As Charles Moore explains in the latest issue of the magazine, the late John Gross
achieved the distinction – among many others – of being the “shortest-serving literary editor of The Spectator ever”. For this week’s archival interlude, I have
pasted Charles’s account of Gross’s brief appointment in 1983 below, as well as one of the three book reviews that Gross wrote for The Spectator that year.
Charles Moore’s memories of John Gross
John Gross, who has just died, had many distinctions in the world of letters, but his obituaries did not report that he was the shortest-serving literary editor of The Spectator ever. In 1983, Alexander Chancellor, the editor, sacked A.N. Wilson from the job for a piece of mischief involving Clive James and Bel Mooney, and appointed John in his stead. John commissioned, it was alleged, one book review, and was then poached by the New York Times. He later returned to England and became theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph. I inherited him when I became editor there in 1992. One day, he disparaged a new play by David Hare. Hare, who is a charming man in all other circumstances, is very sensitive to unfavourable comment on his work. ‘Your theatre critic’, he wrote to me, ‘is a subliterate dickhead.’ I have always treasured this judgment, because it was so perfectly wrong. John Gross was about as literate as it is possible to be. His learning was deep but, both in conversation and on the page, lightly worn. The last time I saw him he corrected me when I attributed to Auberon Waugh a witticism which was actually Jane Austen’s. He did it so delicately that I only noticed afterwards what a fool I’d been. Although there have been handsome obituaries of John in the newspapers, I am left with the irritated sense that he was under-appreciated. He was too clever, too witty, too modest for our age.
An old oyster, John Gross, The Spectator, 18 June 1983
Lewis and Lewis, by John Juxon
Sir George Lewis was a Victorian institution, the only solicitor to enjoy the same kind of fame as the leading barristers of the period. He glides discreetly through a hundred biographies of the period, dispensing sound advice, preparing courtroom strategies, smoothing over difficulties in high places. For much of the time he also seems to have doubled as a private enquiry agent: according to the DNB, the handiest source of information about him until Mr Juxon came along, ‘he possessed as unrivalled knowledge of the past records of the criminals and adventurers of both sexes, not only in England and on the continent but in the United States, which was peculiarly serviceable to him and to his clients in resisting attempts at conspiracy and blackmail.’ And now he has a biography to himself, a solid and highly readable account of a career which can hardly fail to arouse the interest of the voyeur in all of us – well, most of us.
Lewis’s father, who founded the firm, was a minor legend in his own right. His extensive criminal practice made him a byword in the London rookeries, and he is said to have inspired the character of Mr Jaggers in Great Expectations. (It was probably an advantage to him, in the era of underworld types like Ikey Solomons, that he was Jewish: the family name was originally Loew). Lewis himself began as a police court lawyer, but by his thirties he had largely put the rough stuff behind him and graduated to white collar, indeed stiff collar crime. His handling of the prosecution brought by shareholders after the Overend Gurney bank crash made a great impression, even though he failed to obtain a conviction (the Establishment closed ranks, and the Lord Chief Justice was blatantly biassed in the director’s favour.) He also demonstrated his usefulness to an increasing number of blue-blooded clients, among them the Prince of Wales’s crony Lord Marcus Beresford, and it was on Lord Marcus’s recommendation that the Prince came to consult with him after being named in the Mordaunt divorce. The case marked the beginning of a long royal connection, which set the seal on Lewis’s reputation, but which could never have worked if he had just been a mere compliant courtier. He was willing to give the Prince unpalatable advice where necessary, and in turn he usually got results. (Mr Juxon might have mentioned, by the way, that he appears by name in Conan Doyle’s ‘The Illustrious Cilent’ – a pretty broad clue to the client’s identity.)
Between them Lewis’s major cases provide a scenic tour of Victorian and Edwardian scandal and criminality. Charles Bravo expires at the Priory, Charles Dilke spills the milk, Oscar Wilde is accused of posing as a sodomite, Whitaker Wright takes cyanide. After a time it becomes quite hard to think of a cause célèbre in which Lewis was not involved, on one side or the other. Adelaide Bartlett, Adolf Beck, Madame Rachel and her very wonderful beauty salon, Lady Colin Campbell, baccarat at Tranby Croft – all human life is there. Familiar ground, much of it, but with Lewis at the centre of attention, surveyed from an unfamiliar angle. He turns out to have played a much bigger part in a number of famous cases than he has generally been given credit for, most notably in the affair of Parnell and the Pigott forgeries. It was Charles Russell who tore Pigott to pieces in the witness box; it was Lewis who tracked down the forgeries, spotted the give-away spelling mistakes, and supplied Russell with the necessary ammunition.
Lewis was a man of the world; he made enemies, and he did not always represent the right side. Given the career he pursued, it could scarcely have been otherwise. But within his limits, he seems to have been generous and humane. He championed some important legal reforms, in particular the setting up of the Court of Criminal Appeal and an overhaul of the divorce laws: ‘his practice had made him acquainted with every phase of conjugal unhappiness’ (the DNB again), and he was listened to with respect when he gave evidence to the royal commission on divorce in 1909. He also has a streak of disobliging independence, a willingness to rock the boat. It showed itself in his friendship with Labouchere, whose much-raking activities as editor of Truth he approved of, and whom he represented in innumerable libel cases. The Goodman of his day joining forces with the Ingrams of his day – a not unpleasing combination.
In the more compact London of a hundred years ago, Lewis and his elegant German-born wife knew ‘everybody’. Lady Lewis was a celebrated hostess, and they had many close friends among writers and artists (the Burne-Joneses in particular) and in the theatre. One consequence is that Mr Juxon has been able to deck out his text with some excellent illustrations. There are pictures in the book, not all of them very well reproduced, by Edward and Philip Burne-Jones, Sargent and Beerbohm.
The one disappointing aspect of Lewis and Lewis is that Mr Juxon should have stuck so closely to the well-known, well-documented cases. But it was probably inevitable. Lewis burned his private papers when he retired, and without them is must be a hopeless task to find out much about the minor cases, still less the ones which never got to court. He was not a self-effacing man, but secrecy was the sine qua non of his trade; and if his father was Mr Jaggers, he himself went to his grave in the spirit of Mr Tulkinghorn – ‘an oyster of the old school, whom nobody can open’.
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