HENRY PICKTHORN: Parents did not send boys there because they had failedtheir common entrance or had just failed to get a scholarship andrequired cramming for a term or two, but it certainly was a school whichbelieved in cramming and they made the children work jolly hard, from thetime they went in to the time they left. And of course, arriving as Idid at the age of very nearly twelve, and being put rather high up in theschool, it was quite difficult to catch up when one hadn't been used tothis sort of system, and one hadn't been drilled in all the rhymes aboutthe prepositions with the ablative and prepositions with the accusative.One had to learn them fairly fast or one got into trouble.

JUDY SLINN: And you were there for how long?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I was there just for a year.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: It was the time that the Germans were bombingCoventry. The most vivid memory is the awful business of going down tothe cellars to sleep, night after night, and those ghastly hammocks whichyou could fallout of on to a very hard concrete floor. And one also wasgetting quite hungry: I think food was getting quite short. So it

wasn't a lot of fun. And perhaps I was lucky I was only there for threeterms.

JUDY SLINN: And then where?

HENRY PICKTHORN: And then I went to Eton. I think the prep school,because they liked all this stuff of scholarships and honours' board,

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Henry Pickthorn F3717/B/Page 18

would have liked me to have stayed on and sat an Eton scholarship fromthere. And I am awfully sorry to say that I suspect I would have got it,because the teaching was so efficient. But the compromise was I went toEton and I was supposed to sit the scholarship exam after I had beenthere for two and a half terms. Well that was absolutely hopeless. Imean, you go to Eton and there is nobody cramming you there for that sortof thing. So I fell rather flat on my face - not that I regretted it in.the least.

JUDY SLINN: Was Eton your parents' choice? Do you know why they choseit, assuming it was theirs.

HENRY PICKTHORN: When you say "my parents' choice" - I think it was myfather's choice and I don't think it ever occurred 'to my mother to say,"Oh, I'd rather he went to Charterhouse, where my brothers went". Myfather, having been a tutor at Cambridge, I think knew quite a lot aboutschools. I think he had had some Etonian friends when he was anundergraduate, and I think he quite liked them. He was at Trinity as anundezgraduat.e and then became a Fellow of Corpus. He took a lot oftrouble. I know he talked to the Official Solicitor, who used to be incharge of the wards in Chancery, to find out which schools wrote reportswhich made any sense, and the answer was there were only two: one wasEton and the other was Winchester. And all the others had the type ofform that goes round from master to master and they rather copy what thechap above has said; whereas at Eton each master writes an individualletter (sometimes on a piece of proper writing paper) and so they don'tsee what the other people are saying. And I think that impressed him alot.

My brother had already gone there and also the cousin who used to livewith us.

JUDY SLINN: So your brother was already at Eton?


mhs/9S0/d - 18 -


JUDY SLINN: And your cousin?


JUDY SLINN: Fine. Were you close to your brother? Did you get on wellwith him?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Not badly but I wouldn't say 'well'. He was much moresuccessful than I was and I think he got a bit arrogant about hissuccess. But, no, we got on very well I think.

JUDY SLINN: There is - what - about three years between you?

HENRY PICKTHORN: No. Only eighteen months.

JUDY SLINN: Oh, sorry. I was thinking he was the eldest.

HENRY PICKTHORN: No. My sister is the eldest. No. Only eighteenmonths. In practice there was only a year between us in school order,because our birthdays were such that he had been there a year before me.So I was only a year behind him in the school.

JUDY SLINN: Do you have any other recollections of the impact that thewar made on you? You talked about the food getting a bit thin andbombing raids.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well, it sounds quite ridiculous but here I am, agedsixty-four, and goodness knows how many years after the end of the war itis, but it is getting on for fifty, isn't it?

JUDY SLINN: Mm.

mhs/950/d - 19 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: But in a very stupid way one still slightly thinks"Before the war - this" and "After the war - that". 50 I think it didmake a tremendous impression on one. It also sounds extremely stupid andvain and one thing and another but I remember Isherwood, in one of hisnovels (a partly autobiographical novel), saying that he was of thegeneration at school during the First World War ashamed that they weretoo young to go away and fight. That is also actually how I think peopleof my age were affected, although I was only sixteen and a half when thewar ended in 1945. I think there was the same sort of feeling, with meand my contemporaries, that one feels slightly ashamed and now one looksjust as old as all these great heroes who were in the war but were infact only about three or four years older than one was oneself. I thinkthat had some effect.

Of course, again, at Eton I missed the time when the school was actuallybombed. That was 1940. My brother and cousin were there. The onlybombing that we suffered was the 'doodlebugs' and the V2s right at theend of the war. I think by that time one knew one was winning so fastthatone didn't mind. It disrupted school life a lot, because we weresupposed to go out and sleep in the air-raid shelters. Each House had anair-raid shelter in the garden. That was very uncomfortable.

JUDY 5LINN: Were those 'Anderson' shelters or whatever •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think they were bigger than 'Anderson' shelters.They were just a sort of concrete bunker with a hole at one end and ahole at the other end. I believe that we should have been much safer ifwe had stayed indoors, because all one was doing was cooping upforty-five boys (and there was a special separate end of the air-raidshelter for the maids) - all you were doing was concentrating themtogether so that if one thing did land they would all have gone up.

mhs/950/d - 20 -


There was an awful row when the 'doodlebugs' started, because theHeadmaster (Claude Elliott) who really, I think was saved by the warbecause he had been appointed in about 1933, and was extremelyunpopular. What saved him was his ability to organise things during thewar. Likely it was he who said we had all got to have air-raid sheltersand so on. And when the 'doodlebugs' started, he said - after theGuards' Chapel was destroyed one Sunday in June 1944 and almost 121people were killed as a result, including, obviously, quite a lot ofparents of the boys - it was really quite unpleasant - he said, "We can'tgo on having school chapel in case the same thing happens here", and sohe dispersed the boys whenever he could. We didn't have chapel anymore. We simply had prayers twice a day in the House dining rooms. Andagain, for examinations, instead of collecting a large lot of peopletogether in the gym or the school hall or somewhere like that, we had tobe dispersed.

The Provost, Lord Quickswood (commonly known by his nickname 'Linky',born Lord Hugh Cecil, the chap who fought the revision of the prayer bookin 1928 and a great friend of Winston), was a very high Anglo-Catholic.And the row was because he thought it was quite wrong to stop Chapel. Hesaid, "Worship of God is most important and the boys must go on coming toChapel." There was a curious demarcation line: the Provost at Eton wasin charge of the Chapel but the Headmaster was in charge of the boys andresponsible for their teaching. It was difficult to see who actually wasgoing to win this one. But the Headmaster, quite rightly, did win. Heasked, "How can I teach the boys if they are all dead?" And so theChapel services carried on, simply with the Provost and the Chaplain andthe choirboys. And so they had to worship God together, without the restof us.

JUDY SLINN: So you stayed at Eton until•••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Until the end of 1946.

mhs/950/d - 21 -


JUDY SLINN: Were you - overall, would you describe yourself as happythere•••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes•

JUDY SLINN: •••or unhappy?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think extremely happy very happy indeed.Curiously, the term that I looked on as the most enjoyable was my firstone. But I think one was happy throughout, yes.

JUDY SLINN: And then where did you go? And then what happened?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well, I think - I don't know whether it was verynaughty or not - it is the only time I can remember my father actuallyever pulling a string for me. We were told by the Headmaster ofCharterhouse (a man called Birley, who subsequently became Headmaster ofEton) - he rang round all the schools - "If you don't get your boys tovolunteer for a Regiment, they will be sent off as Bevin boys, working incoal mines." Well, actually one or two of them were. Of course this wasthe most awful, awful thing one thought could possibly happen. And so Iwent with a party up to London and volunteered to join the RifleBrigade. So technically I wasn't a National Serviceman: I was avolunteer. And the string that my father pulled was to go to the thenUnder Secretary of State for War and arrange that I should join the armyimmediately after leaving school. So I left school, I suppose, about the19th of December and I joined the army on the 31st of December (justinside 1946). And the reason why he pulled this string was 'The sooneryou are started, the sooner you are finished', and I think it didactually work out quite well.

mhs/950/d - 22 -


So on the last day of 1946 I was given a warrant and I took a train up toStranraer, where one spent a very uncomfortable night in a transit campand then one went on the ferry from Stranraer to Larne and I suppose itwas a train to Belfast and then I think we were just marched, in civilianclothes, from the station at Belfast to Palace Barracks in Holywood andthe doors clanged behind us and that was the start of one's (whateverybody else called) National Service. I used to pretend I was avolunteer.

I spent, I suppose, about six months at the training battalion, PalaceBarracks in Holywood. In those days, you weren't allowed out unless youwore uniform. The reason being to try and show the would-be SinnFeinners that there were a lot of troops about, however young. Youweren't allowed out at all during your first four weeks there.

During one's six months' training, one went to something called a'WOSBY', which I think stood for 'War Office Selection Board', and thatwas the greatest fun. One went to Dalkeith in Edinburgh and was treatedalmost like a gentleman. They then picked most of us and we were on thelist to go to OCTU (Officer Cadet Training Unit). There must have been abit of delay one way and another. I went to OCTU in September 1947, andit was at Eaton Hall, Cheshire, the home of the Duke of Westminster, whohad done a very smart deal with the War Office. I think he had let theWar Office take virtually the whole of Eaton Hall and the land on a leaseof ninety-nine years, or thereabouts, the War Office then thinking theywould want to have an OCTU for the next hundred years. But I think theDuke was paid handsomely when they discovered they didn't need this OCTUafter about ten years and he got his land back with a large payment.

I was at OCTU until the end of that year, when I got a commission. Thecadet who won the Belt of Honour was Jeremy Morse who is now chairman of

mhs/950/d - 23 -


Lloyds Bank. I think he vas a most unmilitary figure but he vas such anoutstanding chap in every other yay that he vas quite right to have beenavarded the Belt of Honour.

I vas commissioned into the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment vhovere in the same Brigade as the Northamptonshire Regiment, and I vas thensent to join the Northamptonshire Regiment in Austria. The Northamptonsvere one of three infantry battalions comprising the remnants of theEighth Army - you remember, the Eighth Army finished the var by pushingthrough Italy and into Austria.

JUDY SLINN: Mm.

HENRY PICKTHORN: And that vas all a very happy time. I mean, it vasabsolutely gorgeous for an eighteen and a half year old to have aplatoon. We vere initially based near a village called Villach. It iscurious hoy ignorant one vas. Because, although one had heard one'sfather talking about all the horrors that had been going on during thevar, vhen I vas first driven from Villach up to Spittal (vhere ourbattalion vas quartered) one passed a lot of elderly people, ofindeterminate sex, simply dressed in blackout curtains. And I remembersaying to the driver, "What on earth is this?" And he said, "Oh they areDPs". And I said, "What's a DP?" And he said, "A DP is a deportedperson. During the var the Germans deported a lot of 'slaves' and allthe young ones have gone back home and these are the old ones that nobodyvill take back." Well of course that vasn't quite true. I am afraid,probably, in these camps vere a lot of Cossacks and Chetniks and so onand so forth, and the young ones, I am afraid, had been sent back and hadbeen murdered in Russia or Yugoslavia and these vere just the verydecrepit ones that nobody could be bothered vith. But I didn't have thesense, really, to understand vhat had been going on.

JUDY SLINN: Had you been abroad before? Was this your first •••

mhs/950/d - 24 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: No, never. This was my first trip abroad, becauseobviously I was only twelve when the war started - oh, I wasn't as muchas that, actually, was I? - no, I was just eleven when the war startedand one didn't travel during the war. And so this was absolutely myfirst sight of abroad and very revealing it was.

As I said, I joined the Northamptonshire battalion but I was actuallysent up to Catterick to collect a draft (of, I think, about Companystrength) of people joining the West Yorks, and I was put in charge ofthis draft. And so I had to take them from Catterick, across London toLiverpool Street, Harwich and The Hook. Of course, having arrived at TheHook - typical joke - the youngest officer was made etc train and Isolemnly had to sign for a train, which took us all the way to Villach,and it took three nights. We slept on the train. The food wasn'tsupplied on the train - I think it was later on - but in those days thetrain would stop once a day and you got out and you went to a sort ofNAAFI place, set up in a German town (or, later, an Austrian town), andthat was the way you had your food. And then at the end of the journeysome RTO solemnly came and took over the train, inspected it and gave mea signature for it. All quite absurd, but there you are.

JUDY SLINN: And so you enjoyed your time in Austria?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Oh very much, yes.

JUDY SLINN: You found it an attractive country?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, it is an attractive country, although, unusually,I don't like mountains. One felt rather confined in Spittal. One wasabsolutely at the bottom of a mountain valley and you could only lookeast and west. There was no view in either of the other directions,

mhs/950/d - 25 -

Henry Pick thorn F3717/B/Page 26

except for the mountains. But it was all good fun. And then we had

three very happy months in Vienna in the summer. The infantry battalions

took it in turn to provide guard duties in Vienna. And it was very much

at the time of 'The Third Man'. In fact, Vienna looked just like the

shots in 'The Third Man'. The driver, if you can remember, the driver of

the British Army Major who discovered Orson Welles at the end, was

wearing my regimental cap badge. So they put in all the right

contemporary colour.

And Vienna was very exciting. The cathedral was still in ruins. The

roof had been bombed by the Americans: goodness knows why they had

thought it necessary to bomb Vienna. I suspect the same reason why we

bombed Dresden - the Russians asked them to. So it had been fairly 'laidabout'. And the big Opera House was just being rebuilt. But there wasanother Opera House called the Volks Opera, where we went. Monty was

then Chief of the Imperial General Staff and we had the privilege of

being addressed by Monty when he came to visit all the troops. Every

single officer was herded into the Schonbrun Palace, and he came and

addressed us. It was the second time he had spoken, because he had come

down to school and he had the most marvellous way of getting his points

across. He would say everything twice. He would say, "The plan was very

good. It was a very good plan. I made the plan. The plan was made by

me." It really was the most effective way of getting his message to the

audience.

There were other troops there. Vienna was divided into four zones: the

Russian, the American, the French and ourselves. And, unlike Berlin,

there was an international sector right in the middle. Let us say, if it

had been London (God forbid!), the international sector would have taken

in the West End, or something like that. And so there were joint patrols

in the middle. Otherwise you had duties in your sector and there you

largely remained. I suppose the point of our being there was to be a

hostage if the Russians should start something. It was at the time of

the Berlin airlift.

mhs/950/d - 26 -


JUDY SLINN: Yes - 1948, wasn't it?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. And some of my contemporaries were verydisappointed not to be there, because they had been in Berlin and I thinkthey were rather jealous, when the message came down that the Worcesterswere digging in in Berlin and so on and so forth, and we were justfrolicking around in Vienna. But never mind!

JUDY SLINN: Presumably your brother was doing National Service at thesame time?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well my brother was just in the tail end of the war.He never saw any action. But he was in the Navy. He joined the Navy, Isuppose, in 1944. And, rather against his will, he was persuaded to do ashort course for naval officers at Cambridge, which took about sixmonths, and so that meant he never actually was at sea until the end ofthe war. And I think he had a much less enjoyable time than I did,because he never left home waters. He was serving at Rosyth; I think ona rather unpleasant job on an air/sea rescue launch, or something likethat.

JUDY SLINN: I didn't ask you before: I mean, if you hadn't been abroad,did your family - where did you go for - did you have family holidays andwere they in England? I mean - obviously, you know, the cut-off point ofthe war perhaps - were your parents likely to have taken you abroad sortof had the war not happened, do you think?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't think they would have taken us abroad, becauseI think they rather disapproved of hauling small children round foreignparts: (a) they weren't particularly well-to-do and it was expensive;and (b) I think they thought we were better off doing things at home withfriends and books (they were frightfully keen that one should read alot).

mhs/950/d - 27 -


The holidays before the war were partly down near Swansea, where we had agreat-aunt who had a lovely house looking over Mumbles Bay, at WestCross. And that was all very nice. And then the uncle who died in thethirties took to farming in Suffolk and we used to stay on the farm for abit until my parents bought a cottage in the village, which theyeven tually retired to and lived in very happily for qui te a long while.And so we used to have holidays at Orford in Suffolk, where there is verygood sailing - we had a dinghy - and so on and so forth.

During the war that part of Suffolk was a restricted area because it wasa training area and you weren't allowed to go there unless you were afull-time resident. So we couldn't go there during the war. And mymother, quite ingeniously, persuaded an MP to lend us his large house atMelbourne, just outside Royston. He also had a property in Yorkshire andcuriously, even during the war, he used to take his herd of cows for achange of grass up to Yorkshire. They were sent by train up toYorkshire. And so he cleared out and we used to move into his house anddid so-called war work on the farm, which was enormous fun and one got onvery well with the bailiff and some of the men. My mother used to drivethe lorry picking up the sheaves after the harvest. And one did a lot offrui t picking, because it was very much the centre then of the bestgreengages and of very good plums in south Cambs. So I think we wereset to work quite hard - certainly during the summer holidays.

During another holiday, I remember, right after the fall of France, whenthere was a great shortage of rifles, they had dug up a lot of rifleswhich had been put in a great pack of grease since the First World War;the Corn Exchange in Cambridge was filled with volunteers cleaning theserifles. Then we were sent to the ADC, the Amateur Dramatic Club Theatre,tying bits of sacking on to netting to make camouflage and so on and soforth. So one was very conscious, I think, that we all had to do ourbit, so to speak.

mhs/950/d - 28 -


JUDY SLINN: Fine. Now what happened at the end of your National Servicein Austria? You came back to England, presumably?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. Well, my father having, as I say, pulled astring, because I had an 'exhibition' to go up to Trinity, I was able toget out in time to go up to Trinity in October 1948. So my NationalService was about three months shorter than other people's two years.

So I came home from Austria. I think I was slightly missed. Thereweren't many people who could run much and the Colonel was frightfullykeen on running and so I used to turn out for the Battalion Sports andhad a much more successful time running there than at any other period -running for the battalion in Klagenfurt where they had a lovely stadium(much better than anything in England at that time). I should havestayed on another week in order to represent British Troops Austriaagainst British Troops Trieste and I would have been able to go dowthere which was I think a very interesting place, because there was stilla bit of a quarrel going on whether Trieste should go to Italy or whetherit should go to Tito.

But I had been asked to go deer-stalking with an old school-friend, whichseemed a better opportunity, so I came home, did that for four days andwent straight to Cambridge in October 1948.

JUDY SLINN: What were you going to read?

HENRY PICKTHORN: History - which I did for two years.switched to law in my third year.

And then I

JUDY SLINN: When you went up, did you already - did you have a career inthe law in view?

mhs/950/d - 29 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: No, no career in view whatsoever.

JUDY 5LINN: It was just that you enjoyed history?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think I did - I did enjoy history, yes. That's why Iread it for the first two years and I think in a way I wish I had for thethird. But I think somebody said, "What are you going to do? Perhapsyou had better switch to law." And in fact my brother, my cousin and I -

we all switched to law in the third year, which wasn't very efficientlydone. One did a vacation (long vac) course which was only about threeweeks, but the weather was good and there was nobody about and honestlyone was as idle as sin. It was a pretty good waste of time.

50 one went up for one's final year in October, when (as I think you knowfrom your own experience) one doesn't do an awful lot of work during thefirst term. 50 one had an awful lot of law to try and learn in aboutfour months before sitting the second part of the Tripos. I was moresuccessful at history than I was at law at Cambridge.

JUDY 5LINN: I didn't ask you why you chose to go to Cambridge. You had,after all, been brought up there. I mean, was it a choice to go there?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't think it ever occurred to me to go anywhereelse. My father was a man of great prejudices. He was modest, in thatwhere some people would say they had principles, he would say, "I onlyhave prejudices". One of his prejudices was actually against Oxford,al though he had a lot of very great friends there. And I think hegenuinely thought that Cambridge was a much healthier place.

JUDY 5LINN: Do you mean in terms of physical or emotional or spiritual?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think emotional and teaching ability and one thingand another. I think he was fairly anti the sort of Evelyn Waugh, theBullingdon Club stuff.

mhs/950/d - 30 -


JUDY SLINN: The Brideshead?

HENRY P1CKTHORN: The Brideshead lot. And there was that awful story ofEvelyn Waugh and co going into - I can't remember his Christian name -anyway, there was a Professor de Zulueta and he had just finished hislife's work on (I don't know) Roman law or whatever it was, and they lita fire and burnt the lot. He had to write it all again.

So I don't think it ever occurred to one to go anywhere else. Andactually, being born and brought up in Cambridge, one was very patrioticfor Cambridge. As a boy, one loved the place and I wouldn't have wantedto go anywhere else. I don't think it would have been suggested.

JUDY SLINN: And did you enjoy your time at Trinity?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, very much. My brother went to Corpus and I wentto Trinity. I think that was done on purpose, that we shouldn't be inthe same College. I think, like everybody else - I expect you feel thesame - I think one didn't take full advantage of the opportunities opento one. But, yes, they were three extraordinarily happy years - no doubtabout that.

JUDY SLINN: And your cousin was up at the same time?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. He was at Clare.

JUDY SLINN: And what did you do, apart from work? I mean in terms ofsocial or sporting activities.

HENRY P1CKTHORN: Well, not as much as I should I have done. I used torun a little bit, but quite honestly running is extremely boring and theother people who run are extremely boring, so I never really got beyondturning out for the College.

mhs/950/d - 31 -


I was on the fringe politically, but I never in fact joined the Union orstood for any of these posts (you know, the Conservative Association oranything like that). I think I was a bit of an 'intriguer'. I used totry and get my friends into the posts they wanted, and so on.

I think I worked hard - well, I don't know about that literally. But itis difficult to say what one did do, because terms are so short. Eightweeks flashes by. One had a lot of friends and I think one should havedone more.

JUDY SLINN: Did you go home very much? Your parents were still livingin Cambridge?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Not a lot, no. No. I did in fact go to my father'slectures because I was reading history and he lectured in early Tudorgovernment.

End of Tape F3717 Side B

mhs/950/d - 32 -


Tape F3718 Side A

JUDY SLINN: At Cambridge, as you recall, did you make friends for lifeand was there a sort of social life that was both - were there womenthere? Well there were, obviously, at the Colleges.

HENRY PICKTHORN: There were, yes. They didn't playa very large part inone's life, I don't think, or possibly they played a lar"gerpart in otherpeople's lives than mine. In fact, my wife was at school there at thetime, but I had known her, off and on, since 1940. I think I made notmore than about three friends that I am really close to still; althougha great number of other acquaintances. Whether three is below average orabove average, I don't know.

I think perhaps one of the curiosities was the extremely bad standard ofteaching. I don't think the dons took nearly as much trouble as theyshould have taken. One or two of them were just too shy to do anything.Others, I think, didn't really care.

JUDY SLINN: When you say 'teaching', are you thinking in terms of thelectures or in terms of the tutorials?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I am talking in terms of 'supervisions', which isCambridge for 'tutorials'.

JUDY SLINN: Sorry. Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I mean, for instance, I was assigned to a blind don atGirton. Well I am ashamed to say - perhaps I shouldn't have been sonaughty - I didn't in fact write essays; I just wrote a few notes and weused to go and read it to her and she said, "That's all very good.That's all very interesting." But her input was negligible. And therewere others like that, who weren't blind but who were just the same.

mhs/951/d - 33 -


I didn't really discover a good teacher until the third term of my secondyear, when I was still reading history - a most wonderful man calledWalter Ullmann, who was a great authority on William of Okkem and othermediaeval characters, and he was a refugee. I don't know when he turnedup at Cambridge. But he really, I found, made one work. I mean, heenthused one and he ticked you off if you were sloppy and so on and soforth. And if only I had had him from the word go, I feel I might havemade more of my life thereafter.

Then I switched to law and I had a very nice supervisor, wi th whom Ibecame, actually, great friends in the last fifteen years of his life.But as a teacher he was absolutely hopeless. He was at that time onlyinterested in ensuring that he got a Chair and therefore he was spendingall his energies on manufacturing the invention of a 'new Chair in the LawFaculty. And one would hand in one's essays in October and you wouldn'tget them back till April, with the Tripos a week away. Well that was nogood at all, I am afraid.

It is curious, looking back, that one just took that for granted;whereas, I should think about ten years after I went down, I rememberthere was a great row at Trini ty Hall because the then senior law don(Ellis Lewis, who had been quite a distinguished man), poor chap, I thinkhe had lost his wife and suffered other misfortunes and he took to drink,and the undergraduates there rebelled, and they said they weren't goingto put up with this. And I think they were quite right, probably, to doit; although one thought, 'How very unpleasant of them to do so', butthey were quite right.

JUDY SLINN: You did say - can I just recap - you did say you and yourbrother and your cousin had all changed to law in the third year.


mhs/951/d - 34 -


JUDY SL1NN: Was this because at this stage you definitely had the law inview as a career; you had made a decision?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I am afraid not. I think it was simply one thought,'One has got to get off and earn a living somehow', and one thought onewould read law and see what one felt about it.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY P1CKTHORN: I can't honestly pretend it was anything more of avocation than that. As a matter of interest, Teddy Burn (I don't know ifyou remember Teddy Burn) - you know who I mean, th~ law don at Oxford, atChrist Church and now retired who actually comes and lectures here - Iremember him saying to me, not many years ago, "Of course, Henry, youdon't get any really clever people coming up to Oxford to read law. Ifthey are jolly good at mathematics or classics, that's what they do, andwe get the rest." And I thought this was a very encouraging and honestremark. I suspect it goes for about ninety per cent of the lawyers. AndI think those who say they had a vocation to be a solicitor, at the ageof seventeen or (I don't know what I was) twenty or twenty-one, I thinkthey are talking through their hats.

JUDY SLINN: You think there is no such thing as a vocation?

HENRY P1CKTHORN: No. I think there might be such a thing as avocation. Again I am only quoting somebody else, but I think, when youare just out of your teens, there are only two careers that you knowanything about: one is schoolmastering (if you have done NationalService, I suppose another is soldiering) and the other is whatever yourfather does. Quite honestly, you don't know really know anything aboutanything else. And I think there is a lot of humbug in peopl~ who thinkthey have a calling to do this, that or the other. I think it is largelychance.

mhs/951/d - 35 -

Henry Pickthorn F371S/A/Page 36

JUDY SLINN: How else did you spend any spare time at Cambridge; I mean,assuming you had some. I mean, were you interested in music or drama?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I was very interested in painting. I am ashamed tosay, I don't know how I did spend my time. I think possibly being on thefringe of politics took up quite a lot of time and sort of socialisingwith the politicians.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. I think, unless you have got an all-absorbing hobby,your term at university tends to go in just talking to people, really,doesn't it?

HENRY PICKTHORN: A lot of it can: a lot of it can - and possibly toadvantage; possibly not to advantage. I don't know~ Who can tell.

JUDY SLINN: It is impossible to tell.

HENRY ~ICKTHORN: It is impossible to tell.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.Cambridge.

So you were coming to the end of your time at


JUDY SLINN: And you took your degree. What happened next?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well I never went and got it, so to speak.

JUDY SLINN: No.

HENRY PICKTHORN: What else did you say?

JUDY SLINN: What happened next?

mhs/951/d - 36 -

Henry Pick thorn F371S/A/Page 37

HENRYPICKTHORN:"What happened next?" Well, I think, in my last term

or possibly even the penultimate term, I did go and talk to one or two

solicitors. A very nice chap, who was solicitor to the Gas Board, I

remember inviting me to lunch at the - is it called the United University

Club? Anyway, the club that is still going in Threadneedle Street. And

I remember being rather priggish and saying, "I think I have decided I

would like to become a solicitor", and he said, "Good God!", and I

thought it was a rather healthy remark.

JUDYSLINN: How did you come to have lunch with him? Did your father

know him?

HENRYPICKTHORN: I think he might have been a pupil in the old days.

Yes. He was called Studholme. He might have been the younger brother of

a friend who was· an MP. I can' t remember. Anyway, he was a family

friend. Yes.

JUDYSLINN: Yes.

HENRYPICKTHORN:That was just one luncheon. As I say, he was then the

solicitor to the Gas Board and fighting like mad because they were being

nationalised. But I couldn't have gone to him. He wouldn't have taken

an articled clerk anyway.

And then we had another great friend who was the Chairman of my father's

parliamentary constituency in the Carlton division of Nottinghamshire,

who was a leading solicitor in Notts (in Nottingham town, rather -

Nottingham City). I remember him saying, "Whatever you do, for God's

sake don't go to one of these big London firms." But fortunately, I

think, I ignored that advice. And the big London firm, of course, in

those days being nothing like as big as it is now.

JUDYSLINN: Sorry? The•••

mhs/951/d - 37 -


HENRYPICKTH~RN: The big London firm being nothing like the size it is

now.

JUDY5LINN: No. No. And so you came to Linklaters to do your articles?

HENRYPICKTHORN:Yes. Again, in quite a - I don't say it is amusing,

but in quite an unusual way. Whenmy father was a young don, to earn, I

suppose, not more than about twenty quid, he went to examine for the

history prize at Harrow. It was a sort of three-day operation. And he

was sent to one of the boys' boarding houses and at lunch he sat next to

the senior boy of the House whose name was Godfrey Phillips. And he was

so impressed by this boy that he gave him the prize automatically.

Godfrey Phillips then went on to Trinity and then went to the Bar. And

then - well you know all about him, of course, from the history of the

firm - then he went out to be (I don't know what it was) Chief Executive

of the Shanghai Corporation and I think was qui te heroic and one of the

last of the Europeans to leave. And he came to Linklaters during the

war. And my father rang him up and he said, "We have decided, at

Linklaters, not to take any more articled clerks for the foreseeable

future, but let him come along and have a talk." And that was how it

was; that was how I came here.

I remember another friend, who was then a Member of Parliament and had

been in one of the merchant banks, who had also done articles here, and I

remember him saying, "Oh gosh, take articles at Linklaters and you will

always get a job", which was quite an encouraging remark.

50 that was how I came to come to the firm.

JUDYSLINN: Did your father have to pay a premium?

HENRYPICKTHORN:Yes.

mhs/951/d - 38 -


JUDY SLINN: Yes, yes. It must have been one of the last premiums paid.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I was the very last one. Yes.

JUDY SLINN: Ah yes, yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Three hundred pounds. And I suggested I had it backwhen I qualified, but they - Malcolm Christopherson, who then lookedafter the finances, said it would complicate the accounts too much, andso that was that. It wasn't a thing one felt one could press.

But they were very nice, in that there was no pay, but you got a bonus.I think one's first Christmas bonus was five pounds, which actually was alot of money and one was jolly glad, because I didn't have any - I neverhad an official allowance from my parents at all. I don't know what Ireally lived on. Somebody gave me a legacy of a hundred pounds and Ithink that kept me going for a long time. But I lived at home, so that Ididn't have that sort of expense. But as for pocket money, one hadnothing at all.

JUDY SLINN: You lived at home, even when you were in articles?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I lived at home while I was in articles, yes. My

parents had a flat in Westminster.

JUDY SLINN: Ah, that's what you mean by 'home'?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, yes.

JUDY SLINN: Sorry. I was going to say•••

HENRY PICKTHORN: They had left Cambridge.

mhs/951/d - 39 -


JUDY SLINN: •••you lived in Cambridge.

HENRY PICKTHORN: No. They left Cambridge in - I think the house wassold in 1951. Yes. About, actually, when I started work here.

JUDY SLINN: And what about your brother and - before we go on to discussyour articles, can I just ask what your brother and cousin did?


JUDY SLINN: Since you had been contemporaries all the way through, orvirtually.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. Well, we were, because I had caught up. We wereall in the same year at Cambridge, because I had had less time in thearmy than my brother had in the Navy. He went to the Bar and my cousinalso became a solicitor with one of the firms in Bloomsbury.

JUDY SLINN: Fine. Now you came to Linklaters and you were articled to•••

HENRY PICKTHORN: To Godfrey Phillips.

JUDY SLINN: To Godfrey Phillips. Did you •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Until he left. He went to Lazards about - less than ayear after I joined, and I was then articled to Kenneth Cole, one of thegreatest men I have ever known.

JUDY SLINN: Did you enjoy your articles?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, I think I did. Again, in a way, it was a bit likeCambridge. Nobody took a great deal of trouble to teach you. It wasnothing like so organised as it subsequently became. For instance, my

mhs/951/d - 40 -

Henry Pick thorn F371S/A/Page 41

spell in the Conveyancing Department, as it was then called, was simplyto sit in the room of a chap who was away for six months because he vastrying to get qualified as a solicitor. And I was supposed to look afterhis work; unfortunately he was the only conveyancer in Austin Friars.All the others were in an office over the road. So there was nobody toturn to, easily or quickly. But it never occurred to one that this was abit of bad luck, or anything like that.

JUDY SLINN: How many other articled clerks were there in Linklaters whenyou became one?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well there weren't any. When I say that, there vas avery clever chap - sorry, the name escapes me - who had just taken hisFinals and went off to work for his father-in-law's firm, which vasSmiths Indus tries, makers of, you know, electrical goods and so on. Hewas the nearest thing to an articled clerk. And then, a week after Ijoined, John fforde turned up. And then, I suppose about a year after Ijoined, Hugh Paine turned up. And then, a little bit after that, MarkSheldon turned up. And that was it. So we veren't really a sufficientforce to organise and do anything, really.

JUDY SLINN: Did you get to know - so, in fact, certainly for your firstyear, it was a fairly solitary existence by the sound of it.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Oh no, it wasn't solitary.

JUDY SLINN: Ah! Sorry.

HENRY PICKTHORN: My first seat was with a litigation managing clerk andone sat in his room. He was one of the firm's great characters - JohnSanders - you will remember from the book.

JUDY SLINN: Mmm.

mhs/951/d - 41 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: And also in the room was his assistant; I mean, his'boy', who sort of ran errands and issued writs and got things stamped.He was quite a distinguished chap, with a Military Medal. He had beenburnt in a tank in Normandy. And he actually then went off to join afirm in the East End. He was called Bill Bush.

No, it wasn't solitary in the least little bit. It was only solitary, Ithink, when I was then sent to the Conveyancing Department to look afterthe work fo.rthis chap who wasn't there. That was a bit solitary. Andof course the premises were quite different to what they are now. Thethought of any carpets on the floor was quite unknown. But one had amuch lower standard of office comfort, and so on.

JUDY SLINN: Did you get to - was there a lunch room then? I can'tremember.

HENRY PICKTHORN: There was a lunch room, yes. There was a canteen, asit was called. And then the partners had just opened a separate lunchroom upstairs,' so that they could talk shop without other peoplelistening in. And, soon after joining, one was formally asked in to havelunch with the partners. And there they were - I suppose there wereabout eight of them there out of the thirteen in all. And I think theSenior Partner carved and so on. It was all quite jolly and informal.

JUDY SLINN: Did it occur to you then, in those years you were doing yourarticles, that you would like to be a partner in Linklaters?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I don't think I had the conceit to think that Iever might be one, or anything like that, or when. One didn't reallyplan one's life - as I think perhaps people do nowadays. But certainlyone would hope to stay on and hope things might work out properly.

mhs/951/d - 42 -


JUDY SLINN: And you did your stint, presumably, at the law school at•••

HENRY PICKTHORN: One went to Gibson and Weldon.

JUDY SLINN: Uh-ha.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. In those days you were examined at the end ofarticles - apparently on what you had learned in articles but in fact itwas just regurgitating the notes that you had taken at Gibson and Weldon,who were the private enterprise crammers.

JUDY SLINN: Yes, yes. Did you go to them for a period of time or didyou go to them sort of continuously while you were doing your articles?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think - in fact I am sure - one went to them for aperiod of time, not for very long; it might have been as long as sixmonths actually. It might have been less.

JUDY SLINN: So this was before the days of Lancaster Gate?

HENRY PICKTHORN: The College of Law had just started up a rivalestablishment, and I am not sure where it was.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: But the fashionable thing was to go to Gibson andWeldon.

JUDY SLINN: Yes, yes. And while you were doing your articles and youwere living at home•••


mhs/951/d - 43 -

Henry Pickthorn F371B/A/Page 44

JUDY SLINN: •••what was your sort of social life? I mean, what else didyou do?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I was courting.

JUDY SLINN: Uh-ha!

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think one went to a few dances in those days. I meanit was still the times when there was a London 'season' and all ·thatentailed. I was never part of that; but, you know, one was disappointedif one wasn't asked to several dances. It was curious really, becauseone never gave anything back, but never mind!

I think one worked quite hard in one's articles. I don't think I had anyother sort of extramural activity. I wasn't doing any 'good works' inthe evening. I wasn't working in a Law Centre or anything like that.

JUDY SLINN: You were courting. Would you care to elaborate!

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well I don't know there is too much to say. It was allvery proper. As I say, I had known my wife since about 1940 and, youknow, we met again and took it from there.

JUDY SLINN: She was in Cambridge still?

HENRY PICKTHORN: No, no. She had been to Oxford and by the time I didarticles she was just about - she had a job writing or helping to writethe official history of the war. And so she worked for the CabinetOffice. And I used to rush over and have lunch with her and just aboutget back in one's lunch hour - or just extended a little bit - and thenpossibly have dinner somewhere fairly cheap in the evenings or go to anight-club or something like that. And she shared a flat with threeOxford girls at Baker Street.

mhs/951/d - 44 -


JUDY SLINN: And when did you get married?

HENRY PICKTHORN: We got married in 1955, just after I had qualified.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. So this had been quite a long courtship then?

HENRY PICKTHORN: No, I don't think so. I mean, we weren't courting allthe time. It might have been, lid say, eighteen months or so. Yes, yes.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. And where did you - and you set up home in London,presumably, when you got married?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. We set up home in a flat in Warwick Square.

JUDY SLINN: Was this a rented flat?

HENRY PICKTHORN: It was a rented flat. And it was a wonderful affair.The Cubitt family - Lord Ashcombe, I think, had owned the Square since itwas built by the great Cubitt who built what is grandly called LowerBelgravia. Anyway, he was his own architect and he had a wonderfulstyle. And the family still owned that Square. And they ran it mostaltruistically. The rents were extremely reasonable and, if you had anycomplaints or wanted anything done, you went and saw a couple of old'dearsI who sat in the office - and it was always done. It wasmarvellous value.

And then, when the first child arrived, we moved into a bigger flat oftheirs. This was at the time of Suez.

JUDY SLINN: Did - sorry - did your wife go on working after you gotmarried?

mhs/951/d - 45 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: My wife went on working until she was pregnant, or justafter that. She went on working in the Cabinet Office, yes.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: That was within walking distance of our flats inWarwick Square. And I had a salary of six hundred a year and I think shehad a slightly larger salary.

JUDY SLINN: So probably, in terms of the early 1950's, you were quitecomfortably off actually.

HENRY PICKTHORN: We weren't extravagant. I don't think it ever occurredto us to have a foreign holiday. I think that· was well beyond ourmeans. But we could pay the rent and buy the clothes and, well, we had achild fairly soon, so we weren't that hard up.

JUDY SLINN: I am sorry. I backtracked. You were saying you had thefirst child in 1956, was it?

HENRY PICKTHORN: 1957.

JUDY SLINN: 1957?


JUDY SLINN: Yes. And you moved then, again, you said?

HENRY PICKTHORN: And we moved into a bigger flat, also in WarwickSquare, which had been the London home of a Cabinet Minister calledFlorence Horsburgh. Nobody has heard of her any more. She was the sortof 'statutory woman' and she had been Minister of Education. And weheard that she was leaving the flat, and we took it over.

mhs/951/d - 46 -


Again it shovs hov cheap things vere, because our rent vas £365 a year (apound a day), for vhich ve had a porter vho emptied the dustbins and vehad piping hot vater and central heating all throvn in. And the landlorddid all the vear and tear and repairs and so on and so forth. And ve hada lodger then. I think that helped a bit too. We had a lodger until thesecond child arrived, I think.

JUDY SLINN: Your first child vas a boy?

HENRY PICKTHORN: A boy, yes.

JUDY SLINN: And then the second one?

HENRY PICKTHORN: The second one vas a girl. And then tvo more boys.Yes.

JUDY SLINN: Did you set out to have a large family?intended to have four children?

I mean, you

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't knov I ever thought too much about it, really.I think my vife likes children.

JUDY 5LINN: So then ve had better return to your professional life. Youqualified in•••

HENRY PICKTHORN: In 1955.

JUDY SLINN: You vere admitted?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. Or vas it 1954? Honestly, I can't remember. Itvas that sort of era.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. Did that make a great deal of difference to you, tothe kind of vork you vere doing?

mhs/951/d - 47 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, I think so. The biggest difference was onestarted getting a salary for the first time. Before that one simply hadthe odd bonus at Christmas and I think there was a summer bonus as well.

One was put in a room of one's own - no, I wasn't, actually. One shareda room with another junior solicitor, which was a very good idea. Onelearnt quite a lot from him and he learnt quite a lot from me, I hope.And one had one's own secretary and one was expected to get on with it,without a great deal of supervision. I think one was thrown in at thedeep end quite distinctly.

JUDY SLINN: When you say you were expected to get on with it, what wereyou expected to get on with? I mean, where did the work come from? Dida partner hand on work to you or what?

HENRY PICKTHORN: The partner parcelled out the work, yes. And I think,quite quickly, the clients would then come to you direct. But certainlyfor the first year or so, I think it was all probably parcelled out toyou, and only very small things would come in to you directly from theclients.

Curiously - I don't know why it was done by the partner I was workingfor, who was the great Kenneth Cole, whether he was a bit haphazard orwhether it was deliberate, but he would tend to give you a job for oneclient and then the next job for the same client he might give tosomebody else. And I don't know whether this was deliberate or whetherit was just who happened to be in his mind when the job came in. Onewould have liked, I think, to have felt one was getting a bit closer tothe clients than one did. Maybe it was deliberate, because he didn'twant us to get too close to them. I don't know.

JUDY SLINN: And this was presumably - what sort of work was it?

mhs/951/d - 48 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: It was a lot of what one thought was vitally importantwork at the time; it was a time when there were quite a lot ofprospectuses, flotation work. Obviously one didn't do that on one's own:one did work with a partner on that. There were a lot of rights issues,which again obviously is prospectus work but much simpler, when you aresimply raising money from your own shareholders and one was expected toget on with that on your own. And there was a great spate ofcapitalisation issues. I think companies during the war had built upreserves and their share capital was well out of line.

And every job one did started off with a silly thing called an'Application to the Capital Issues Committee', because the Control ofBorrowing Order was such that even a bonus issue, a capitalisation issue,was controlled by the Treasury. And so the first thing you did was fillin a great big form, with details of the company and why you wanted tohave a bonus issue, and this was sent off. And you waited about afortnight and they either said 'Yes' or 'No'. I think they almost alwayssaid 'Yes' for the capitalisation issues but they could often say 'No'for the rights issues.

JUDY SLINN: That was a relic of war-time controls, wasn't it?

HENRY PICKTHORN: That was a relic of war-time controls, introduced in1939. But these letters were solemnly sent off to the Treasury in GreatGeorge Street, SW1, and I must say, looking back, it was the mostappalling abuse - to think of these civil servants being paid to dealwith applications for engineering companies to make a bonus issue and soon. A terrible state of affairs, really.

JUDY SLINN: And that lasted - how long did that last?

mhs/9S1/d - 49 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: Well it went on a long time, but it was largelyabolished, I should think, about four years after the Tories got back in1952. I think it still went on, as I say, for about four years then.And then I think they cut it down and cut it down but it wasn't finallyabolished until about twenty years ago. I think there were certaincontrols - I think on foreign companies raising money here - whichlingered on.

Of course the awful thing was, when they cut it down, you could forgetto apply: whereas, in the early days, when everything had to be thesubject of an application, you didn't forget. And it was quite a usefulexercise, in a way, that you collected all the information for thisgovernment department and there it was on your file.

JUDY SLINN: So you were doing, primarily, company and commercial work?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. And it was all far less specialised in thosedays. I mean, if there were problems over service agreements, you didthem; whereas, nowadays, you WOUldn't deal with an employment matter inthe Corporate Department without going to one of the employmentspecialists. Although, one has to say that the law has become infinitelymore complicated. Employment law was simply common law; there were nostatutes at all. And the text book was called 'Master and servant' by achap called Batt, who I think had been a County Court Judge in Edwardiantimes. It was relatively simple.

It is surprising, I think, how much responsibility one did take. I daresay all the young men and women say the same today, that they do take alot of responsibility. One wasn't expected to run cap in hand to thepartner, Kenneth Cole - in fact he hated you doing it. He was quite abusy chap. He was a very, very clever man. I don't think he ever reallytook work home. He managed to do it in the office. He had a greatreputation. Nobody would ever go into his room, even to say something

mhs/95l/d - 50 -


about a Test Match, and go away empty-handed - he would give them a jobto go out with. He had a wonderful technique of getting rid of the stuff.

JUDY SLINN: Did you have many dealings with your other partners inLinklaters?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, I think one did. I remember being quite surprised- I had only been in the firm about a week when I rang up one of myCambridge chums, in fact one of the three I have mentioned I have reallykept in touch with, and we met for lunch. And he came round and we metin the general office. And he was with one of the big three accountingfirms. And, as we were just saying "Hello" in the general office, anelderly chap walked by and he said, "Good morning" to me, and my friendsaid, "Who was that?" I said, "Well I don't really know, but he is oneof the partners." He said, "Good God! Do you mean to say your partnersactually say 'Good morning' to you?" So I thought how lucky I was tohave decided to come here, rather than go into accountancy.

Yes, they were extraordinarily good about getting to know you. Althoughthere weren't very many of us articled clerks - as I told you, I was theonly one for a time - but they would ask you to dinner. There was atradition for the Varsity match that we all, partners and articledclerks, met in a pub and there was a car to take us down to Twickenham.And so you saw them then. And they were all extraordinarily kind.

I don't think they expected you, as I was saying earlier, to buzz intotheir room and say, "I say, what do I do about this one?" They didn'tlike that very much. They would rather give you a job and forget aboutit.

JUDY SLINN: Manners, presumably, then were still fairly formal withinthe City?

mhs/9S1/d - S1 -


HENRYPICKTHORN: I don't think one called people 'Sir'. I hate being

called 'Sir' and I don't think they like being called 'Sir'. But one was

extremely respectful, obviously. And everyone was very well dressed.

You never went out without a hat. And the secretaries all wore hats -

well turned out and so on and so forth.

JUDYSLINN: Presumably it must have been quite a problem, as an articled

clerk - or could have been - to keep one's appearance (you know, given

that you weren't earning any money) and you had to appear every day

respectably clothed.

HENRYPICKTHORN:Well I had a demob sui t and I think I had one other

suit and one just rung the changes. And, living at home, I didn't have

to spend any money on board or lodging. The underground fare was only

four old pence each way from St James's Park to Mansion House, so that

wasn't an awful lot of money. The canteen was subsidised. I think the

lunch cost one and threepence. This was before the days of luncheon

vouchers.

But one couldn't have expensive tastes. I did take some holidays abroad,

as an articled clerk, before we were married. But they were fairly cheap

affairs. I went to stay with the old Trinity Chaplain in Madrid. And I

went by sea and then train, which was great fun and it didn't cost much.

And then we, as a family, have got a lot of friends in France and one

could go and stay with them.


mhs/951/d - 52 -


Tape F3718 Side B

[Second interview of HENRY PICKTHORNat

Linklaters & Paines2!!

Tuesday, 23rd February 1993starting at 09.55.]

JUDY SLINN: Can I just ask you one thing arising out of the previoustapes that we did?


JUDY SLINN: You didn't really say anything about your wife's familybackground. You said you had known her a long time.


JUDY SLINN: And I gathered she had been at school in Cambridge. So didshe come of a Cambridge family?

HENRY PICKTHORN: No, she didn't. Her mother was a Cambridge girl. Shewas about the third generation of educated womanhood. My wife actuallyfailed to get into Cambridge but got a scholarship to St Hilda's, Oxford,the same week, I think. And her mother had been very much the prize girlof Newnham in about 1922, where, incidentally, she was taught history bymy father. And her mother had also been at school in London with mymother. My wife had great-aunts who were very much the founding mothersof education at Oxford.

The background of my wife's father's family, I think, were generations ofclergymen, plus a sister of Archbishop Juxon.

mhs/952/d - 53 -


My wife's father was in the Colonial Service; went to Cambridge (Isuppose in about 1911) and went straight to be District Commissioner inKenya. He has actually written a great deal of his reminiscences, how hearrived there and had to walk two hundred miles to his first post and soon.

My wife's mother's family background was military. My wife's grandfatherwas a soldier and her great-grandfather was the senior doctor in theBritish Army and had spent a long time in India. And her mother was bornin India.

My wife has the distinction of not having a birth certificate be~ause shewas born in Nairobi in 1931, where there were no birth certificates, butshe got a bit of paper out of the then Governor. So all our children areon the records as Kenyans.

I don't know if that gives you enough about her background.

JUDY SLINN: Yes, yes. That's fine. Yes. What did she read at Oxford?

HENRY PICKTHORN: She read history. And she had a job, after coming downuntil the first baby was on the way, working on the official history ofthe war, in the Cabinet Office, helping in the preparation of the editionon the war in Burma.

JUDY SLINN: Did she ever - while we are on this, shall we just continuefor a bit with the, sort of, family?


JUDY SLINN:children.

Did she work again? Because she went on to have four

mhs/952/d - 54 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: No, she hasn't. She chiefly worked in the home, butshe hasn't followed a career.

JUDY SLINN: And can I just follow through on the domestic side. Youlived, you said, in a flat in Warwick Square, when you were firstmarried, and then you moved to a larger one (also in Warwick Square).


JUDY SLINN: And then you had a second child and then a further two.


JUDY SLINN: Presumably at some stage you moved from the flat.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. Fairly soon after our fourth child was two yearsold, the flat really became unbearably small, and we moved two milesupstream to a house in Chelsea.

JUDY SLINN: And have you stayed there?

HENRY PICKTHORN: And we are still there, yes.

JUDY SLINN: But you also have a house in•••

HENRY PICKTHORN: We have got a bolt-hole down in Suffolk, where I havecertain family connections.

JUDY SLINN: And can I also just follow through on your children as well,since we are here, before we return to professional life.


mhs/952/d - 55 -


JUDY SLINN: Where were they educated and what do they do?

HENRY PICKTHORN: The three boys went to Eton. The oldest boy then wentto Cambridge and became a banker. The second boy went to Sandhurst andwas commissioned into the army. He carried the ensign at the Troopingthe Colour and he served in Northern Ireland. In due course he came outand he is now a Lloyd's insurance broker. The third child - the thirdson, I should say, is now an articled clerk in the law. My daughter is •••

JUDY SLINN: Which firm is he with?

HENRY PICKTHORN: He is at Linklaters & Paines.

JUDY SLINN: Oh, I suppose this is possible because - did he come afteryou had retired?

HENRY PICKTHORN: He came after I had retired, yes.

JUDY SLINN: Because there is a rule, is there not, at Linklaters •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't know that there is a rule. I think there was acertain feeling about that - I haven't studied the history of thesubject. They used to do it in the old days and it was actually one ofthe great strengths of the firm that there were family connections. Itwas very much a family firm. Even as late as when I joined, there werethird generations, if not more. But it became too big for that, as somany other family companies have found in the past.

JUDY SLINN: Other firms in the City, of course, do have a definite rule,don't they?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't know.

mhs/952/d - 56 -


JUDY SLINN: I think some of them do.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think some of them may do. I think some of them evenhave a rule that once you leave you can't come back, which thank heavenswe have never been as dogmatic as that, because a lot of jolly goodpeople have left and come back and done extremely well and we have beenvery happy with them.

JUDY SLINN: And your daughter.

HENRY PICKTHORN: My daughter was at a school in Hampshire, North ForlandLodge. She declined to go to university. She worked at Christie's for awhile. She then worked as a secretary in the Prince of Wales's office.She had a very nice trip on Brittania when he went to the Mediterraneanand toured Italy.· And she retired in due course when the first baby wason the way. And she has now got three children and is much too busy fora career.

JUDY SLINN: Now, if we return to your professional life, we got you tobeing a junior solicitor •••


JUDY SLINN: •••working mainly on company work, you said, and we dealtwith new issues - rights issues, capital issues.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. Company work was the firm's specialisation inthose days. If we were working for a company, the work, broadly, waseither property work (in which case, if you were on the company side youdidn't do it) or it wasn't, and even if it was litigation, you took astrong part in what was going on, with the help of a litigation managingclerk. We hadn't developed in those days the degree of specialisationwhich came later - thank goodness it did come - where, if you have aproblem over tax you go straight to the Tax Department; or, over

mhs/952/d - 57 -


employment, to the employment specialists: or, over anti-trust work, tosomebody who deals with monopolies and mergers and so on. And of coursethe great strength of the firm, as it developed in the sixties andseventies, was an ability to have these specialisations and still have anextraordinary degree of loyal co-operation between the various people inthe various departments. I never knew anybody say, "I won't help you.It is your client", or, "It is your business to deal with that" or "Idon't want you to help me, because it is my client and I don't want yougetting involved." Never any feeling of that whatsoever.

But certainly, going back to your question, life as a junior solicitor inthose days: you were expected (and I think sometimes one failed) to dealwith a very wide variety of the sort of problems which companies have. Iam not saying that people didn't help you, beca~se they did, but youcouldn't unload, say, an employment problem on an employment specialistbecause there wasn't such a person.

JUDY SLINN: Yes, yes. I mean, I have heard people say before that if

you were a company solicitor you did everything for them, for theclient. You dealt with his suit , you deal with the early stages oflitigation •••


JUDY SLINN: •••and any other advice they wanted.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. That's what I found out during my early career.

JUDY SLINN: Did you move on, in the later fifties, to having your ownclients, because you said last time that, you know, Kenneth Clark atfirst handed out •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Kenneth Cole!

mhs/952/d - 58 -


JUDY SLINN: Kenneth Cole. I am sorry.


JUDY SLINN: At first handed out the work, parcels of work, from variousclients. Did you gradually build up a•••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, I think one did. One of the curiosities, as I mayhave mentioned at the last interview, of Kenneth Cole was he didn'talways go to the same assistant for the same client. And I suspect itwas partly because he had forgotten that Assistant A had done the job forClient B the last time round or it may have been deliberate. I don'tknow. I never asked him and didn't intend to ask him.

So it wasn't all that rapid, building up relationships with your clients,but obviously it came. It was very nice, after one had only qualifiedwith the firm a short time (you might say a few months or perhaps ayear), if the clients rang you up and didn't go to the partners. If onewas stuck, one then went and got advice from a partner. If it was somebig new job, then obviously you went straight and told him what it wasall about. And very likely they would say, "Right. Well carryon and doit."

JUDY SLINN: Who was the most influential - who were the most influentialpartners in Linklaters then? You said that you found Kenneth Cole - thathe was very able•••


JUDY SLINN: .•.that he was a very important influence on yourprofessional development.


mhs/9S2/d - S9 -


JUDY SLINN: But who were the•••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Who were the others?

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well certainly he vas one. Sam Brown was the SeniorPartner and had a great reputation - throughout the City and beyond.James Sandars was one of the key figures. John Field was a greatworkhorse, I think possibly not with - certainly, in his modest way, hewould never claim to have the intellectual ability of the other three Ihave mentioned. And then, coming along very fast, of course, were JohnMayo and Ferrier CharI ton. They were obviously people to be reckonedvith, in their early days and people saw that more and more.

I think John Mayo quite made his reputation - he had a reputation already- during the Austin/Morris car merger, which seems an avful long time agonov. Austin and Morris obviously were great rivals for the small car -they made small cars in England and they merged. I don't knov vhen itwas. Was it the late fifties, early sixties? And then this is a greatexample of bigger means worse. The whole thing has been one disasterafter another as they got bigger. We have just seen Leyland-Daffdemerging last week. The awful theory was, I think, that if you putsomething good together with something bad, whatever vas good came out ontop; vhereas, Gresham's Lav vorks the other vay round. I am afraid theinfluence of the bad drags the other one down. It is one of those sadthings.

It is one of the things vhich worries me very much about Europe. Theorganisation which our present politicians are pushing us further andfurther into is far too big to work. And there is a lot of 'badness'about it, to use a simple vord , I have the darkest forebodings, butnever mind. That's a different matter.

mhs/952/d - 60 -

Henry Pickthorn F37l8/B/Page 61

JUDY SLINN: So what course did your professional life follow through thelater fifties and into the early sixties?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think one worked hard. I think at the time therewere quite a lot of things which seemed terribly exciting but which areon such a small scale now compared with the figures involved because ofinflation. One worked away. And then the surprising day came when SamBrown, the Senior Partner, summoned me: he sent his secretary and saidthat he wanted to see me. Also waiting outside his room was MarkSheldon. I can remember the day exactly because it was the date of thebirth of our second child. And we were ushered in and he said, "You areboth to become partners in November", which was quite unseen, quiteundeserved and quite unexpected. But obviously one couldn't turn it

down. And that was that.

Looking back, I sometimes felt that they had been very kind and invitedone too early, but there you are.

JUDY SLINN: It must presumably have been very welcome, if you werehaving a second child.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well I don't know - I mean, financially it was allvery nice and one got one's foot on the bot tom rung of a pretty goodladder. But in fact the rewards weren't staggering. I remember Samsaying that we should share in the equity, in the profits. He would letus know the percentage later on. It would be very small but he said,"Don't worry. Everybody has a minimum of three thousand a year. "Certainly that was, I suppose, about double what one was getting then asan assistant solicitor, so, yes, it was good news.

JUDY SLINN: And which year was that in, do you remember?

HENRY PICKTHORN: That was in 1959. We were invited in April 1959 and we

became partners at the year end, the end of October.

mhs/952/d - 61 -

Henry Pickthorn F371S/B/Page 62

JUDYSLINN: Do you remember what number partner you were and what did

your •••

HENRYPICKTHORN: Well I qualified some months before Mark. When I

joined the firm in 1951, there were thirteen partners and I think we had

already crept up to about sixteen,. So my guess is that we were numbers

seventeen and eighteen. Thinking quickly, the only partners who had gone

were Gerald Addison, who had died in 1956, and Harold Bundy. HaroldBundy had died in about 1957/58. Both were quite old men. Harold Bundy

had a Military Cross from the First World War - a very nice man, as

indeed was Gerald Addison.

JUDYSLINN: Yes. Did you - had you had many dealings with Sir Sam

Brown? Did you feel you knew him, or was be Ing summonsed to see him a

bit like being summonsed to see the headmaster?

HENRYPICKTHORN: Yes, I think it was. I hadn't particularly had

dealings with him, no. I think I had done one job with him, but his

principal assistant had always been John fforde, who went on being his

assistant after John became a partner, which was a year or two earlier

than when we were invited to join. Mywork had been largely, I think,with Kenneth Cole; a little bit with Peter Benham. So I didn't know him

well, no. He was a very fine figure.

JUDY SLINN: What difference, professionally, did becoming a partner

make? Did it increase the number of clients you had or •••

HENRYPICKTHORN:Yes, it did. The firm was run in an extraordinarily

informal way, for good or ill, in that on becoming a partner one wasn't

then told, "Right. This is your list of clients", or anything like

that. Whereas, of course, later on, every client had a responsible

mhs/952/d - 62 -


partner and a second responsible partner to whom the client knew he couldalways turn. But I think one certainly felt that, as a partner, one hadgot to do things on one's own and one did do things on one's own, whereasbefore one sought advice and so on from the partner from whom the job hadoriginated or from the partner who you knew usually did work for thisparticular client.

JUDY SLINN: Did you find yourself working harder as a partner and longerhours.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Difficult to remember, but I am sure I did, yes.

JUDY SLINN: I was going to ask you generally about sort of working hoursthrough the fifties and the sixties and the sort of pattern of your'working life.


JUDY SLINN: If there was a pattern.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. Well, office hours were longer then. I think wedidn't shut until six in the evening. On the other hand, I think mostpeople had cleared off by about a quarter to seven; whereas, in theseventies and eighties, there would be an awful lot of people there untileight or nine o'clock and an awful lot of people - well not an awful lotof people, but some people would be up all night, and so on.

Kenneth Cole was an extraordinarily quick worker. He very rarely tookwork home and I believe he very rarely worked at weekends. He had afriend at the Bar, who I also knew quite well, and he said he was a mostextraordinary chap: "I happen to know that he doesn't work weekends orevenings like everybody else does."

mhs/952/d - 63 -


Whereas Sam Brown, I think, very able though he was, hadn't the speed orthe intellect of Kenneth Cole and I think he worked pretty dreadfulhours: he was a worrier and really only got through the work by workinga lot at home and working a lot of weekends.

JUDY SLINN: Did you take work home in the evenings and work at weekends?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. One certainly did. The first occasion when Iremember sort of working all night was probably about 1962/1963, and thiswas actually about the first ever bond issue: I should think it mighthave been, raising money in Switzerland for an English company. And Iremember we had two nights in succession at Helbert Wagg (whichsubsequently turned into Schroder Wagg) , when one went on until the sunrose. But that was unusual: whereas, of course, by the time oneretired, it was a fairly run of the mill event.

I was always very struck (touching wood) how extraordinarily fit, on thewhole, we all were. I think life was hard for everybody. But certainlyI was spared some of the appalling travelling which a lot of them used todo. But (touching wood again) we weren't ill and people survived.

JUDY SLINN: How did you cope with working at home, with a lot of smallchildren? Was it easy?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well I think they were probably in bed by the time Iwas there: or, at weekends, my wife would take them out and I would getsome peace and quiet.

JUDY SLINN: Were you a very participative father with them? Did you •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think reasonably, yes. I would hope so.

mhs/952/d - 64 -

Henry Pickthorn F371S/B/Page 65

JUDY SLINN: You spent time with them at weekends?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, I did spend time with them.

JUDY SLINN: So did your workload get much heavier as a partner or was ita sort of gradual build up?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I can't remember. It got heavier, but when it got somuch heavier I don't know. I can't even remember when one was firstentitled to have an assistant of one's own or to call on (sometimes) twoassistants. I don't think that probably came until about 1970 - thatsort of time. And that was quite a big step. It is quite a big step todo something yourself and then to delegate and to trust the person towhom you have delegated it: not to interfere excessively; not to be toooffhand - and not to be too trustworthy, without showing that one isbeing untrustworthy. It is finding a point between the extremes. Butobviously delegation was important. And working together with somebodythroughout on big jobs too was easier, I think.

I think Warburgs always used to have something called 'The Rule ofThree': there were never less than three people on any job of anysignificance. And I think that came to be the position here as well - ifnot three, at any rate two.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Of course one of the snags of that sort of working isthat you may think, 'Well, the other chap will look after that' or 'I can

And again, if you have got accountants working(wrongly) on the accountants doing something oron your doing something - particularly if it is a

rely on him', and so on.with you, you may relythey may rely (wrongly)prospectus.

mhs/952/d - 65 -


JUDY SLINN: You mentioned the development of specialisms and that, astime vent on, company vork became in fact several different kinds of",ork, really, didn't it?


JUDY SLINN: Did your vork - in vhd ch slot, as it ",ere, did your vorkstay? Did you stay with the issue and prospectus ",ork or •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: I did some of it. I certainly vasn 't one of theleading lights on prospectus ",ork. I did some ",ork on behalf of merchantbanks, but I was never their first port of call. I think probably thatmost of my vork sounds rather dull, in that it vas provincial, in thesense that it was in this country and very often in the provinces ratherthan in London. I seemed to have a number of, first of all, expansiveand then possibly contracting and then again expansive companies vhd ch",ere buying the smaller companies and then again sometimes selling themand buying other companies and so on. So there ",as a lot of that sort of",ork.

Obviously I ",as also involved in a number of take-overs. And, again juststaying ",ith the figures, compared ",ith the figures novadays , I don'tthink anybody really kne", ",hat a billion ",as and certainly hadn't come tothe conclusion that a billion ",as a billion in the American sense ratherthan in the English sense, because one only talked about millions or onetalked of fractions of millions. But I remember doing a debenture stockissue of £325,000 at five and three-quarters per cent; ",hereas no",adayspeople vou Id be doing bond issues for literally billions of pounds and,unfortunately - certainly until last year - the rate of interest vou Ld

have been, perhaps, fourteen, ",hereas ",e ",ere getting a",ay ",ith somethingquite trifling.

mhs/952/d - 66 -


On the take-over front, we used to get very excited about tiny littlethings. I remember one (with me) very popular client called Burt Boultonand Heywood. They were a combination of chemists and timber importers.And I think in the early sixties, believe it or not, Horlicks (the makersof the drink which puts you to sleep in the evenings) had some spare cashand they made a bid for Burt Boulton and of course there vas no logic inthe thing whatsoever, and Burt Boulton fought like mad. Unfortunatelythe chap with the longest purse tends to win and the outcome of this wasthat we fought them off and they finished up with only, I think, aboutthirty-six/thirty-seven per cent of Burt Boulton. So Burt Boulton havethe unhappy position of having 'Big Brother' sitting on their tail thewhole time.

I don't suppose that the market capitalisation of Burt Boulton was morethan three million pounds, but it was quite a cause celebre in thenewspapers. It was before the invention of the Take-over Panel, so thedocuments were much simpler. I don't think that there were any fouls, soto speak. I don't think that the Take-over Panel would have improved theway the bid was mounted or fought off.

I think the biggest acquisition I ever had a hand in was BP taking overSelection Trust. I can't remember when that was but it is quite recenthistory - the seventies. And that was, at the time, the biggestacquisi tion there had ever been in the UK. One played no part in thediscussions as to whether the bid should be made. Of course, as it was,one was simply told of the decision. It turned out a total disaster forBP. I don't know whether I am talking indiscreetly. Should I shut up?

JUDY SLINN: No, I don't think so. Were you acting for BP?

HENRY PICKTHORN: We were acting for BP.

mhs/952/d - 67 -


. JUDY SLINN: Because Linklaters alvays acted for BP, didn't they?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I think BP thought that being an oil company vasa form of mining - they vere mining something that vas liquid - vhereasSelection Trust had mines for various assorted substances such as goldand copper, and they thought the tvo vould mix veIl. And the great sortof 'prize', the vogue vord at the time, vas 'diversification'. But thegreat flav vas BP paid too much and they didn't really knov vhat to dovi th a Mining House and eventually sold it to Rio Tin to, not many yearsago, and, I am afraid, lost a lot of money.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. Of course the sixties and the seventies vere, as yousay, the great period of diversification; the idea being that if youcould manage one thing yoU could manage anything almost, vasn't it?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I think sticking to one's last is actually quitea good rule.

JUDY SLINN: It vas through the late sixties, really, that there vas thegreat take-over boom, vasn't it, vhich culminated in the greatICI/Courtaulds fight?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. Well nov, the firm vas concerned vith that: Ivasn't personally. And ve vere on the losing side; ve vere on the sideof ICI. And I think in fact ICI should have von that one. That vas thefirst take-over bid vhere I think emotions got very strong and I rememberbeing greatly shocked vhen Courtaulds •••


mhs/952/d - 68 -


Tape F3719 Side A

JUDY SLINN: ••.•at the end of the ICI/Courtaulds battle?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. When the bid lapsed, Courtaulds and their staff -they worked just round the corner in St Martin's-le-Grand - persuaded thethen Rector of St Vedast to have a thanksgiving service in his church andit seemed to one as rather involving God in the affairs of Mammon, butthere you are.

JUDY SLINN: I don't think anybody would do that these days.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don I t know! Let I s say, quite a lot of prayers aresaid during a battle. It can be pretty miserable when you lose, whenyour jobs go, and so on.

JUDY SLINN: The firm was growing at this stage, was it not, in terms ofpartners, by - well, the late sixties and into the seventies?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. One looks back and thinks there has been acontinual period of growth. I think there must have been a period ofstagnation in the early seventies when the share indices almost fell tozero. One forgets now, but there was a time when everything seemed to gowrong and then suddenly it was put right. And one of the extraordinarythings was certainly the effect on the Stock Market of the InvestmentManager of the Prudential, because I think he called his friends togetheronce and said, "This is too awful for words", and they simply startedbuying again because they didn't like to see things going down - and itworked!

JUDY SLINN: Was that, do you mean, after the secondary banking crisis ofthe early seventies?

mhs/954/d - 69 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: That's about the time, I think, yes.

JUDY SLINN: Yes, yes. And that was, of course, because a lot of thesecondary banks had got involved with property and there was a collapsedproperty crisis.

HENRY PICKTHORN Yes. And I am afraid there were some crooks about too.

JUDY SLINN: That was really, sort of, combined with the first oil pricerise as well, of course, and that was sort of 1973/74.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. And there was a disabreeable case that I wasinvolved with. There was a fringe bank called London & Counties which Ithink was one of the worst. It was the one that ·Jeremy Thorpe was on theboard of, as its Chairman.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: And, very sad for the auditors, they were part of thesubject of an investigation by the Department of Trade, and we acted forthem and tried to help. Their audit procedures were very severelycriticised. But what one felt was so extremely unfair about it was thetiming. Because, if you are an auditor and you know something is goingwrong, do you blow the whistle at once and bring the pack of cards down,if it is only a pack of cards, or do you go along for a 11ttle while,trusting people that they are going to do the things necessary to putmatters right. And in the end the auditors - I say "in the end", I thinkquite soon the auditors did in fact blow the whistle and the band didcollapse like a pack of cards. The audi tors hadn't been all that slowabout it but they were criticised for not doing it just that little bitearlier. Well, I suppose some people, who sat in judgement, have tojustify their money. I think it was a pretty unjust state of affairs.And what I thought was so unfair about the Department of Trade inquiries

mhs/954/d - 70 -


was the fact that the inspectors interviewed people (from whom theywanted to take the evidence) on their own, and you had no idea whatanybody else had said.

JUDY 5LINN: But presumably the danger is, if you interview themtogether, then you get a story which could be the result of collusion.

HENRY PICKTHORN: No, I don't think so. It was then for the inspectorsto decide who was speaking the truth.

JUDY 5LINN: 50 it was a bad period then in the seventies?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. And I hope you didn't mind me expanding for a11ttle while, because I think when times are hard one shouldn't be toooptimistic. I have a theory that it is the optimists in this world whoactually cause the suffering to other people. They are cheerful andoptimistic and think that all is for the best - and bound to work out allright in the end - but in fact they are the people who take the money offthe other people and if the whole thing goes bust it is the other peoplewho suffer and the optimists go off in their cheery way and do somethingelse. It always seems to me that one shouldn't complain at pessimism.

JUDY 5LINN: Do you think you are a pessimist rather than an optimist?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Absolutely, yes. I am a natural pessimist - but maybeI have done more harm than the optimists. I don't know.

JUDY 5LINN: And then also I have understood that of course during theseventies there was quite an increase in insolvency-related work. Didyou do any of that, or was that done by somebody - by another part of thefirm?

mhs/9S4/d - 71 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: I didn't do it, as such, no. One had to know a bitmore about it and learn which part of the 1948 Companies Act had allthese insolvency sections in it, but it was something one had scarcelylooked at before I became very conscious of it because I was dealingwith an enormous amount of debenture stock work, which at the time was Ithink possibly the principal way by which companies obtained finance.Now they are called 'bonds' and they tend to be denominated innon-sterling currencies. But I did an enormous amount of debenture stockwork in the sixties, seventies and the eighties. And obviously, if youare issuing money, with or without security, what happens if anythinggoes wrong is very important and you have got to get the terms right ifyour debenture stockholder is going to be properly protected. And indeedsome of them started to go wrong: we did start to have insolvencies inthe last ten years or so of my practising.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. Can I just ask you: when did you retire?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I retired in October 1990.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. So you were talking about the eighties, then?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I am talking about the eighties, yes.

JUDY SLINN: Yes, yes. When you say 'bond issues' or companies lookingto bonds, you presumably mean in euro-currency?

HENRY PICKTHORN: No. I personally, mostly, was concerned with sterlingissue currencies.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

mhs/954/d - 72 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: And I think perhaps those sterling issues were mademore in the sixties, seventies, early eighties; and subsequently, at atime when companies thought they would be borrowing money more cheaply,in foreign currencies - or there simply wasn't enough money here to beborrowed, or we were acting for foreign companies anyway. But certainlyin the sixties and seventies the traditional way for a public company torai se more capi tal wasn't a rights issue of more shares; it was thedomestic debenture stock market, as it was called.

JUDY SLINN: I am a bit vague about this, but isn't there some pointwhere, for tax reasons, debentures became less popular. Was that in theeighties - or am I entirely wrong?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't think that is so. No.·

JUDY SLINN: You talked about the Companies Act 1948. That •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think it was inflation that killed off the debenturestock issue.

JUDY SLINN: Ah, yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: What really killed it off was that the Prudential andthe other institutions (which had the money) got fed up with lendingmoney - it may have been a high rate of interest (ten or twelve) - butgetting paid back in debased pounds after the twenty-five/thirty yearlife of a debenture stock.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: One tried to get over that to some extent by havingconversion rights, options and so on. Now that inflation is lower, I

mhs/954/d - 73 -


dare say that it is coming back to some extent. The foreign bond issuestend to have a much shorter life than the twenty-five/thirty years whichwe were dealing with.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: It is more like ten.

JUDY SLINN: Yes, yes. Debentures are usually at a fixed interest rate,aren't they?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Usually, yes. I mean, sometimes they fluctuate but inthe main they are fixed, yes.

JUDY SLINN: So your work continued to be mainly concerned with companiesraising funds?

HENRY PICKTHORN: And take-overs and acquisitions by public companies ofprivate.companies.

JUDY SLINN: You were saying they were mainly UK companies.


JUDY SLINN: Did this involve you in quite a lot of travelling in the UKor did they come to see you, usually?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think there is nothing that a businessman inYorkshire likes more than catching the 'puffer' and having breakfast onthe train and coming down to London and coming into a warm office anddrinking cups of coffee. So, I think the job was always done down here;but then obviously, yes, one used to go up and spend time in Preston, inSheffield and Leeds and quite a lot of the big provincial centres(Manchester, Birmingham and so on).

mhs/954/d - 74 -


JUDY SLINN: Did you enjoy that?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, very much. One made really very strongfriendships, that one has kept up, with some of the clients. And, youknow, when one was a tender age, again this was something of achallenge: to right some legal point that was raised, and so on and soforth. It was not very big league stuff but it was quite satisfying.

JUDY SLINN: How did your practice change in the seventies and theeighties then? I know that is rather a wide question.


JUDY SLINN: But are there any particular changes that you can identify?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think, as regards the actual carrying out of thework, there were more people on any given job than there had beenearlier. We were getting upwards of two or three people taking on thejob instead of just yourself.

I am afraid I can't remember when were the boom times for debenturestocks and when that tailed off, exactly. But I think if one looked atthe inflation rate, one could tell, although there always had to be atime lag. If it wasn't - soon after two or three years of reallyappalling inflation the institutions started saying, "We've had enough ofthis".

JUDY SLINN: The highest inflation in the seventies, of course, was 1979,wasn't it? I mean, it rose up to about fifteen.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well I think it rose even higher after Mrs Thatcher gotinto power.

mhs/954/d - 75 -


JUDY SLINN: That's right, yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: And that continued until about 1981.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. It got up to about •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Twenty or twenty-something per cent.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Which was pretty alarming. So, there must have been atime when I was doing less of that debenture stock issue work and more ofthe acquisition work. And also more of looking after the debenturestocks issues which one had arranged in the years gone by. I tended, onthe whole, to act for the trustees (as the policemen of debenture stock)who kept an eye on the interests of debenture stock holders. And one hada running list of debenture stocks which might get into trouble, orlooked like they might get into trouble, and one had to be tough and askfor one's money back •••

JUDY SLINN: What was •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: •••or the banks would get in first.

JUDY SLINN: Oh, I see. I was going to say, 'What do you mean by "mightbe getting into trouble"?' You mean the company might be getting intotrouble, so that they wouldn't be able to pay the interest on thedebentures?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. Before that point was reached, there were anumber of covenants in the debenture trust deeds - for example, thatcertain degrees of cover had to be protected and one had to watch that

mhs/9S4/d - 76 -

Henry Pick thorn F3719/ A/Page 77

these degrees of cover were being protected and if they weren't then onecould call for one's money early. And the important thing of course wasto call for the money early enough to get it, before all the othercredi tors put their claim in. And it required quite a fine judgementsometimes.

JUDY SLINN: Yes, I would have thought so and a sort of knowledge of whatwas going on in the industry as well, the particular industry that -well, industry as a whole and the particular industry that that companywas concerned with.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I don't think I flatter myself that one waswatching 'Chemicals' or other manufacturers. Property was the one: ifyou lent money to a property company, when they started to get intotrouble it was perhaps fairly obvious.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. Property companies got into trouble again during therecession of the early eighties, didn't they?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. But didn't that happen before •••

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: •••in the early seventies?

JUDY SLINN: Yes, yes - 1973/74. And then the early eighties and then ofcourse again more recently.

HENRY PICKTHORN: That's right.

JUDY SLINN: But that's since you retired.


mhs/9541 d - 77 -


JUDY SLINN: Yes. During the eighties - ve are perhaps jumping a bit andve ought to come back to the seventies a minutes - but, during theeighties, the firm, I understand the firm doubled in size.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I shouldn't be surprised, but I vas alvays ratheragainst statistics. Though some partners would rather boast about sizeand the fact that ve had doubled. Being a pessimist, I vould touch voodand say I didn't knov really hov big ve vere.

JUDY SLINN: How did you view this growth, vhen you did look at it?

HENRY PICKTHORN: As inevitable. I didn't knov it vas right to do it.But I certainly vould have been the vrong person to have been in charge,not having the right outlook on life, because I have a tvisted outlook inthat respect.

I think it was inevitable because, when I joined the firm, there werethirteen partners and ve vere the biggest firm in the City (or perhapsthe second biggest). And, if ve hadn't expanded and kept on expanding,we should have become a very different firm. We should have become athird-ranking firm vhich does commercial work and happens to be in theCity - as indeed has happened to some firms.

During the 1950s there vere quite a lot of firms much of a muchness vithus - although indeed ve vere the biggest or the second biggest - and theymust, I think, have taken the conscious decision that being a dozenpartners equals a nice life and they vere going to stay that way. Wellthey very rapidly vent downhill and it didn't take any dirty tricks fortheir clients to move over to us; they just did. They could see thatthey got a much better service in the bigger firm vith its specialistknowledge and its back-up.

mhs/954/d - 78 -


So I think it was just a fact of life that, to stay the sort of firm wewere, we had to expand. And of course it is not the same sort of firmnow, because we do a great deal more work than we did then. We have gotthe overseas' branches. The practice is international now. Thankgoodness we are well placed to do our share.

JUDY SLINN: Did you have any dealings with the overseas' offices?

HENRY PICKTHORN: No. I mean, I visited them if I happened to be in thecountry, but I never, as a partner, ran one and I never volunteered to goto one and I don't think I was ever asked to go to one. I think probablyI was a bit too old, actually. The foreign offices are quite a place forthe 'young Turks'.

JUDY SLINN: Have there always been 'young Turks'? I have heard othersrefer to them as that. Is it inevitable there will be a generation of'young Turks' coming in?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I suppose the expression goes back to Ataturk, doesn'tit, just really after the First World War. But it is quite a usefulexpression. Yes, I think there has always been new blood in anyorganisation and no doubt Sam Brow and Kenneth Cole were 'young Turks'in their day!

JUDY SLINN: Well I just wondered what effect you felt the growth - givenit was inevitable - what effect it had on the relationships betweenpartners. A firm of, say, twenty partners (which it was soon after youbecame a partner) is one thing•••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Soon after I became a partner - it was in the 'teens'.

mhs/954/d - 79 -


JUDYSLINN: And it didn't go over twenty until after 1967, because it

couldn't.

HENRYPICKTHORN:Yes.

JUDYSLINN: Because that was the legal limit.

HENRYPICKTHORN:Yes.

JUDYSLINN: But now you are talking, you know, of a hundred and thirty

partners, or whatever, it is a very big change, isn't it?

HENRYPICKTHORN: It is a big change. Well there is still a certain

intimacy between some but not between all. And I think there are

intimate groups here and intimate groups there. But I think it hasalways been very much the ethos of the firm that you have got to fit in;

you have got to do what the general consensus wants.

The Senior Partner always used to describe himself as 'primus inter

pares' and one is grateful for that. I think that the fact that we have

always been an equi ty-sharing firm from top to bot tom has been very

good. I think the fact (again touch wood) that we have been reasonably

prosperous has meant that people haven't been worrying about whether

somebody is maybe drawing more than his share for what he contributes or

less than his share. Thank goodness it never crossed anybody's mind -

while I was here.

JUDYSLINN: When you became a partner, did you have to pay in to the

capital of the firm, because some firms do that, don't they? I know mostof the big City firms don't now, but I just wondered whether in •••

mhs/954/d - 80 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: I had to put up some capital. But there was noquestion of putting some money into the pockets of my then partners. Idon't know whether there ever has been, but I think that again is one ofthe great things of the firm, that you didn't - you weren't buying outsomebody who was about to retire.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. There were no 'goodwill payments'.

HENRY PICKTHORN: There were no 'goodwill payments'. And I think howblessed we have been by past generations for their generosity, in manyways, because some grasping Senior Partner in the twenties or earliercould have set up a system by which (a) he had an inordinate share of theprofits and (b) when he left he jolly well took a lot of money out ofothers for giving up that share of the profits. It was a very greatblessing and I think unquestionably one of the strengths of the firm wasthat one didn't have to find money for the outgoing partners. The amountof capital one had to put in was relatively small. And one borrowed fromthe bank and one got tax relief as well.

JUDY SLINN: Did you - to go back to your family for a minute - I mean,as your professional career developed, as did your brother's at the Bar,did you - were you close? Did you see each other regularly?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, quite regularly. He wasn't at the Bar for verylong because he eventually came into the City and became a banker atSchroders. I think he has been retired about ten years.

JUDY SLINN: And did you have connections or friends who were solicitorsfirst and then partners in the other big City firms?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I think one's Cambridge friends and schoolfriends - I think they all became partners before I did, but I think onewas happy to stick with a pretty good firm and possibly be realistic. Soone knew a lot of people in a lot of other firms, indeed, yes.

mhs/954/d - 81 -


JUDY SLINN: So you felt part of the sort of web of the City, if you like?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I think that takes a bit of time. I think onewasn't really a part of the web of the City until one became a partner,although when one first regularly caught the underground from St James'sPark, to get out at Cannon Street, one always met somebody on the way, onthe train or in the street.

JUDY SLINN: And what is your view of the - rather a wide question: whatis your view of the development of the City over the period of yourpractice? I mean, are there major changes that you can identify in thatperiod, in terms of the way it operated or the people involved?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well, as you say, it is a very wide and difficultquestion. I think one of the great sadnesses has been the decline ofLloyd's, which one had a great respect for as a great English and a greatCity institution with a long history.

JUDY SLINN: To what do you attribute the decline of Lloyd's?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I am afraid, partly mismanagement and, I am afraid,partly dishonesty. And I hope they can pull themselves together.

JUDY SLINN: Do you think that there is more dishonesty in the City nowthan there was when you first came into the law in the fifties?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I think, probably - but it is a bit of a loadedquestion. I don't think there was dishonesty in the early days.Obviously there had been people like Bottomley. I don't know when heoperated - just after the First World War?

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

mhs/954/d - 82 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: There was another chap who came from a very respectablefamily, called Bevan, who went to gaol in the twenties. There wasHarris, the fire-raiser.

JUDY SLINN: Hatrey.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Hatrey, of course. I think there is a cup somewhere inthe basement of this office, which was presented to L&P because we actedfor a firm of solicitors that Harris had got into trouble and we didn'tcharge. And it was known as the Crocker Challenge Cup.

JUDY SLINN: Oh yes?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Do you know who Charles Crocker was? But, anyway, thatis enough about that.

I don't know that when I started one ever thought of people being honestor dishonest. I certainly remember somebody saying - I don't rememberexactly, but basically somebody saying to my father, "Oh, he will do verywell in London, going to Linklaters - of course their stock-in-trade iscompany law." And he said, "No, it is not; their stock-in-trade isbeing as straight as a die". And I think that may have been right. Theworld thought that we were as straight as a die, and I think, happily, wewere and are.

If one was negotiating with honest solicitors and you thought they hadgot something wrong, you would tell them and they told you. You may say,"Gosh, that is not to the benefit of your client", but it is really. Ithink that if the clients that we are both dealing with don't cross eachother, it is quite an advantage.

The first crooks I came across actually were from Canada. I think I didrefer to them at an earlier stage - or perhaps not.

mhs/954/d - 83 -


JUDY SLINN: No, no. I don't think so.

HENRY PICKTHORN: This vas a property bunch in Toronto vho van ted tofloat a Canadian property company over here in the early sixties. And Iam quite proud in a vay, because I think I vas the first person to thinkthat they really vouldn' t do. They came over here and they had a suiteat the Dorchester and they vere a1vays complaining that ve veren'tgetting on vith things and so on. But, after about a couple of months ofnegotiations, the thing broke down. And one did subsequently ascertainthat they vere in deep trouble in Canada. I vas quite pleased that, overthe veekend, one of the financial journalists vas :saying, "You shouldnever invest in a company vhich has only got a quote in a country otherthan its own." And, you knov, one felt at the time the reason vhy theseCanadians vere here - if they had got something· good to sell, they vou1dhave done ita t home - and they came over here because the dollar vasfashionable, property vas fashionable, and I think they thought theycould pull the voo1 - thank goodness, they didn't.

But that vas the first episode of dishonesty that I can remember. I amavfu11y sorry, but I haven't got a nasty enough mind. But I can rememberother troubles. I mean, one got very indignant sometimes vith merchantbankers, vhen the take-over rules came in and I felt that take-overs verebeing improperly conducted. And one got very upset that people didrather bend the rules. But that is not quite the same thing as - you aretalking about dishonesty, aren't you?

JUDY SLINN: Yes. Bending the rules though, perhaps going as very far asthe rules allov is one thing, isn't it?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I think in fact •••

JUDY SLINN: Or is it?

mhs!954! d - 84 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: •••the spirit is something as well.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: And I do think that vhen they break the letter of thelaw of the take-over rules the Take-over Panel should come down much moreheavily than it used to do. The rules are there and they should be keptabsolutely to the letter. Whereas, the Take-over Panel might say, "Ohwell, it doesn't really hurt anybody" and shrug it off, which I think vaswrong. That could be very, very upsetting if you thought your client wasbeing disadvantaged.

JUDY SLINN: Did you actually have cases like that?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes - quite late on. I can't remember vhich rule itvas. Well I will show you in a minute. Oh yes, I can. We vere actingfor a company (Simon Engineering) and a most appalling gang of people gottogether and formed a shelf company to take them over, which I thoughtvas utterly wrong, because it vas only a shelf company and if vhat theywere trying to do was change the board of directors, well vhy not justconvene a meeting and pass resolutions to sack the old directors? Butthat was thought to be a naive way of looking at things. And thesepeople did bend the rules and break one or two, and the Panel shrugged itoff. I am glad to say that they were defeated. But it vas quite adisagreeable affair. That was sometime in the eighties - towards the endof my practice, actually.

JUDY SLINN: So is what you are saying that that sort of behaviour, thebending of the rules and things, became more common by the eighties, doyou think?

mhs/954/d - 85 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: Well there are more rules to bend, for one thing, ofcourse. The Take-over Panel, I don't know when it was invented now, butit wasn't so long ago. When I retired, I did bequeath to one of myfellow partners all the Take-over Panel booklets which have ever beenproduced. It goes back to the first and that one is about five pages, orless, of general principles. And of course now it is about a hundred.


mhs/954/d - 86 -


Tape F3719 Side B

HENRY PICKTHORN: I was talking about the take-over bids and how the bookof rules got very largely expanded. And of course the more material inthe rules the easier it is to find loopholes and so on; and theloopholes are such that sometimes you can drive a coach and horsesthrough them. So part of my life was occupied with looking for otherscheating.

JUDY SLINN: Do you think it is because the City has got bigger and thatcompanies have expanded their activities, and that you have got a lot offoreign banks? These are the sort of broad trends of changes, aren'tthey, in the City?

HENRY PICKTHORN: . Yes.

JUDY SLINN: Do you think any of those are responsible for, orcontributing to, the greater dishonesty?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well you say 'greater dishonesty'. I don't knowwhether, having regard to the increased business that is now going on,there is more dishonesty than there was in the old days.

JUDY SLINN: Proportionately?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Proportionately?

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I just don't know, and I just think it would obviouslybe quite impossible to establish. I think that the bigger anyinstitution gets, the less people know each other, and the more they arelikely to try and pull the wool over the eyes of people they don't know.

mhs/955/d - 87 -


We have been importing quite a lot of foreign practices. I think themere fact that Guinness relied to a large extent on their Washingtonlawyer shows that. I am not trying to criticise him in any way. He hasjust been found as pure as the driven snow by our courts. But obviouslythere were tricks imported from overseas. Even the expression "dirtytricks", I don't think, goes back any earlier than the seventies, does it?

JUDY SLINN: No, I don't think so.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't remember hearing it at all.

JUDY SLINN: I think what most people are interested in and would like toknow, really - and obviously, in many ways, there is no definitive answer- I suppose, the Guinness affair is generally regarded as the worst caseof whi te-collar skulduggery of the seventies and the eighties, and Isuppose people are interested in whether that kind of thing would orcould have happened earlier or whether it is specific to its time.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't know how to answer that. It always seemed tome in the Guinness affair that they were breaching a very old bit ofcompany law that you can't give financial assistance for the purchase ofyour own shares. And common sense really was that they were doing justthat. But that actually wasn't what the charge was brought on (or thecharges). I am afraid I haven't really studied it or such study as I didmake of the Guinness affair was quite a while ago and it has rather goneout of my mind. I think that part of the trouble is the impetus which ajob develops; you want to win and everybody gets terribly excited. Youwork night after night and I think your judgement gets a bit clouded andyou want to put the deal through at all costs, which is wrong.

mhs/955/d - 88 -


Again, being political for a moment, it is one of my fears about thisEuropean business at the moment, that ve have got politicians in officein this country and in Europe vho are very much a 'classe politique' novand out of touch. They don't knov vhat people actually vant. They havenegotiated something. Some of them have probably never done anynegotiatingpoli ticians.

before in their lives, because they are professionalAnd they just vant to see it through. They don't vant to,

as they put it, vaste the hours they have spent talking betveenthemselves. I think they do develop their own impetus and that's vhere alot of damage gets done. Decisions are taken by people vho are tired, soto speak.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. There is no doubt take-over battles do generate anenormous amount of excitement and adrenalin amongst the participants,don't they?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. And vhat vas unheard of in the old days vere allthese advertising chaps for vhom, I am afraid, I don't have a great dealof sympathy.

In the last take-over bid vhich I vas involved in before retirement, Ivas really appalled at the degree to vhich the PR adviser vas listened toby the board, and quite probably he gave jolly bad advice. And then, notonly did ve have a PR adviser but ve had a 'lobbyist', one of these chapsto vhom ve pay money to go round and lobby Members of Parliament andmembers of the Government, vhich seems to me an absolutely appallingstate of affairs. Why they have anything to do vith them, I can'timagine. But ve seem to be moving more and more in that direction.

One is getting further avay from vhat is legal and vhat is not legal.One is getting further avay from professional advice given by bankers,tovards vha t the 'image' says and vha t arm-tvi sting you can do. And I

mhs/955/d - 89 -


don't think that is the fault of the City, as such. I think it is very

much the fault of the larger world and it is the fault of Westminster. I

don't know why these beastly MPs will listen to these people. I think

they are letting the side down. There is even one firm of lobbyistswhich has amongst its partners ex-MPs.

JUDYSLINN: Presumably on the basis they know the system.

HENRYPICKTHORN:Well they think they know the system. And I should

dare say you will find there are ex Civil Servants among them as well.

But I think it is a pretty nasty development.

JUDYSLINN: Because of this, has the - one of the questions I was going

to ask you was: has the role of the company lawyer diminished, do you

think? I mean, has he less influence than perhaps he had thirty or forty

years ago?

HENRYPICKTHORN:I hope not and I think not. I think in fact veryprobably we are moving further towards the American state of affairs,

where I don't think anybody in the commercial world or even in theprivate world will do anything without consulting his lawyer. And I

think in some ways we have got to that position.

Hand-in-hand with that, I am bound to say, I think lawyers have become

less liked than they were in the old days. I think possibly, because

they have to be used so much, they are treated a little bit - as Enoch

Powell said in another context, "You have to have sewers", and I think a

lot of people slightly feel, you know, "You have got to have lawyers".

And consequently the relationship has changed a bit, because there is somuch more law, for one thing.

I remember, in the - actually I think this was in the seventies - doing a

job for Rothschilds. And this was a question - my clients were the

American parent company of a sizeable English company and the Americans

mhs/955/d - 90 -


were selling the English company to another English company. And some

point came up: 'What does the Stock Exchange Yellow Book say?' - a

frightfully easy piece of construction - and the banker, the chap from

Rothschilds, explained what it meant. And I was taken aside by one ofthe American lawyers afterwards and he said, "Why on earth do you allowthe banker to explain what the Yellow Book says? The lawyer shouldexplain what anything means." And I said, "Well, quite honestly, an Act

of Parliament or law report, yes, but the Stock Exchange rule book, if it

is perfectly obvious what it means, if the banker wants to explain,

that's up to him. If I thought he had got it wrong, I should have said

so." But he simply felt that there was a demarcation: that a bankerwasn't there to explain anything like that, which is silly, of course.

If the banker didn't understand the Stock Exchange rules he wouldn't know

where to start.

JUDYSLINN: Of course the American system - I mean, certainly as far as

take-overs are concerned - involves much more litigation, doesn't it,

than our system in this country?

HENRYPICKTHORN: Yes. I have never been close to a court wi th an

American take-over, of course. But I think it is very different to ours.

JUDYSLINN: Well, you know, there are an awful lot of defence mechanisms

and stratagems •••

HENRYPICKTHORN:Yes•

JUDYSLINN: ••• that companies use. Most of which involve taking action

in the courts.

HENRYPICKTHORN:Yes.

JUDY SLINN: Which must presumably, necessarily, be considerably moreexpensive.

mhs/9SS/d - 91 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. Of course in this country there was a great vogue- it has rather gone out, but it was very useful - to merge, not by meansof a take-over bid but by a 'scheme of arrangement', which had the sameoutcome. And you went to the court to approve what was in effect atake-over. This was something you could only do, really, if it was afriendly, negotiated, affair. But that meant going to the courts, and ithardly took any longer. I remember - oh dear! Which one of thecommissions was appointed to inquire into company law? I can't rememberwhich one it was called. It must have been in the sixties, I suppose. Iremember one of the counsel, giving evidence, saying that all take-oversshould be by means of the court 'schemes of arrangement', which of coursewas rubbish - but this was a member of the Bar who didn't actuallyspeciali se in company law - because you couldn't .do it if it was anopposed bid.

The great practicable, easy point in giving advice on schemes ofarrangement was that you would save stamp duty (or transfer duty, which Ithink was two per cent in those days).

So an awful lot of mergers and acquisitions have been arranged in thiscountry through the courts. And indeed I think it was John Mayo andFerrier Charlton who largely invented the idea, and then of courseeverybody followed suit •.JUDY SLINN: Has the framework of the law, in which you worked when youstarted in practice, which was governed by the 1948 Companies Act, yousaid •••


JUDY SLINN: •••has that changed an awful lot?

mhs/955/d - 92 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: 'Yes and no' is the silly answer. The actual statutesI suppose are about twice or three times as thick as they were then, butit is still a question of a company limited by shares or by guarantee andso on and so forth. It has changed a lot. I think, for the companylawyer, what is even more significant perhaps than changes in thestatutes are changes in, and theRules and then the Take-over Code.more significant.

introduction of, the Stock ExchangeI think that they were in many ways

JUDY SLINN: How do you keep abreast with changes in the law? I mean, isit a case of having to do quite a lot of sort of extramural reading?Well, changes in the law - changes in the area, anyway.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. There was always a tremendous amount of that andthey got thicker and thicker, so to speak. Fortunately, there are somedear, kind people at Linkla ters who would look it all up, work it allout, prepare a jolly good note and give jolly good lectures. And I can'tsay that I was one of the people who was in the vanguard of that sort ofkindness. There were one or two things which I think I did instigate.But people like Ralph Aldwinckle: scholarly, extremely practical,extremely lucid, extremely hard-working. You may say we were spoon-fed,and I think in many ways we were. But he and various assistants verymuch led the education of the rest of us on changes in the law. FerrierCharlton was another: John Mayo was another. There is a tremendousamount of reading to be done to keep up to date. And you can't possiblyjust skimp it; otherwise you and your clients will end up flat on yourface.

JUDY SLINN: So did you find yourself working - I mean, you have talkedabout working hours - but did you find yourself working longer hours, youknow, say in the eighties, during the last ten years of your practice?

mhs/955/d - 93 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: I think probably one did. I think, on the other hand,a lot of people exaggerate how much work they do, and I think theassumption today seems to be that you can't earn a living unless you area 'workaholic', as they like to call themselves, whereas the old'fogies', in the fifties and sixties, were very much ten to four-thirtychaps, which isn't true at all. I mean, I think John fforde will tellyou how, at the end of the war, there were certain people here (like SamBrown, and John's father Sir Arthur fforde) who came back and they said,"Vie are a good firm and we are jolly well going to make it the best", andI think they worked like devils, no doubt about it. James Sandars wasanother: a tremendous worker and I think he was the sort of chap whoevery night was working until one o'clock, even in these far off days.

I suppose more hours are put in now than they were then, but it is notall that significant. I think what is exhausting for a lot of people isthe degree of travelling which is necessary - vhich :fortunately I wassaved, by and large. But I don't think anybody really quite knows theeffect it has on you, doing (I don't know) say fifty trips abroad in ayear and some of them as far away as Tokyo, with time changes, climatechanges, people changes, food changes and all the rest of it. I think itwould be really very wearing indeed on the system.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. Bill Park said so. I mean he, in the end, aftershuttling to and fro across the Atlantic, had some sort of a collapse,didn't he, I believe.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I didn't know that, but I don't doubt in the least thathe did. And I don't know whether anybody was really keeping an eye onhim sufficiently, because it seems to me pretty obvious that, if he washaving that sort of life, somebody else ought to be watching him fairlycarefully.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

mhs/955/d - 94 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: Because, apart from anything else, you can get terriblyexci ted and get terribly 'important' (flying here and there and dashingoff the plane) and you think you are the bee's knees and that's the timevhen there are mistakes aplenty.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. I think the sort of extremes of people travelling likethat are documented.


JUDY SLINN: But in terms of the sort of everyday pressure, as you say,it is not known vhat effect it does have on people.

HENRY PICKTHORN: No.

JUDY SLINN: Other than - did you find your work stressful in any way?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think I am a natural worrier. And one got terriblyinvolved, yes. There is no question about that. I criticised just novallowing a job to develop its own impetus, but one did care terribly thatyou did a good job and it vas disappointing if something vent off. Butit was terribly important that it should, every now and then. And it vasterribly important that you should retreat back every now and then.

JUDY SLINN: Why?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Because, to take one example, I remember being rung upby, I suppose it vas about the number two ranking firm of stockbrokers,saying, "Will you come and act for us and for the merchant bank. Youvon't know too much about them but it is Norton Warburg". (That vasrather a phoney name; it had nothing to do with the real Nortons or thereal Warburgs.) "And we want to do a rights issue and we want you toadvise on the issue." Well we went and met those people and qui te

mhs/955/d - 95 -


honestly they just veren't top draver. And I came back to the office andgot out a great big questionnaire of information as to vhat I thought vasrelevant to the prospectus ve vere going to issue. And of course - veIl,I say 'of course' - fortunately it absolutely floored them and that vasthat. And so ve - I can't remember if they vent off elsevhere - but,anyway, they veren't prepared to give us the information ve thought vasnecessary. And I vas quite amused by this. The assistant, vho has beenqualified for years nov, aftervards he said, "I remember you coming backand saying, " I don't like these people. I didn't like the vay theyplayed vi th their shirt-cuffs'." So it is very important, I think, torefuse to handle a matter from time to time. I don't think I vasparticularly clever. I think anybody here vould have been up to it. Andof course they did get into the most terrible trouble. I can't remembervhether they vent to prison or not.

One of the scandals vas that the Bank of England had alloved 'NortonWarburg' to come and talk to the bank employees, vho then said, "This isa vonderful company", and they put their money into it and lost the lot.

So I think it is very important that some things should go off and someshouldn't even start at all.

JUDY SLINN: What impact did the Financial Services Act of 1986 and'big-bang' have on your practice, on your vork?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Not an enormous amount, I don't think, in that I vasn'tinvolved vith any bank acquiring a firm of stockbrokers or a firm ofstockbrokers being acquired by any bank. I think there vas a generalfeeling of sadness in that a lot of household names vent out of thevindov. We vere doing a job on a prospectus and one day ve vere in theoffice of a very old firm of stockbrokers. That vas on the Friday and vecame back on the Monday and ve veren' t in the stockbroker's office atall; ve vere in the office of the subsidiary of an American bank andthese chaps vho had been partners for tventy or thirty years were just

mhs/955/d - 96 -


employees of a bank's subsidiary. And one fel t sorry for them and one

felt it wasn't the same world and one felt that standards were bound to

fall. And I think they probably have, going back to an earlier question,because how can an American bank employ people they have put out of

business - I don't know - or how can the people work with the same degree

of enthusiasm, when they are not working for themselves?

I can't imagine anything worse. People used to say it would happen

eventually to us (like 'big-bang' for the stockbrokers: the partners,

making a lot of money, being taken over by a bank, putting the money in

their pockets and becoming employees). I think a lot of people thought,

'What on earth is going to happen to Linklaters? Won't an insurance

company take them over?' But to do the same work simply to live, I can't

think it would be any fun for either party. Not only less fun or no fun

but I think less rewarding - far less satisfaction.

JUDYSLINN: Well it would be very difficult, I think, in terms of

professional standards, to be •••

HENRYPICKTHORN:Well, it would. But I think, just the same sort of

comment was made about 'big-bang': I mean, the debate pre 'big-bang'

was, "You must distinguish between the stockbroker and the stockjobber".

Of course that was just cast aside: "Oh that's a bit old-fashioned

now"• I think it might have been a 1it tle bi t more expensive, but I

think it did avoid conflicts of interest. Sadly, I think one of the

shames is that people don't seem to worry nearly so much about conflicts

of interest.

To take an example, I am sure there is going to be trouble in the

investment trust world. Clearly, investment trusts, having zero

preference shares and ordinary shares and stepped preference shares and

so on, well the board of directors is going to be torn in different ways,

mhs/955/d - 97 -


whether it should be interested in income or capital appreciation orboth. It seems to me not what an investment trust should be in, which issomething absolutely solid, simply for the private investor.

JUDY SLINN: Did you do work for investment trusts?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I did a bit, yes.

JUDY SLINN: But that, presumably, also became more specialised, did it?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Towards the end - absolutely at the end it did, yes,because of these different forms of capital. My last, perhaps my secondto last, big take-over was the then biggest investment trust being takenover by a pension fund. And this is where, as I say, I think the PRchaps and the lobbyists were given their head much too much - and lost!Nowadays the merchant bank in a take-over takes rather too dominant a:posi tion (despite these PR blokes, but they recommend the PR blokes andwhat they then do is out of their hands). This particular merchant bank,their number two (it wasn't one of their directors but their number two)was in charge of all the drafting; he played too big a part and I thinkthe directors listened to him too much and the whole style of the defencedocuments was wrong. All the bankers get frightfully hidebound infollowing their precedent documents. And what this particular take-overdefence required was originality: to write the thing in decent English,not simply have a lot of catch-phrases and slogans, the way they did it,but point out the general sort of ghastliness of the nationalised pensionfund getting the money from the taxpayer in the first place, building alarge stake in this investment trust and then turning cuckoo (and, I mean'cuckoo' in the strict sense of pushing the other shareholders out of thenest), so that it grabbed a hundred per cent of the investment capital,to the immediate advantage of the other shareholders because they weregetting a little more of the market balance but not to their long-termadvantage, and now that investment trust has gone.

mhs/955/d - 98 -


You asked earlier whether one got frightfully het up and involved inone's work. But you can see that - I don't know what it is, perhaps twoand a half or three years on - I am still quite het up about thatparticular matter, from which I suppose it must be plain that one did getvery excited and worried about one's work.

JUDY SLINN: And did you take those worries home?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I lived with it the whole time. When you aredoing a job like that, you d~n't think of anything else, which is perhapsa bit unhealthy. And you would have to rush into your room in the officeand try and deal with the mail or deal with other matters, and sometimesfound it quite difficult. Fortunately, in a big firm, one usually canoffload the other stuff and get cracking with the really big thing.

JUDY SLINN: How long does that sort of transaction last? I mean, howlong did that particular one go on for, that situation?

HENRY PICKTHORN: It ran the life of any conventional contestedtake-over, which is three or four months.

JUDY SLINN: That is quite a long time, though, isn't it, to be worriedabout something •••

.HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, yes.

JUDY SLINN: •••and for it to carryon?


JUDY SLINN: And, presumably, sometimes - yes, is that the longest, doyou think, or have you had transactions you were concerned with that havemaybe run on longer?

mhs/955/d - 99 -


HENRY P1CKTHORN: Well, under the take-over rules, they can't run onlonger than that. There is a regulatory time-table which has to be met.But I suppose there have been jobs (I can't recall them now) which havegone on longer. On that, one of the advantages of being on the companyside is that your jobs do start and finish. Whereas, I remember, as anarticled clerk, when I sat with a colleague who did trust work, wills andso on and so forth, there was stuff there which had really been rumblingon for years and years and years. And I think I would find thatextremely frustrating.

JUDY SL1NN: Yes. At least, if it goes for, say, four months, you havegot a piece of work: you have got a beginning and an end •••

HENRY P1CKTHORN: Absolutely, yes.

JUDY SLINN:can't you?

•••and you know that you can close the file at the end,

HENRY P1CKTHORN: That's right.

JUDY SL1NN: Whereas, settling a will or an estate can go on for years,can't it?

HENRY PICKTHORN: For years, yes.

JUDY SLINN: And presumably keeps popping back on your desk?

HENRY P1CKTHORN: Yes, that's right, and you have forgotten what happenedlast time, and so on.side.

So that is the beauty of being on the company

JUDY SLINN: Yes. You feel that was a choice that you made that was theright one, as it were, that the company - you have never felt there wasanother area?

mhs/955/d - 100 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: I have never felt that, no. I think possibly I came toit because of the advantages of the work. I think perhaps I should havegone a bit more for the overseas work, but I didn't and I regret it.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. I haven't asked you at all about travelling. It isone area - I remember you said that when you were first married youdidn't have money for foreign travel (holidays).


JUDY SLINN: Did you later? Did you and your wife, and did you take thechildren abroad, did you go for holidays abroad?

HENRY PICKTHORN: No, because we had a bolt-hole in Suffolk and we tendedto go down there. The children were all packed off to France and learntFrench in their teens and stayed with friends and made quite a lot ofFrench friends. But we didn't have holidays abroad. We had one inCorfu, which was a great success. But on the whole we were happier to bedown in Suffolk, with sailing, swimming and friends and so on - andcheaper!

JUDY SLINN: So you never got bitten by the travel bug, as it were?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Never got bitten by the travel bug. I used to travelquite a lot before I got married. I rather prided myself on having beenin Vienna in the year Franz Lehar died. And of course I was veryfortunate: I was stationed for nine months abroad for National Service.That slightly went when I got married, partly because my wife had done somuch travelling as a child, she wasn't all that keen.

JUDY SLINN: So you were both happy to settle. You acquired thebolt-hole quite early on, did you?

mhs/955/d - 101 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: We acquired the bolt-hole in about 1962, yes. Andbefore that time we used to stay with my parents, who also lived inSuffolk.

JUDY SLINN: Your parents?


JUDY SLINN: Oh, they moved there, did they?

HENRY PICKTHORN: They moved there.


mhs/955/d - 102 -


Tape F3720 Side A

[Third interview of HENRY PICKTHORNat

Linklaters & Paineson

Tuesday, 2nd March 1993starting at 14.30.]

JUDY SLINN: I think, from what we have been saying, there were possiblyone or two more things that had come up that you had recalled to mindabout Cambridge in the days of your youth.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I think you thought possibly, rather than youth,childhood might be quite interesting. I don't know whether it is. Ithink it was a very happy time. My father was a Fellow and Tutor of avery small College - I think the second smallest. They had a veryintimate High Table. I think there were only twelve dons in all, whichis amazing when you go and see a college now. They were all closefriends. They all, I think, admired each other and they were all top oftheir respective academic fields. The fellow dons provided godparentsfor oneself, one's brother and sister and vice versa.

I think one of the strangest things, in a way, was how, as a child of a

don, you were almost treated as a member of the College, really from theage of about four upwards. You could go there; have tea in the Porter'sLodge; children's parties in the summer were given in the Fellows'Gardens, as a matter of course, with races and goodness knows what. Inthe winter there were Christmas parties in the Halls of other Colleges.So I think the other Colleges were just like Corpus were. One knew theCollege servants very well. I remember we always had a terrifictea-party with my father's gyp just before Christmas. The bedmakers, I

think, were friends.

mhs/956/d - 103 -


It was something which had virtually disappeared by the time I went up to

Cambridge as an undergraduate in 1948. And maybe it was a bit of an

abuse that the overheads of the College should be partly spent on the

College gardener, keeping the College garden in order for the enjoyment

of the dons' children.

JUDYSLINN: The overheads in those days weren't terribly high. Do you

think the system ended, or that way of life ended, for economic reasons

or was it the fact that Cambridge started to grow bigger?

HENRYPICKTHORN:I think it partly came to an end because in those days

the Colleges obtained their revenue from fees and endowments. There

weren't great State hand-outs. And I think the governing bodies of theColleges felt they were running their own ship and the way they wanted torun it was in a happy sort of way.

Once the war came and anyone who had been in the Services (including,

quite absurdly, somebody like me who was only a National Serviceman after

the war) got government grants. And then the whole place became

thoroughly corrupted and, I am afraid, interfered with by government

subsidy. And I think that probably was what changed a great deal of

Cambridge.

I think I regret in a way that one wasn't more conscious of what was

going on. But there wasn't any great sort of feeling of intellectual or

academic snobbery. I remember the poet Hausmann being pointed out to me

as he took a walk along the Coton footpath, and I think that was quite

exci ting once one was old enough to read a few poems and remember that

one had actually seen the chap. One also used to see J.J. Thomson, thegreat Master of Trinity, walking past. I remember seeing him outside

Peterhouse with his walking-stick rattling the railings, which was rather

enchanting. But people like George Trevelyan, who were neighbours (well,

less than quarter of a mile away), one just simply took for granted:

mhs/956/d - 104 -


here was George Trevelyan. In due course, in 1940, J.J. Thomson died.Trevelyan had been at Harrow with Winston Churchill and Winston Churchillbecame Prime Minister and appointed George Trevelyan to be Master ofTrinity. One didn't think at the time that one was almost rubbingshoulders with the gods, but I think obviously one was. There wasn't afeeling of what I described as sort of intellectual snobbery at all,which was a good thing.

JUDY SLINN: Just an acceptance of what was there, really.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, I think that's right. I think so.

JUDY SLINN: Any other reminiscences of Cambridge as a child?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think one saw a lot of people. My parents were quiteconscientious in the sense that there were always undergraduates comingto lunch two or three times a week. At weekends perhaps old pupils wouldcome and stay. If they were kind they would take you out on the river ina punt, which was something one never got the opportunity to do on one'sown and my father couldn't be bothered or couldn't afford it. So I didsee a lot of people - and they were a lot of jolly nice people.

It changed overnight on the 3rd of September 1939. I can remember thatday well, because we didn't possess a wireless in our household but mymother thought we ought to go and hear Neville Chamberlain announcingthat the ultimatum had expired and we were at war with Germany. And sowe biked up to the house of the midwife who had brought us into theworld, in Grantchester Road, and we sat there and heard this rather grimwording. That very night there was an air-raid warning. I think therewas an air-raid warning over the whole of England because a single Germanaeroplane was spotted trying to cross the North Sea.

We spent quite a lot of that holiday, before the 3rd of September, inCambridge. Being day boys, we were called in to our prep school to dig

mhs/956/d - 105 -


air-raid shelters. The air-raid siren was shoved on the top of the gateover the Porter t s Lodge at Selwyn. That was the one we heard. And ofcourse, when term started a month later, there were virtually no youngmen - I think the young women, presumably, were there - but there were noyoung men turning up. And what began to fill the Colleges very quicklywere people training, largely for the Navy and for the Air Force. Isuppose there were probably some army sappers, and so on, training. Andone saw these young people, straight out of school not likeundergraduates on bikes - but they formed threes and they were marchedaround the town when they went from wherever they were staying (near tous, for Selwyn College) down to a lecture room. And they did a shortcourse, in Cambridge, of about three months and then I think, poor chaps,were pushed into rather inefficient aeroplanes and many of them werekilled. Certainly I remember my mother t s cousin being sent up in aBlenheim Bomber, having been on one of these courses in September/October1939, and was killed in a matter of weeks.

I think Cambridge was probably quite a sad place during the war. Thereis quite a good account of it by a chap who curiously was in Cambridge inboth wars. He had suffered infantile paralysis in the 1914/18 war and sowas one of the very few students then. In fact I think he was about theonly undergraduate in Corpus. And it so happened that he was evacuatedto Cambridge during the Second War. A lot of government ministries andsome firms as well got out of London when the bombing started and came toCambridge, as did quite a lot of schools. And I think quite a lot ofLondon University came. We certainly had lodgers vho came from LSE, Ithink it vas. And so our top floor was filled with lodgers and they atewith us and they were very nice too.

JUDY SLINN: Were there any normal undergraduates then? Was normalteaching kind of suspended?

mhs/956/d - 106 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: I honestly don't know but I think there were far morewhat I call normal undergraduates in the Second World War than there hadbeen in the First. But there weren't very many of them. There were oneor two, but mostly these were Naval short courses, Army short courses,RAF short courses. There were some overseas people. I remember Trinitywas asked to take a lot of - I think it was - Nigerians. And a sort ofidiotic decision that Trinity (which is my own College) took was thatthey shoved all the Nigerians into Whewe11 ,s Court, which of coursedidn't go down very well, because the last thing they wanted to do was tohave a Court which was full of nothing but Nigerians. And they kept thewhite men in Great Court and Neville's Court. Incredibly foolish,really, and I think it upset them no end.

JUDY SLINN: Certainly at Oxford there was some teaching still went on,because Ferrier Charlton went up, and I suppose there were others likehim, who actually had scope to do, you know, sort of two terms of theirdegree or something •••


JUDY SLINN: •••before they were of an age to go into the Armed Services.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I think, if I knew more about it, there was thesame thing at Cambridge, because one has read biographies of people whowere there for a very short while and then went into the Services.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. And then came back at the end of the war.


JUDY SLINN: And finished their degree.

mhs/956/d - 107 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: I hadn't realised that Ferrier had done that. But hecame out and, I think, you knov vas quite a hero in the Air Force and",on a DFC, and so on.

So they didn't close down quite so much. And of course there ",ere farmore people in reserved occupations. I think they had to go on trainingengineers - they had to go on training other scientists as part of the",ar effort.

JUDY SLINN: Yes, yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Slightly disgraceful, I suppose, and something ",hichpeople ",ill hardly believe, but as a child I am afraid I first heard ofthe atomic bomb in 1940, simply through being a 'Cambridge child'.

JUDY SLINN: Oh, really.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't remember the ",ord 'atomic', but I do distinctlyremember going to my prep school - this vas vhen I first verrt to be aboarder - and very indiscreetly saying to another boy, something about,"Yes, but ",e are vork.Ing on a tremendous bomb". And the reason I knevabout this vas - I suppose 'security' had hardly been invented in thosedays - but I kne", that George Thomson (",ho ",as a physicist) had been tosee my papa to ask him in turn to go to the government and say that therevas some heavy va ter in Norvay and - I can I t remember vhe ther it vasheavy ",ater or something else - in Belgium, ",hich simply must be got outbefore the Germans got there. And this ",as just at the beginning of theNor",egian campaign. And so one kne", the reason ",hy they ",ere getting ortrying to get this out, and the reason vas because the chaps in theCavendish Laboratory thought they ",ere going to get quite close tospli tting the atom. And of course there vas then a Cambridge team vhi chvent and pursued the studies at break-neck speed in America - I thinkeven before America entered the ",ar, but I am not too sure about that.

mhs/956/d - 108 -


I think there is a certain amount of feeling that the Americans possiblylet us down in not acknowledging the extent of the British (theCambridge, I think it really was) contribution to being the first peoplethere with the nuclear weapon. After all we know the Germans weren't farbehind but thank goodness we were ahead.

JUDY SLINN: Did you, as a child, understand what this was or just thatit was, as you said, to a friend •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well one certainly understood that if there was a bomb,which was going to be immensely more powerful than anything else, itcould be a war-winner. There was a lot of talk at the time; there was alot of stuff about HitIer always boasting about having a secret weaponand we were all guessing what it was. Was it the magnetic mine or was itsomething else - it might have been this - some super bomb.

JUDY SLINN: I find it quite amazing that obviously this was sort offairly well known or reasonably well known.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't know that it was.

JUDY SLINN: Ah! You think it was just because of this connection withyour father? [SPEAKING AT SAME TIME AS HENRY PICKTHORN]

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't think it was. I am afraid it was simplyeavesdropping after lunch, I should think it was. We always used to -well, before the war I suppose we had lunch in the nursery and we usuallyused to go down and have coffee with the grown-ups. And during the warthe nursery obviously wasn't there and we all 1ived together. But Idon't think it ever occurred to anyone to say, "You mustn't know anythingabout this", or, "Shut up", or anything. I don't think it would haveoccurred to them that we would have talked about it. Anyway, touch wood,I don't think we did any harm at that particular point.

mhs/956/d - 109 -


JUDY SLINN: Yes. Because there was a government campaign, wasn't there,which I think was the Second World War, that 'Careless talk costs lives'?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, illustrated by Fougasse, the cartoonist. Yes, itwas allover the shop. And I suppose it was 'careless talk' to talk to atwelve year old child at a prep school. But I don't think I then thoughtabout it at all until in fact I remember I was out sailing in August in1945 with a chap who was in the Navy, still serving, and I think abouteleven o'clock we were saying the usual sort of stuff: 'Of course it islovely to have beaten Germany, but I suppose the Japanese campaign willgo on for ever', and he said, "Oh, I don't think so, now that we havejust dropped this bomb." And I think it was at that point I rememberedback to this other affair, because it had never been talked about again.

JUDY SLINN: Was your father away more during the war? Was he away inLondon?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't know he was away any more. He was away on hisown much more. My mother basically stayed in Cambridge during the warand he came up and slept (as I think I told you before) in mygrandmother's house, which was then full of people doing war work; i.e.people who had to be in London. He was away right at the beginning ofthe war because, having been in the Royal Flying Corps, he then wanted to- well, he did volunteer for the Royal Air Force in 1939, gaily thinkingthey were going to shove him in the back of a bomber and he was going tohave a machine-gun and do what he was doing in 1916. But in fact he hadbeen quite badly wounded and he was very offended by being told to pushpins about on a map. So he resigned in a matter of about a fortnight,having suffered much umbrage, I think. But there you are.

JUDY SLINN: Can we go forward now and ask you about the sort of lastyear or so of your practice and the lead-in (assuming there was alead-in) at Linklaters to retirement. I don't know quite how the systemworks here.

mhs/956/d - 110 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: Well I retired before my sixty-fifth birthday, largelybecause I found it, as I may have said before, extremely difficult tokeep up to date with all the changes in the law, particularly theEuropean Directives and our own Financial Services Act, which in turn waspartly due to the European Directives and which I think was a thoroughbosh-up. And I think we are lucky to have survived to the extent that wehave, although the expense which this has added to any form of securitiestransaction is simply appalling.

JUDY SLINN: Could you elaborate on that a bit? I mean, in what sense doyou think it was a 'bosh-up'?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think they did everything with much too broad abrush, in regulating the honest people and the dishonest in the samemanner, extremely expensively. The client has to pay in the long run.And of course you are not providing any form of protection to thosedealing with honest people and you are not really providing much of aprotection for those dealing with dishonest people, because they will getround it. But the expense of every stockbroking house or lawyers havinga compliance officer and the amount of paper that has generated, I thinkwas quite unnecessary.

JUDY SLINN: Is what you are saying, really, you are - I mean, there is aview which has been put forward by solicitors for nearly a hundred years,off and on, that there is no way you can ever actually legislate to coverthe black sheep. Those who want to get round it will always get round it.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, I am sure that is right.

JUDY SLINN: Whatever you put in place.

mhs/956/d - 111 -


HENRYPICKTHORN:Yes. And also, of course, the more you put in placethe more people are going to get round the spirit of the law and the

spirit of what one's behaviour should be, while complying with the

letter, and I think that's quite an important criticism. Because I think

probably in the early days it was the spirit that stopped people doing

things. And now they say, "Well, let's hire a clever lawyer or a clever

banker and find a way round it." But you will get more from Ferrier

Charlton and John Mayo, I think, on this topic, than from me.

It was certainly most disappointing the way that the Financial Services

Bill was discussed and very intelligent criticism was put forward, in

particular by a committee of The Law Society headed by Ralph Aldwinckle,

and simply brushed aside by a Minister who had no experience whatsoever

of what he was trying to legislate for, or about. And one does think

there is something a bit wrong with the system: that legislation is

something which should not be undertaken lightly but take a matter of

years to plan out and discuss.

JUDYSLINN: It is very difficult, when you roll away everything that is

there, as it were, isn't it, and replace it with a completely new system?

HENRYPICKTHORN:Well certainly I found it quite difficult for me,

having been in practice for thirty-six/ thirty-seven years, having these

immense changes. One kept on thinking back in the old ways and then

perhaps you would remember what it was like after a first set of changes

and then it had been changed again and so on and so forth. So I think

that was one reason why one felt really it was time to go. I had failing

eyesight, which meant that I had to read most things with a magnifyingglass but you can't really do that if you are rushing around at meetingsand trying to pretend that you are on top of things. If you suddenly

pull out a magnifying glass and peer at the newspaper, it is not very

impressive.

mhs/956/d - 112 -


So I retired early. The form was to give notice and I think it is

possibly as little as six months after you reach your sixtieth birthday.I think my notice was probably still about a year before I was going togo. I enjoyed the last year very much. One gradually handed over one'sclients, but I think I am proud to say that I worked hard up until thelast minute, because I happened to have two or three big jobs withclients I liked very much indeed, although I think one does as good a jobfor all clients, likeable or not. But one was happy to be full tiltuntil the very week one went.

JUDY SLINN: Did you keep on any work, to come back for a time? I mean,because it always seems to me that if you just stop at a date which youhave agreed, and you are going full tilt, as you say, until then, andthen you know it is like a great fence: you come to a stop.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I had a fortnight's holiday and then I did comeback because there were one or two things that I hadn't sorted out, butit wasn' t serious work; it was really only putting things in the rightorder and explaining a few things to people, due to my inefficiency ofnot having done that before I actually left. But I didn't keep on anyclient work. And I think, in the sort of work I was doing, it would be agreat mistake to think that you can keep your finger in the pie. It isall or nothing.

And I must say I am jolly glad not to have had part-time directorshipsand so on. Every day one seems to pick up the paper and read of some oldfriend with a thoroughly respectable (what one thought was a thoroughlyrespectable) company and, as a non-executive director, he didn't knowwhat was going on, and it could ruin one's declining years!

JUDY SLINN: So what do you do now? What sort of pattern is there toyour life or what are your sort of activities in retirement?

mhs/956/d - 113 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. Well the pattern, I am afraid, is rather stupidin that we spend about four nights a week in London and three nights aweek in the country and one wastes a bit of time going from one to theother. In London I spend quite a lot of time in a State school where Iam a Governor and where I teach a morning a week, and that's quite fun.

JUDY SLINN: Do you? What do you teach?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well I don't teach anything more than children how toread, but I do think it is terribly important because it is quite a smallschool (about a hundred and eighty children, ages from five to eleven)and so they go up the school with their age group. And of course some ofthem are jolly able and some of them are jolly unable. And it is thosepoor people that one is trying to help. And I. am bound to say I havebeen very encouraged in the last year, in that there are some hopelesscases but they are very few and far between, and there are some who just,for some reason, haven't got interested in reading - the parents a bitlazy or a single parent family or one reason or another. And if you canget through to them that actually reading isn't a bad thing to do, it isjolly nice when they get the hang of it.

So that's all I have done. But I shall stay with the same form untilthey leave at the age of eleven-plus, and I think, as they progress upthe school, I shall probably try and teach alit tle bit more formally,although I am afraid in a State school formal teaching is not quite whatit used to be. They all rather sit round tables and get on with theirown things, partly because they are of such mixed ability and partlybecause that's, it seems to me, the received wisdom as to the way smallchildren should be taught. So it will be quite difficult just to get upand tell them a bit about English history, which is something I shouldlike to do, because they live in the heart of Westminster and some ofthem ought to be jolly excited by English history. They - most of themgo to the Abbey once a year and so some of them are faintly aware of it,

mhs/956/d - 114 -


but I don't think they are more than vaguely aware of it. I mean. I wastalking to one of the teachers not long ago. and she said that reallytheir world is bounded by their 1950's style estate. council estate, withthe river on one side, which they never dare go near (possibly rightly),and Lupus Street on the other. And there are shops on one side of LupusStreet but not on the other side of Lupus Street. And even going toVictoria Station is a bit of an adventure. I think. sadly, in thedangerous world we live in, one used to read about chaps who wouldreminisce about their childhood in London, and how they would walk allover the place and see everything of interest from quite a tender age.But I am afraid nowadays it can't be done in safety. what was done inthose days.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. So that in fact children are getting, in thatsituation, a much narrower life.

HENRY PICKTHORN: A much narrower life: a far narrower life. I think itis one of the greatest sadnesses of modern life. And they may think thatthey have got a less narrow life because they have got video games andTVs and so on and so forth, but it is an infinitely narrower life than itshould be.

JUDY SLINN: Was this something you thought about doing before youretired, and sort of deliberately set out to do, or was it something thatjust happened to come your way?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I had been a Governor of this school for thirty years,but when I was in work here, one did the formal stuff of attendingmeetings and I am afraid I used to get some of our legal work done in theoffice by colleagues for nothing. But that was about the sum total ofit. One simply hadn't got the time to go into school once a week and getto know the staff and the children in the way that one can now that oneis retired.

mhs/956/d - 115 -


So, yes, I had planned that I would spend more time on this and it did

coincide of course with - oh dear, what is the jargon - LMS (local

management of schools). It did coincide with that move, which in the

case of our school has been a great success. The school is far more

managed now by the Governors and the staff. We can actually go and buy

the books we want, which one couldn't in the old days, and one can decide

whether one wants to take on another member of staff or not, and

consider, "Can we afford to do it?"

So I was lucky, from that point of view, that it did coincide with my

retirement. And that does take up more time than it sounds, actually,

because there are various committees and school meetings and Westminster

Council meetings that somebody has to go to and present views and take

views. And there is a lot of time, I am afraid, in simply saying, "These

loos absolutely stink to high heaven and we can't go on like this. We

have got to get them out and have them rebuilt." I mean, that took two

years of persuading others that it really had to be done, because the

whole building stank, and finding the money to do it. So it all takes

longer than you expect.

That is one occupation. I think I neglected private affairs (family

trusts, estates of dead relatives that I was supposed to be responsible

for) while I was here and that's all taking quite a long time to get

straight and it is quite amusing. It means sitting at one's desk and in

a minor way doing the sort of thing one was doing here, except I wasn't

doing probate work or trust work, but one is ringing up stockbrokers andtax advisers and so on and so forth. So that has been quite a consumer

of time.

Our parish mag is so ghastly that I said I would write a monthly piece

for them, and that's qui te fun.. And again I don't type or use a

word-processor, so that all takes a bit of time and it is just a question

mhs/956/d - 116 -


of writing about some local saint or explaining what 'Trinity tide' meansor what was the point of Epiphany. That certainly takes me a bit of timeto look it up in a few books and condense it to seven or eight hundredwords.

JUDY SLINN: Is this in London or in Suffolk?

HENRY PICKTHORN: It started in Suffolk, but I have actually persuadedfour other clergy friends to take it as well, so I am proud to say Ithink I am syndicated, but the readership is not more than about athousand. But it is amazing how interesting it all is, actually.


mhs/956/d - 117 -


Tape F3730 Side B

HENRY PICKTHORN: One of the saints to whom churches have been dedicated,of genuine English ancestry, is St Botolph. But few have a clue who StBotolph was, and I hadn't much until I looked it up. There were four StBotolphs in the City of London. I think one disappeared in the GreatFire and there are still three. And St Botolph actually was a Suffolkman. So that sort of thing is all quite fun. I didn't know it beforeand I hope that people who read the mag didn't know it either.

Otherwise, I suppose - oh, I spend a bit of time on politics, actually.I have always done quite a lot of canvassing in elections and so on. Icertainly did a lot in the General Election of April 1992. I have done abi t in the local government. And now I am very concerned at theMaastricht Treaty. I dare say it is too late to do anything about it,but I think we are having the right to govern ourselves given away by aconspiracy of politicians and it is time we all made our views known.

So that. is taking a bit of time at the moment. I do a bit of gardening;do a bit of sailing. It doesn't sound much, but it fills the day.

JUDY SLINN: Do you enjoy it?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Very much.

JUDY SLINN: Put it this way: did you feel any regrets when you leftLinklaters?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, certainly. I did explain I still come here to seeone's old friends and I think one misses lunching with one's friends;one misses talking over the topic of the day, or legal points or whateverit might be, with one's friends. That was, I think, the great joy ofbeing in practice in partnership. So one does miss that a lot, noquestion about it.

mhs/957/d - 118 -


On the other hand, one can't cling on to these things for ever and I

didn't have any regrets at going. Whenyou say, do I enjoy it, I am not,

I think, one of those people who sort of says, "Golly, I am relaxing now"or "I am not relaxing now" or "I am enjoying this" or "I am not enjoyingthis". I think probably I am like the Duke of Norfolk, a rather nice old

chap who was Earl Marshal at the time of the Coronation, in an interview

in the Sunday Times he said, "I am content". Well I am sure he had lots

of worries. But I think possibly I am fairly naturally content.

I certainly don't understand people who say, "I have to go to Madeira

because it is the only place I can relax." SomehowI don't qui te know

what they are talking about.

JUDYSLINN: No. But, I mean, I was thinking in terms that there is awhole gamut really of attitudes to retirement, aren't there?

HENRYPICKTHORN:Yes.

JUDY SLINN: I mean there are people who find it is intolerable, after

having a busy professional or commercial life.

HENRYPICKTHORN:Yes.

JUDY SLINN: You do meet people who simply cannot come to terms with

that. You meet others who really can't wait to shake the dust of

wherever they were off their feet and say, "This is wonderful", whatever

they are doing.

HENRYPICKTHORN:Yes.

JUDY SLINN: And then there are a whole number of attitudes in between ,and that really was the purpose of my question.

mhs/957/d - 119 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. Well I suppose I am somewhere in the middle. Ithink quite a lot of people who fancy themselves as 'workaholics'probably did work too hard. I found it quite nice to read in thenewspaper that Ernest Bevin, when he became Foreign Secretary - I readthis last week - he moved into the Foreign Office on the Tuesday and onFriday the civil servant said, "Here's the box for the weekend", andBevin just turned to him and said, "Well thank you very much. A niceidea, but I'd rather not." I found that good; I think that was, in someways, the right attitude. I think some of these people, especially thosein public life, who think that they are working the whole time, theyaren't in fact. They are just not thinking.

JUDY SLINN: Do you spend more time with your wife? I mean, we haven'tactually talked about her since we - you said she didn't work again afterthe children, but •••


JUDY SLINN: •••when the children grew up, presumably she developed otheractivities.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well, the extraordinary thing is that - when you say'the children grew up' - we are a slightly elongated family in that thereis over ten years between the oldest and the youngest, and so since thefirst child was born there has always been one child in the house, andthere still is. And she is a bit of a push-over, in that she does allthe washing for the two older sons, who have left the house, and theironing and she has got two houses to keep clean. She is the gardener intwo houses, and so on and so forth. And sometimes, you know, she thinks,'Golly, what a fool I am. I should be doing something else'. But she isvery, very busy in doing these sort of things. I mean she is terriblyconscientious about it and she is very conscientious about helping our

mhs/957/d - 120 -


daughter with the grandchildren, and so on and so forth. At the drop ofa hat she buzzes off there and helps out, as necessary. So she is farfrom idle.

But possibly she would like to have something a bit more intellectual todo. Not that she has allowed her mind to stagnate in the least littlebit.

JUDY SLINN: No, no. I didn't mean to suggest that at all.

HENRY PICKTHORN: No, no. But, yes, I suppose I do spend more time withher. Between ourselves, I think she would - she rather liked herindependence when I was out of the house all day and now she rather likesit when I come to the office like this. Although at the moment she hasgone to look after a sick relative. But, yes, we do see a bit more ofeach other.

JUDY SLINN: Do you have friends down in Suffolk as well?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Oh yes.

JUDY SLINN: So do you have sort of two social lives: one in London andone in Suffolk?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, I think that's probably a fair way of putting it,although one doesn't look at it like that. One just has friends and someof them happen to be there and some of them happen to be here.

JUDY SLINN: Yes, yes. I mean, do you envisage spending more time inSuffolk?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think eventually we shall sell the house in Londonand be there all the time, you know, if we are spared, as they say.

mhs/957/d - 121 -


JUDY SLINN: Can I take you on now to one or two sort of overallreflections on your time in the City?


JUDY SLINN: I mean, firstly, just purely in terms of very basic sort ofchanges, you presumably - am I wrong in assuming that you travelled byTube from, I think you said, from .••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well I started first from St James's Park because myparents had a flat in Ashley Gardens, by Westminster Cathedral, and I didthat until I was married. And then we had a flat in Warwick Square and Iused to catch the underground at Victoria; and then, since we came toChelsea, I caught the underground at South Ken. Yes.

JUDY SLINN: Has that over the period of time, did anythingparticularly change about your journeys to work that you noticed?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well they got longer, because we moved further out, andthey got more expensive. I think they probably got more crowded. Therewas a nice time when people didn't write all over the trains withfountain pens or whatever it is they squirt it with! There was a time -I have told you I am very anti the anti-smokers, though I don't smoke -when the underground trains were highly repellent, you know, in the oldsmoking days. When the door opened it looked like there was a bonfireinside. They would be quite clean in the morning and you would go backin the evening and you were just treading in an ashtray. It was quiteextraordinary, really, that it was ever allowed to get such a hold.

Obviously, when one first works - well I am not sure about when I firstworked - but when I think Winston Churchill got back into power, was itin 1952?

mhs/957/d - 122 -


JUDY SLINN: Yes, or 1951.

HENRY PICKTHORN: The bowler hat came back in a big way, because I thinkhe summoned his prospective Cabinet Ministers and they were allphotographed, turning up in taxis or on foot, at Number 10 wearing bowlerhats. And we - everyone had been wearing a bowler hat in the undergroundin those days and I think the ladies were probably wearing hats too, butthere weren't, perhaps, quite so many ladies. Certainly I remember hereall the secretaries used to turn up in the morning wearing a hat. And Icertainly also remember the first meeting I ever had with a ladysolicitor and she wore a hat the whole time.

So everyone is much scruffier than they were on the underground. I thinkthat London being the home of the well-dressed male has rather sadly goneout of the window. You do see some quite well-dressed people around inthe City, but you don't in the West End, do you? Not that I am a greatdandy or anything like that, but I think it is a bit of a shame thatpeople don't bother in the way they did.

I don't think I can say much more about the underground.

JUDY SLINN: No, no. It was just that I wondered whether, you know,there were any striking changes in the way you got to work, as it were.


JUDY SLINN: Any other sort of major changes in the City, in terms ofcustoms and manners?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Customs and manners?

JUDY SLINN: That you observed over the period?

mhs/957/d - 123 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I think probably in the early days there was muchmore dropping in to each other's office than now, partly because we wereall much closer together. I mean, when I first worked at Linklaters, wewere in four little offices, but they were all on top of each other, andour main office was in Austin Friars. But somebody in Robert BensonLonsdales, as it then was (now Kleinwort Benson), would be over the roadin Broad Street and would ring up one's principal and say, "Kenneth, canI pop over and see you? II , just like that. And he would pop over and hewould be seen, not in an interview room as happens today, but he wouldjust come into the partner's or the assistant's room and that was it Orone would go over there at the drop of a hat. And there was much more ofthat.

I think actual communication was much more by letter than it subsequentlybecame, obviously, with fax and telex - telex then fax it should be,shouldn't it? - and telephone. I think there were probably more letterswritten. And I think there were less of the mammoth meetings which seemto get orchestrated nowadays. You are out on some new job and themerchant bank pompously sends out a dramatis personae and, you know, aprogramme (which you know is going to be torn to shreds and not kept to),and he summons a meeting in a board room with a table as long as acricket pitch and you all sit round it and nothing very much happens.

I think in the old days a job would start off, much more likely, in thissort of, "Can I come and see you? 'We want to do this, that and theother". And my recollection is that the solicitors actually did muchmore of the donkey work, which was then pinched by the merchant bankersin about 1960. The merchant bankers started moving into 'palaces',whereas they had been in the same sort of offices as stockbrokers were,sort of Victorian (or earlier) buildings with a well in the middle, withwhite tiles all the way round it, so that you got a bit of light on theinside. And that was where a merchant bank might be.

mhs/957/d - 124 -


I remember casting my eye over the threshold - luckily the door happenedto be open into the banking parlour at Morgan Grenfell - and there wasLord Bicester (who was, I suppose, about eighty) and there was his eldestson, the Honourable Vivian Smith who was known as Bicester's boy, andthere was Lord Harcourt and somebody Hill-Wood, about eight of them, andthey were all sitting in one room. I mean quite a nicely furnishedroom. In fact one would have loved to have some of the furni ture andpaintings. But there they all were and they probably had a couple oflittle rooms outside where they could see people. But they didn't livein a great 'palace', as they subsequently did, when they had to justifytheir expansiveness.

And I can't remember when it started to happen, this business of doingsomething quite simple, like a rights issue or. a bonus issue, and themerchant bank getting out the programme and a list of documents and allthat sort of thing, because that used to be done by us and, I think, justas well. It might have been a bi t more back-of-an-envelopes sort ofstuff, but we did it.

JUDY SLINN: It probably cost a lot less.

HENRY PICKTHORN: It cost far less because we didn't have these overheadsand these monstrous board rooms and people being summoned to a meetingwhere, quite honestly, not much was said or done.

JUDY SLINN: The move towards having 'palaces' in the City •••


JUDY SLINN: •••is an interesting one, I think, isn't it?


mhs/957/d - 125 -


JUDY SLINN: I mean Linkla ters, when I first knew it in the earlyeighties, although you were in Barrington House here •••


JUDY SLINN: •••which you had been since 1956 •••


JUDY SLINN: •••was not as 'palace-like' as it is now.

HENRY PICKTHORN: No. I think it was actually far more tasteful, if Idare say that. (Laughter)

JUDY SLINN: 'Even more', actually!

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes - what a coward ought to say! I don't know. Ithink probably it is the younger generation, with the big ideas, that ispartly responsible. And I think one gets talked into an awful lot byarchitects and so on. I think it was partly - in Barrington House - thethreat of the landlord, which he carried out in the end, you know, "Thishas got to have regulated air-conditioning, whether you want it or not."I think it was partly the necessity of making changes to bring in all thewiring for the computer systems and so on and so forth, which wasinevitable. And I suppose the feeling, once you are doing that, 'Well,let's have a foyer that looks like the Regal cinema.' But the psychology.of the. thing beats me, actually. It really does. I also think it ispartly because an architect will show you a drawing or a plan and I thinkneither he nor the client knows what on earth it is going to look like atthe end of the day. I mean, the drawing looks fine but it doesn'tactually turn out as you expect it.

mhs/957/d - 126 -


I suppose the moving into the 'palaces' was - well, there was a lot ofbombing, as you know, in the City, although actually it was burning, Ithink, rather than bombing, wasn't it, that did the damage?

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think most of the destruction was one night in 1940when, believe it or not, the Germans dropped their incendiaries and therewas an exceptionally low tide and the ghastly thing was that the waterwas supposed to be got from the river and the jolly old LCC hoses weren'tlong enough to get at the water at low tide. Awful to think of, isn't it?

JUDY SLINN: Mm.

HENRY PICKTHORN: You know, they had measured for a sort of middle neaptide but they couldn't do a really low spring tide. And so an awful lotgot burnt which shouldn't have been burnt. And then, when the rebuildingstarted, fairly late because of restrictions on construction after thewar, I suppose people felt, 'Let's give it a whirl'.

But I certainly remember being rather resentful that one suddenly wasexpected to have a higher standard of living in the office, in the senseof thickness of the pile and the quality of the curtains, than one had athome, because as a junior solicitor one didn't rush out and buy thickpile carpets and so on and so forth. And one thought the thing was beingrather turned upside down.

(External interruption)

HENRY PICKTHORN: We were talking about 'palaces'. I think the banks,the merchant banks, led the way and then I think the solicitors thought,'We are just as grand as they are', and they rather followed suit - Ithink stupidly, in my opinion.

mhs/957/d - 127 -


I remember doing a property issue in the property boom days of the earlysixties, and this is before - well, two property 'crashes' ago. Andsitting there and doing a prospectus and somebody said, "Oh you mustdescribe such and such a building" - it is a monstrosity in Holborn and Ithink it is called 'State House', believe it or not - "as a prestigeoffice building." And my principal, Kenneth Cole, said, "Well I am notsure I should be happy with that word because in the film industry, whereI have done a bit of work, a 'prestige' film is one which is expected tolose money." But they still went on using these awful words of'prestige' and 'prestigious' and so on and so forth. But of course itthen became a bit of a saying that, 'Rule one of investment is you mustsell the shares in the company when they move into a new head office.' Ithink it is a very sound rule. Possibly that and when they have a Peeron the board. I don't know.

But when we first came into Barrington House, we thought it wasincredibly grand. There weren't any carpets. I mean, we thought it wasso grand because we had parquet flooring and that was killed because ofthe stiletto heels. Do you remember, in about the late fifties, all thegirls started wearing stiletto heels, which are not suitable for parquetflooring. So we had to put down some carpeting. And David Pearson (whosubsequently went off and became Deputy Chairman of Robert Flemings) , Iremember he went out and (frightfully clever) he chose some real woolcarpet designed not to show the dirt, and it was marvellous stuff and itlasted about thirty years. I think they have re-carpeted twice since hechose this excellent stuff. So quality pays.

JUDY SLINN: Did individual partners' rooms improve as well?

HENRY PICKTHORN: In a sense they went down because when we first came inhere a partner had a jolly big room. He would have two windows and a bigroom to himself. And then, as we expanded and we were squeezed in thesense of space, I think they have all been cut up. I think there is only

mhs/957/d - 128 -


one partner's room which hasn't been cut up since we moved in here in1956. So in a way they are less grand, but everyone has got much granderideas about furnishings and the furniture - and some pretty ghastly worksof art!

JUDY SLINN: Yes, I have noticed. Yes. You were saying you thought itwas the next generation of solicitors, and that ties in with a question Iwas going to ask you, which was: were other young men coming into theprofession now very different from your generation, do you think?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I hope not. I think quite a lot of them always havesome bigger ideas, grander ideas; maybe that's a good thing.

JUDY SLINN: Do they have greater expectations of, for instance, thelife-style they expect to be able to support, the income, than you did,do you think?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think probably they do, yes.

JUDY SLINN: Because in the last few years an awful lot has been writtenin the press about the sort of, you know, the incomes of City solicitors.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I always turn over rapidly; I never study thesethings! Subject to that comment, I think probably they have got muchbigger expectations than we had and than, you know, our predecessorshad. The partners, when I joined, I suppose they were well-to-do by _goodness knows - by world standards they were very well-to-do. But theywere all modest people. I shouldn't think there was a swimming bathbetween us! And I think they would have a fairly modest, English-builtcar and so on.

JUDY SLINN: One didn't go for foreign holidays and have boats and things?

mhs/957/d - 129 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: I think they might do a driving holiday in France but Idon't think they vere attracted by sitting on the sand in the West Indiesor all that sort of thing.

JUDY SLINN: Somebody, I think, did once suggest to me that quite a lotof the partners at Linklaters •.•

(External interruption)

JUDY SLINN: That the partners in Linklaters in, I think it vas, thefifties - some of the older partners had private incomes and thereforenot particularly concerned in fact about vhat they made out of practicein terms of incomes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I don't knov. Obviously, if they had been partnershere for quite a vhile, they had saved a bi t and that vould havegenerated their own further income. I suppose Gerald Addison, the SeniorPartner, vhen I vas first here - I don't knov, really, hov much money hehad. It never occurred to me to think about it. The Brown family, thethird generation at least of successful City solicitors, must haveaccumulated a bit, but nothing like enough to educate their families, Idon't think, vithout having a good professional income. Certainly therevere no Dukes of Westminster about in the firm - nobody vith vast vealthat all.

I certainly remember, even vhen I vas a partner, there vas one partnervho had been made up five years earlier, so he must have been made up inabout 1949 and he still hadn't put all his capital in, and it vas treatedas a big joke, to be honest. But he vas made to, eventually. And Ithink it vas just that he vas casual and lazy. And, funnily enough, Ithink he probably did have grander ideas than the others. I think hevas, probably, a bigger spender on holidays and I think he had a biggerhouse than most of us.

mhs/957/d - 130 -


But I remember, as an articled clerk, one of the jobs I did in theProperty Department was buying the house for the then second juniorpartner, who had been a Colonel in the war, and he was buying a house inKent for £8,500 and I remember absolutely whistling to myself, 'How couldanybody ever possibly consider buying a house for £8,500!' - mind you, ithad quite a bit of land attached as well, and I think it was actuallyquite a nice house. And I should think he was another partner withgrander ideas than most, but nothing particularly ostentatious.

JUDY SLINN: What would you have seen as a sort of normal amount to spendon a house at that date, when you thought eight thousand was a lot?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think, probably, five. But, I mean, I am speaking asa poor judge. I suppose, I remembered what my parents' house inCambridge had been sold for, which was five, and I remember what mysister, who had been married a year, paid for a house in SW3 in 1949.And I had a mother who was never allowed to but she always fancied shecould dabble in property, I remember. If she had been given her head wemight have been very rich and never had to work. But, you know, shealways knew what house prices were doing and certainly £8,500 was quitean expensive house.

JUDY SLINN: In the sixties, yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: In the - no, I am talking about 1953, I should think,when this job was.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. Even in the early sixties it was quite a lot.

HENRY PICKTHORN: It was actually, yes.

JUDY SLINN: Because property prices didn't go up that much, really,until sort of the great booms of the later sixties, did they?

mhs/957/d - 131 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. There was a boom then and then of course theeighties' boom, yes. And they came back a little while in the middleseventies, I think.

JUDY SLINN: Yes, yes. There was something of a boom in the earlyseventies, I seem to recall, as well actually•••

HENRY PICKTHORN: It could be.

JUDY SLINN: •••before the collapse.


JUDY SLINN: .I don't think I have asked you before about hobbies, aboutwhat other interests you have.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well we have touched on it slightly - what I do since Iretired.' I suppose one is following one's hobby there. I sail a bit, ina slightly curious manner, in that most of one's friends continuallytrade up from one boat to another. I have got a Wayfarer dinghy which wehave had for thirty years and I have still got the same Wayfarer dinghy.And she is moored in spring and summer-time on the River Devon which is amost beautiful river. And I spend quite a bit of time there. I think Iam a fair-weather sailor and not a particularly gallant one.

JUDY SLINN: Do you sail out to sea, sort of thing, or just up the river?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Occasionally, but it is mostly estuary sailing. She isnot built for seafaring.

JUDY SLINN: No. They are not very big boats; they are sort of for twopeople. [SPEAKING AT THE SAME TIME AS HENRY PICKTHORN1

mhs/957/d - 132 -


HENRY PICKTHORN: No, they are not. And they are an open boat and if youare not careful the water will come over the stern if you have got a nicefollowing wave, you know. You can have some pretty nasty minutes. And Iam not a very gallant or very skilled sailor.

JUDY SLINN: Are you a good swimmer?

HENRY PICKTHORN: No, but I can swim. I was never taught the crawl butI can get along. I think I am quite old-fashioned: I never wear alife-jacket because they are uncomfortable. Of course nowadays, thankgoodness, most people are sensible and certainly all wear life-jackets.

I quite like gardening. I suppose the parish mag is a bit of a hobby.Politics is a bit of a hobby.

JUDY SLINN: When you say 'politics' - I didn't take you up on thatbefore - I mean, do you belong to a political association or a politicalparty and are you active?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well I belong to a political party and I kick myselffor sort of being the stooge who does the house-to-house canvassing anddoesn't try and make his views known a bit more and I am tryingdesperately at the moment to complain to a few MFs about what they aredoing to this country by giving away our right to govern ourselves to alot of Europeans. And this is more time-consuming than it might appear.

JUDY SLINN: What about music? Are you interested in music at all?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I am afraid not. It is an awful pity, isn't it? Aterrible shame. I think slightly - one must never hold anything againstone's parents - my father hated noise and to him music was a form ofnoise, and so he was qui te unmusical. I have a very curious early

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recollection of when we did first have a gramophone: I always used toburst into tears. The only records we had were 'Baa-baa black sheep' and'Marche Mili taire' and I can't think why it made me unhappy, but Iabsolutely loathed the thing.

I do quite like listening to music now, thank goodness, and my childrenare better than I am about it. I am very fond of paintings. I don'tpaint but I spend quite a lot of time going to galleries and potteringaround galleries which sell paintings and buying the odd thing or two. Iam proud to say that I should think there must be about thirty people inthe office to whom at one time or another I have given a little drawingor a little painting. I think in fact it is a jolly good present forpeople, especially for somebody who has never looked at a picture before,because quite a lot of people who have never looked at a picture, oncethey actually own something, take it home and think it is rather nice andsee there is more in some second-rate drawing than some first-ratereproduction and it does give them a lot of pleasure and they do getinterested.

JUDY SLINN: Is there any particular sort you like? Are you awater-colour man or oils or what?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think basically I am a water-colour man but of courseone's tastes change with fashion. One thinks one is much too clever andthat fashion has no effect on one but it jolly well does.


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Tape F3721 Side A

JUDY SLINN: You did say that, you know, you didn't have a radio at homeas a child •••


JUDY SLINN: •••and a young person. Did you - are you a radio listeneror a television watcher?

HENRY PICKTHORN: No. We listen to the radio quite a bit in the car,until it becomes too irritating and one turns it off, as awful as a lotof the programmes are, and we listen to tapes a bit in the car. But Idon't listen to the radio ecstatically. And quite honestly I don't thinkthat I can say much about television. We haven't got a TV in London. Wehave got a TV in the country and so one looks at it a bit at the weekendbut not much, I am afraid. So I am not an expert on either.

JUDY SLINN: If you were starting out now, as a young man, would you joinLinklaters, do you think?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, if they would have me, which they might not! Youmean would I join Linklaters as it is now rather than as it was in 1951?

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, I think I should like a shot, if given the chance,yes.

JUDY SLINN: Notwithstanding the difference in terms of size and the wayit is run and the way it operates now?

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HENRY PICKTHORN: No. I think one has got to regard the changes 'Whicharose (and 'Which are necessary) as necessary. And I think one 'Wouldbejolly lucky to come here.

JUDY SLINN: And do you think you 'Wouldmake the same choice about doingcompany la'W?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Probably. I think company la'Wis the mainstay of thefirm, always - when I say 'always', certainly has been for a hundredyears and is no'Wand ever more shall be, I hope.

JUDY SLINN: Do you think it presents - does company la'Wpresent a kindof constant intellectual challenge?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think any 1a'Wdoes. I think it certainly does, yes.And of course what is quite nonsensical is the chap who says there is nopersonal element in it. There is a tremendous personal element in it.Admittedly your client is a company but you are dealing with maybe thechairman and maybe the company secretary. You are dealing with somebodyand he is worried and you get just as worried as he is about getting thejob done properly. And one hopes it goes well and he is as grateful asif you had cleared up his mother-in-la'W's'Willor whatever it might be.So there is a terrific personal contact. I think more of a personalcontact in the company field than any other field, because you have thesame old clients again and again and again, and a nice, active,commercial client is always doing something; whereas a privateindividual who is always consulting his lavyers can be an absolute painin the neck, I think. So I think you have a much greater chance offorming close friendships than if you are dealing with private clients.

JUDY SLINN: Well, presumably, more so nov because there is much more no'Win the eighties and the nineties; more activities that companiesundertake, more things that they vant to do that require legal advice

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than - I mean you could go quite long periods, couldn1t you, in the sortof forties and fifties when, unless it wanted to raise money, a companydidn1t actually particularly need legal advice?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I am not sure I would agree with that. I have noexperience of the forties. In the second half of the fifties (which iswhen I qualified) I think they did want legal advice and they didn1t havetheir own staff then to do quite a lot of the work which they do now.The Company Secretary might have been an accountant; might have justbeen a nice chap; might have been a solid tor. But they certainlydidn1t have legal departments. And so they probably came to you formatters which now they would regard as a bit humdrum and they would do ontheir own. And of course they are much more adept now than they werethen in keeping precedents and filing things away in the computers and soon and so forth, so they can do much more without getting legal advice.

That1s one side of the picture. The other side, of course, is that, asyou say, things have become more complicated and they do need legaladvice for that reason. So it is a bit of swings and roundabouts as towhether you see more of your client now than you did then.

JUDY SLINN: What about you mentioned that sometimes CompanySecretaries were accountants - what about the relationship betweensolicitors and accountants, from your own experience? Did you find it ahappy one or a difficult one? Do you think accountants have taken workaway from solicitors?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I have no doubt they have, though not on the companylaw field. I think that certainly in the provinces they have taken a lotof work away. They are in a very good posi tion to take away the taxwork, because they do the audit; and possibly quite wrongly - and if Imay indicate there that I do mean I qui te vrong ly ' - they are not onlyauditors but they are financial advisers and tax advisers and there is a

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perpetual conflict. They can't afford to lose a client by upsetting himover one matter or another. So they have certainly taken away a lot ofwork on that side.

Happily, when they get really stuck, I think they do come to a firm likeLinklaters, to go to the Tax Department here, and get advice. And youmay say, 'Well we, in turn, may often have to go to some tax counsel'.But for that reason, when things really get hard, there is a lot of taxwork still for the lawyers.

I don't know to what other extent the accountants may have taken workaway from solicitors.

JUDY SLINN: There has of course been in recent years this, you know, thewhole idea of mixed partnerships.


JUDY SLINN: And to some extent possibly, it seemed to me, it arose outof, you know, the idea that rather than being in competition for someareas of work, you would actually work together.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well I think you have put your finger on what I thinkwas - and I hope still is and certainly should be - the position, that wedo work together. If there was a job involving Linklaters and Peats, fora mutual client, we worked together like billy-ho and we weren't worriedabout whether Peats might do something we ought to be doing. That justdidn't happen. And not even when I left, it didn't happen. And, youknow, you co-operated. They had input on their field and we had input onour field.

There were always certain firms of accountants that one liked more thanothers. We are not going to name names, but again there were certainbanks, and if you had a job and it was with such-and-such a bank or

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such-and-such a firm of accountants, I think you knew you were going toenjoy yourself and get on well: less so with some of the others. And itis funny how often it worked out like that. And I don't think it wassimply because one was prejudiced from the start. You might have beendealing with a partner or an assistant at a firm you had never met beforein your life but somehow, if he was with the firm you liked, you got onwell and the sort of ethos of his firm was pretty well one's own ethos -or wasn't, as the case may be. It was quite surprisingly noticeable.

I think you have touched on the question of (I can't remember) - is itcalled 'one-stop shopping' and 'multi-practice partnership' orsomething? I can't remember. The whole thing seems too ghas tly forwords. I would hope it would be postponed for as long as possible. Theclients may think that they will save a bit of money here and there, butI doubt it. And I think you would get the most ghastly conflictsactually - especially when, I mean, the chips are really down and it islitigation that counts. And I just don't see how you can haveaccountants involved in handling the litigation side of a client's work.

JUDY SLINN: No. There has undoubtedly, of course, been conflicts, Ithink, between solicitors and accountants over - well, it was really inthe sixties when the tax work started getting more complicated withCorporation Tax, didn't it?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I don't know that it was all that difficult. Thewhole basis changed overnight but I remember going to a meeting and thepartner in one of the top firms of accountants being just as flummoxed aseverybody else when it started. I am sure that our Tax Department, youknow, got on top of the thing as quickly as they did. And this was whenCallaghan was Chancellor. I remember it very distinctly. I can almostsee the room we were in and it was on a prospectus {I can't remember

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Henry Pickthorn F372l/A/Page 140

which one it was), but I remember this partner throwing his pen on thetable and saying, "Well I simply can't advise. I don't understand thenew basis of anything", and he was a jolly bright lad, actually.

Actually, I think it is in the provinces that they have taken away thework more than they have done here.

JUDY SLINN: I suppose, in the City, you could argue that there is plentyof work for both, really.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Well there was until I retired. I think obviously nowthere is a fall-off - lots of people want a lot more work to do.

JUDY SLINN: Yes.

HENRY PICKTHORN: And they are getting a bit more jealous about it.

JUDY SLINN: Yes. Of course the other area the accountants expandedinto, of course, was management consultancy.


JUDY SLINN: And presumably that has also declined through the recession.

HENRY PICKTHORN: I suppose so. I think, though, you know, it was a goodthing that they did expand that way. I can't see solicitors doing that,quite honestly. I don't think it is our metier at all.

JUDY SLINN: I wouldn't have thought so.

HENRY PICKTHORN: No. I am certainly not jealous that they should doit. And I take it all with a bit of a pinch of salt anyway - maybewrongly. But so many of these management consultants never actuallymanaged anything before they became consultants; and it is one of thecuriosities and they still seem to be consulted!

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JUDY SLINN: What of the - you said something then that made me think ofwhat I ought to have asked you before. You referred to going to counsel.


JUDY SLINN: Was there a difference in the number of times and the kindof counsel? I mean, over the period of your practice •••

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes •

JUDY SLINN: •••did the number of times you would go to counsel foradvice change?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, I think it did. In the early days you went tocounsel far more than we do now: progressively we went to counsel lessand less and 'less. I think that is probably because, although weregarded ourselves as a big firm in the fifties/sixties, we were so muchsmaller. and we hadn't got the expert knowledge which we subsequentlybuilt up. And one did go off to counsel a lot - even in, you know, one'sown field, the company field - partly because, as an assistant, perhapsif you went and asked your partner and he wasn't there (he was away onsome job or other), he might say, 'Well, look, I am awfully sorry. Youhad better go and talk to so-and-so at counsel.'

But certainly towards the end - I should think even the last twenty yearsI was practising here - I absolutely hated going to counsel and did it aslittle as possible. Not that some of them weren't jolly good friends andjolly good chaps, because they were and, as I say, one got to know themvery well and liked them a lot and admired them a lot. But one had aslight sense of failure if one had to go. And of course one didn't gounless one had thrashed it out here.

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I am a great believer in the two arms of the profession. It is certainlya great protection to the solicitors that when you are really stumped youcan, you know, give your advice but say, "I think we ought to go tocounsel", and it is a great protection. That sounds as if one is beingvery defeatist and unsure of oneself, but in fact I think it does meanyou give better advice until you get up to that point when you havereally got to go to somebody else. And then you have got somespecialists there who are quite independent: are far more independentthan they would ever be if the profession was fused and you had a chap(who may have been a leading light in Lincoln's Inn) who has become apartner in your own firm. You would almost certainly have to go to him,whereas in fact you would rather go to a leading light who has now goneto another firm. So I don't think that's in the client's interests inthe long run. He might save a bit here and there on his bills but not alot, I don't think.

So I am afraid I am old fashioned and I am anti fusion.

JUDY SLINN: Does it actually though, given the complexity of the law now- does that expertise still rest with the Bar?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes, in some fields but not in an awful lot of fields.I think the expertise (or whatever you like to say the word is) •••

JUDY SLINN: 'Specialised knowledge'?

HENRY PICKTHORN: •••the specialised knowledge rests in a firm like this.

JUDY SLINN: Because I have heard it said before (one of the reasons Iasked you) that the Bar has been used less and less as a, you know, fountof specialised knowledge.


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JUDY SLINN: But really what you are saying is that its use lies in itsindependence?

HENRY PICKTHORN: I think it is its independence that I would value.

JUDY SLINN: And, presumably, in its - also of course its specialabilities in terms of pleading in court?

HENRY PICKTHORN: Absolutely, yes. And they have done that all theirlives and they do it very well.

JUDY SLINN: But of course, increasingly, solici tors are getting theright of audience in the courts, aren't they?

HENRY PICKTHORN: .Yes. And I have no doubt some of them are jolly goodtoo.

JUDY SLINN: So, in other words - but, you know, that seems to be anotherchipping away at the areas which have been, you know, reserved for theBar.

HENRY PICKTHORN: Yes. I think the Bar has always been a pretty riskyplace. I am not a great risk-taker. But you were asking me just nowwhether, if I was starting again, I would want to come to a home likethis. I think one of the reasons is, yes, you know, one wouldn't want togo to the Bar. You have really got to be quite a brave man, I think, tostart at the Bar - always have and more than ever now.


[Tape F3721 Side B is blank]

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NATIONAL LIFE STORIES CITY LIVES Henry Pickthorn Interviewed by Judy Slinn C409/105

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Transcript of NATIONAL LIFE STORIES CITY LIVES Henry Pickthorn Interviewed by Judy Slinn C409/105