Gruff Justice

James Robertson Justice: What’s the Bleeding Time? by James Hogg, with Robert Sellers and Howard Watson

‘You — what’s the bleeding time?’ Sir Lancelot Spratt, consultant surgeon at St Swithin’s, barks at Dirk Bogarde’s trainee doctor. ‘Ten past ten, sir’ is the sheepish answer. Another cherishable exchange in the long-running series of medical comedies sees a patient complaining about shrapnel up the — ‘rectum?’ offers Spratt. ‘Well,’ comes the plaintive reply, ‘it didn’t do ’em any good.’

Gruff and domineering, Spratt and the actor who indelibly played him were interchangeable — except that James Robertson Justice wasn’t really an actor. He didn’t have any showbiz friends or interests, and drew a blank trying to talk to Donald Sinden. He couldn’t learn lines; dialogue had to be written on banners and hoisted on sticks over the camera crew. Justice simply came on as himself, a human bison, ‘portly, bold, rumbustious’ in the words of his enthralled biographers. Nor was he always jovial. ‘His crinkly eyes could suddenly turn very nasty indeed.’

It is true that though he appeared in hundreds of films, Justice always looked the same (burly, with a big red beard) and sounded exactly the same (loud, irascible and commanding). You can’t imagine him in Chekhov doing doubt — but what a Falstaff he’d have been, or Baron Munchausen. He was a stranger to modesty or self-conscious dithering and never minded if the script required him to undress on the set. When one of the crew laughed at his tackle he yelled, ‘What you Cockney f***ers do not appreciate is the co-efficient of expansion.’

Justice said he was in the film business only because ‘the emoluments aren’t exactly to be sneezed at’. He lived lavishly, going ‘every year to Holland to select his bulbs’, and he was passionate about breeding goshawks and peregrines — one of which attacked Trevor Howard at Pinewood.