BarTalk February 2005
Volume 17, Number 1

Like Rumpole, sometimes the very best part of our career was the beginning of it.

By Tony Wilson

Like the pharmaceutical industry “discovering” a new disorder just so it can market a drug to cure it, I have found a condition common to lawyers of a certain age. I call it Penge Bungalow Syndrome, and it’s named after the Penge Bungalow murders, perhaps the most famous murder trial that never happened. It’s from Rumpole, and it’s referred to in John Mortimer’s books almost as frequently as She Who Must Be Obeyed, which is what Rumpole called his wife and what I called my first boat.

Now I presume all of us know Rumpole, because as lawyers, we’ve all read the books or watched the late great Leo McKern play him on TV. And many of us know something of author John Mortimer, because unlike McKern, Mortimer is not only still alive, but holds the record of being one of the very few speakers at the Vancouver Bar Association’s Christmas Dinner not to have been pelted with a bun. He spoke in 1987, and unlike any other speaker I’d seen in that hot seat, he had the audience (rather than a bun) in the palm of his hand. Nothing was thrown at him. No obnoxious conversations were held while he spoke. He left the room thinking that members of the B.C. bar were a respectful and polite lot. Then he met me.

Now Mortimer wasn’t a dying George Harrison, and I wasn’t trying to get him to sign a guitar on his deathbed, but I wanted an autograph anyway. As he was surrounded over dinner by an armada of judges and other VIPs, I couldn't find a polite way to get to him, so I found an impolite way. He stood up, no doubt to see a man about a dog, and I made my move. With pen in hand, I accosted him en route to the loo and asked him to write “To She Who Must be Obeyed, And All Who May Sail In Her” on the back of the program. He said that was a peculiar thing to write about my wife, but I said it was about my boat. Then, after signing, he said “I’d love to speak longer, but I’m afraid I really must pee.” With that, he was off. He probably decided to use the cubicle rather than the urinal so no one else would turn his way and ask him for another autograph, with catastrophic consequences.

Which brings me back to Penge Bungalow Syndrome. It was Rumpole’s tour de grace, his Waterloo, his finest hour. He faced a hanging judge, alone and without a leader, became an expert on bloodstains, and secured an acquittal. But the trial happened in the first year or so of Rumpole’s practice and everything else in his fictional long career paled by comparison. In other words, the height of his career was the beginning of it, and everything else was downhill from there.

Years ago, I read a Supreme Court of Canada decision where one of the counsel was an old friend of mine from law school. I called him to discuss the case: “Ahhh…” he sighed. “My first year of practice and I’m at the Supreme Court of Canada on a fundamental question of constitutional law. Now I do foreclosures and ICBC work. That case was the Penge Bungalow murder trial of my career.”

So there you have it. Penge Bungalow Syndrome is when lawyers have the finest professional experience of their lives while articling, or in the first few years at the bar, only to discover the career ahead is an endless routine of partners meetings, billing targets, accounts receivable, fee estimates and less than constitutionally satisfying law. There is no cure.

Tony Wilson is a Franchise and Intellectual Property lawyer at Boughton. He’s written for the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, and Macleans magazine. Email: twilson@boughton.ca

This article originally appeared in the February 2005 issue of BarTalk and is reproduced here with permission of both the author and the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch.