Was It for This the Clay Grew Tall?

Abstract

Irresolute Clay: Shaping the Foundations of Modern Environmental Law. By RICHARD MACRORY [Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2020, ISBN 9781509928118, hardback, 189 pp, £25] When I was a law student at Cambridge in the 1970s, I developed the habit of browsing second-hand bookshops, of which there was then no shortage in Cambridge, for legal biographies, autobiographies and memoirs. This pastime continued through to my early years as a Cambridge lecturer. I amassed quite a collection, almost all of which have over the years found their way back into the charity shops which had become the successors to the second-hand book shops. In truth, their value was pretty limited. They were often rather sycophantic portraits of legal luminaries or judicial monsters such as Norman Birkett, Marshall Hall, Lord Goddard, etc, depicting a legal landscape that had already largely passed into history by the time I acquired them. The least valuable by far tended to be the autobiographies or memoirs, which were generally of much less interest to the reader than to the author. I recall one rather dire read entitled Jottings of an Old Solicitor, which was essentially a catalogue of less than interesting cases and anecdotes.1 A much more engaging biography was that of Sir George Lewis, the Victorian and Edwardian celebrity solicitor who practiced from Ely Place in Holborn and numbered royalty among his clients.2 There, however, more of the interest lay in his extra-legal life. At Ely Place, Sir George and Lady Lewis met ‘tout le monde’ as described by his biographer, his house thronged with painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, writers, lawyers, politicians, where the establishment and Bohemia were thrown together. Lewis was depicted in a fine portrait of 1892 by John Singer Sargent, one of his regular guests.