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Best books, favourite films, top tracks and an essential: Counsel invites barristers to share their cultural influences. In this issue, we talk to James Cartwright, a criminal barrister at 1MCB who also paints, sculpts and runs BEWCC, the cricket team representing the Bar in the Lawyers Cricket World Cup which he co-founded.
A key word in my Barrister’s Best brief is ‘civilisation’. Stowe School (pictured) has one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world and all those years ago, its beauty soaked in. There was a handful of brilliant teachers and Ars Longa easily lodged in this young pupil. The building blocks of an individual life are usually laid down early and I read The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart; I don’t believe I understood it at the time but it sits now in my mind, a warning, a scripture, a test. This happened in my lifetime, Treblinka v Stowe.
Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Goya’s Disasters of War and Picasso’s vast output are witnesses to their time and thought and require different tools, especially history, in their appreciation. They are good because they are true. A sketch can catch what a finished picture may not and all art and literature contributes to our understanding of the human condition. Unfortunately, art has little effect upon mankind’s proclivity to oppression and destruction. The deterrent for that lies in politics, economics (a well-filled belly), a working law and institutions; above all, a watch on corruption. But this is outside my brief.
In my view, the greatest sculptures are Michaelangelo’s Pietà and Shelley’s two vast and trunkless legs of stone. The one is the human, the other is the inhuman. The human endures and the inhuman perishes. The ‘human’ is, of course, people, and therein lies the secret. You can, as Auden said, only love what you possess, your family and friends. Your team, your country? Well, I cannot say, it is too abstract.
If it has something to say, it is good. Rev Gary Davis’s Cocaine Blues, a 1930s guitar piece, is nothing but it paints for me a picture of a lone man adrift in the hugeness of America and is as strong as Britten’s War Requiem. I try to eliminate the academic categories. I love the way the Americans have been singing about their country and troubles since long before the Delta blues. It is not as sophisticated as Mozart (The Marriage of Figaro is sublime), but it works.
Life at the criminal Bar is a privilege. Detached but involved, a barrister quickly learns of the tensions inherent in life, the individual and the team, power and the state and the need to be, above all, professional; a case well-fought maintains society. It is so easy, too, to retreat, when needed, into one’s own world, to write, to paint, to sing, to be oneself. Of course, in some ways, that retreat is even more precious than earning a living. Writing, painting, music being essentially evidence of their time and lucky are those barristers who are able to lead a dual life of work and art. ‘A lawyer,’ as Walter Scott said, ‘without literature and history is a mere mechanic.’
It should be apparent that all art, music and writing attracts me. We pass through music, art and books and they pass through us. Talking silently across time, only an individual response is possible. Do others, with hindsight perhaps, hear the collapse of European civilisation when listening to The Merry Widow? Do others, looking at a Goya portrait, see the same person that I do? Was the Duke, the Duke Goya painted? However familiar some of Chaucer’s pilgrims seem, do we really understand what they thought? But I love them all the same. We go back for answers and just for pleasure to all these things because they are important.
However, rising even above this is cricket. The day cricket is played worldwide, the last Treblinka will be demolished.
It will have to be the Colonel Bogey March by Lieutenant FJ Ricketts. Why? Because it is a strong reminder of TA days when we held back the Russian Bear and kept the Iron Curtain drawn. Also the best cricket book by far – C L R James’ Beyond a boundary. The sketch of Cudjoe explains why cricket is life.
A small generation ago, we started a Lawyers’ Cricket World Cup in which, biennially, the Bar team, trotting across the Commonwealth, valiantly takes part in the, so far unrealised, hope that ‘We could win it, chaps.’ The Cup has created a wide web of friendship across a growing number of cricketing lawyers in the Commonwealth (and Eire) and is, without doubt, A Good Thing. Barristers who play cricket will help keep civilisation afloat. The next cup takes place in New Zealand in January 2020 and new recruits should contact jamesiccy@aol.com
A key word in my Barrister’s Best brief is ‘civilisation’. Stowe School (pictured) has one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world and all those years ago, its beauty soaked in. There was a handful of brilliant teachers and Ars Longa easily lodged in this young pupil. The building blocks of an individual life are usually laid down early and I read The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart; I don’t believe I understood it at the time but it sits now in my mind, a warning, a scripture, a test. This happened in my lifetime, Treblinka v Stowe.
Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Goya’s Disasters of War and Picasso’s vast output are witnesses to their time and thought and require different tools, especially history, in their appreciation. They are good because they are true. A sketch can catch what a finished picture may not and all art and literature contributes to our understanding of the human condition. Unfortunately, art has little effect upon mankind’s proclivity to oppression and destruction. The deterrent for that lies in politics, economics (a well-filled belly), a working law and institutions; above all, a watch on corruption. But this is outside my brief.
In my view, the greatest sculptures are Michaelangelo’s Pietà and Shelley’s two vast and trunkless legs of stone. The one is the human, the other is the inhuman. The human endures and the inhuman perishes. The ‘human’ is, of course, people, and therein lies the secret. You can, as Auden said, only love what you possess, your family and friends. Your team, your country? Well, I cannot say, it is too abstract.
If it has something to say, it is good. Rev Gary Davis’s Cocaine Blues, a 1930s guitar piece, is nothing but it paints for me a picture of a lone man adrift in the hugeness of America and is as strong as Britten’s War Requiem. I try to eliminate the academic categories. I love the way the Americans have been singing about their country and troubles since long before the Delta blues. It is not as sophisticated as Mozart (The Marriage of Figaro is sublime), but it works.
Life at the criminal Bar is a privilege. Detached but involved, a barrister quickly learns of the tensions inherent in life, the individual and the team, power and the state and the need to be, above all, professional; a case well-fought maintains society. It is so easy, too, to retreat, when needed, into one’s own world, to write, to paint, to sing, to be oneself. Of course, in some ways, that retreat is even more precious than earning a living. Writing, painting, music being essentially evidence of their time and lucky are those barristers who are able to lead a dual life of work and art. ‘A lawyer,’ as Walter Scott said, ‘without literature and history is a mere mechanic.’
It should be apparent that all art, music and writing attracts me. We pass through music, art and books and they pass through us. Talking silently across time, only an individual response is possible. Do others, with hindsight perhaps, hear the collapse of European civilisation when listening to The Merry Widow? Do others, looking at a Goya portrait, see the same person that I do? Was the Duke, the Duke Goya painted? However familiar some of Chaucer’s pilgrims seem, do we really understand what they thought? But I love them all the same. We go back for answers and just for pleasure to all these things because they are important.
However, rising even above this is cricket. The day cricket is played worldwide, the last Treblinka will be demolished.
It will have to be the Colonel Bogey March by Lieutenant FJ Ricketts. Why? Because it is a strong reminder of TA days when we held back the Russian Bear and kept the Iron Curtain drawn. Also the best cricket book by far – C L R James’ Beyond a boundary. The sketch of Cudjoe explains why cricket is life.
A small generation ago, we started a Lawyers’ Cricket World Cup in which, biennially, the Bar team, trotting across the Commonwealth, valiantly takes part in the, so far unrealised, hope that ‘We could win it, chaps.’ The Cup has created a wide web of friendship across a growing number of cricketing lawyers in the Commonwealth (and Eire) and is, without doubt, A Good Thing. Barristers who play cricket will help keep civilisation afloat. The next cup takes place in New Zealand in January 2020 and new recruits should contact jamesiccy@aol.com
Best books, favourite films, top tracks and an essential: Counsel invites barristers to share their cultural influences. In this issue, we talk to James Cartwright, a criminal barrister at 1MCB who also paints, sculpts and runs BEWCC, the cricket team representing the Bar in the Lawyers Cricket World Cup which he co-founded.
The Chair of the Bar reports back
Susie Griffin on the admin that keeps barristers from billable work
Clement Cowley, Partner at The Penny Group, explains how global events can influence the performance of pensions and ISAs, and why taking a long-term approach to investing is often the most effective strategy
Mário Barroso, Head of R&D and Method Development at AlphaBiolabs, discusses what family law professionals need to know about hallucinogens, from the main hallucinogenic drugs encountered in family proceedings, to their effects and the testing options available
Harmony Christian Ministries is the latest charity to benefit from a £500 donation from AlphaBiolabs via the company’s Giving Back initiative
By David Green
The golden age of advocacy? David Langwallner pays homage to the filmic if contentious barrister Sir Edward Carson and some of his contemporaries
Leah Arthur, a pupil, and her second seat supervisor, John Goss, share their perspectives on building a productive pupil-supervisor relationship
Henry Fingerhut outlines what the Bar Standards Board AI guidance means for early career barristers
The Ministry of Justice will match-fund up to 100 criminal pupillages, with grants available to criminal chambers across England and Wales. Similar to the COIC scheme, the grants will match-fund pupillages additional to those otherwise offered without government funding
Not yet, says Jacob Turner. Regulation, unlike the technology itself, is a domain the legal profession can still control
