By David Langwallner
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I am a graduate of Trinity and was an ordinary member of The University Philosophical Society and a Gold Medalist of that Society. The gold medal was presented to me by Senator David Norris the last previous recipient of same before the value of gold and indeed medals became debased. One of the reasons apart from assessed oratory skills I got the medal was in a staged enactment with hundreds of people present when I played Sir Edward Carson in a re-enactment of the Trial of Oscar Wilde. Thus I memorized inside out the transcript of the famous trial and it stoked my interest in Carson.
Carson is a very ambiguous figure indeed as far as Irish people are concerned. Rather he invites the question what is Irish or what it is to be Irish. To some he was a traitor to others one of the greatest Irishmen of all time. I am ambivalent.
The general ambivalence about him is of course political. He was the founder of The Ulster Unionist Party and the prime architect of the ultimate secession of the 6 counties and The Government of Ireland Act 1920. Thus to Catholicism North and South he is Satan incarnate to the unionist community the great leader.
His career as a politician to some extent diminishes his far greater achievements, some would say, as a barrister. In point of fact he is arguably the greatest British or for that matter Irish barrister advocate of all time. His prime fame rests with the Wilde trial but that was not all. But let us turn to that first as it is a fascinating commentary on Ireland.
Trinity when Carson was an undergraduate was exclusively absent a few special dispensations a protestant school and the entire better for that in many respects. When I was there the generations of catholic graduates were coming in and the catholicization of the faculties by the religious mullahs has been a censorship driven disaster. It has also curtailed with over inquisitive authorities the freewheeling nature of debate. The steady employment of rather limited UCD technocrats exported from that infernal place leading to a gradual decline.
When I was there the last vestiges of public speaking as spectacle was in evidence. Cheap circuses and gladiatorial combat for students. So for the staged trial there was a queue from the GMB all the way to the entrance of the college.
The legendary Patrick Healy the last of the Dublin generalist wits and layabouts the perpetual student now a professor in Vienna and survivor played Wilde with huge panache.
Carson and Wilde were of course contemporaries at Trinity dramatized by Ulick O’ Connors play A Trinity of Two. In fact as children even before they had met on a beach in Waterford. So it is remarkable then that Carson took the brief in the libel
Wilde remarked when he heard of it that:
That he will; no doubt prosecute with all the malice of an old friend.
Save that they were not friends far from it.
The Marquis of Queensbury, the inventor of the rules of boxing, left a calling card at his club to Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite. Now he could not spell but the implication was
clear and Wilde sued for libel, always, then and now, very dangerous. All the more dangerous when it was not a libel at all. He should not have done so; people should not conceal their failings or lie about them privately. Wilde was lying and thought through wit and theatrics he could pull through it.
Carson was a mediocre person in the shining light of the Wildean genius but a tenacious cross-examiner. And he conducted in effect a war of attrition. Playing the man. A witness box in general is not the place for theatrics or showmanship. Wilde began to enjoy the show too much in fact.
Carson kept asking him questions about his relationships with young boys a Wilde got over confident. Swatting Carson down like a flee with dazzling repartee but Carson like a metronome kept going and popped the most devastating weapon in the barristers art a
surprise question. The true genius of the art of cross examination.
After Oscar regaled the court room with the art of ridicule, dismissing any ulterior purpose to his many associations with boys, Carson asked about the boy Grainger, and simply asked “did you kiss him?”
Wilde’s witty response, leading to his premature death, was “oh no he was far too ugly”.
The gate was thus open and other boys, less ugly, by implication were kissed. Reading Goal was the ultimate outcome and premature death.
Carson I think took the case because of moral disapproval of Wilde once he had established in his own mind that the allegations were true. He refused the criminal brief charitably as he felt Wilde had suffered enough.
But the reputation is not just built on that case. In 1908 Carson represented The Evening Standard in another libel case. The newspaper had published a story that the philanthropic Cadbury family had been running their chocolate factory with cocoa imported on the cheap from a slave plantation and though the allegation was made out it was a remarkably victory in that the jury only awarded a farthing. Contemptuous damages only awarded when the verdict of libel is inevitable but the moral high ground nonexistent.
His other famous case was the defense of a school boy naval cadet accused of theft Archie Shee the pretext for The Winslow Boy dramatized in a fictionalized play by Terence Rattigan in 1938 where a young naval cadet was accused of the theft of a postal order. Carson’s defense was a brilliant exploration of the contradictions in accurate identification evidence and the case was withdrawn after four days.
In fact it possible that the glamour of reportage of this case led to his second marriage.
He was a terrible judge in The House of Lords and little can be said about that stage of his career But as an advocate he stands perhaps as the deadliest of all cross-examiners a declining skill but the most deadly weapon in the barristers armory.
David Langwallner is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the London School of Economics and is a barrister at 1MCB.
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