NATIONAL LIFE STORIES Legal Lives Alan Carr Interviewed ...

Alan Carr

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NATIONAL LIFE STORIES Legal Lives Alan Carr Interviewed by Rob Perks C736/02

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Alan Carr

C736/02/01 F5086A

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Alan Carr

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Track 1 [F5086 Side A]

So, maybe I could start asking you when and where you were born.

I was born on the 1st of September 1936 in Stoke Newington; I believe I was born at

home in 39 Fountayne Road, N16.

What do you remember of the house?

Only from photographs, because we left it when I was 3, just before 3 at the beginning

of the war. I remember it as being a house with a very tall pillared portico, and me in

a little coat and golden curls reaching up to about my mother's, well, below her knee,

standing there being photographed, and also pictures in a pram in the garden. Apart

from that, nothing. I've been back down, just driven through Stoke Newington and

that sort of thing, but not seen the house itself since I left it then.

Tell me a little bit about your parents.

I was the third son, and third child that is, of my parents. They were both born in

England. My father was born in 1900, October 1900, so he was coming up for 36

when I was born, and my mother was born two years later than he so she was 34.

They were a very good couple, shy perhaps a little, but we all got on very well. They

had three sons, each born with a five-year interval between the two, between them,

and all our birthdays fall in one week. Infer what you want from that.

And which week, which week was that then?

Well, between the 27th of August and the 2nd of September, mine is in the middle,

but the middle, my second brother was on the 27th of August and my elder brother ten

years older than I was on the 2nd of September.

And how did you get on with your brothers, from your earliest days?

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My eldest brother, David, who has now died, distant; he had quite a fiery temper,

there was a big age differential, tended to be the boss. And my parents were in

London in the war, we were down in Newbury and they joined us in the evening and

they came down each... So that he was a bit distant at that time, became closer to him

perhaps in later years. The middle one, Ken, I was closer to in age and in fact I went

to Gresham's School because he had gone there as it was thought to be a modern

science school; I went there and did history, but that was all the way that the cookie

crumbled in the war.

Tell me about your father, what did he do?

My father was a draper. He didn't enjoy that very much, he was a retail draper, and he

also had an interest in a hosiery would you call it? No, a lingerie manufacturer in

Nottingham. He did it well, he worked very hard, and he retired as soon as he could

which was at about the age of 60. From about 1929 on, until he died in 1983, he was

a Freemason. I am not. But he was obsessed about it, and became a historian of it, a

distinguished researcher and became the Secretary of I think the foremost Lodge of

research in the world, which was Gotchakoramati[ph] in Great Queen Street, and he

spent over twenty years at this and became, not entirely self-educated, he left school at

13, but he became a great speaker on it, he became a great historian of it, and

everything that I would like to be - not at that subject, but, his obsession was very

productive, and I think that's a good thing.

Why do you refer to it as an obsession then?

Because I think it was an enthusiasm plus; he went round the world, he went to Iran

and Australia and the States and everywhere talking to people about the subject. He

was very much invited to do it, and he was editing a journal, a research journal on it;

my mother used to speak of the `adulation' that he received, you know, in endless mail

and the receptions he got wherever he went, and I think it was an enthusiasm pushed

to a particular degree. Obsession is I think not a bad thing to have as long as it's in the

right direction, it doesn't do anybody any harm, and produced a great deal of

excitement and satisfaction for him.

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So, what do you remember of him being a Mason when you were young then?

Very little. I remember there used to be a certain amount of dressing up. I know very

little about Freemasonry. I remember seeing photographs of him in Masonic regalia.

I remember him and my mother going to ladies' nights in London hotels in the sort of

Fifties and Sixties, and later than that too. It was sort of to some extent a sort of

glamorous part of life. My mother didn't enjoy it particularly, but accepted that it was,

you know, a harmless and exciting outlet for him.

And, you say you're not a Mason yourself; was that something he was disappointed

about maybe?

He never indicated anything of the kind. My older brother was, and the other two

were not, but David didn't make a great success of it, and my father I'm sure

understood that there was no point in joining simply because he was enthusiastic

about the idea. I was interested in the speculative side of Freemasonry; I don't know

whether you are a Mason yourself, so, the sort of Mozart and the enlightenment and

that sort of thing is of interest. The more plodding social side I wasn't enthused about.

The transition, which is what my father's great interest was, from operative Masonry,

Masons that built churches, to speculative Masonry at the turn of the 17th, 18th

century, was something he was very deeply interested in and did a lot of research on

and wrote about; that was to me rather technical. And he was interested in the rituals

and training people to speak and enter into that side of it which was not of great

interest to me. And the speculative side of it, which would have been of interest,

didn't seem so high on his list. So that, I was never excited to enter the craft. Also I

happen to think that it's not a very good thing for sons and daughters to follow their

fathers' line, which comes first in the, whether one brought the other idea into my

mind I don't know, but I think it's better for sons and daughters not to enter family

businesses or necessarily go down the same line of enthusiasm.

Why do you hold that view?

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I think the sort of notion that there's a family business which is a gold mine, and it's,

you know, not a duty but a very natural thing for a son to follow his father into a

family business, is not a good thing either for the father or the child. I think it's much

better for a son to go his own way. I was fortunate to be able to go my own way; I

used to help out at Christmas and that sort of thing, and that was fine. Both my

brothers worked in this business for a time, which they were very ill-suited to do, and

it would have been better if they had got out earlier. Ken, one of the three of us, you

know, went to Canada and does his own thing and I think is better for that, but I was

fortunate to find my own path a good deal earlier.

You said your father was a draper, what exactly was he involved in?

He had a shop in Mare Street, Hackney, and sold ladies' clothes. It was called

Denny's[ph], it's not there any more, I think but it's acquired by Marks & Spencer.

What happened very broadly I think was that this shop was in a good place for Marks

& Spencer to develop. In the very early Sixties my father retired from that business

and my older brother David took it over, only to sell out to Marks & Spencer, which

was really his achievement in running that business. That left him with some money

but no career really at all, and I don't think David ever really did have a career, he

wasn't trained, he had no professional qualification. And he then joined his father-in-

law in business for a time I believe, or that family if his father-in-law wasn't...or his

father-in-law wasn't still alive. And that's part of the difficulty I think about a son

growing up too closely in the shadow of his father, that he doesn't actually have an

identity or a career of his own, and I certainly think that was, you know, rather

upsetting and difficult for David. So that was the main part which produced a

comfortable income.

How many people were employed in the shop?

In the business? Perhaps forty, something of that sort. Between thirty and forty. I

saw it at very busy occasions when I went there, but it was a very large shop. There

was a smaller shop in the same street further up which sold what used to be called

baby linen, that gives you the sort of vintage of the shop. The interesting thing is that

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my mother was really the practical businesswoman. She was the younger sister of

Joseph Collier who set up Richard Shops and United Drapery Stores and a lot of other

things which, I entered the firm solicitors because he was a major client at that time,

we can come back to that if you wish. But she was a very practical businesswoman

and she saw that a baby linen shop, which was the first of the two shops that opened,

was a good thing. Unfortunately she fell down the stairs just before the shop was due

to open and broke her nose, so my father had to run the shop. At that stage he was I

think manufacturing stockings with his own father. He went to run the shop, because

somebody had to launch it, it was all ready to go, and he saw for himself that she was

right, that it was a very good location, and I think he became interested then in retail

business. But he wasn't a businessman because he was there to make a great deal of

money, he was there because it produced an income for him, a comfortable income, he

worked extremely hard, he had his other interest in life. So that when he had an

opportunity at one stage, more than one stage I'm sure, to join his brother-in-law, my

mother's brother, Jock Collier, Joseph Collier, he didn't, because he knew that he

would have no life of his own. He was quite ready to work very hard in his own

business, because it gave him that independence, and that in a way I think rather

proved my point that it's better for people to go their own way, and not be

overshadowed or...

So both your parents to a certain degree had already through their families been

involved in...

In business.

In draper business in fact, or...

Yes, that's right.

What do you remember of your grandparents on your father's side then?

On my father's side I didn't know my grandfather, he died about 1937 of cancer. And

my grandmother I knew, a tiny little lady. She was I think born in England but she

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must have been a very tiny little girl when she came to this country. She was illiterate,

she could never read or write. She spoke very sweetly in English. She was

unbelievably spotlessly clean. She ran a haberdashery business, which in those days

was threepence-three farthings a yard, all calculated in her head all those sort of

things, very small. Of the two families, my father's family and hers, I've always

understood that my father's family were very poor, they lived in the East End. Her

husband died comparatively young, my father was the oldest son and left school at 13

ready to, I think he went to work in a men's outfitting business in the City, and I heard

stories which I'm quite sure were absolutely right that, there was a certain sort of pride

in these things, and if you didn't have any soup you still put a pot of water on the fire

so that nobody should know you didn't have any soup. But they all came through very

well, and his brothers and sister I think lived a pretty full life. I didn't know all of

them very well but I do know some of them quite well.

And, you said that your parents were, did you describe them as a close couple or a...?

I think they were a close couple but they were a rather shy couple, they weren't

demonstrative, I think particularly on my father's side. I think that changed perhaps

over the years. My mother was not a recluse or an invalid but she was not well for the

last years of her life and so that she tended to be at home and he travelled abroad, he

became much more outgoing. But, no, they understood each other very well. I think

they both had potentially very violent tempers, my mother always said she had to

repress hers or the marriage would not have lasted, and it was only very rarely that

that, in my experience, you know, broke down just for half an hour or something of

that sort, so that I had that feeling that at times, not so much in later years but at times

there were tensions, as I suppose there are in every marriage.

Mm. And what would they have been about, to your memory?

I think in the years that I was around, because I was at boarding school at Cambridge

for quite a lot, I think it was my mother felt, I think the phrase or something, not a golf

widow but a Masonic widow in the sense that my father had a great deal of interest

outside. They both shared an interest in the theatre and opera particularly and

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Glyndebourne, that sort of thing, and I think she had a feeling that she should, you

know, be phoning up and booking tickets at all times, and I think he felt that, you

know, he would be always ready to go if she did that, but he had a great deal on. It

was that kind of thing. My mother also developed an unwillingness really to phone

anybody, because he/she might be watching the television, or might be busy, or, you

know, so that even her own brothers and sister, you know, she didn't see as much of as

she should have. She had a day when she went to visit her mother in St. John's Wood

at that time with the other sister, and that was my grandmother's day, and there was

another day in the week which was my mother's day when everybody in that family

came to my mother for tea. Those were two things that were sort of set aside, they

were sacrosanct. There was a third day which was a Sunday lunch when there was an

aunt, my mother's sister, came to lunch, and those could not be moved. There was a

time when, I'm speaking now quite a few years later in Hendon, a place my mother

didn't like, nor did I but we had to live there for a time, and they came over to tea to

visit us and our children and we were the focal point of the family for a time then.

But these were important parts of her life. She never really I think made a life of her

own, which is a great pity because she was a very able person, perhaps more

formidable potentially intellectually than my father, she was a very able person.

You said that she had taken a hand in the business in the early stages. How did that

change?

Well, she had been in a business family with her brother, she had worked for him, she

understood retail business, she was a very practical woman, and she wanted to run this

baby linen business. But fate intervened, and my father became involved in that

business of necessity in the opening months. She came back to it, but then the war

came and we moved down to Newbury with other members of the family. To start

with my mother stayed with us at home during the day and my father went up every

day with his brother-in-law, my mother's brother, and sister-in-law, this man's wife,

every day on the train, came back, and only in the later years of the war my mother

went up quite a lot to London as well. So one way or another she did not stay in

business very long. When she left I'm sure expected to go back into business much

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more fully when she had had her three children; it was that sort of thing that really I

think to some extent frustrated her.

And what do you remember of the move to Newbury? Because you were 3 at the

time?

I was 3, yes. We went to one house out towards the Greenham Common end of

Newbury, all seemed huge to me of course, it's not, [INAUDIBLE]. And then we

went to a house at 65 St. John's Road, which is just near the park; and the park was the

area of land between us and the railway station and I remember seeing, or going with

my cousin to see my uncle and my father to the station in the mornings and walking

back, it seemed an immense walk. It was all very nice, they were communicating,

they were identical houses between 65 St. John's Road and 1 Howard Road with

communicating gardens, and it was a very nice place to grow up. One heard, knew

very little of the war. One could hear the guns even fifty miles away which is where

we were, occasionally; I think one, I do remember quite vividly one German plane

being chased across Newbury by an English fighter and unloading whatever it had to

unload on the way, but that's probably the only real incident of the war. My father

was in the Home Guard, Dad's Army, I have a valued picture of that. My uncle was in

the Fire Brigade. And, it was a good time for us, it was quite a good time really to be

in the war. When it ended, we went back in around August 1945 to a big house, a

very big house in Brondesbury Park, and that was all sort of quite new, I couldn't

remember anything of Fountayne Road. And that was very exciting.

So the house in Newbury, was that bought, your father bought that did he, he sold one

and then bought another one in Newbury?

I think that's right. I'm pretty sure he did buy it. It's possible that both these houses,

Howard Road and St. John's Road were rented but I think, they were new, I think we

were probably the first people to live in them, and I think they were probably bought, I

couldn't answer that definitively actually. And they were comfortable houses,

probably much smaller than they seemed to me but they were four-bedroom houses.

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So there were the two parents and your two brothers living with you at that time?

That's right.

In Newbury?

That's right, in this house.

Did your mother have any help at all?

Yes, I remember, she didn't have living-in help, that's why she stayed at home during

the day, most of...for quite a few years. And she had daily help, which was not I think

very difficult, of a certain age; younger people of course disappeared very quickly.

And then...

What did they do then, what would the daily helps do, to your memory?

I think they would come really and do rough work, you know, cleaning kitchen floors

and things of that kind. I do very much remember that in this incident I mentioned of

the excitement over the garden with the famous...and gunfire, the daily help then was

Mrs. Goddard who was convinced that the Germans' plane was definitely firing her

and she emptied a pale of water into the drain. Rather fanciful but I remember it quite

well, and that would be the kind of help that my mother might have had. I think that it

was...it was that sort of thing rather than baby-sitting type of help because my mother

wouldn't, I don't think my mother was actually around very much in the later stages,

my brother David was there I remember. It was to some extent a wider family thing

because the identical house at the other end of a large garden with a communicating

gate was my mother's brother, Harry; my father's name was Harry, her brother's name

was Harry, so there was this, a sort of feature of it. He made a very good vegetable

garden, he was a keen gardener and enjoyed being in the war very much for that

reason, he never had that opportunity living in Kilburn to have such a good garden.

And his family were older, a little bit, so he had two sons and a daughter, the daughter

was about ten years older than I and she was really running that house, doing a lot of

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shopping and, as a lot of very young teenage girls did in the war, really ran the home,

and her mother, my aunt, went up to London to work in their business with my uncle

Harry. So that, she was more or less of an age, just a bit between my two brothers in

age, two older brothers in age, so that it wasn't just, you know, me hanging around

alone at my age, because my youngest cousin, this is Helen's younger sister, nine years

younger, she was about my age, and those are the people I lived and played with most

of the time.

And what sort of things can you remember playing first, your earliest memories?

Sometimes it's difficult to tell what one can remember and what one remembers from

seeing photographs. We have a lot of photographs.

Who took the photographs by the way?

My father at that time took a lot of family snaps, and we've got a good collection of

family snaps which I developed with my father-in-law into a modern archive, not to

put too pompous a name on it. And that was very good, I can remember a lot of

things from those photographs, but I wouldn't say I would have remembered them

without. I remember large lawns in our, what seemed large lawns, in our garden,

because my father didn't make a vegetable garden, and we had lots of space for the

usual sort of games in the garden. I can't remember very specific games.

How did the war impinge on you? You said that you didn't really get much of a sense

of the war. I mean, do you remember of sort of rationing and those sort of things?

I don't remember being short of things, because I was too young to remember having

other things before. I had, you know, sweet points from my aunt and that sort of

thing, it was quite a common way of, aunts made up that sort of thing for children. I

remember that I didn't know what a banana was, and somebody brought a banana

back, one of my cousins, not in that family, from another family, came, fighting in

Italy and brought a banana back. Goodness knows where he got it, anyway, it was this

green thing, and my father made a great family joke out of it. He asked me to go and

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fetch a knife, and I had no idea that you opened a banana without a knife, and it was

amazing, I had never seen such a thing. And of course as somebody might look at a

paw-paw or something now, a banana was unknown at that time. But I didn't feel

deprived. And I think actually it was probably well understood that people ate quite

well during the war; it was after the war that bread was rationed, wasn't it, and at the

time, in fact diet was I think more difficult for a lot of people after the war.

What do you remember of the course of the war? I mean do you remember people

listening to the radio or...?

Oh, I became very excited about it in that way certainly by the time I was 5, 6, that

sort of thing. My parents, own parents came originally from Russia, and there was a

great deal of excitement about the Eastern Front. My parents changed, my father

changed his name. Hugh[ph]. I was born Alan Michael Kapinsky[ph], they shortened

it to Kapin[ph], just because Kapinsky[ph] was rather a mouthful, but when the war

started my father changed his name to Carr, and then it became rather absurd because

he had three brothers, two kept the name Kapin[ph] and still are around with that

name, and one took the name Carter, and here he was Carr. So it was rather difficult

to explain that all these four were brothers. But, I rather regret that in many ways. I

have a daughter now, Edna, who is into, she's a painter, and I think Edna

Kapinsky[ph] would have been a very much nicer name than Edna Carr. I often urge

her to take the name as her nom de guerre or whatever you call it, but anyway...

Was there a particular reason why your father changed his name the second time?

Well, I don't...to Carr?

Mm.

I think that the first change from Kapinsky[ph] to Kapin[ph] was very informal, I

mean I don't think he formalised it at all. I think that there was a feeling that, this

would have been before I think the German attack, the Nazi attack on Russia, but

Stalin, the Nazis were all in this together - not his feeling at all - and that he didn't

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want to have a Russian sounding name. At any rate it was some time in the early

Forties I think that he made this announcement, and deed poll and all that sort of

thing, and my own birth certificate, which has got an Edward VIII stamp on it, has in

his handwriting at the bottom, `Name changed by deed poll,' you know, written at the

bottom.

In his hand?

His hand, yes. And the extract from the `Gazette' or whatever it is, that accompanies

that.

So what sort of psychological connection do you feel with that earlier Russian family?

With the family, none at all. My uncles and aunts I know, but beyond that generation

to my grandparents and beyond, apart from my grandmother who was called Mrs

Kapin[ph], always called Mrs Kapin[ph], like the other two sons, I had no direct

knowledge, but I've always been very interested in it, and with my older son Amnon

we did a lot of research together, particularly when we started to develop a kind of

family archive, and although I've not been to Russia I have a bit of knowledge of

family names and where they came from, and that was true on my mother's family side

too, although they were more prosperous and both very much of the same background

though from the Pale I suppose it would be between what is now Russia and Poland.

Lithuanian, very orthodox background.

This is your mother, mother's family?

And my father's side.

Oh right.

Both. I think my mother's father, who she hardly knew, died when she was very tiny,

and I don't think ever came to England, died I think in Russia, and was quite a

prosperous man in timber or something of that sort, is my understanding. Her mother

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I am sure was born in England but she spoke hardly any English for a very long time,

a lot of Yiddish and Russian and Polish, and I remember her as a great round motherly

Slav woman, close to my mother very much, and to the others though they were very

different types. And she married a second time and it was only my mother's step-

father that I knew for a time who was called Markovitch[ph] but it was never part of

our family name, and before that, again I suppose typical of many families that came

from the East in the 1880s, '90s and the turn of the century, when my grandmother

came with her parents I think, or maybe she was born here, maybe it was her own

parents that came, that would have been what it was, my mother's father, or step-

father, it would have been my mother's father, was asked, you know, what is his

name? And they were in Koblenz at the time, and Koblenz...so my mother, on my

mother's birth certificate it says Fanny Matilda Koblenz.

Interesting.

Because to spell out a Russian name was too complicated at the time, and I think

many people had that experience. And then they took the name Collier, C-O-L-L-I-E-

R, which remained my grandmother's name until she married a second time and then

when her second husband died she went back to calling herself Collier again, and that

was the name of all her children until they married if they were woman, so, Jock

Collier and Harry Collier were the two uncles I knew best, and there are aunts and all

the rest of it. They were in some ways I think a more established family, but the

background was I think very much the same. And they knew each other well as both

families knew each other well in the East End. And, that was the origin of that side,

the Ashkenazi branch in fact of Jewry. When I married later on an Israeli of a

Sephardi branch who were very much born and brought up in Israel, that's when the

excitement began, because I was, you know, very interested with Amnon in, you

know, showing how the two strands came together. And that was the origin of our

photograph collection, because my father-in-law entered enthusiastically into this, his

family came really from North Africa and Turkey into Palestine, and it was actually a

very fascinating exercise, and our collections were kept separately in different albums

until Dalia and I married and then, they follow the same course; you can see on each

page what's happening in each... It was fascinating, and I was very lucky in that

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because I'm a historian really by enthusiasm. And my father-in-law also was, and he

was...he was educated in France, and he worked in the Mandate, Palestine, for the

British authorities, and with very very few Jewish officials, he was a district officer, I

think one of two, and he became in effect Governor of Galilee, and he became quite

well informed on the crusades and the Horns of Hattin and that sort of thing. My wife

grew up as a little girl in Tiberius and then they moved to Haifa. Now all this was a

million miles away from Lithuania and the East End of London, and to pull all those

things together was very exciting, Amnon found it so.

So, tell me a little bit about your sort of religious upbringing then.

Well, I should say that my father was very well brought up. He went every Saturday,

every Friday night, to his own grandparents, and spent the whole Sabbath with them,

obviously long before I was around, or before he was married. And we have a very

beautiful photograph of a white-haired old man who was my father's grandfather, and

it's hinged in the album, on the back of it it says in apparently the most beautiful

Hebrew, very clear, `Today I am 77 years old'. And this is the sort of Lithuanian

Hebrew thing coming through very clearly. My father learned Hebrew from him.

They didn't pass it on. I had my Bar Mitzvah, but I could read Hebrew and painfully I

could read it now, I don't understand it, apart from what I know, the one word in

twenty that I understand because I'm married to an Israeli, and I didn't really have a

strict Jewish upbringing at all. I feel, I know very well that I am a Jew, and I have

encouraged my children to be aware of the fact that they are Jews, but it's not a strict

position at all. My sons are circumcised, their sons are not; that doesn't worry me, it

doesn't worry Dalia. Both my sons are married, as you infer, and they've chosen

whatever names they want for their children. I recall my father being in some ways

disappointed that I hadn't chosen names for my children that flowed from the family,

Lewis[ph] or Leah[ph] or those sort of names. We chose names for the three children

which sounded the same in Hebrew and in English; you didn't have to make Schlomo

into Solomon or Moshe into this that and the other. It's Amnon, Dan not Daniel, and

Edna. I don't think they think very highly of their names any more than I think very

highly of mine, but it's one of those things. I remember my father saying, and I was

very touched, he didn't say it beforehand, very typical of him, he only said after, `Well

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you know, it's those sort of names where you see a family's connection.' And so I

regret it in some ways that I didn't give them more than one name each. But that

would be very very typical of my father. He would never wish to impose. He was

quite an emphatic personality but he would never interfere in that way. Anyway that

is how our archive started and continues, because I have become more than

enthusiastic, obsessive about it, and runs to quite a lot of...

And what about your mother, what was her religious upbringing and how did that

impact on you?

She felt emphatically that she was a Jewess, she was not strict. There clearly had been

a break in not that she...both my parents felt Jewish, I feel Jewish too, but they were

not practising strictly at all. They kept a kosher household, there were certain foods

they wouldn't bring into the house, largely, she said, this is my mother, so that her own

mother, could feel comfortable in coming to the house. It was not really out of

conviction and everybody drew the line in a different place, and I didn't feel that it was

out of conviction. I went to boarding school, an English boarding school, and was

very comfortable eating bacon and shellfish and all the other things. And different

people ate out in the same way, or not, or in later years have become vegetarian which

solved a lot of problems perhaps, but for different reasons they have become

vegetarian. My wife is quite a strict vegetarian now. So, I saw that in my father-in-

law's family also that he knew Arabs very well, he became a lawyer acting for Arabs,

he would eat things that Arabs might eat, or he might, you know, steer a very different

path. I don't these are matters, things of strict conviction, but equally there wasn't any

question of getting married in a church, or anything of that sort.

And what about Friday, Friday evening?

Friday evening was preserved by my father-in-law more than by my own parents. I

can remember my grandmother with the candles and the bread. To be quite honest I

hardly remember my mother doing that, and I think she may have come to regret that

to some degree, and whenever I did see her in later years doing that it seemed artificial

to me, but that was unfair, but she didn't do it regularly at all. My father-in-law also

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married a second time, and they kept not an orthodox house in Israel, which was at

that time quite rare, but a family, it was definitely a feeling of, this was their religion,

and of course most people were Jewish anyway, and certainly broke the bread and the

salt and it was passed round, a little kiss, and I liked that very much, I had not seen

that in that way until in fact I went out to Israel to be married in December '63,

something of that sort.

Do you remember when you became aware that you were Jewish? You said you knew

you were Jewish, do you remember when you became aware of that?

I suppose my first actual awareness of it would have been in Newbury rather than

before. I can't really say I remember something from, before I came to Newbury. And

I think it would be quite hard for me to pin-point when I first knew that. But I do very

definitely recall that that was not something that was hidden from me, or that it was

something that I was ever encouraged not to make aware, and when I came to go to

boarding school, which, I went to the prep school of Gresham's when I was 7 or 8,

something of that sort, I well understood that I was Jewish and was very ready to say

so if the need arose. I didn't go there trumpeting that, I didn't go there saying there are

certain things I musn't eat at school, and that was something I got on with quite well.

Of course there were so few, Gresham's is in Norfolk and at that time there were so

few Jewish people around that people didn't know anything about it anyway, it didn't

really arise. It came out in religious instruction, that sort of thing, and I used to say

my piece, probably rather more than my share. But, it wasn't a problem. I think that

there had only been about two or three boys, my brother, my older brother, Ken, being

one of them, and he was less, a good deal less I think, into it as they would say now,

than I.

I'm just wondering what it was that, what it was that identified you as being

particularly Jewish, you know, when you felt that you had become Jewish, what it

was, you know, whether it was parental influence or...

It's difficult to identify that very precisely, because my friends initially were in the

family, cousins and things of this kind, I didn't sort of think, oh we're Jewish and the

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people over there are not. But certainly it must have been when I was at, I went to

Newbury Grammar School, which was a good school, I must have known then that

most of the people there were not Jewish, but I don't remember it being brought home

to me. I don't remember for example any sort of Holocaust kind of impressions until

the war was over, and then I have a very vivid recollection of the sort of, British

troops entering Belsen and that sort of thing. But I suppose I was, must have been

aware that my enthusiasm for the Red Army in that sense, but as we kept a very sort

of, maps of, you know, Kursk and all this, and moving the arrows which were sort of,

all children would do anyway whether it was the Irrawaddy or the Don. I think that I

must have been aware then that this was partly behind one's enthusiasm. And there

must have been a sort of unchaining of that enthusiasm.....

End of F5086 Side A

Alan Carr

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Track 2 [F5086 Side B]

And you said that your mother and father didn't really observe strictly, but what about

synagogue attendance?

In Newbury there was a community, and my father led it in a way. He was I think

probably at least as well educated in that as anyone, and I do recall that as head of that

community he was given a most wonderful Haggadah which is, you know, the

Passover book, a beautiful leather bound Haggadah, and wonderfully illustrated, and

it's beautifully inscribed, the leather pad inside the cover to mark that. And, I do recall

very vividly the Passover feast, and that was kept in the war as well, we had several

families to come to join us, because it wasn't just my uncle Harry, other uncles and

aunts also came to Newbury from far and wide, sort of, around and about, and that

was a good occasion, a very good occasion, and that I think is probably the most vivid

Jewishness that I have, because it brings together very obviously the national exodus

side of the Jewish faith, the relevance of the Jewish faith if you like for the Last

Supper, which most gentiles have no understanding of at all, certainly no Christians

indeed don't have much understanding of, and yet doesn't involve one in wearing

paiyot[ph] and things that I would not want to get involved with. That said, in 1989 I

went to the Yemen, and that community was supposed, the Jewish community there

was supposed to have been evacuated in some wonderful operation in about 1950 to

Israel, but I was travelling in a remote part of the Yemen with a gentile friend, and in a

place called Sada I stumbled on people with stalls selling Yemeni silver, wearing

paiyot[ph], and of course I found that overwhelming. That's the only time it's ever

happened. But, so my Jewishness has come out in different ways. And he was very

moved to see that I could, you know, I related to that. But it's not been a direct

ritualistic formal religious feeling, it's been something vaguer than that. I think just as

powerful actually. And, as I say I was particularly excited, and all my children have to

some extent but particularly Amnon, by seeing the other strand when I went to Israel,

and Amnon became extremely interested in that, at the age of 8 he was preparing

family trees and giving them to my grandfather - not to my grandfather, to his

grandfather, to my father, and became extremely interested in all that. Amnon is very

competitive, I'm just linking it up to the Jewish side for a moment; he and Dan went to

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Belmont, the junior end of Mill Hill as weekly day boys and then Amnon decided he

wanted to go to Winchester, and wanted to be a Scholar there. He didn't get into the

Scholars' house, [INAUDIBLE] college, but he did get into one of the other houses,

and then made it his business as one of perhaps ten Jewish boys in the school to give

lectures to the school - he was only 13 - on Shabbat, Passover, these kind of things.

And he did keep the fast, and in that house there were no other Jewish boys, but the

housekeeper was very delighted, you know, to sort of prepare him for the fast, she was

a Christian lady of course, and have something for him to break his fast with. And

for a long time through his schooling, four or five years, he kept that very zealously,

but he is now in New York and he is married to a black analyst and lives in New York

and has a son. That doesn't trouble me, because perhaps rather like my father I never

interfere, or try hard never to interfere, but it was quite a reaction suddenly by him.

Similarly Dan, my second son, knows exactly what he is, but he's married to a gentile

girl who I am very fond of, and they call their son Aaron. That's his choice not mine,

and they had other strange names, to me, on the list, but they picked Aaron without

reference to us. I think at one time they were going to call him Blue. [LAUGHS] But

anyway, I should think that Aaron, despite the name, probably doesn't feel at all

Jewish. I see a lot of him, I'm very fond of him, and I think that could change, not

through any direct influence but I think when he comes to travel I think these things

happen in subtler ways than any influence that a parent or grandparent can have

directly, I'm sure that's so.

And were you pleased about the name?

Aaron?

Were you pleased?

Yes and no. I think it's a beautiful name, and it's much nicer in Hebrew though they

don't pronounce it that way, than in English. I mean it's a little bit `keep you hair on,

Aaron' is not an ideal, but it doesn't get in his way at all, and I think he is quite pleased

with it, I think, to have a name that starts with a double A is distinctive. He's only

going to be 6 on Christmas Eve so that, he probably hasn't, you know, had any

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problems with it. But, I can't believe that he won't at some stage feel, you know,

something, and, despite the name or because of it, I don't know. And to me it's very

interesting to see how that develops. Neither my wife nor I feel particularly close to

Israel. She's turned away from it intensely, I expect that will come out in another

discussion, but, we live well together I think, and she goes to India a great deal, she

goes to a different kind of life there. When I say not close to Israel, she now has

turned her attention to translating Indian spiritual messages in Hebrew, and they get

published in Israel, there's quite a community and interest in that kind of thing, and

that is actually her whole life in many ways now, her great centre of her life is that.

And where we went, say, twenty times in fifteen years perhaps or twenty years

certainly, to Israel when our children were small, we've only been lately for one or two

very few family occasions there, but she has been with me, where I've seen her family,

I'm very glad to, she has been more interested in picking up the threads with a

different kind of community in Israel, and that I think is very interesting and not at all

reprehensible, put it that way. But, her own family in Israel find it more difficult to

get used to that idea, but I think they are getting used to it.

We've talked a bit about sort of religious, your religious upbringing. What sort of

views did your parents have towards sort of political issues?

I'm sure I remember a vivid anti-fascist background. I think strongly of them as

Liberals. I think at some stage they definitely voted Liberal, big L, but that really

disappeared so quickly after the Second War that it was just a memory. The political

figure I remember most vividly is Lord Samuel, who was of course the first Governor

General if you like in Mandate, Palestine; he was the great man at the synagogue at St.

Petersburgh Place in Bayswater, we went to live in Bayswater in about 1949, and

stayed in a flat there for many years, and I do remember most vividly his coming into

the synagogue and everybody standing. Incredible. And of course he was a great

Liberal politician, a statesman, and those things linked in my mind both politically and

with the Jewish background. When I developed an interest in history, yes I was

interested in politics in that sense. I tended to become more interested over the years

in Disraeli, say, rather than in Lloyd George or, Gladstone certainly, and that wasn't

for any particularly reason except that more of temperament, and temperamentally I

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suppose that would be very much a Disraeli Jew. But in politics my parents I don't

think had emphatic interest; they never had any wish to play any political part in life.

They were on that side in things, and I think they became a little bit lost when the

Liberal Party disappeared, because there was not any question of their wanting to pick

up a socialist life, although many others I'm sure of their background would have

done, and had done. And I don't think they identified closely with the Tory Party,

although they may well have voted Conservative. They didn't go into what they were

going to vote at elections any more I think than I have with my children, and I don't

think politics was ever a mainstream interest in the family, certainly hasn't been

directly for mine.

Were you encouraged to read when you were young?

Yes.

Would a parent read to you at night, or...?

I think there was less of that than there should have been, partly because people came

back late from London, and so that part of life was a bit interrupted, but I think I did

read early, I'm sure I did, and I was certainly, not was encouraged, there were masses

of books around all the time. My father was, you know, he had educated himself to a

great degree. They were both, both my parents were given a good basic education,

and my mother particularly won a lot of prizes, but she didn't really complete her

education. There was no thought of either of my parents even going through to what

would now be A'levels or that sort of thing. I was the first person in my family to go

to university, which was ridiculous because both my brothers should have gone, but,

or could have gone in current circumstances, but did not. My mother in particular I

think would have been an excellent graduate from a university, I don't know quite in

what subject, but she was I think a great talent which didn't develop as it should. And

whether she sensed that herself or not, I don't know, she never said anything of the

sort, she probably never thought of herself in that way, but I think she could have been

a very able, trained person, and that didn't happen in quite that way.

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What can you remember reading, what was the sort of...?

I can remember particularly a prize I was given called `Folk Tales From Many Lands',

I was given this prize in Newbury Grammar School, I must have been about 7, 7 or 8,

something like that. Amnon's got it now, he just pinched it and went to America with

it, but it was a wonderful book, and I think it was edited by a lady called Lilian Garth,

I remember her quite well, and it was just that, extremely well told, amazing stories

from Russia and Serbia and Turkey and everywhere, and that was very vivid to me.

And was this links with family do you think to a certain extent as well?

Well, you could read back into that now, but it was given to me by the headmaster,

you know, as a Prize Day in an English grammar school. And, I don't think he could

have possibly seen it that way, I mean anybody else could have won this particular

prize, but I do remember it extremely well. I remember the paper, I remember the

prints on it extraordinarily well, there were very few colour things but what were so

vivid were these wood-block illustrations, very vivid to me. And, yes that was really

the beginning of my fairy tale education. It's ironical now reading `The Uses of

Enchantment', I don't know if that's a book that [INAUDIBLE], but, everybody comes

at these things in a different way, but I think they do come at them, I think there are

very few, I hope there are very few childhoods that are so deprived as that, but that is a

wonderful book, I am a great believer in that.

Anything else you remember reading? [INAUDIBLE] for instance?

I do remember very vividly, this is just post-war and I suppose my most vivid political

thing was the independence in Palestine for Israel, and then I had quite a big spring-

back folder in which I had cut out brown paper bags as the pages, they weren't

photograph album pages or anything else, they were brown paper bags cut up as the

pages for this album. And I read `The Illustrated London News', and the papers about

that, and mounted them in there, and I was quite on top of that subject, and I knew

how it had come out of the end of the Second War, and exodus and all that. And that,

I suppose that must have been some quite serious tensions in my mind with Bevin and

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jumping the queue and all that sort of thing. I didn't know then of course that I would

ever meet and marry a girl from Israel, but it was very vivid to me, and Amnon's got

that too, and it is part of our lives. And I suppose that was the most political thing that

I got involved in, and it was probably a very good thing for me that it didn't go on that

long. And I do of course remember the War of Independence, because I was very

much at the age, what 12, when that would be, you know, quite a key memory in one's

mind. Otherwise, I read `Alice' and Edward Lear and all those sort of things, which I

try not to foist too much onto my grandsons, but... And, I was encouraged, you know,

if I wanted to go into acting then I did go into acting, and my parents made costumes

for me, I enjoyed all that very much. I do think there was definitely a bit of drama in

one's life, and I think that the Passover feast was part of that too. And, apart from that

book I can't remember what would have been the earliest title that I read, but I was

reasonably literate certainly at a very early age.

Mm. And you mentioned theatre and opera as being an enthusiasm of your parents.

That's right.

Did they pass that on?

Yes they did, very much so. And I went on to do History and English at school and

got into all that, and of course I suppose inevitably acted Shylock at Gresham's, which

was itself quite an interesting experience because there were so very few Jews around.

But I had been in a lot of house plays and other things long before that, so I did enjoy

all that very much. And I can remember my first `Tosca' at the Ostend Casino[??],

just the second act and the third act I think it was. So... And I remember very well,

my father was I think a very good father, I remember going to `La Traviata', it was

probably the first thing I remember vividly at home, because I could read the

programme, I must have been about 11 or 12 I suppose and I remember saying, `What

is the demi-monde?' [LAUGHS] I mean this is a very typical answer he gave, he

said, `Well, ladies who are not quite nice.' [LAUGHS] And, I suppose that was, you

know, not quite accepted. And I suppose for that age that was enough. And I passed

this on to my own children; I think they're much more sophisticated. But, I remember

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that very well. Similarly, he never actually flinched or gave me something that was

wrong in an answer, I remember for example I was taken to the Law Courts by him

around this sort of time. I wasn't sort of consciously, there was a list of things that had

to be...but we happened to go to the Law Courts. We went to the Old Bailey, I vividly

remember an occasion, again I must have been about 12 or 13, 14 maybe, and...I must

have been younger than that because I didn't know what incest was, and there were

two, brother and sister, and the parents were looking after their child, or maybe more

than one child, and I asked my father, `What is incest?' And he explained very clearly,

and you know, that was accepted. So at certain levels my father was very clear in

explanations. But as regards specific reading things, I can't, you know, focus on any

particular book.

You mention the Law Courts. Was there anything significant in that later on, you

know, as a...?

Not at all, no. I mean I think I went through a lot of the adolescent things about the

stage or the Bar, both of which were extremely misplaced. But, I came to be a

solicitor for quite different reasons, because I thought at first I was going to stay on at

King's and do research and I... I went to King's from Gresham's because my history

teacher, an old Australian man called Kelly[??], said, `You ought to try for a

scholarship there,' and he was a wonderful teacher, he was the best teacher I ever had,

and I got a scholarship there, I got a minor scholarship that was upgraded. King's

wouldn't let you read Law anyway for all your time, so I finished up reading History

for all my time and I was very glad about that, and I was well taught there too. In the

second year I thought, this is it, and I got a good degree, and I'll stay on. But by the

third year I felt stifled, and I do again vividly remember going to see this great tycoon,

my uncle Jock, my mother's older brother, and he had had some sort of progress report

and in his way I think followed me quite closely, and I was saying that I thought I

might be doing some research. And I remember vividly his words were, `I knew a

historian once, he had a beard,' and, we're talking about 19...the middle, the mid-

Fifties and you know, that was quite enough to... Of course ironically now of course I

wouldn't have thought that having a beard would a particular, you know, non-

recommendation. Anyway, he said, `Look, I can introduce you to a firm in the City.

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You'll have status, you'll have a good income, you'll have a great deal of scope for

your talents,' and that is what happened. And he introduced me to George

Dennehy[ph] who is the Anglo-Irish second partner of Simmons & Simmons, with

Gordon Simmons he was running that firm. And I did go there. I had no idea what

solicitors did; unlike the family doctor children then didn't go to holiday jobs or know

much about other professions. But I took to it, and apart from the fact that my law

school attendance started with a lady saying to others from Oxford and Cambridge,

[INAUDIBLE], `Intelligence is at a discount here. You are here to learn this', that's

the only really awful, perhaps very salutary shock in making the change to the Law.

I was hoping to come back to this, but it will be the next time now. Can we spend just

a few minutes just finishing today talking a little bit about your first school memories

with, I've got a good sort of sense now of the family and so on. What were your first,

earlier school memories?

I remember going to a little kindergarten in Newbury, overwhelmingly girls, run by a

lady called Mademoiselle Bois de la Tour[ph], a formidable name, that's really only

her name and her dog that I can remember. And a cousin, actually the younger

daughter of this man Jock Collier, Pamela, who had had little or no education of her

own, she must have been about 14, and she helped run this kindergarten already. And

that's probably the earliest memory I have of any school. Very soon after that I went

to the Newbury Grammar School, it was a very...well I think a very well run school,

and I remember a man called Starr[ph] who was the headmaster of it, and you spoke

earlier, just to link up with my first schooling, I got on well at school and I was very

literate. I do remember, you talked about rationing, I threw away a bread roll, as

children sometimes do, and I didn't own up to it and got the cane. It hasn't happened a

great deal, I think it was the only time actually, and I do vividly remember my father

saying to my mother, `It serves him right, he's going to learn that lesson'. Because not

only...it was obviously not owning up to it, but it was important not to throw away a

bread roll. And it was this kind of muttered phrase throughout one's career, you

know, `Little children in Belsen would be better off, you know, with what you've

thrown away' kind of thing, or, `Don't waste food' and that kind of thing. There was a

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kind of muttered background. But there weren't any resentments about it, and it was

never held against me later on; I was very ashamed of myself for that.

And what was more significant, as you said the lying, or the throwing away of the

food, to your parents?

I think the lying actually, and the cover-up, probably. But, I think it's hard to say now;

I think just to throw away food was not a good thing to do, I mean it was a very bad

thing to do. But I think probably longer term they realised it was...so I tried not to...

Were you a good child generally then?

Yes I think I was, I think I was.

What sort of...

I can't say too good; I don't think I was a goody-goody, but I think, I didn't suck up, in

fact I tended to be fearful of sucking up, but, yes I was in line, I wasn't a rebel, I think.

What sort of punishments would your parents have?

Very few punishments that I can remember were vitally necessary actually. Do you

know I can't remember being punished by my parents. I might have been told, you

know, go to bed early or something like that, or, I won't go to the cinema perhaps or

something like that, which, to go and see a movie was exciting then. But I really can't

remember what the punishments... I mean I was a good child in the sense that I was in

a routine that if necessary I would, you know, clear the table, obviously I would be

ready to do that, and I always regarded that as very much a part of what one, you

know, should do, and I think generally I see that all around now, people do that. So I

don't think thee was a lot of need for punishment.

Newbury was a day school?

Alan Carr

C736/02/01 F5086B

Yes, yes that's right. And then my brother, Ken, who was five years older, it was a

question where he should go for school, and he was interested in science, and

Gresham's was thought to be the place. It had been evacuated from Norfolk to

Newquay, to an hotel, to two hotels down in Newquay which was not a million miles,

it was sort of more or less in the direction, thought to be safe, and he went there.

When the war was finished he went back with the school, Gresham's, to Norfolk as a

boarder, he had been boarding in both places. I tried to go to St. Paul's; I didn't get an

entrance there, their loss. [LAUGHS] And so I went to the prep school department of

Gresham's, not as a scientist, I've never been interested or good at the sciences, apart

from a little bit of biology, and in fact I developed an interest in the theatre, English

and history, and I think I was very well taught.

So how old were you when you went to Gresham's then?

Just 8.

So you did an entrance at 8 for St. Paul's?

Yes, something of that sort, yes.

And how did that go down, the fact that you failed to get an entrance for that, in the

family?

I remember it was in Hammersmith or around that part of the world that the school

was then, and I remember going to stay with an aunt, my mother's sister, who lived

there, and I remember staying there in her house, also over a shop but the shop had

been closed some time before, and going to the exams. I don't know why I didn't get

through, get in, but it didn't come to anything. I didn't have any knowledge of St.

Paul's except it was a very good school, and I was quite glad to go to Gresham's, and

my brother was there. Of course it was an immense distance away, 120 miles into

Norfolk was then a great distance; my parents didn't have a car until quite a bit later,

and even then would never drive all that way. I was one of the less visited children at

that school I would say. And, my mother loved to come and see the plays, and

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sometimes she came up by herself if my father couldn't come with her, and I enjoyed

that very much. My father I wouldn't say, he didn't look tremendously in place; I

recall again very vividly, Ken didn't get on tremendously well at school, I think he had

a much stormier adolescence than I, and he was thought very unlikely to get his

School Cert. as it was then called, O'levels, to the extent, and I think this was very

wrong, people were betting that he would not. And, of course he did very well. But

by that time my father had made some sort of descent on the school. I remember most

vividly with his black Anthony Eden hat and black crombie coat, and he came to see

the headmaster, and decided that he would take Ken away. And that, I can't

understand the timing of that; you would have thought you would wait to see the

results first. In fact he did very well, and I can remember, you know, the sort of £5

notes, those white £5 notes falling on the table at Brondesbury Park, and Ken was in a

sort of bemused sort of daze, he had done much better than he thought he would do,

and I thought that was probably, you know, one of the worst things that my parents

had... They hadn't engineered it, they probably regretted it, they probably saw it was a

great mistake, but it was too late. But I stayed on, I did well at the school, they didn't

have many scholarships to Cambridge then. I was an exact contemporary of John

Tusa, who went up to Trinity and of course gone on to a big place in the BBC since,

and he also took a History scholarship, he was also trained by Kelly[ph], and we went

up to Cambridge more or less the same time.

Sorry, what were the pound notes you mentioned?

Well there was a bet.

Oh I see, that was the bet.

That's the bet. And so he won his bet, he was betting that he was going to do that,

and... I remember that it was not rightly stacked, people should have been saying,

`You are going to do this' rather than, `We don't think you are going to do this.'

Maybe it was a more clever strategy than it appeared.

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Maybe, and maybe short-term it was much better that he should actually produce the

right result. But I do recall that, I mean it seemed to me that it was sad that people

were not really showing that confidence. And he had a rather chequered time after

that because, he got into different lines and they all turned out to be dead ends, but

he's now doing I think exactly what he wanted to do which is, he does carpentry.

There's a strong, I hesitate to say genetic but there's a strong ability to use the hands in

our family. I don't share it. I can press the button on a camera. But he trains, I won't

say delinquents but people, sort of, what we might once have called borstal in useful

carpentry and things of that kind, in Canada. Our grandfather, my father's father, was

a cabinet maker originally. And Dan, my second son, is a builder, and I don't mean an

architect, I mean a builder, and when he came with us to South America he was

fascinated to see, he reburbishes barns, he does great things in Dorset, and he was

explaining the building techniques that the Bolivians used and now use. So that can't

be a coincidence. Aaron, his son, is extraordinary with his hands. [INAUDIBLE] is

also into craft and design. But there's definitely, there has to be; my cabinet-maker

grandfather made the most beautiful turned ashtrays and candlesticks, and we were

saying[??], turned columns carved, carved columns out of blocks of very hard wood in

South America, and it was remarkable.

There's a connection.

There is a kind of connection I think. Sorry, I've been very laborious in my answers.

No no. Let's pause there for today.

Yes, thank you.

End of F5086 Side B

Alan Carr

C736/02/02 F5087A


We were talking last time about, I think we had got up to Gresham's just about, and

we had just begun to talk about...

My St. Paul's failure.

After St. Paul's. I just wondered why, who it was decided you should go to

Gresham's.

My parents decided, and I concurred, because my immediately older brother, five

years older, had already gone. It was in the war, he went when Gresham's was

evacuated to two hotels at Newquay from Norfolk, and they chose it for him, I think

probably quite well, because it was thought to be a sort of advanced guard science

school, and it worked out quite well for him and he went back to Norfolk as a boarder

after the war and it was thought a good idea for me to go there, although I was five

years younger, although I wasn't interested in science. But it worked out very well

because I think I was probably better taught there than anywhere else in the subjects I

liked.

So had you already visited the school before you actually attended it?

No, no. That was unthinkable, because, it was really decided in the closing weeks of

the war that that's probably what I would want to try to do, or certainly before VJ Day

before that, and to go up to Norfolk and have a look round, it had moved back to

Norfolk by that time, was sort of too remote. But my brother Ken thought it was a

good idea, and so it turned out I think.

Do you remember what you thought about the idea of following in his footsteps and

going to Gresham's?

I thought it was, you know, quite an exciting thing to be doing. If I had gone to St.

Paul's no doubt I would not have been a boarder. It didn't worry me at the time to be

Alan Carr

C736/02/02 F5087A

boarding; of course I had lots of homesickness when it happened. I, like a lot of

children, was sent on to a sort of holiday school camp kind of thing through the

summer of 1945 when I was just coming up for 9, and while parents and everybody,

families, moved back to town, and that was really the first time I had been away from

my parents. I went to some cousins, male and female, to somewhere near

Bournemouth, and then in the September I went to Norfolk.

So was the summer school a sort of preparation in a way, was that the idea?

It wasn't proposed for that reason. I think that even if I had been going to school as a

day boy in London I would have gone to this place, because I think parents wanted to

have their children out of the way during the summer while they could move back to

town. And quite a lot of people seemed to be, not in that plight, it was a genuinely

quite comfortable summer school, and we went on little expeditions and things round

Christchurch and Bournemouth, that sort of thing. But I hadn't been away before so it

was in effect a preparation, whether they thought of it in that way I don't know.

And what sort of school was Gresham's at that time? How would you describe it?

It was remote, I mean geographically remote. I didn't...my parents didn't have a car,

and I think most of the people that came from anywhere sort of south of Cambridge

didn't have a car for transport to and fro. And, I found it very exciting. I went, I was

just 9, and there were two junior houses and four senior houses. It was very rural, I

had never lived anywhere so rural; you walked a quarter of a mile through lanes and

things of that sort all over the place simply to get to school. I'm sure it's not as rural as

that now but it is still quite a remote north Norfolk school. But at that time they had

attracted a great sort of intellectual, I can say it now, I wouldn't have thought of it

then, on arrival, crowd; the sort of Benjamin Britten era was just about to begin, Peter

Brook was in the theatre, both these were in the house that I went to in the senior

school, Woodlands, and music and all those things were very very much admired at

Gresham's. They had also had a very good science record. They came back from

Cornwall to Norfolk and they had not long finished sort of brushing themselves down.

They had wonderful buildings spread out over a great flat landscape of north Norfolk,

Alan Carr

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they had an open-air theatre in vast, to me seemed vast school woods, and indeed

much more lavish sort of facilities than most of the London schools that I would have

considered or thought I would have wanted to go to. So it was actually a very

good...very exciting possibilities seemed to open. The school wasn't yet overcrowded,

and, I think I was at the stage of sort of settling down to boarding school life. There

was no question of going home at weekends or even for half term; a lot of parents did

come to collect children at half term if there was such a thing, or the odd day off, but I

tended to stay behind because it was just too remote. It didn't worry me at the time.

It's wholly fee-paying in terms of its pupils?

Yes, yes.

How many pupils, do you remember, at the time?

The two junior houses together had I suppose about 80, 40 perhaps in each, and...very

difficult to say. It's not a big school, wasn't then, they've built at least one, possibly

two more senior houses since. And, I suppose the whole school was perhaps 500 in

the senior school at the most, certainly not more, and I think it worked up to that

because I think it was still at a time when people were coming back. So...

What sort of pupil profile was there in terms of sort of background and geographical

spread in terms of the pupils?

When I arrived I think that most people were English rather than just even just

Scottish, but there were still people coming and arriving from Holland and people that

I could now see were refugees; names like Van Buren didn't mean anything to me

then, and Tusa also went to the school and earned a distinction at the BBC since. So

that, at that time I think it was probably quite an exciting mixed sort of intake,

although it was only boys obviously in the gender sense: even that's changed of course

now. But it became the policy, particularly in the...the avowed policy of the

headmaster, to make it a Norfolk farmers' school, which, his name was Martin John

Olivier, a cousin of Laurence Olivier, and he saw that that was the future of the

Alan Carr

C736/02/02 F5087A

school. I think they've tried to move away from that a bit since, but that didn't really

make a great deal of sense with the kind of background that I mentioned a few names

for at the beginning. So I don't think in the time that I was there that it was the

conscious policy to encourage a wide range of pupils.

And from your father's point of view was it a significant financial commitment to

have two of you at that sort of school?

I don't think it was ever indicated that I had to reach a certain grade or do a certain

amount, or it would be impossible for him. He was in very much a middle

businessman's slot. I think that he earned enough for that. I think that...I wasn't put

under any kind of pressure. I think that to some extent my brother who was there was

a bit under pressure, not that, `I can't afford to keep you here if you're not going to

work'; he gave the impression, dare I say it as a late developer, that he would muddle

through sort of thing, and in fact my father wasn't prepared to wait forever. And I well

remember that when my brother, he's five years older than I so that when he was about

15 my father came up to see the headmaster to see, is he going to get through his

O'levels as they would then have been, or very soon after have been called, his

General Certificate. And he was told always, as it had been for years on every report,

he certainly could if he would, was the main thrust of it, and my father wasn't satisfied

with that, they had been disappointed for so long, and they made arrangements to take

him away after the O'levels, not...didn't make the arrangements after the O'levels to

take him away, but they planned that in the summer they would, you know, take him

away. And I may have mentioned this to you on an earlier occasion, that turned out to

be terribly damaging. It wasn't for financial reasons particularly but my father had

become impatient and didn't see that it was getting anywhere. Neither of my older

brothers went to university, not because my father didn't have a great respect for

academic things but we were at a time just in the Second War and of a sort of

generation where you had to prove yourself, not because you couldn't pay, but because

people who went to university wanted to go there and were going to make the most of

it. It wasn't a God-given right to go to university at the expense of your parents or of

the State, and that was the sort of background. So I was in fact the first member of my

Alan Carr

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family to go to university. I'm sure my father learned a great deal from all this and I

learned a great deal from the experience that, my children have too, rather late then.

I wasn't quite clear whether you had felt homesick or not when you first went as a

boarder.

Yes, but not in the sense that I was constantly asking to be taken away; I wasn't

unhappy, but there were times, you know, twinges of homesickness. Generally there

was much more to do in the country, I found, than in town, and I had a very good

time. Plenty of things to do, it was very stimulating, long bike rides which I wouldn't

have been allowed to do in London, I could do in Norfolk, and generally very well

entertained. I think it was a good education, and very largely left to get on with it.

And, fill your weekends.

And what subjects were you finding yourself drawn to at that stage?

When I went at 9 or 10 it was very all-round as you would expect, and I could cope, I

was ahead of most of the people at the school. I came out all right in the first years

and stayed pretty well all right. I turned away very quickly from physics and

chemistry; I was quite interested in biology; and I became interested in religious

knowledge simply because of the theology side of it rather than any particular creed.

And English and history. And stayed that way I'm afraid, very narrow.

And was that a method[??] of indigenous interest if you like, or was it encouraged by

particular teachers do you think?

I got on well with the history and English teachers, and to some extent French and

those sort of subjects. I never could get on with Latin, although the senior Latin

master turned out to be somebody I greatly respected, my housemaster in the senior

school, Woodlands, and he had been Ken, my brother's, housemaster too. But, and

I've never been very fond of classical studies in that sense. I enjoy mythology and I've

learnt since how it's good to read mythology with your grandchildren. But, I didn't...I

think it was more a dislike for the subjects rather than the masters, not always,

Alan Carr

C736/02/02 F5087A

sometimes I disliked the masters too, but more than anything maths was a terrible

weakness for me, and I didn't like the subject or the masters. And, I don't have a

mathematical turn of mind, and I do remember somebody saying, writing on a report

or a critique or something on a maths paper that I had done that it as an insult to him

that I had produced such a bad paper, which isn't perhaps the best way to get the most

out of your pupils, but...

Has that sort of gone through life with you, that feeling about maths?

Yes. I admire somebody who can cope with maths and be humane, and we have many

mathematicians in a firm like this; we don't only take Law graduates, many

mathematicians do very well here, so do bio-physicists and bio-chemists and all kinds

of people with many different kinds of language abilities, and I of course, I mentioned

I think before that I wasn't recruited with a Law degree, and I think that is, can be, you

know, a wonderful mix. But I think in my experience it's rather rare, and I think it's

particularly rare to combine those sort of talents with language skills and even more,

personal skills, the sort of things that you perhaps develop in reading History.

I mean do you have a view on why it is that some people sort of gravitate towards

certain interests and subjects, as you did, as opposed to others? You know, do you

think there's a sort of, a psychology behind why people select history or maths in

different ways?

At the time I knew little of maths, the reason for studying maths, and perhaps am not

much more understanding of it now, but certainly a bit. Maths I could cope with[ph]

was the three Rs, which everybody is now being taught again as if it was something

very new, I could cope with that sort of thing, but real sort of maths and what it's

about was never got across to me in the sense that it was a beautiful subject, as music

or philosophy or something like that, and that never came through. And I greatly

doubt whether it would ever come through at a place like Gresham's then, maybe now.

I think it could come through at a place like Winchester, and I think I mentioned my

older son went there, but not to do maths as it turned out, he was a historian too.

Alan Carr

C736/02/02 F5087A

I suppose the question I'm asking is whether there's a sort of in-built tendency from,

maybe from very early stages, from parental influence perhaps, to being more

interested in the humanities rather than the sciences.

Yes, the answer to that I think, in my case is, yes, and it may be much more

widespread than in my case. Maths for me was to some degree the ability of an

illiterate grandmother to run a haberdashery shop at threepence-three farthing for nine

inches or whatever. That's putting it very crudely, but I didn't see much beyond that,

and certainly we had logarithms then, we had all kinds of things that people perhaps

don't worry too much about now. We didn't have calculators. And so, the hard work

of that sort of thing you had to do, and I think it's probably a good thing, I'm not sorry

that I can do my ordinary arithmetic, but I didn't enjoy algebra, geometry and all the

rest of it, and didn't get beyond that, I never did any advanced maths at all, I just got

my sufficient O'levels for my maths for the GCE.

Tell me a bit about the way that the school was structured in terms of houses and...

There were two junior houses, each in what looked very much like... Well one, the

smaller one which I was not in, was in a little pleasant country cottage, it was called

Crossways, and at the other side of the crossroads, and there were other houses

beginning to appear but not, without a sort of suburban look, was Kenwin[ph], which

was where I was, and it was very much a Norfolk solid house, the flint dash, not in the

1950s sense but a much older sort of look about it, was where the housemaster lived,

and a very solid house. And a great big, or so it then seemed, a great big playground,

not a concrete playground but a great big field, for everybody to play in. And this was

nothing to do with a rugby field or the actual sports field, it was a big place to live.

And then there was, I was speaking of Kenwin[ph] alone now, they had a very nice

lawn garden with tennis which you could play on when you were a bit older, the

housemasters' court, and you had an orchard. I remember it as a very nice place. It

didn't take my breath away, because we were...we had a nice garden too in Newbury,

but I hadn't had people of that sort of age to play with in great numbers, and, it was

good.

Alan Carr

C736/02/02 F5087A

Dormitories?

Yes. There were four dormitories, two quite big ones and two much smaller, and they

sort of converged up and down stairs where a matron had a surgery, and I think the

chief matron that I remember at the time I was there was called Miss Miller, and one

of the people that with no doubt a copywriter's tongue[??] put up a nice sign, `Miss

Miller's medicines maketh man'. And I came and had my Radio[ph] malt every

evening, as everybody else did.

What would be a typical school day, when would it begin?

Let's take it at the start of the year, because there was this endlessly long Michaelmas

term, although not as long as it is now, and, we would get up very early, about a

quarter to 7, seemed very early then. And, cold shower.

Always cold?

Always cold. It wasn't very prolonged because you just ran through it. And breakfast,

porridge and all those sort of solid things. The central heating was very crude, great

big pipes. And, Norfolk is very cold, Noël Coward said very flat Norfolk but it's

actually very cold Norfolk, and that particular part of the coast, as I'm telling

everybody now, what are you worried about, because when you're up in Norfolk and

the wind's blowing from the east, often the north-east, there's nothing between you and

Siberia, and it is very very cold, and we saw a lot of that and I was very impressed

later on with tales, true tales, of the sea beating down on that part of the coast. I

had[??] been millions of miles away from that sort of feel before seeing that two[??]

years later. But the day was a cold shower, breakfast, catching up with homework and

things of that sort, prep, and walking down to school, which was actually very

pleasant, unless it was very very wet, about...I'm judging the distance, which I know,

between, in the other direction into the town, Holt, and into the school, so it must have

been about half a mile, and very pleasant. We went to classes, we moved from class

to class, the teachers didn't come to us, and that was somewhat surprising in a way. In

the early years I suppose the same master took us for quite a lot of things, but not for

Alan Carr

C736/02/02 F5087A

everything, and when he didn't take us, we moved to another class. They had very

good science facilities so it made sense obviously to go to laboratories, but it wasn't

only for that, you went to your French master's class, you went to your history master's

class. And that actually necessitated an enormous change-around every 40, 45

minutes, and this really very large sort of area of school buildings, without an

enormous number of pupils, there was this constant change to and fro. And so this

was going on through the morning, and particularly at the break, and then again at

lunchtime. There were six periods in the morning, but there might be a break for one

thing or another. Is that right? Let me get that right. There may have been five. And

then there was lunch, and we often had, we always had a sport of some sort in the

afternoon, so that you went back to two more lessons two days a week I think it was,

and it was often dark when you went back. The Cromer Road between Holt and

Cromer 9 miles away, runs right through the school, or rather the school is really built

across it, but there was no underpass or bridge, and one of the really very beautiful

buildings, I mean it's a magnificent building called the Library Building, I can see now

is a very Thirties structure, had a very beautiful library as its core, and classrooms

above and below all round it, and they had history, English, French, those sort of

subjects were there, but you had to walk across the Cromer Road if you had a lesson.

And, not when I was there, but not very long after I had gone either, a pupil was

killed, run over, and it was quite amazing really that that hadn't happened before.

Now I believe they have a bridge, and, I suppose there was less traffic on the roads

then. It was such an obvious possibility that... So, I only mention it now because we

were walking around class to class rather than waiting for somebody to turn up and

teach us.

Then what time would school finish in the afternoon?

In the afternoon in the winter, if you had hockey or football or whatever it is in the

afternoon, you would go back I suppose at about 10 to 4 till 10 to 6, something of that

kind. It was a very very cold place, and so you had something hot to drink before you

went into school and then again when you came back. I seem to remember 10 to 6

was the time when you went back for your supper, and then we...I'm thinking a little

bit more now of the senior school, I was three years or whatever it is, four years, in the

Alan Carr

C736/02/02 F5087A

junior school, but the pattern of life wasn't very different, it was probably a longer day

as I have described it, but the same pattern in the junior school. You sat in your

dining-room at your, wooden tables in the dining-room to do your homework,

superintended by an older boy. The younger people had one and then two lots of

homework; they went up to bed, and then the older pupils, particularly in the senior

school, had a third prep, and staying up for third prep was then, you know, quite a

mark of distinction. You had already had a cocoa or whatever it is between the

second and third prep, and when you had really reached the ultimate, you know, you

were given something more, another round of cocoa or whatever it is with your

housemaster before going up altogether, but by that time, you know, you were quite a

senior sort of person.

So did you...you studied within your house, or was there an element of selection

within subjects?

You did your prep, your homework, in your house, and you...but you studied as a

school, so the junior boys went up to school. The teacher, Mr Laurence Taylor, Laurie

Torry, had a classroom, and he taught us - I'm talking of the early years now, year

actually in my case - in his classroom for whatever he taught. But it was a school

classroom in a row of school, in one of the school buildings. The main school

building had a great hall in it, and classrooms on a number of floors which, this was

much higher, and I suppose it was a red-brick sort of 19th century sort of Gothic style

building, very imposing, I had no problem with it. There was no darkness anywhere

in the sense that, you weren't overlooked by a lot of other buildings, there was no

streets, there was the Cromer Road, which turned out to be more dangerous than we

had thought but it looked out onto wide playing fields, and on the other side towards

the road there were many gardens, rose gardens, between that, the Cromer Road, more

rose gardens and the Library. It was all very spacious. And an equivalent building

was one of the senior houses which I didn't go to, Housens[ph], and they lived closer

to the school than the junior school and a little bit closer to the school than

Woodlands, which is the one I lived in as a senior boy, later on, older boy.

Alan Carr

C736/02/02 F5087A

I suppose what I was asking was whether you would be selected by ability or whether

there were...I mean were there more than one class for a subject in a year, or would

you just study within a year right through the school?

Well, some...yes you were selected by ability in this sense that, for certain subjects

there were sets, and they, whichever set you were in was in theory to do with your

ability, and no doubt in practice in many ways maths, French, Latin I think particularly

went by set, and, I don't think that history and English went by set, you were in a class

and you...it wasn't one class each year, you could go up 5A, 5B or whatever it was,

something of that kind, where you did the non-setted subjects. So I think there

was...you were selected by ability. There was a ceremony where you went into school

hall, the whole school, not just the junior school, went in four times a year, where

somebody solemnly read out your quarters order.

So you would be given a position if you like within...?

Yes.

According to house?

Yes. Not according to house, according to where you were, what your marks were in

a particular.....

End of F5087 Side A

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A


Until I came up against mathematicians and scientists at an older age I was able then

much more to hold my own. And I don't think quite honestly people took these things

terribly seriously, it was just a bore having to stand through it all. But it must have

meant that you were supposed to be getting on, and I'm sure I wrote letters back

saying I'm top equal in this, and had a good round this term, and certainly in that sense

I was earning my way.

How much competition was there between the boys for position in that sense?

I don't think the boys felt it very much; I think that it wasn't a problem that, `Oh he's

got the prize and I haven't,' or `I can't seem to shake this chap...' Much more in sports

of course. And that was quite new to me.

How did you do in sports?

Not very well. I quite enjoyed certain things, but I had not had a terrific sporting

career beforehand, and I got into, I did enjoy rugby, and I learnt hockey and enjoyed

hockey quite a lot. They didn't play soccer, I mean you could play...you could take a

soccer ball and play around but it wasn't one of the games that was done at the school.

Cricket I was hopeless at, and in fact got worse, not better, and I could never bowl

accurately, and I had to be, even in the nets I had to be two or three away from

anybody. Just a hopeless performance.

Have you always worn spectacles?

No. That may have been something to do with it, you know, why not, yes. I didn't

wear spectacles till I was married, about 27.

And you weren't aware of any...?

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

No, I wasn't. I think it was just that, I was bored with cricket, and, I didn't have a

natural interest in it at all. Rounders or something of that kind maybe, but, that wasn't

quite what was required. But there were a lot of other things to be doing apart from

team games. There were plenty of team games, a lot of athletics, corps, CCF, and

endless opportunities as it seemed for runs, five-mile runs, this sort of thing, which is

something I hated but it got it over quickly. And field days, Norfolk farmers mud

seemed endless, where you had to spend the night, you know, finding your way

around with a torch and that sort of thing.

Was that with the corps?

Mm.

Did everybody join that?

Yes. I don't think they had conscientious objectors.

So what would you do in the corps, apart from hare about the countryside with

compasses and things?

You were supposed to be taught how to use a rifle and some degree of military

presentability, and we used certainly to parade up and down drilling. That was very

tedious. And of course you had, having this sort of prickly Dad's Army kind of

uniform gave then an opportunity for you to present yourself in corps clothes with

shiny brass badges and spats and all that sort of thing. So that it was something really,

you know, make sure you didn't get terribly on the wrong side. Collecting fir cones

was another punishment that didn't seem to have much point to it.

How did you feel about joining, I mean being part of something that was sort of rather

militaristic if you like, in view of, I suppose partly your upbringing, what you were

saying last time, and also the war?

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

I didn't rebel against it at all because it was militaristic. I thought it was an

inconvenience. But I had entered into the sort of, vicariously, the Red Army entering

Berlin, and indeed the Hagganah in Palestine, Israel as it became, and I had never

been a pacifist, and that side of it, because it was militaristic, didn't trouble me at all,

and if you like, because I was getting orders and drill from a British sergeant-major

didn't disturb me for that reason particularly. It was just a nuisance, and I got through

that side of things. But I've never been a pacifist, and I don't think I would be

militaristic particularly either. I think there are difficulties about pacifism.

What's your view about the corps and that sort of training for younger people

generally, in the light of your experiences?

I thought it was a tremendous waste of time, and I don't think it made people

militaristic particularly, I don't think it gave undue opportunities for bullying

particularly, or anything else. But remember that National Service, national military

service was still in force, and I think that, a complete waste of time, and this was like

an early preparation for it in a way.

Did you do National Service?

No I did not. It actually came to an end just as I was going up to Cambridge. But

both my older brothers did, and one was actually, my older brother David, was in the

war, or at any rate in the Army for a time, and Ken, who was at Gresham's of course,

was in the Air Force. A complete waste of time, terribly debilitating in every way,

and it wasn't because of him, his is a very different temperament I think from mine,

but, baby-sitting for officers' wives that sort of thing, and, just passing time. I think

people who propose a sort of short sharp and military approach to youth problems

don't know necessarily what they're taking on. But certainly I think, it didn't lead to

very much I think either good or bad at Gresham's.

You mention punishment. What was the sort of discipline regime like at Gresham's,

from your point of view?

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

I don't remember any flogging by boys, and in fact the only sort of corporal

punishment was dished out by the headmaster if at all. Otherwise punishments

weren't very well conceived I don't think. You had to collect things that were tiresome

to collect, fir cones, or if you were untidy, report in shiny clothes. If you were

forgetful, those sort of punishments. I suppose in a way that if you responded in the

sense that you realised this was a waste of time and a nuisance, it did make you less

forgetful and untidy. I'm obsessive about both now, so that I, in that sense I suppose,

if I had been inclined to be untidy all my life I'm certainly not now.

Were you punished yourself?

For those things? Yes, yes that's why I said, corps and the ability to be asked to turn

up in corps clothes, or it would have been Rugby clothes.

So these were things that happened to you?

Oh yes. So I...I didn't look forward to excelling as, you know, as a young officer, and

I didn't think I was learning much in the way of sort of military skills. I think it is

quite useful to be able to try to find your way around the countryside in the dark,

perhaps the odd field day, but, it was part of a pattern of life, and I hadn't come from a

school with a different approach to things, and I stayed at Gresham's all the time,

which perhaps wasn't a very good idea because I stayed there in the prep school, junior

school, right through to when I left school, so I had never been to another school from

9 to 17.

Apart from Newbury of course.

Apart from Newbury, yes, yes, yes.

What were the differences, can you remember now how you felt about the key

differences between the two schools?

Alan Carr

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I don't think I've really weighed them up, one against the other, but, it was definitely a

much more sheltered life at Newbury, but...and one was a boarding school and one

was not, which is the vital difference. So that, one seemed a not unnatural extension

of the other; I had understood that I would be going away, you know, to Gresham's

and very quickly got the reality of that. It wasn't...it was actually quite exciting in a

positive way. And I didn't know enough, and Newbury wasn't London, I didn't have a

great comparison with what, say, Westminster or St. Paul's or Winchester might have

been, to take two big London schools, or a great, a really great school.

What impact do you think, I mean having all three of you away from home, what

impact did that have on your parents, and particularly your mother I guess?

My older brother was back home by that time, because he's ten years older than I, so

in that sense I think she didn't miss out so much. I think my mother, and my father,

were...it was a huge change in the pattern of their lives, but then again in Newbury

they had gone up to London every day, so it wasn't quite the normal sort of life,

although I suppose if they had gone to a factory or a shop from home they would not

have seen us all day anyway, but to go and get a train journey fifty miles to London

each day and come back in the wartime where the trains ran pretty well, was quite a

wrench. So when we went to school, yes they wouldn't see us each evening, that's

quite so, and I used to get very nice letters, and I used to write occasionally, and, I do

remember, and of course this is the great negative/positive advantage of boarding

school, that when you come home for the holidays it really means something. Not I

think because we were spoilt, because we were not, we had a good home life, but you

appreciate so very much more, and that is, it's a great bonus.

Did she miss you, do you think?

Yes, yes I do think. Not pining in the sense that some mothers do, I don't think

pining, but I think she did miss us, and I certainly remember that she came up to

school, and it was quite a journey for a lady who never drove in her life, and we didn't

have a car at the outset anyway, but she made an effort to come up for plays and Prize

Days and that sort of thing. My father occasionally, not because he wasn't entering

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into what we did, but it was a tremendous outing and a lot of time off. But, he did

come from time to time as well. And I remember, and I can see now, what a

tremendous thing it was in this great field that we had to play in, in the junior school

at Kenwin[ph] we had the opportunity to build sort of subterranean houses, a sort of

troglodyte kind of life, and I well remember, it was lined with sacking, Norfolk

farmers could provide a lot of things for the skills of others to implement, and we had

an incredible time [INAUDIBLE] made children[??] go through all this. And my

mother I can remember crawling down these quite small passages in her nylons, and

realise this is quite a valued product being risked, and in some cases spoilt.

And would all the mothers do that sort of thing?

Yes, I suppose they would, but being much less prepared for it, and not having come

120 miles from London for it. So she did enter into a lot of things. And we have

some very nice photographs of Sheringham, that very brisk north Norfolk coast, nice,

nice family snaps on the beaches and things like that. And I do recall both of them,

my father and my mother, coming up and staying in the Burlington Grand and that

kind of place, and me bicycling across five miles for breakfast on a Sunday morning

when they came. That kind of thing very vivid, because it was so very different from

anything we had ever had, and quite different I think from any London schoolboy's

experience too.

Do you remember the sort of changing relationship with your parents that was

beginning at this stage?

This stage being when I started at Gresham's?

Yes, and how, what impact Gresham's had on you in terms of how it affected your

relationship with your parents just being distant from them and so on.

[PAUSE FOR THOUGHT]

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

Because you were saying that your mother missed you, and that she would...they

would come up and see you.

Yes, I'm sure that's so, and to that extent I responded to that, and to my father too. I

think I've mentioned that both my parents were not outspoken about their feelings, we

didn't have shouting matches between parents and us. I think both of them in fact had

potentially very violent tempers, and I recall my mother saying that she knew when

she got married that that was potentially very explosive between them, and somebody

had to curb their impatience, and she did. So that was the background, and, I don't

think that should give the impression though that everybody was living on a stack of

dynamite at all, I think we had a very cordial, happy family, and in a sense perhaps

made more so from the children's point of view when they came back home and had a

tremendous contrast in our lives. I didn't have any resentment, and I still don't feel

any resentment, that I was taken to boarding school. I never felt dumped, I never felt

that my mother or father had been put under a terrible pressure in parting with me

every time, and I don't think that there was a pining or a wish that I didn't have to go

back to school, never expressed, and I don't think actually felt in that way at all. But,

yes I was the last child, and I was quite a good companion to my parents when I was

in London.

And would you go back alone to school, or would you be taken by your parents?

I went back, not with my parents, they wouldn't come on the train with me, and they

never never drove me to Norfolk, so I was taken to Liverpool Street Station and, `Oh,

you can go now'. That must be the most awful thing for a parent as I say, because you

know, the last thing one wanted to be seen was have your parents hanging around the

train when lots of other children were getting on the train. And after that, you know,

after the first five minutes it was over, and we were on the train, and now I can say of

course they were going back home or to whatever, to their shop, and that must have

been very painful. But they didn't, what they didn't have was endless floods of tears,

`No I won't get on the train, I can't go, I'm not going back to school'. I didn't react like

that; I can see that other children might have. I didn't have this terrible torture that my

children suffered, my two boys suffered, being weekly boarders at Belmont up at Mill

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

Hill, where, not just we but my parents then as grandparents every Sunday evening at

teatime there was this wrench. It wasn't a frightful flood of tears every time but it

was, you know, it's getting dark, it's teatime, must be on our way soon, every week.

That I think is not a good idea. It was thought to be a good compromise, but I would

actually much rather have been away for three months, and I didn't have to go through

that. And my parents in that capacity, as grandparents, it was a terrible wrench for

them.

So would you kiss your mother goodbye?

At home. Quite right, yes, good question. No I wouldn't have kissed her goodbye on

the platform.

So you would say goodbye at home and then, what would you do on the platform,

just...?

On the platform, I would be taken in a taxi or my father would take us in the car, and I

would give her a hug before getting onto the platform, but I wouldn't be waiting for

the train to go out. Perhaps when I was a little older I might have, before getting up

on the train, but there was very little hanging around, not that there was a great deal of

time anyway. But I wouldn't have been hugging my mother on the platform.

And your father, how would you...?

I didn't hug my father, not because he was my father, I didn't...

Shake hands or...?

Yes, I suppose that's right, yes. I can't actually remember. Certainly I remember

getting off the train, the converse process, arriving; my father always met me and I do

remember running down the platform and a great big hug, yes, certainly, and a great

big hug from my mother when I came home. But going out, I don't remember, and

perhaps that's one of the things that tend to get blunted, that, and I don't mean the

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C736/02/03 F5088A

memory, I mean the actual slowness to acknowledge that this is a bitter moment. And

for a time it was, I'm not saying that you didn't feel anything at all, and the last thing I

wanted to do was to be brought to the station early, and would be hanging around.

One wanted it over and done with.

What would you do in the summers?

To pick up the thread, there was a Speech Day in the school, a kind of half-term, and

it was not always that my parents could come up in the middle of the term, but most

times they did, and it was a nice time to be in Norfolk then generally, but they didn't

come up for VJ Day, so I stayed behind with the housemaster, Major Day, not Mr

Day, and his family, they were perfectly OK and took me, you know, we went out to

Blakeney Point which was a lovely place to be, and you know, all that was fine, I

didn't feel too badly about it. There was only one other boy I think in that particular

predicament. At the end of the summer term, which I think is what you are really

getting at, we came down from school and went away, and we had good holidays, and

they were quite long holidays, they seemed endlessly long.

All five of you?

Yes, I ought to get this in some, in a better ordering, because David being ten years

older, he got married very young, in 1949, so he wasn't around for very long, really, I

only went to school in '45, the first summer, about the third summer or so after I left, I

think it was the same year as my Bar Mitzvah, so that I don't remember David coming

on a lot of holidays, he was quite old enough, and did, he spoke some French, he went

off to Liège and places like that. So he was old enough to take his own holidays most

times in the summer. But I do remember Ken coming on holiday with us, and I had a

cousin, June, who I may have mentioned, who was nine months older than I, we spent

a lot of time together at Newbury, she also went to a boarding school, a girls' boarding

school, Lillesden, and did riding and all those sort of things. A very outgoing type,

enjoyed it very much. And her father and my mother and brother and sister, her father

also called Harry. So that, here was a girl going to a boarding school in the same sort

of circumstances, age, as mine, it didn't seem an unnatural thing; I didn't seem to be

Alan Carr

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deprived, she was very much a playmate for me when I was back from school. And

that's the way we saw it. My father had by this time got a car, a very nice car, and I

remember a very beautiful Armstrong Siddeley with wonderful curving wings, and he

driving us on one of our holidays, because you spoke of the summer, down to Saint

Jean de Luz and into Spain. And that was a tremendous adventure, it was very

exciting. And June's older sister, Helen, nine years older than June, came too, so that

we were looked after to some degree I suppose, and my mother and father really

enjoyed it. And, my father spoke French; part of his family lived in France and were

Resistance heroes and that sort of thing, and he always could speak French, I mean it

was something that was not surprising somehow for him to speak French, and, it was

those sort of occasions that I really greatly admired my father. I don't want you to feel

that I wasn't, I had some resentment or difficulty in admiring him at other times, but

for an almost self-educated man to train himself to write, I don't mean literally to write

but to put together coherent sentences, to research and to be quite adequate in French

as well as English and Yiddish and Hebrew, was good going. And later on when I

married an Israeli girl, he could turn his Ashkenazi grandfather's Hebrew into sort of

Ivrit. So he was a very good man, I liked him.

Where else did you go on holiday, apart from France?

France, we went to France quite a lot, but quite remoter parts of France, Annecy we

drove to one year I remember, the only time I ever saw Churchill alive. And, the

south of France, Côtes d'Azur, Provence. And we always went down one way and

came back a different route. I went to Paris quite a lot, my father knew Paris very

well from before the war, and greatly enjoyed my visits with them then. We also

went, I'm talking about the sort of mid-Fifties now, so it was about the time, early

Fifties actually, '52, '53, just before I went up to Cambridge, I went with my parents to

Italy, and we went several times to Venice; we went to Florence and Rome, the usual

major cities. I do feel, not that it was consciously done or I was saying, `I must be

taken to so-and-so,' no child could, but I do think I had a much better background of

Renaissance and actually seeing Italian museums and castles and food than most

children, even now. Of course I travelled with my parents, it was all very pleasant,

Alan Carr

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but I was only then after all 16, 17. And when I went to Cambridge I did most of my

travelling with friends from King's.

Talking about friends, I wanted to ask you about your sort of friendship network at

Gresham's, what sort of friends did you have, where were they drawn from, and...

I had few friends that have lasted on, because of the nature of the school and where

they came from, but there are two or three that I did stay close to for a long time, but

few. One who came perhaps two or three terms after I, up to Crossways rather than to

Kenwin[ph], the other junior house, was called Simon Deane[ph], and he was the

child of Anglo-Indian parents in the sense that they had been out in the Raj in India

and then came back to manage a Barnardo's home. And that seemed to me fantastic

and wonderful, and it was a whole side of life I knew nothing of, a very correct

English family. And I met his mother once, his father not at all, but he was around.

And he had an older brother, as I had an older brother, at school, at this school, and so

for a time there was a sort of parallel. Tom Deane[ph] I hardly met, he didn't stay very

long, so there was Tom and Ken at Woodlands and Simon and Alan in... And that

worked very well, he's a little older than me, he was about the same age as my cousin

June. And that worked very well, and he had a wonderful aunt in Ipswich who used to

come and see you, and that was very nice, because his parents wouldn't be coming up

from a Barnardo's home in wherever it was to visit him, or, any more than my parents,

so it was, this is how things worked out, and it seemed good. And she sent parcels,

my mother sent parcels, all that sort of thing, and we survived on parcels. And then,

in the senior school people, more cultivated put it that way, not more cultivated than

Simon but more cultivated than most, Ian Lowe[ph] and one or two others who were

more interested in the sort of subjects that I was interested in, particularly on their side

in art. Simon was interested in those things but had always intended and made up his

mind he was going to be a doctor, and so he was, but I saw him right through his

career, he was at Clare, I was at King's, and I've always been close in that sense. Then

he became a doctor in Woolpit, which is a place near Bury St. Edmunds, in a very,

quite remote part of Suffolk, and he's married with children, but I've lost touch. I've

seen him there a couple of times, I get a Christmas card, but it's no more than that

now, which is a pity. So that was one, Ian Lowe[ph] was another, and there were

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

others who, the older brother of the wine man, Johnson, was in my house also, and, it

was few, but people I was close to rather than a lot of people around the place. There

were a lot of people doing shooting and things of that sort which was very exciting,

and Norfolk farmers' sons are very good at it, and... [LAUGHS] You know, pick up

whatever you need to pick up. And we had a lot of staff then who could take you out

in some wonderful vehicle and you could shoot pheasants and things like that, or

whatever it was, or rabbits, whatever. Another advantage of a country school. So

there was that kind of thing, but it didn't go much further than that. And then I think

most friends came from working with a particular, in a particular subject. I met John

Tusa chiefly through that sort of thing in the end, as he was in another house, we both

did acting, we both did history, and I think that our, at a later stage our careers came

quite close together for a time.

And what about masters, any key teachers that you recall that were influential?

Yes, yes. Kelly[ph], an old Australian actually, he came from Australia. He was quite

an elderly man, he was housemaster of another house but he was the senior history

master. I think he was a marvellous man, really without exception the best teacher

I've ever had.

And was your interest in history, it came from him?

Yes, I think so. Not that it came from him but I think he was...he was a very fine man.

End of F5087 Side B

Alan Carr

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History teachers, yes, a particular master. But I ought to take it in sequence. I had

two very good history teachers at the school, at different stages. One was called

Charles Lloyd, and that was at the earlier part of my history career. He was more the

painstaking type of teacher, but very responsive, very good, and I studied with this

man and later on at sort of A'levels, S'levels, with Kelly[ph]. John Tusa and I both

studied with both these masters. Kelly[ph] I remember particularly because he was so

completely unassuming. He didn't say, `You ought to do this, you've got to do the

other.' He was very sympathetic, he understood the kind of things that you could

produce. He was always ahead of you in the sense that...but not in a...it didn't appear

so. I'm not expressing this very well, but he never wrote long criticisms of your work,

it might have been very good if he had, but he was always ahead, and I can see now

that he got a lot out of me, and it was in fact he who suggested that I should certainly

try for a scholarship at Cambridge, and remember nobody has been to university; I had

had if you like a distinguished career at school because I came top quite a lot, but John

Tusa and I were both told, yes you should certainly try, and what he said went. So,

yes there were two good groups, and this is how my whole university career was

organised by this man, as it seemed to me, in a few moments, but terribly

unassumingly, it was only his suggestion, but he knew it would carry enormous

weight. He said there are two good groups, Trinity, John, John Tusa, and King's. And

that was the real adventure, to go up in December when I was 17 and take my

scholarship exam and be in digs in Silver Street for the very first time in my life. And

I happened to have found recently the bills for my dinners in hall for the five days I

was up at Cambridge to take this exam. And it was then that I realised what I owed

him. And even more, when I went to Cambridge, I got my minor scholarship, and it

was upgraded immediately the next, in the first year. John got his major scholarship

right away. And when I was there, yes I should have gone there, and I did go there,

and I really enjoyed it very much, but Kelly[ph] had taught me better.

What was his interest as a historian?

Alan Carr

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I don't think he did a lot of research, and it may seem very routine, but he was very

very understanding of all the things that you had to keep on doing again and again in

those days, English constitutional history, and I would never be taught Tudor and

Stuart history by anybody else. And the sort of way he had of talking, he pulled out

these bland brown and tawny, these constitutional documents that were like a lion[??],

he used to say, and you could sort of hear him back in the Australian sort of, which is

where he finally retired to. He was an old man, and that's not just the fancy of a sort

of young schoolboy, he was quite elderly, and his wife was younger. As I say they

lived in another house, not even the house...not the house that John lived in, not the

house that I was in, but he was really an old man to be a housemaster, but he was a

very humane man, very, and he was teaching the right subject, and he must have been

teaching it for quite a long time. John I'm afraid would know better than I, and I wish

I had spoken to him more recently about this, would have known much more of the

academic background of Kelly[ph]. But, he was a very very shrewd man, not in the

sense of acumen, he had a lot of wisdom, and often you didn't know that at the time. I

see that now very clearly, he was a wonderful teacher. And I was well taught at

Cambridge, but I could compare like for like in many ways, subject for subject, almost

essay for essay in a way at times, and I thought he was, you know, I was never taught

so well. You had a different environment of course at Cambridge, but I had a great

respect for him.

Was your father happy about you deciding to do History, was that a course that he was

happy with?

I think he was very happy that I should do that. And so, the irony of course was that I

went to a school which was thought to be a science school suited to my brother, and

turned out to be a history school suited to me.

Interesting isn't it.

Yes. That's why I think it's one of the reasons, one of the chief reasons I think, it's

quite impossible to plan.

Alan Carr

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Before we talk about Cambridge, which I want to talk about now really, I just wanted

to ask you one question. You had sort of touched on the connections between the

school at the local community. How else would the school, or you as a pupil, be

involved with the local community in Norfolk?

Up to now when we've been talking about my activities at school, yes they have partly

touched on the local community, but it's been more the walks, putting it perhaps in a

Proustian way, of being into the school. If you walked a quarter of a mile the other

way, a little more than that actually, you came to the village, Holt, and you used to go

there, you were given time to go down there and you could buy your ice-creams and

sweets and all the rest of it, and you could go for bike rides, and you could...I drove

and got a speed-wobble down Letheringsett Hill and had concussion, go to the

sanatorium, that sort of thing. So there was that side of the community, which I

actually was very excited about, and I remember going into a very very modern

sanatorium as a consequence, and listening to `Dick Barton' to my heart's delight at a

quarter to 7 every evening. And, no television of course, hadn't been invented really

properly. And, otherwise, apart from shopkeepers and local masters, and there were

some, or masters, couldn't possibly have been local, called Bagnall-Oakley, Dick

Bagnall-Oakley was the geography master who would take you out in his fast car

shooting or whatever. So one drove across Norfolk farms. There were some very

eccentric wealthy ladies who lived in very beautiful houses, Holkham wasn't all that

far away, that had beautiful furniture, so that one sometimes met local people in that

way, but not local in the sense of fishermen or farming people. Later on in the school,

I say 14 onwards, then there's a little bit more understanding, maybe a little bit less

than that, one went to Weybourne and Cley and these sea, the Norfolk coast, and then

I did get some real feel for the community. I can't remember which year it was now,

'47, '48, when there was the tremendous onset of the sea, and quite big boats were

swept well inland, and that was very impressive, I mean something, not just that it was

exciting in that sense, but I never forgot that, and when many many years later there

was this terrible flood down in Devon I could remember that that had happened. It

was like the dyke bursting in Holland, and it had a resonance about it all which

impressed me very much. And so when I was taken to see `Peter Grimes', that was

Benjamin Britten's opera, from school if you like, I could understand why he actually

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

came to feel for Crabbe and the poem and all the rest of it very much. So I suppose

that is to some extent responding to the community; I can't say that I got to know the

community very well, I wasn't...my summer holidays weren't spent with a friend on a

Norfolk farm, I was only too glad to get back to London or be taken to the Continent.

As a senior boy would you have been allowed out to socialise locally?

Yes. I can't remember going to visit a friend of my school time who wasn't in the

school, so maybe I was slow, or, I think it was unlikely. However remote Norfolk was

it didn't encourage you to go and do work on the farm and make your own friends

there; I don't think it discouraged it but I certainly don't remember being encouraged

to do that. It may well have changed, I think a lot of attitudes have changed. But I'm

quite sure we weren't encouraged to, and I can understand in many ways why. It was a

very dispersed school, Gresham's, there weren't railings or anything of the sort in that

sense apart from decorative ones, and I can imagine that it would be quite difficult to,

you know, get...you know, check on where people were. But in fact we were given an

immense amount of freedom. There's no way my mother or father would have let me

go on bike rides in London.

And you met girls by the time you had left Gresham's, had you had contact with the

opposite sex at all?

No, no. I mean, not in any...I didn't dance. I met, I had cousins, and there was a girls'

school, West Runton, that came in to the school dance or to house dances. Hopeless.

[LAUGHS]

Do you remember what you thought about the opposite sex at that age?

I didn't think a great deal about them. I hated being made to dance, and I think that all

that side of things was badly handled. I might not have been very responsive even if it

had been much better handled. My housemaster, I haven't spoken about him, which is

perhaps a shame because he was a very big formative feature of my whole school

career, Max Parsons was a bachelor, but he was getting on in age by this time, I mean,

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C736/02/03 F5088A

must be coming...he was moving towards the end of his career, and he lived in

Woodlands and his house, which was a very beautiful house, he had his sister, a

spinster, who was a dancing instructress, and his mother, who was a Queen Mary type

figure with a toque, and indeed that must have been conscious because she was a

friend of Queen Mary, they had met...her...she was a widow, this old lady, and was a

Methodist I think, father of my housemaster, and they had met at some time in

Birmingham or somewhere I think it was in the Great War. And, yes, they used to

have postcards and Christmas cards exchanged, and we always came back in January,

the spring term, and there was a Christmas card, so... I remember that quite well, and

being taken with my housemaster in the term time in the Christmas holidays to the

theatre, they were very good at that, not as a routine though, as chore, because I and

Simon were both in this house, like Tom and Ken before, were taken out. And then

we had to go to the Waldorf and dance with, you know, this man's sister. And what

would have been a fantastic day was just frightful, because, you know, you felt that,

you couldn't get through your dinner because, you know, get up and dance. And so I

didn't respond and I don't think she was the type, spinster or not, to personally to get

one to respond, and I don't think that set a particular trend but it certainly confirmed it.

There was no sex education then?

Oh no.

[INAUDIBLE] dancing.

[LAUGHS] No there was not. There was biology.

Ah.

Yes, things were quite quite different. There was biology, and, I don't actually, and

perhaps this is the biggest comment, I don't actually remember being in tremendous

ignorance. I don't remember being tremendously excited with the news, you know, it

wasn't, I had been told something, yes that's...I think... So in that sense perhaps it was

a sensible education, it came into place in a natural sort of way perhaps. But...

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

But not from the teachers from the sound of it.

No. No, it was always frogs being dissected, or a page in a zoology book or

something of that kind, which is not the best way I quite agree, I'm sure that's so. But

I think that, I don't think that very many masters or housemasters realised then that

that was actually quite an important part of their jobs, putting it absolutely as a basic

function of a teacher, and I think that was a mistake, and I mentioned before that my

parents weren't quick to come forward on that side of things. So, yes I think that that

was a gap certainly.

What sort of role did the...you mentioned this particular housemaster, what other role

did he play?

Max Parsons?

Mm.

He was a very cultivated man in his way, I admired him very much for that. He wasn't

teaching a subject that in itself as a subject led me to something, but as a cultural

background, he was a Latin teacher and he knew Greek but people didn't do Greek at

Gresham's, he was quite considerable. But it was tempered, as I see now, by the non-

conformist background which was on all sides; not that he was an evangelical non-

conformist, but I think it was limiting, I think it really did limit very very much, and

so by the time I knew him he was already, his sight was not good, and he used to drive

around still, and I remember Simon and I would sit at the back and say, `Why is that

car parked there?' so as to... [LAUGHING] Terribly careless of this person to get out

on the wrong side. [LAUGHING]

Did he teach you any [INAUDIBLE] at any time?

No, no, quite amazing, and neither did he, as far as I am aware. When we left the

school he retired at much the same time, not for that reason but he was due, and he

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

opened a prep school at Idlicote which is near Shipston, Stratford-on-Avon, a

beautiful house he got, and I and Simon and quite a few other boys of our sort of

vintage, Brian Johnson among them, [INAUDIBLE] Russell, but several of them

came and helped him get it going in the sense of painting the walls and all that sort of

thing, and going there in a `Decline and Fall' kind of manner to help with classes.

And Simon, this was a very very, almost a standard thing was to fill in between school

and university with a bit of prep school teaching, on anything in particular. I didn't

have to do that.

The other thing I wanted to ask you about school was the religious side.

Yes.

What was the position of the school on that?

I think it was easy-going, because I was easy-going. I don't think I said, `I don't want

to go to chapel,' it was called chapel, it was a Church of England service, they had a

very nice school chapel, beautifully panelled chapel, very nice. And I used to go to

that, I used to go to house prayers, it wasn't a problem to me at all, never has been.

And, I'm sure I was far too talkative and voluble on those sort of subjects. The

divinity, religious knowledge as it would be called now, it was called divinity at

school, teachers were almost universally, as I thought, probably showed, silly, and

used to be very fussy, and I remember, I used to be, I'm sure it was the case, probably

better informed than most people in the class on those sort of subjects, simply because

I had a broader background and had done some history, and my own family

background. I didn't flaunt that in the sense, `That's why I know better than you,' but,

a lot of them were very very narrow indeed: I'm talking now just of the masters, and I

suppose I got in their way a little bit, but I always turned up for chapel, it was never a

problem, and my parents came down for Speech Day or whatever it was, Prize Day,

you know, they came to the chapel service. This was never a problem at all.

This would be daily chapel?

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

There would be daily chapel, yes, in the school.

This was Anglican?

Yes.

Was there any attempt to accommodate other religions?

No. There weren't that many others; there were some Catholics of course, though not

very many. I think that I was one of three Jews at the maximum. One had something

to offer in that sense. Not that I went round with a star or even a sort of metaphorical

star, but, after the first months, years, perhaps the first couple of years, when people

who I can now see were, because I said before, refugees or, not in the sense they were

homeless or poor, by no means, but had come there for different reasons which were

obscure to me, there were very...it was very very few, and so it wasn't a problem, I

wasn't persecuted as a result. I suppose if we had been a 20 per cent or 5 per cent it

would have been different. It never occurred to me to make that much distinction.

And did other people see you as Jewish in any way?

Not that I'm aware of, it didn't get in my way. One of the things we haven't mentioned

is that the friends that I had came home.

And they were non-Jewish?

Yes, no problem about that. My mother didn't keep a strictly kosher household,

and...yes, that was one of the things I greatly enjoyed, that people should come home.

Simon for example came to the theatre, and enjoyed it, he was very good at acting,

and that was important that he should be. And all that side of things was very good.

Simon, Ian and I ran this art file, which was a very very good thing. And this is where

the sort...this is the kind of activities that went on in the house that perhaps might be

worth touching on if you wish. Boys inclined that way to the art subjects, we devised

the idea of an art file, and it was in effect a great bin, rectangular bin, with lots of card

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

in it, and a lot of postcards from the National Gallery etcetera, and they were stuck up

on these things according to subjects. We three, nobody else interfered. Whatever we

three thought was going to be a good subject for that week, we got up, had a

typewriter, and typed something by way of a note underneath it, and that was it. And

that seems incredible, that attracted a lot of people to come and see it, it was put on

top of the piano, you know, before hymns were played for our house prayers or

whatever it is, and people came in to see that, and that was at the weekend they could

see that, and they might say if they were interested, can they do a bit on Vermeer or

something like that. Now that was wonderful because it was entirely our wish to do it,

and Max Parsons was very - that's the housemaster - was very very good at making

sure that that kind of thing was helped, he was interested himself.

Where would you get the material from?

The housemaster.

He would provide the...?

Very good, very very good at that. A lot, in that kind of school a lot goes on in the

houses, that's really where everything happens. There was a thing called the Eccles

Room, a former, a housemaster, Eccles, of this house, had provided a room and

furnished it with a billiard table and house library and comfortable chairs. My father,

being close in trade[??] was only too delighted to send comfortable chairs with uncut

moquette covers. I remember the phrase, that's when I learnt it. And, this was a

recreation room, and was a really comfortable, lovely place, so it seemed to us. And,

a lot of things went on in that way that were really very good, and I think in many

ways, perhaps in most ways, it is good to let people get on with things. But compared

with some of the facilities that are offered elsewhere, they were thin, and I think it was

actually a very good thing to thicken them out yourself. And in fact, my daughter has

done an art design degree, this Phaidon book, I think it is a Phaidon book of a novel

way of looking at art, available at just under £20, it is a lovely book, it's an excellent

book, and an amazingly cheap price, but, that was what we had invented, and why was

that so new? You know, you could look this, and cross-reference to that, and you

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

changed it every week. There was a great deal in that sort of thing. I ought to touch

on the plays as well, because I think that's actually the most vital part. Each senior

house had a house play. Two did one the Spring term, and two did the Michaelmas

term or the September term, and then there was a school play, usually in the woods

because it was one of the unique features that we had an outdoor theatre, in the

Summer term. So, there was a lot going on, and that was fantastic for a science school

particularly, a lot of opportunities. And a man called Alec Dyson was the

housemaster, was the man who did the plays in our house, and went very well, and

most of the people I've mentioned in Woodlands were in that each year, because there

was a house play and then if you were up to it you were in the school play as well, so a

great deal of your activity was in plays. Even before that I was in, the first thing that I

did do at Gresham's was a play called `Claudius the Bee'. I was not Claudius, I was

Professor Gatesbeer-Bugloss[ph], but the inventiveness which my parents and brother

went into to make the costume, I've only recently shown to my grandson, who is much

more inventive himself now, but, it was very much encouraged. I mean they enjoyed

this, and so did I.

How many productions would you be in during an academic year?

Oh certainly two. Certainly two. A house play and a school play. And so I finished

my career at Gresham's as Shylock, treading a beaten path. But not in a...it hadn't

been done before I think in a Norfolk woods theatre, out of doors, and, I greatly

enjoyed it. They got all the costumes in the right places. This was not I'm afraid the

era which, it would have been better if it had in many ways, and I want to get this

across too, it was not the era of bringing in the girls from the local school, or having a

sixth form girls, at Gresham's; that's changed a great deal now, and there were many

very very amusing incidents round this in-between phase, yes.

And all the female parts would be played by the boys?

Yes, yes. And Simon Deane[ph], whose voice broke quite early, had a part in, as a

female, and I have to say, I'm not old, I'm only 20 [LAUGHING], and that wasn't

thought at all silly, so... I'm sure it was by him and by me and others in the...but it

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

didn't seem, you know, that called for any particular change. Perhaps it was desired

not to make any change. But, the most absurd of those things in some ways was that,

was to do `Antony And Cleopatra', in which I was Enobarbus, but John Tusa was

Antony, and another boy was Cleopatra. That was much more difficult, not because

it's very explicit but simply he had not the imagination to cope, it was quite beyond

him. The English master was a sympathetic sort of teacher, he did the school plays,

and he did Tusa's house and another house there, so he did three plays a year as a

producer, but I suppose two is about the most you could aspire to in a year.

And did you continue this interest in participating in the theatre?

Yes I did, or wished to, when I got to Cambridge, but then it was very clear that you

were either in an acting set or you were not, and many very very famous people, not

least - golly, Jonathan Miller?

Miller, yes.

Was very much our era, went down that road, along with many other people, Peter

Hall and goodness knows who else, at Cambridge. But, I don't think you've seen Tusa

and Carr and others getting into that, or Deane[ph], Simon Deane[ph], getting into

that, because we were very busy, and you either went one way or another. I don't have

regrets about that, but... And, I really do enjoy plays, I mean, and later opera.

Just returning to religion.

Yes.

We were talking about chapel.

Yes.

What I wasn't really getting a sense of is how you retained your Jewishness, because

you mentioned that the Bar Mitzvah was coming earlier on.

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088A

Yes.

When was Bar Mitzvah, and how did you...?

Cope with that.

Mm.

[LAUGHS] Well, looking at it the Gresham's end first, because I don't think I invited

very many of my masters to come to London for my Bar Mitzvah, but from their point

of view I was not asked to be confirmed, so they were sensitive to that degree, and I

went to chapel before my Bar Mitzvah and after, it didn't stand in my way at all. So

that, my Bar Mitzvah would have been at about September 1949; my brother had got

married, my older brother had got married in June, and I didn't know Hebrew. So, I

had to be taught at any rate to read Hebrew, the predicament of any boy at that stage. I

didn't go home you see from school to be taught, to be given a thorough Hebrew

education by my father, who could have given that perfectly well, much better than

was available generally. Ken I'm afraid did have to learn, because there wasn't

anybody to each him, and my father used to stand over him with a stick, or a slipper I

think, in the holidays at Newbury, because he went, you remember, down to Cornwall

with the same school, to get him through his Bar Mitzvah; it was unthinkable that you

shouldn't be Bar Mitzvah. And so, yes, I didn't have some grizzly memory that I've

got to get through my Bar Mitzvah. My father didn't teach me that. We did have

somebody I think come for a time to Norfolk, but most of it was done at school, and I

could read adequately. I'm afraid if you ask me.....

End of F5088 Side A

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088B


By 1949 we were living, my parents were living in a very big flat in Bayswater, and

we went to St. Petersburgh Place synagogue, an Orthodox synagogue, and Lord

Samuel was, I think I may have mentioned on another occasion, the great figure there,

and Efren Levene[ph] giving him, making him sound more dignified than he really

was, he was like a twinkling man, spoke to me at my Bar Mitzvah, and I stood up and

I was overwhelmed, terrific. And there was a party at home and a party at the Savoy,

and I forgot my speech, I mean I couldn't remember, I was shy, and it was thought

impossible that I could do that, because I was pretty voluble normally. And of course

the speech had been written by my father anyway, and, oh it was a most tremendous

party, I got on the lines again[??] [INAUDIBLE] fairly quickly, but for a child, and

[INAUDIBLE] seemed incredible for a child then to be in a place like the Savoy was

daunting. And, so I got through my Bar Mitzvah, is the right way to put it. I haven't

forgotten it, except that I can’t remember the portion, but, when I went back to school

I didn't sort of, I didn't feel, I'm in the wrong place, and I've never felt that about my

Jewish religion, but I don't feel that I'm not Jewish either. And, it was much easier, if

I can just digress for one second, when it came to my sons, because they could study

more easily at school, because somebody could go up to Belmont, and they had a

much better Hebrew because their mother is Israeli, and they also had pretty good

English. So they had both languages to be very good in. And Dan, my second son,

who is about as remote from these things now as you could imagine in the sense of

being a Jew had the most wonderful Hebrew for the purpose of his portion, and, much

better than the Golders Green gabble as I said, that most people had in English. So,

they didn't feel left out, we didn't feel left out, we could cope at home with our Bar

Mitzvahs and it didn't stand in our way elsewhere.

I would like to ask you, by the way, whether, you mentioned your older brother's

wedding. He had married a Jewish girl, had he?

Yes he had, yes. He had married a lady who is still alive, one of two daughters of a

very very Orthodox Jewish family, not in the sense that they, I don't think they made

pianos, but they were very Orthodox, had no son and they had adopted a son, so that

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C736/02/03 F5088B

was the complement. They lived at Hare[ph] Court by St. John's Wood Station. And,

Daphne was not a beautiful girl, I've got to be very frank about this, she was not a

half-wit or anything but I think it would be accepted that David probably married her

to be away from home, and her parents were pretty well off. I don't think she was

intellectually his equal at all, and I think he felt that. But, I think David's great

problem was that he had these sort of difficulties and resentments about his life and

his lot, and he didn't complete his A'levels, he should have been able to do Latin and

Greek. He didn't go to university, he didn't have a career really; he worked first for his

father and then for his father-in-law, and it didn't work, and I think he was more

frustrated than most children are. But he saw a great deal of his parents. He followed

too readily in his father's footsteps, and his father was a very fine man. So, one of the

lessons I suppose I draw from that is not to see too much of your father and his

footsteps, even if he is a very fine man. For example, he went into my father's

business, not just to keep the till at Christmas but he took over that business, but I

don't think selling underwear in a ladies' shop is ideal unless you are cut out for it,

unless you are a street wise man or there's some other reason for you to have been

there. He then made pianos, but he knew nothing really about pianos, he went there

because it was convenient for him to do that. And he never found, and he had a very

very difficult temperament and temper, and he had a quite unhappy life.

And when did he die?

Not so very long ago, about five or six years ago, something of that sort. Shall I

comment on that a bit?

Mm.

He had left home, he had one son, who is a schoolmaster, a bachelor schoolmaster, at

Brentwood, a housemaster as well now, and, he hadn't just left home for the sake of it,

he had gone to live with a man, with a pop star who he had known for some time.

David was dying of cancer and this chap looked after him. There was a tremendous

rift in the family over this. But Dalia was very good about it, and I saw quite a lot of

him. When he died in, whatever it's called, the Wellington Hospital, by Lord's, and

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088B

this fellow came to the hospital, and so did Nigel, the son. But there was never any

doubt in the others' mind who everybody was. Daphne, the wife, would not, you

know, come into the room at the time. I don't know how they could have patched that

up between them, between mother and son afterwards, but, something burst there

obviously, and it was the right outcome for David. And I do remember one thing, one

of the really quite difficult experiences was taking my brother from Collindale, from

this man's flat, when he had to go to this hospital, Collindale to Lord's is a long ride in

an ambulance, and one didn't know what the outcome would be. But, I don't want to

give the impression that was the absolute end, because he had been in a nursing home

for a time in Hendon and that's when those who were ready to go and see David, went

to go and see David. But being too close isn't always I think the best thing, the fact

that if you feel that you should follow in a particular footstep, I don't think that's right.

How did you feel about your brother's shift away from his wife?

I thought I could understand that. I didn't understand why it had gone in that

particular direction, as an individual, I'm not talking about the sexual side of it

particularly, that I don't think is, you know, that's for him to decide. He had already

brought up a son, there was only one child of this marriage; I don't think, so far as I

could possibly tell, that his son opposed that, and that he wasn't going to oppose it,

there was no way that anybody else was going to tell me that I should oppose it. I

don't see much of Nigel, he's quite older than my children, and, well I do have some

kind of contact, I went to lecture at his school on takeover bids, and, so I keep in

touch. And I think that's, you know, that has to be David's choice at that stage of his

life. I can't say that I was tremendously shocked in that sense, and I think it was

something that burst, I think it was tremendous hypocrisy from uncles and aunts and

things like that, great-uncles and aunts I mean at that sort of stage. And, that's what

happened to him. I think that one of the things, I had to pin a sort of, there's no

responsibility for things, but I think that there was always a slight impatience of my

father that when he couldn't see a result coming then, well, `He's coming in with me'.

And I think he was a naturally impatient man, and I'm sure I am too, though I think

that there was too much readiness to take David, and for a time Ken, into that quite

unsuitable business, and not to get them out. You know, now I suppose they would be

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088B

told, `Take this money and walk across Australia' or something, whatever; do

something, but don't go to Mare Street, Hackney, to work in Father's shop, particularly

- I'm getting into deep water - particularly if your father hates it himself. Not to

replace your father, because perhaps it was a sort of feeling that, you know, if you

can't find something better to do then this is what you should do. I think there was

that kind of feeling. I wasn't subjected to that at all because I was fortunate enough to

find my own way very early on. I never suggested apart from, you know, going along

at Christmas and times, sitting at a cash desk for a day or two, that was all I had to do

with it, and I was very fortunate.

When you say your father hated himself, was it...?

My father...?

You said your father hated himself, did you?

No, I think that he...he didn't enjoy the job he was doing. He wasn't trying to make his

sons do it for him; my father was very fortunate, he retired at 60, and David, his older

son, did take it over and then sold it to Marks & Spencer on very fortunate terms, and

then he went to work for his father-in-law. But, that was all very fortunate. My father

was very lucky and I admired him very much because he had made enough to keep his

family in comfort pretty well, and he had had to pay a great sum in medical treatment

at the time David was in the war, and David didn't have to go overseas, he worked in,

he was in the Army and didn't have to go overseas, and it was the fortunate time of his

birthday as well. But, my father was a very generous man, he knew his

responsibilities very well, but he was also very fortunate to be able to retire in modest

comfort and do what he really wanted to do which was Masonic research, and was

around for 22 years to do that.

Let's just talk a little bit about the transition to Cambridge from Gresham's. I should

first of all ask you I suppose how you excelled in examinations. What did you leave

Gresham's with?

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088B

In terms of the number of subjects I didn't have all that many, but I had S and A'level

English and History, and then for the purpose of making up the number of A'levels

there was a wonderful little subject called History with Foreign Texts, and you had to

reach two French, in my case two French and two Latin books, because I knew no

Italian, and, you studied those texts and the background to them, Charles XII of

Sweden I think it was for Voltaire, and a frightful piece of Charlemagne and that kind

of thing. But it was good because it opened things up quite a bit. And then I got an A

grade in that, and that was enough. But what really counted in getting into Cambridge

actually was the scholarship and being interviewed by Lord Annan as he had become,

with two others, and that was a tremendous experience, I'll never forget it.

What do you remember of that?

What I remember of that was that, there were the three of them, and there was me.

Who was there?

There was Sheppard, who was the old Provost of King's, a very old man by that time;

there was, I think it was Saltmarsh, although it ought not to have been because he had

been many many centuries before at Gresham's, but he was the senior History person

at Kings; and there was certainly Noel Annan, who did all the talking. And...

You were 17?

Yes. It was December of my 17th year, I was just over 17. And, we had, as I recall,

about the most stimulating sort of intellectual conversation I've ever had in my life,

although I saw Annan long afterwards when I was at Cambridge, in the sense that I

thought he got something out of me. And of course I suppose you will say, what came

out was, you know, that I was Jewish. It seems that as soon as anybody asks me

anything I'm telling them that all the time, but it didn't come up directly in that way, it

came up on the question of poverty and riches, nothing to do at that stage of the

conversation with religion as such at all. And, he was going down the path, you

know, I remember him saying quite tersely... I said, `I don't think poverty is a virtue.'

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088B

`Do you think it's a vice?' And I said, `No, I don't think that either, and I think that's

where Christians get it so wrong.' And then we really opened it up, because of course

he was very responsive to that kind of discussion, and we had a very very good

conversation after that, and I've been into it with other people as well, because that I

think is what an interview should be about. And, I'm probably giving the impression

that I was a very sort of immodest sort of person knowing that I had made a great hit

with somebody; I didn't feel that at all and, you know, I just got through these papers,

and it went very well, and I went back to school, because it wasn't the holidays this, it

was in December but I had come up from school, and I remember being told, eat

prunes or whatever it is, make sure you are regular, you can't want to go to this sort of

thing in the...or you can't be blocked in an exam and that kind of thing. Unbelievably

primitive, but probably quite efficient things to be told. And went back, and then at

the...we went down for the school holidays, the Christmas holidays, very soon

afterwards, and my father every Thursday went to Simpsons to have his hair cut,

Simpsons in Piccadilly, and I went with him as it happened this day, although I didn't

know I was going to get a result that day, and I was going to meet John Tusa to go to

see `Antony And Cleopatra' which had come down from Stratford. And, the result

was brought to me in the barber shop. It was a message, a telephone message, that a

telegram had come to Bayswater. And then there was a cutting in the paper which

said that I had got this minor scholarship, and I was very excited indeed about that,

and John got a major scholarship to Trinity. And, we were the only two boys that had

ever been sent by Gresham's to Cambridge to take up a scholarship in History.

Really?

Kelly[ph] wouldn't send anybody unless he was, you know, pretty sure. But, it was a

sweet way he had of putting it, he said, `I think you're good enough to try for King's,'

and of course then the difficulty was, it was a kind of gamble, whether you only would

take something for King's when you filled in the form, because King's led, as you

know, a group of colleges, so you could have gone to Peterhouse or others in that

group, but I would only go to King's; I thought, I was crazy, I thought I'll try again and

if I don't get it, because I was young enough to try again if I wanted to: of course I

would have been completely deterred, I can see that now.

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088B

And who selected King's? I mean, Kelly[ph]?

Kelly[ph].

On the basis that it was a good History...

Yes, he thought it was the right... I think he was...he was even bigger[??] than that, I

think he thought it was the right place for me to be.

From what point of view?

I think from the point of view that he knew people there, he knew the atmosphere

there, he knew it wasn't a vast railway station of a college, probably, I don't know. I

didn't have the wit to say to him, `Why King's then?' It wasn't the same as if I had an

uncle who had gone somewhere else, and I'm sure that was the case in a way for John

Tusa too; his older brother, he had an older brother at school called George who had

not gone, as I recall, he might have gone to Oxford, I'm not sure, I don't think so. But

John and his wife Anne[ph] are very very good historians, and immensely voluble

and, I don't think he said, `Well, I don't think, I'd rather not,' or, `Why did you ask me,

suggest I go to Trinity?' Actually, I think he made a fantastic choice between the two

of us, because he didn't want to compete I suppose in that way against each other. I

don't think I would have enjoyed Trinity, I think it was a huge place. Very

distinguished, but King's was spacious but not too big, and, a very very good, a very

good place to be.

So, what happened back at school when they found out you were going up to

Cambridge?

Of course they didn't know until the beginning of the next term.

Right.

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088B

Oh, well I think it was with a great deal of excitement.

How many others went up from the same year?

Well, now that's a very good question, because there weren't very many, and those

with awards there were...we were the only two, because the scientists hadn't got any

scholarships. And, I think it was, you know, it was a big thing. And my...and I found

them, you know, very very pleased. But they could - I won't say this, I'm quite sure

they didn't say they could see it coming, but they felt that I had got over my St. Paul's

failure some time before that, put it like that, and I think they thought I was going to

find a way, which unfortunately my brothers had not. Ken did in the end, and quite a

different way, he turned out that he was very interested in English literature, and he

was, as we had known for many years he was very very good at carpentry, and he went

to Canada with his wife, who is not Jewish, and, big story there, but, he then got some

kind of job teaching delinquents in a kind of course that, you know, was good for that,

and he did very well. She left him after a while, with two daughters, and after a while

he...they were of an age, I mean, 19, 20, 21, something of that sort, and he married

again, again to a non-Jewish girl, with a wife who already had a family of her own. I

haven't seen him for a very long time, but I think he found a way, I think people do in

the end actually, I don't think that people don't find any answer, but it's a question of

what and when. David had to wait a very long time. How are we doing?

We're 10 to 1.

Oh good.

Is it a good place to pause?

Yes, you probably want anyway to have a wash, but I think, please tell me how you

want to play it. I feel I'm much too discursive.

I feel we've got...no no, it's absolutely fine, I feel we've got to a point where...no no,

where we can...

Alan Carr

C736/02/03 F5088B

And these are important.

...begin to talk now about Cambridge in some detail, so I think it's maybe a good place

to pause today and we'll pick up next time with Cambridge, yes?

OK, that sounds good to me, yes, fine.

End of F5088 Side B

Alan Carr

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OK. We were talking, I think the last time we got up to, you were just about to go to

Cambridge. We had done Gresham's.

That's right. I had been up for my scholarship and had had an interview with Lord

Annan I think is just about where we had got.

Mhm. So did you go directly from Gresham's to Cambridge?

Yes I did. I stayed on for the two intervening terms, didn't go and teach in a prep

school, that was rather a luxury, because I took my scholarship in December and went

up in the following October. So that was very pleasant, played Shylock and left.

So what did you do over the summer in sort of preparation for Cambridge?

I travelled. I was given a few books to read, and I travelled to Vienna and Dubrovnik

and had my birthday there in September.

Alone?

No, with my parents actually. That was the first time I had been to Vienna, in early

September '57; I went a lot after that.

And, was there a sense in which this was the sort of last summer in any way, a sort of

turning point at all?

Yes it was, because I was very much looking forward to going up to Cambridge, but

because I had travelled many times with my parents and greatly enjoyed it, a turning

point really from that point of view came the next year when I didn't travel with my

parents but travelled with a friend from college. From that point of view, that marked

a bigger change, but, I still was very excited to be in Dubrovnik which was where I

was actually on my birthday.

Alan Carr

C736/02/04 F5089A

Great.

Yes.

So, you started at Cambridge, when would that be, in the...

In October '54.

Tell me about your first impressions.

My first impressions were, I had a privilege, in addition to the £60, which was what

my scholarship was worth a year, I was in college for the whole of my three years.

The first suite of rooms that I had were, the walls were streaming with damp. My

mother was appalled, and made the usual sort of comment to a man called Iredale[ph]

who was then head porter, and he came back with the response that these were Lord

Keynes's rooms. [LAUGHS] So, they were good enough for me too. And of course

they were. But, other friends had rooms in much the same rather dreadful part of the

college, another though had a very attractive set of rooms immediately over the

porter's lodge. Actually King's is a very nice building in its own right and looks out

on the Gibbs building and the chapel and, it's a wonderful set of rooms. But I was

only there for a year, and after that had for two years a wonderful set of rooms right

down by the river. So that was a great privilege actually, I'm only making a mockery

of that particular point, I'm afraid it's rather a tease for my mother, she was very proud

to have been told by the porter that these were Lord Keynes's rooms. Immediately

above there was a great set of rooms where in very dignified old age Morgan Forster

lived, and he padded round the, you know, courtyards and things of this kind, and

quadrangle, and he was a great man to see and to talk to, and that was very fine and I

realised that, you know, this was something you couldn't have anywhere else, people

just living in the college because it seemed a good thing to do; they had been invited

to come and study. And the thing about King's was that there was so much space,

business outside and a great deal of space in the college, because what was it, about

350 people I suppose in all, but in a college that was half the size of Trinity perhaps,

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that was wonderful. The student population, I mean the undergraduate population, put

it that way, was a mixed age, because there were still people coming back from the

war, so you had some older undergraduates, you had quite a lot of quite young

undergraduates, and an extraordinary mix of people from all round, which was very

stimulating, very exciting. What is not generally understood though is that, I think it

was 90 per cent of all undergraduates were assisted financially in one way or another.

And that was in the mid-Fifties and I don't think that percentage has changed very

much in the interval. It was a very exciting place to be.

What friends did you make initially?

The friends I made initially were chiefly in the subject I was reading. John Barratt

was also a Scholar, a History Scholar from the Midlands, born in Edgbaston, and he

was a little over a year older than I, he took his scholarship a year before but came up

when I did. Neither of us had done National Service, and it was abolished in fact

while we were up at Cambridge. He was the man with the room over the porter's

lodge. And he and his father, Sidney[??] Barratt, were very great friends, and I make

the point quite strongly that his father knew how to make friends across generations,

which is not easily done, and I think he was very good at it. And another of

Sidney[??] Barratt's close contacts and friends was the man who is so good at clocks,

at TSB, the name's gone out of my mind for the moment, it'll come back in a minute.

Nicholas...

Goodison.

Goodison. So that that was really very pleasant, they lived in a beautiful Georgian

house in the Midlands, and I went to visit quite a lot. So that just as at school it was

nice to bring people down to London from the wilds of Norfolk, so one was able to

get out into the wilds of the Midlands and Stratford and places like that, which was

very good. John and I think alike about a lot of things, not that we have strong

decisive political views but we did pursue a very similar path in history at King's, and

it was a very enjoyable three years from that point of view. There were other

historians and modern linguists, classicists that we were both friendly with. We were

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very well taught in a very unpretentious way, there was no aggro about it. I wasn't as

well taught as I was by Kelly[ph] at school I think, but it was still a terrific atmosphere

to be doing what you enjoyed doing.

Who were your main tutors?

John Saltmarsh who in another life was apparently at Gresham's, a rather self-

consciously eccentric man who was the great authority on the chapel, and he used to

take parties of people all over the roof and between the roofs and everything else, a

very great figure. Christopher Morris, who died I think not very long ago, was rather

an acidulous man but wrote very well on the Tudors and wrote for Batsford a book on

the Tudors. He really was the man who ran the History Society, and there were about

twelve perhaps, something like that, maybe a few more, undergraduates, not all

Scholars but mostly, some had some sort of award, who gave a paper to the History

Society, which was very good, a very enjoyable thing to do. Richard Layard[ph] was

a man who was then a historian, I think he has moved on to something else, I haven't

seen him for a very long time, he was a Scholar too, and he did a paper for the History

Society on witchcraft, which was very good. I did a paper on Lord Shelburne.

Why Lord Shelburne?

I don't know exactly except that I was very keen on Georgian memoirs at the time and

I think he was an underrated figure. It was said at the time, particularly, this is

particularly typical of Christopher Morris that I had read my paper very dramatically

and that I had some facial resemblance to Lord Shelburne; I didn't wear spectacles

then. But, it was an enjoyable thing to do. I'm trying to think what John Barratt did

his paper on. I'll know by nightfall because I'm going down to Bath to stay with him,

but... Our interests were not too pressured, it wasn't a question of having a difficulty,

and that was actually the...it was very relaxed. I was given £5 a week as my allowance

from my father, and that was plenty.

In terms of the study of history, were you encouraged to a particular period or interest

during the three years?

Alan Carr

C736/02/04 F5089A

That developed more as I went. I didn't know until the end of the second year that I

would definitely stay on and read part two of the tripos. I think I may have mentioned

that I read History then right the way through because you're not allowed to read Law

at King's for three years, and once I had started on History I stayed with it and did well

at it. The choice of special subjects came later, you could branch out a bit, but where

you had to do certain subjects I was re-doing what I had been doing at school, Tudor

and Stuart Constitutional History, and perhaps because I was very well taught at

school I didn't feel that I was really learning that much more; I'm sure there was a

great deal more depth to it, but I think that's where Kelly[ph] was a remarkable

teacher. But there were whole areas that very slowly were opening up. It was still

quite rare in Cambridge in the Fifties to hear about Peru or China; there wasn't a

possibility of studying Oriental History at that level at all, if one wanted to do so you

had to go on and do a Ph.D. really to do that effectively. Where things did change and

develop was, you could do Russian History, and you could do U.S. History, and I

certainly did a paper on U.S. History and greatly enjoyed it, but that was something

quite new, nothing like that at school. And gradually things opened up a bit, and you

had the opportunity to do something in part two which was a little bit more in-depth,

and the subject that John Barratt and I did, and we were the only two to do, was called

`Britain, Russia and Europe, 1875-79', which was the Congress of Berlin and Disraeli

and Bismarck and all that, which we greatly enjoyed, and I think we've been studying

it ever since. It was a very good thing to do because we both spoke English and

French and could manage in those two languages, hardly at all in German, could read

a little German if pushed, but with that weakness in languages it was very hard to do,

or find, a subject which one could really get one's teeth into in modern history, and

that has always been a weakness for me.

But modern history you were gravitating towards?

Very definitely. And that's always been the case, and in fact it's become a more

pronounced thing, it's become what I would think would probably be strictly

contemporary history but not journalism, and that's a difficult line to draw, but I

Alan Carr

C736/02/04 F5089A

would have thought the last seventy years, something of that kind, the last hundred

years. I've enjoyed modern history very much.

Do you remember any key works that you read at Cambridge that were of influence?

That's quite difficult. I suppose from the point of view of key works, the subject that I

chose to do, and John Barratt chose something else, was called `Theories of the

Modern State', and that, Lord Annan taught that, as he became in that title, and so I

read a lot of Rousseau and some Plato as a beginner, and Bloch, Hobbes particularly, I

greatly admired Hobbes, as much for the sound perhaps as the sense, but... And right

the way through I got my teeth into some Marx, but only in English. And generally

the whole political background really became, had a whole added dimension to it

because it was really very well taught, he was a very powerful lecturer, and he became

Provost during the course of my time at Cambridge, at King's. So that, it was a very

good time to be there, and I think it was those sort of books that I took to very much at

that time rather than a single book. John Barratt did Mediaeval Travellers, something

that I might have wanted to do in later life but I wasn't to know that then; Benjamin of

Tudela and things of that sort. Curiously he could hardly remember when I mentioned

to him recently that he had done this, but of course it was a very apt thing for him to

do and that's very much his cast of mind to have done something like that, rather, a

stronger meatier subject, than this other one. In fact the only book that he's published,

I think he did write one or two others, [INAUDIBLE] Through Lightest Africa, it was

a sort of modern version if you like of some travels he had when he took sabbaticals

as a schoolmaster. But, I can't remember any single book perhaps at the moment that

greatly influenced me.

What sort of political views were you developing during your three years at

Cambridge?

Not very clear-cut political views. And that's I suppose quite an admission, because

1956 was our last year, and so to be up at Cambridge in the year of Hungary and Suez

and not say I had formed very strong political views or gone to Budapest is, I am

conscious, quite a comment. I didn't feel as involved in the Hungarian thing as many

Alan Carr

C736/02/04 F5089A

people at King's and Cambridge generally did. Friends of mine did get very heavily

involved, and were, you know, rushing out to Austria and trying to get into Hungary.

Suez I did feel very strongly about. I think that at that time it wasn't known how great

the various deceptions were, but I did feel very pro-Israel about the whole thing, and I

think that in some ways the sort of anti-topple-Nasser campaign was a complete fiasco

as is known, and was very badly handled. What wasn't known so much at the time

was the kind of pressure that Eisenhower put on the Israel Government at and around

the time of Suez, but I didn't feel passionately that, you know, send in the paras, or

passionately, musn't interfere with nascent Arab nationalism. I knew enough about

the background I suppose to understand that Egyptians have never been wanting to be

called Arabs before and that this was quite a new development, and Nasser of course

was seen as a very serious sort of threat, and this caricature of another Hitler or

Mussolini was taken I think, you know, absurdly seriously. And I think he was a

pathetic figure, completely out of touch with how to organise opinion or actually lead

a country through a crisis of that kind. But, I had never been a great admirer of Eden

anyway, and I think the main political gain from the whole crisis was the emergence

of Macmillan, who probably succeeded better than Butler would have done. So,

setting it in its context, those two huge convulsions didn't actually I think give me a

tremendous political set, and I suppose together, taken together they might have been

something like the Spanish Civil War for people at Cambridge in the Thirties, but it

didn't have that kind of impact, perhaps because it was so soon after the Second War.

Cambridge was still a relatively quiet place, and I think it was that, and the fact that I

was turning away from a very quiet university pleasant life that led me away from

Cambridge after my third year there, rather than to stay on and do research as I

thought I might do after my second year there, I've always thought that, I began to be a

bit frustrated. Perhaps it's though because I didn't closely identify with one or other

side in either of those huge political crises.

So where would you have placed yourself on the political spectrum at that time do you

think?

Certainly not voting socialist. Probably troubled by the ineptitude of the Tory

Government on those particular things. Ready to vote Tory, and I suppose I had my

Alan Carr

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vote [INAUDIBLE], when did I have the vote for the first time, at 21, would have

been the Macmillan election. I voted for Macmillan. I think that was probably the

right thing to do at the time, I don't reproach myself for that. Gaitskell of course was

his opponent in that election; I've got much more respect for Gaitskell now than I had

then, but, and it may be he would have been a greater Prime Minister, though that's

not the kind of slant that one can be expected to have. One certainly ought to

remember one's first election.

Did you join any political or quasi-political organisations at all at Cambridge?

No, I did not. Of course, you are reminding me that as a freshman you arrive, you get

endless solicitations and cards, and turn up for this and all the rest of it. I didn't join

the Jewish Society, I didn't join the actors; I had done quite a lot of acting at school

but I did not join the Marlowe Society or any of the acting things, although there were

tremendous facilities for them. And the reason was, and I suppose it follows very

naturally therefore from your last question, that you had to commit to a way of life.

You were in an acting set, you were in the Jewish set, you were at the union making

speeches: it gave a cast to your whole life, and the friends that I was with didn't want

to do that. So, that could be caricatured as being on the fringe perhaps, but I am very

glad that we didn't, and it wasn't a counsel, `We are not going to,' it was a reaction of a

certain type of undergraduate. So what did we do? We read Jane Austen, and one of

the things, we had a lunch club, and we...I do remember particularly a very good

evening of reading [INAUDIBLE], there were six of us and we shared the novels out

and we read quite large chunks. And that was one of many, not just the Jane Austen

but of others. The atmosphere was, I would have thought, closer to 1890s Oxford

than 1980s anywhere university. Although it may have been closer in time to the kind

of atmosphere there would have been in Cambridge or Oxford or anywhere at the time

of the big strikes, the miners' strike of the Eighties and then again in the Seventies, the

atmosphere was still very quiet, you could get on with it, you could live your own life,

and I think probably I got tired of that too.

Are you suggesting that you actually as a group made an active decision not to join

things?

Alan Carr

C736/02/04 F5089A

No, I was saying the reverse actually, it was a cast of mind; certain people weren't

going to be drawn into those sort of things. It wasn't, we're above that or we won't do

that, but I think each in our own way saw that if you played rugby, whatever you did,

you were, at that time you were identified with a particular set way of life and you

committed to that, to the exclusion really of other interests. And that didn't appeal,

and I think that's how we came to find ourselves together rather than the other way,

`We are not going to do this, we're going to read Jane Austen', I don't want to give that

impression but in fact I think we greatly enjoyed actually studying, not in a self-

conscious way, but enjoying Cambridge, and... I certainly enjoyed being at King's,

and primarily for study. I think that that didn't mean that one was consciously in

libraries all the time, far from it, and I always preferred to study in my own rooms, but

it did mean that you had time for study and enjoying each other's company, going out,

going about. Life was very easy, books were very cheap. Heffers was then a very

good book store, and David's[??] book stall in Market Square at Cambridge was a

wonderful place. Anybody who had any taste for antiquarian books, which I got

largely from my father, had the most wonderful time, and that's before I went to

Oxford even on a visit. Of course Oxford I think is much better for books of this

kind, Blackwell's and others. But, it was still a fantastic place, you could find things.

I've never been a great antique collector, except perhaps for books, but it was a very

enjoyable place to be. And although I did go along to one or two of the early meetings

of the acting set, I realised that you would be completely committed to that whole way

of life, and probably go on in one way or another to act or direct; Jonathan Miller was

there, and quite a lot of other very famous names that have gone through and become

very famous in the theatre in one way or another, and I enjoy seeing their productions.

Who were the other key friends and colleagues that you made while you were at

Cambridge? You've obviously mentioned John Barratt and this sort of little set, but...

Yes. It's quite interesting that he went to school at Clifton, and his father I think

became Governor of Clifton, though I don't think he, I'm not sure that went to school

there, so I did know a number from Clifton. But I met really for the first time a lot of

brilliant Etonians, because of the relationship between King's and Eton, there were

Alan Carr

C736/02/04 F5089A

Etonian scholarships for people from Eton which they would have earned I think on

any basis anyway. There was someone called John Villiers, who read History, I think

he had a brother, James Villiers, who is a quite well-known actor. Actually he, John

Villiers, went to Winchester, but, he was a very able man. Two from Eton were Ben

Anderson[ph], who read Classics because it was incredibly easy for him to do them,

and he got his first, and had a lot of time for nothing very much, in fact I think he went

on to do History in the end and, I haven't seen him for many years, he went to Cornell

and did some research on Indonesia and I think he's been in Indonesia almost ever

since. He was a close friend of another Etonian called Tony Flowerdew, who is a

mathematician and has been cybernetics ever since. And those two were about my

age, that is a little younger than John Barratt, knew each other very well, we travelled

together in the summer, and greatly enjoyed each other's company. I don't think Ben

ever married, and John Barratt has not married; Tony Flowerdew has married twice,

and I've married once.

End of F5089 Side A

Alan Carr

C736/02/04 F5089B


Looking back on the people that you met at Cambridge, how significant was it as a

place where you, you know, made friends and contacts which were helpful later in life

do you think?

I didn't make any contacts. I did make some friends, and I think probably chiefly John

Barratt, largely because of his cast of mind and sense of humour, and because of his

delightful parents and family, he has a sister, and his sister married a man called

Martin Scott who was a historian and teacher at Clifton, he's older than both of us, he

went to Winchester to become the head of the college there. Quite an eccentric man,

taught my older son, Amnon, at Winchester history, and I'm going to be seeing them

both down at John's house at the weekend. Not that I've kept in close touch with

them, apart from Christmas cards and letters, and shock horror when they get back

from South America, from a trip or other, not that they go there but, I think they enjoy

the sort of frisson of various experiences we have to tell. I think it was that approach

that you could enjoy a great deal about life and not feel totally irresponsible for doing

so that I liked. But, we were actually quite close in another generation with very big

tycoons. John's father, and one would never have known this, was from peasant stock

in, I think the Borders or, near Wales somewhere, but he was a brilliant chemist and

he went to a company called Albright & Wilson, which was independent then, and

then it was found that he had great financial skills and he went on to be chairman.

And it was his, I won't say his one thing to hide this from the world, but he was a very

modest man; he had Gainsboroughs and Italian bronzes in his house but he would

never drive a Bentley. I found that very congenial, it's that kind of cast of mind I'm

trying to get across. My own uncle, my mother's brother, older brother, was a great

tycoon, ran a string of shops, sold out and became United Drapery Stores, quite a

different type altogether from Sidney[??] Barratt, and I admire both of them very

much, and actually was guided by them, more subtly by Sidney[??] Barratt, John's

father perhaps; more directly in a way, more immediately, by Jock Collier, my uncle.

But, they were very much in the real world, and, I think it was subtly that kind of

influence that led me away from Cambridge and not to stay on and do a Ph.D., and

Alan Carr

C736/02/04 F5089B

that eliding the point that I had stayed with History in my third year, I didn't go over to

do Law, and I got a good degree, I was pleased with that, and really enjoyed it.

So, when you say that you became interested in the real world, I mean as you say it

would have been easy to stay on and do research.

Yes.

Was it purely the influence of these two?

Not...it wasn't as direct as that. I was stifling in the third year. I had thought at the

end of the second year of staying on to do History, I had got my first and one of the

tripos, there was no way that I was going to leave the subject, I wanted to go on and

do it. And as I started the third year I thought, this is a wonderful life, I really would

like to stay on, do a Ph.D. and perhaps, you know, become an academic, I thought this

was something that I would quite like to do. But perhaps because of the sort of great

stir in the world that 1956 created, and we came down in '57, I began to feel stifled,

that it was too comfortable an existence, that I didn't want to be in libraries and an

elegant set of rooms in Gibbs' building[??] forever, and, I was, I was stifled. It

wasn't...it was my reaction after three fantastic years. And so I came to London,

obviously I was still living with my parents in Bayswater then, except when I was up

at Cambridge, and I began to think then, what I am I going to do? And I got a very

clear message from my uncle, and that was the secret, not a masterful message at all

but a clear message, he said, `I can introduce you to George Dennehy[ph], who with

Gordon Simmons is one of the two senior partners at Simmons & Simmons. I think

you would be a very good solicitor, and I think he will take you and will be very glad

that he has taken you.' He didn't put it as directly as that to me, but I heard and saw

what he wrote to George Dennehy. He kept an eye on me when I came here. Now I

had never wanted to really go into a solicitors' office, I didn't know what happened in

a solicitors' office, and in the Fifties people didn't become vacation students in big

City offices or really have much knowledge of the world. It may seem unbelievable

now but that is the truth. If you went to the Cambridge University appointments board

in the Fifties, which I did, there were really only about five things you could do in life.

Alan Carr

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You could stay on and so research; you could go into the Army and the other services;

you could go into the Church, which wasn't for me; journalism, but they never

suggested journalism or anything like that; or trade, and they wouldn't pursue that, if

you wanted to do that, you could do that; or the Law. And very few other things. And

that was another thing that I felt stifling about Cambridge in my final year, because it

was out of touch. And so I did go into the Law. The Law as far as Cambridge meant

of course meant the Bar; they didn't really, there was no question of Slaughter & May,

Simmons & Simmons, Linklaters doing the rounds of the universities to see, you

know, who might be interested, not at all, that didn't happen. Now it's true, I wasn't a

Law graduate, and I dare say others were closer to those things, but it was a feeling

that I was out of touch with life that led me to come to London, and I did come for an

interview here and I was taken on. Of course it was a very different firm, it was a very

small firm.

I was going to ask you that question. What sort of firm was it at that time, what was

your first impression of it, what do you remember of it?

My first impression of it was that it was dominated by these two men, Gordon

Simmons, who was the son and nephew of Simmons & Simmons who had founded it

in 1896, I didn't know the date then, they were twins those two. So it was a family

firm by origin. Gordon Simmons in 1957, actually I came up for an interview in '56 in

my third year, was very much the owner of the business with George Dennehy[ph]

who was a very different man, the Anglo-Irish background, he was my principal, I

signed up articles with him. George Francis Heffernan Dennehy[ph], not the sort of

names you are likely to forget, quite a resonance to them. He was an Etonian, I knew

something about Eton from being at King's, and he had a rather cultivated languid

manner, I can see now very much out of touch with the City even then. He was a

brilliant company lawyer, and that's why it was he and not the more outward type of

Gordon Simmons that looked after my uncle's work, which, my uncle was a big client

through the United Drapery Stores. The reason I came up for the interview was an

equally powerful interview that I had had in Kensington, which was where United

Drapery Stores then had their offices, and when I put to my uncle that actually I had

thought of staying on at Cambridge to do research he couldn't understand that or

Alan Carr

C736/02/04 F5089B

purported not to, and said that he had met a historian once and that he had had a beard.

And that wasn't alone enough to, you know, scare me off, but it was a remark he

thought worth making, which is to show something of the difference in approach. But

what he did say was that, `I think that you would have the cast of mind for that, you

would have a status, you would have a good income, and you could pursue, you know,

interests if you need to do so or want to do so.' But I think it was probably that he had

no...he simply couldn't understand that anybody would want to be an academic. And

so that's how I came to the City, and the impression that I got of George Dennehy[ph]

was that it was indeed worth a try.

What do you remember of that interview at Simmons, when you first came?

I had the impression that...the interview itself you see was before I actually arrived; I

was given an interview and then George Dennehy[ph] kept in touch with my progress

at the last year of my degree. I think he understood enough to realise that I, although

it wasn't in Law, I was getting a good degree. In those days there people came here

without any degree, Gordon Simmons, and contemporaries of mine who came here

didn't always have a degree. It was a very small firm. The notepaper was grey azure

with black name on it, not very distinctive. The number of names on the notepaper

were I think nine partners; there are now 139, if we put them on any longer, but we

don't, and that's only a fairly recent change. It's quite unrecognisable what a City firm

was like then. We were not as near the front as we are now, and I came to see later on

that actually this was a firm that was going places in the City, and that was itself

exciting, but I didn't know that then, I really didn't know what went on in a solicitors'

office. And so I took on trust my uncle's assurance that it would be a worthwhile

profession. I looked round a little bit in the office; it was then at a very fine address, 1

Threadneedle Street, which was a building which the firm shared with Eagle Star,

which was a principal client, and it had a great air about it. Actually we have in the

course of our research for a history which we are preparing of the firm for the

centenary year got a very good reproduction of a painting that Simmons & Simmons

gave to Eagle Star of that building as it then was, and it was very much as it had been

in the late 19th century. And, it was opposite the Bank of England and the Royal

Exchange, and it was a whole new experience to come to the City on a daily basis as

Alan Carr

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an article clerk without knowing anything, any law at all, because I had never read any

law. And I had a privilege; I did not pay for my articles, but I was not paid either, I

was a gentleman article clerk, and I had to do a lot of exams and actually learn some

law, and I was allowed to take time off, eight months for part one and six months for

part two, actually to learn some law. And I finally was brought down, I think I

probably mentioned this to you in another context, that when I went to the Law

Society's School of Law at Lancaster Gate, very conveniently near to my home in

Bayswater, the lady that started us off made it clear at the very first sitting that

intelligence is at a discount here, you are here to learn this. And that was brought to

earth with a bang. Actually I don't think that is quite as bad as that, but the Law

Society exams then were very much a learning, a memory test, and you had to pass

every head at one count, there was no way you could, if you missed one of seven

exams that you could just take that one again, and it was horrifying to see people at

both the intermediate and the final taking it for the third, fourth, sometimes fifth time

because they were not getting them all at one go. That changed not very long after. I

was horrified by that, not just for the intellectual snobbery but because I didn't trust

my memory to that degree; I've always thought that it would buckle if I, you know,

had to sort of strain myself by learning endless cases and judgments and things and

legislation. And at that time I did have quite a bit of migraine which may or may not

have been related to it, it faded over the years afterwards, but, I think that it was a

foolish approach, and they have changed it to quite a big degree.

How did you feel about effectively leaving studying behind and then going back into

studying?

Well you see it wasn't the same thing. It wasn't...I didn't regard it as study. I had

never done jurisprudence, or wanted to, I had never read law, and so I wasn't coming

back to the study of law, I was coming back to memorising things, and it was quite

different. To be quite fair though, the lady, and I can't remember her name, who made

this shattering remark at the opening, did do better than that, because I remember her

reading out the Donaghue & Stevenson[ph] judgement in tort, and, I thought she was

fantastic because she took the trouble actually to read it out. And I can remember her

reading now, `Who then in law is my neighbour?' And then she goes on to read it out,

Alan Carr

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and she was actually reading it out as she was saying, `This is a really beautiful piece

of prose,' and of course it is. And that wasn't generally known, and of course that kind

of law I did greatly enjoy learning, and I realised she had another side. But I had

never learned law in that way, I had never studied law, and to some extent I'm afraid

the solicitors' exams were to some extent memory tests. Of course they became more

focused and the questions usually ended, `Advise him,' you know, Mr White is buying

Blackacre and all this sort of thing. And, it wasn't that difficult I think to get the

points, and I did get through the exams, but of course, you might say I should have

done, I was given time off, but it was quite hard because it was doing unfamiliar work,

largely that I didn't, you know, particularly enjoy, and, I got through my exams OK

and came back, it would have been about, I qualified in 1961.

Did you have any doubts?

No I didn't. But, the question is a very perceptive one if I may say so, because, I

wasn't the only one that came down to the City to the law, John Barratt did too, and he

was far less suited to it, and he went to Bertram and Co, but he stuck it out through the

exams and qualified; he then went straight off to become a schoolmaster, and knew,

he must have known, you know, very early on that he was not going to stay in the City

in any way at all. But he I think came down into the law largely because I had, rather

than the other way around, and he knew very quickly that it wasn't for him, but

absolutely, 150 per cent credit that he stayed on and qualified, and remembers a great

deal of his time in Bertram, and of the cases, and of the language of the judgements,

and of our, the horrors of the exam, much more than I. But it was a very good time,

he was coming really to live in London, which he hadn't done before, and he had a flat

in Lowndes Square, which was very elegant and unassuming, and even then I started

to take snaps, I mean snaps and nothing more, and trips down to the Cutty Sark and

Greenwich, called[??] the Conveyancing test, because it was an afternoon off after the

Conveyancing test. And all that was very very agreeable. And then he went, as I say,

to be a schoolteacher, he went to Lancing, and he produced plays at school, and I kept

in touch with him for quite a while, we travelled abroad quite a bit together, and he

produced plays and he produced `Everyman' in Lancing Cathedral with music by

Verdi out of `Don Carlos', and I think I was the only person that recognised, and he

Alan Carr

C736/02/04 F5089B

knew I would be the only person to recognise, that he was using the overture to the

last act and not the first overture. But, all that kind of thing was very agreeable. And

as I say I got through the exams, and I was in the office quite a lot in between because

my articles were for five years, must have been right, because I hadn't got a degree. I

must be quite right about this, not right. No, I had three years of articles, but I had to

take more exams, that's right, because I came down from Cambridge in '57, came to

Simmons & Simmons in '57, and I was qualified in '61, yes, so it was three years for

articles. And...

And what sort of work were you doing in between the studying? You had time off,

but presumably you were working the rest of the time?

I came to the office.

In the office?

Oh yes.

And what sort of things were you given to do?

A lot of property work, conveyancing work, gradually coming into the Company

Department. I didn't do litigation, I mean in practical terms, I didn't go up to the

courts in litigation, and the practical side of one's experience wasn't as clear-cut as it is

now. I remember very well the property work that I had to do, conveyancing. The

firm acted then for a company called Davis[ph] Estates, which was some sort of

development company, and the article clerks that were around were supervised by

solicitors who weren't yet partners, I remember particularly one called Ian Martin who

looked after our activities, who was from Rugby, that was unusual at the school, he

had not long arrived as a solicitor, he wasn't articled at Simmons. And he had been in

the Air Force for his National Service, not at all the type though that you would

associate with that particularly. He had always made a living during his articles at

some firm in Brighton I think, out of racing. He could follow form, it was just, it

wasn't that he didn't take any particular pride in that but he could always make a

Alan Carr

C736/02/04 F5089B

comfortable living in that way. He was very good company, not an intellectual, not in

the least interested in opera or anything that was the stage, you know, very loathe to

have public money put into that kind of activity, but very very good company.

Another who I met at that time, and Ian's retired and so has Alan Fisher[ph], who I am

coming on to, became a property lawyer like Ian and became a partner. He was from

Oxford, had done Russian, in the Navy I think, and so he was a little older than I, and

had pronounced left-wing leanings. You would never know that, he was completely

unassuming. I think of anybody in Simmons & Simmons his mind was closest to

mine. He had a wonderful sense of humour and a very unassuming way of making a

point, very good, and unlike me a very good speaker, after dinner speaker. And, he

was one of the two people who were offered partnership in this firm, refused it. He I

think for socialist reasons, and he thought better of it and came back to it and took a

partnership here. I respected him very much for that. The only other person who did

that was a Quaker, and he was offered it quite late in life and couldn't take it, it was

against his principles to take it, and I think, he was a good deal older and I think he

left...he didn't leave the firm then, but he just left. There were very few people

actually in those days who would have turned down a partnership here, and I'm glad

Alan did, largely because of what he actually contributed to the firm; I'm glad to say

that he's working on the committee that's working on this history of the firm, not that

it's going to be a history by committee, we have an author, but we have to dig out a

great deal of material, we haven't got the kind of archive you would greatly admire.

And what sort of...

Work, the actual work?

...work was the firm interested in at that time? You've mentioned the sort of stuff of

solicitors' firms, but you didn't mention why [INAUDIBLE].

I personally had been for too long, because I wasn't attracted by conveyancing work,

had done some of that kind of thing, I realised that I wanted to become a member of

the Company Department, which was tiny at Simmons & Simmons at that time.

George Dennehy[ph] was really the great strength of it. From the time of the twins

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that set up the firm, as I now know more clearly, they had been friends with somebody

called Philip Hill who was a financier in London in the City before and after the Great

War, and that friendship had led them to Sir Edward Mountain who was the brains

that was behind Eagle Star and Gardner Mountain and the Lloyd's side of things as

well in different ways. And the twins established themselves, quite a remarkable feat

because they were just 21 when they set up the firm in 1896 with an office boy, they

had only just qualified, but they did get the firm going and kept it going through the

Great War, and immediately, soon after that the firm had been appointed to act for

Eagle Star in a number of important ramifications, and I suppose in those early years

they grew with that connection. It led them also to Thomas Beecham through Philip

Hill, which became Beecham Group, and Smith Kline Beecham; it led them also to

Tommy Sopwith, the Biggles sort of background there which led them to Hawker

Siddeley. It led to many things. And although the firm had had, as many firms had in

the Second War, very depleted ranks, by the time I arrived it was taking off again. I

think immediately after the Second War I think things were very bad, but it wasn't sort

of, I mean when I arrived we weren't sort of seeing pictures of the Blitz and all that

sort of nonsense, which I'm very glad we're not going to have in our history, our

centenary history, although obviously we went through that period. But there were a

lot of great things going, a lot of the merchant banks were really getting into their

stride again, and George Dennehy[ph] had a great opportunity there because of the

connection with Philip Hill, which, and one of the big jobs that he handled which I

was on the fringe of was the merger of Philip Hill, Higginson and Alangers[ph]

Limited with Samuel banking thing which became Hill Samuel. And that was then a

major transaction, not in terms of the money size, I think it was about £12 million

value, but, then that was a very substantial transaction, but it was an important step in

setting up one of the main City merchant banks.

What was your role in that particular...?

I was still an article clerk I think when it went on.

End of F5089 Side B

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090A


We were just talking about your involvement in the Hill Samuel merger, yes?

Yes. I didn't play a main part in it, and actually I should have had a clearer idea of the

date it actually took place, I think it was nearer to '60, or '1961, something of that sort.

I do remember that George Dennehy[ph] was masterminding the transaction, and an

accountant that was employed very much my sort of level in the City called Roger

Roswick[ph] worked with him; Roger was taken on as an accountant who never

actually qualified as a solicitor, and left to work for Jimmy Goldsmith and pursued a

different career in the end, but I think he was George's principal assistant on that.

But, between the two was somebody called Patterson[ph], who was George's batman

in the war, a most brilliant mind, quite brilliant mind, and George had brought him

back. And he became one of the best company lawyers in the City, Pat, and for a long

time he wasn't offered or, and didn't take partnership, but he did become a partner, and

retired finally as a partner in 1984, a little after George had died. And he himself died

a week or two ago. I went to his funeral and met his daughters, as I had met them

before, one of whom in particular he was very very proud. I think it was a great

achievement which I've only come to understand more recently, at the time of this

man's death, in seeing how these matters are brought out in the history. So those

three, coming back to the deal, those three, Dennehy[ph], Patterson[ph] and

Roswick[ph] were really in charge of the thing, but I did see it, I knew what was going

on, and I think I can be more specific about the reason that I wasn't close to it, is that

actually I was getting ready to go away to Brussels, because about a year after I

qualified I remember being called in by Gordon Simmons and asked would I like to

set up the firm's office in Brussels, that was our first overseas office, and the first City

firm to set up an office on the Continent.

Let me come back to that in a moment. I just wanted to retrace and get a clearer idea

of the firm at the time. Now you've mentioned that, you know, the Company

Department was very small, I wonder if you could give me a sense of the structure of

the firm, how it was organised, and how the different departments functioned.

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090A

Yes.

At the time when you joined.

It did work in functions according to practice areas, but it wasn't as rigidly defined as

it would be now. There were I think nine or ten partners. When I arrived in the firm,

and for a little while afterwards, there was someone called Langham Hodges[ph] who

appeared as the senior name on the list, but that was really a courtesy because he was

senior in years to Edward Henry Gordon Simmons, E.H.G. Simmons, and G.F.H.

Dennehy[ph]. At that time names were always just shown by initials. It wasn't so

very long before that the last of the twins, the later of the twins died, and Langham

Hodges[ph] was the survival, so we have three names there, Hodges, Simmons,

Gordon Simmons, and George Dennehy[ph]. And then there were names that became

very well known in the City, David DeKahl[ph], who had recently arrived in the firm

about two or three years before I came as an article clerk, he had come from

Freshfields; and Michael Holmes[ph], who had come after the war from Linklaters:

we were beginning to recruit in the City which is the significant thing. And

Patterson[ph] was still not a partner so we've got about five names now, six names

now. Bernard Kelly[ph], B.N. Kelly[ph] was a partner, and he went off to Lazards,

wasn't suited to a law career but he's still around, and I think his chief contact was

with George Dennehy[ph]. Sir David Wilson had arrived, he was from the Bar and he

set up a Tax Department, and that was the beginning of a separate Tax Department.

He was very brilliant at overseas, off-shore settlements and trusts of that kind, and

particularly affairs in the Bahamas and matters of that sort; and Stafford Sands I think

was the Minister of Finance in the Bahamas at that time which was a connection

which worked very well. Steven James[ph] I think was a partner already, or became a

partner very soon afterwards. He also had come first from the Bar, the Patent Bar, and

made a name for himself with Beecham. And of course after Gordon's death, and

there was a period of eight or nine years with Peter Richardson who was a partner,

Steven[ph] became Senior Partner here for twelve years, was a very successful Senior

Partner here. So there were about eight or nine, maybe a few more, partners, and we

were all operating at that time in this one building in, I think it was three floors in the

old, 1 Threadneedle Street, building. There was another building in Throgmorton

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090A

Avenue but it was really quite small-scale, the whole thing was very small-scale. I

ought to be able to tell you how few people there were in the office, but it was all

quite tiny. And it was quite unusual to use a piece of paper of A4 size, a lot of

ordinary letters went out on the smaller size paper, and that was quite common in the

City too. So it was departmentalised. Gordon was a client-getter perhaps rather than

doing a great deal of work for clients, he was very brilliant at that, he had a very good

manner, he had a house in the country, out at Essex, staff called him the Governor, not

to his face but he was known as the Governor, it was a paternalistic system, and he

had a house also in St. John's Wood, not a very pretentious one, and he only married

quite late in life. George Dennehy[ph], a very different type as I mentioned before,

who in effect did the company work. They were the first two who actually articled in

the firm, and the first Senior Partner after them who was articled in the firm was Peter

Richardson, who was from Oxford and he was a very brilliant libel lawyer, and he had

a connection with the Berry family and the `Telegraph', and that was the origin of our

connection with the `Daily Telegraph' or was very important in it anyway, and along

with Eagle Star that is another long-standing client outside the Philip Hill connection.

Another friend of George Dennehy's[ph], rather than Peter Richardson's this time, was

Rory Moore-O'Ferrell[ph], who was again the Anglo-Irish background, they were at

Eton together, and Moore-O'Ferrell had been famous for outdoor advertising.

Although it's not a huge group by comparison with the press it's quite a considerable

one and I think I have established that it's probably the oldest, quite independent

connection of the firm, because it was formed in 1936. We've acted for them since,

and I set up their Adshel bus shelter subsidiary, which has been very successful. But

they've done a lot of work in that field. I'm trying to give you an impression of a fairly

small-scale, not only by modern standards but even by comparison with some of the

big merged firms, Linklaters and Paines and Slaughter & May were much bigger, and

were seen as far away. No doubt Gordon had got clear ideas about overhauling them

in various ways, and I suppose we have caught up out of all proportion in some ways,

but those were the two great names that I remember as names in City legal terms.

Clifford Chance had not been merged, it was still Coward Chance and Clifford

Turner. And the City was a very different place, but very exciting.

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090A

So I'm getting the impression of a smallish firm with partners specialising in particular

areas of the law with articles working to them, would that be correct?

Yes you worked, you were articled to an individual, as you still are. There were

specialists but they had only just begun to specialise. The Tax Department, as I

mentioned, was new; somebody who was, and I should have mentioned this name

before, Robert Vigars[ph], was in origin a conveyancing partner, he had aspirations

and went away to do a lot of work at the GLC, but he enjoyed doing company work,

and became pretty good at it too, but really he was seen as the senior property lawyer,

and he and two or three others later on were more responsible for the Property

Department, but Bob Vigars[ph] preferred actually corporate work, and it wasn't as

clear-cut as that. David DeKahl[ph] however had been taken on because we had

needed to strengthen our corporate abilities, and he and George Dennehy[ph] and

Patterson[ph] and some of the other names I've mentioned, you know, merely set

about doing that. I can't myself imagine George Dennehy[ph] doing anything other

than company law, but the boundaries weren't quite so rigidly defined in those days;

we didn't have an I.P. department, Intellectual Property, we didn't have somebody who

was exclusively a patent lawyer or trademarks at all, that grew later. And indeed one

of the great strengths of the firm was that we did patent litigation along with other

litigation very successfully; there had been really I think only one other sort of fairly

major City firm that have succeeded in that, and that's Herbert Smith. And, it was

more a question of who you were articled to and whether you had the opportunity to

work in that particular area, and I was quite lucky about that, although it suddenly

took a turn soon after I was qualified, because I was snatched away from that to go to

foreign parts.

So was it fairly arbitrary to whom you would be articled?

No, because George Dennehy[ph] was the connection, each partner could take two.

But more generally?

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090A

More generally, I think it was a great deal of patronage in that sense, that you know,

you took people on recommendation, you know, felt they had done the right thing, but

you would be introduced to somebody. It was, he would feel a responsibility

obviously to see how you were getting on, and I do, I have found recently in all kinds

of my own records rather than family records, from my uncle and my mother, letters

that passed between my uncle and George Dennehy[ph] about my career, how am I

getting on. I didn't know he had taken so much interest. And that pleased me. And

George Dennehy[ph] used to write to him about how I was getting on at law school.

Very typical of his humour, this is George, `He did not get an A,' in some paper or

other, `for the very simple reason that they don't avoid[??] grades,' you know, but, you

know, he let it half sink in that he had missed the target or something, because my

uncle would have assumed that I would have had to get a First or an A or something.

But, they did keep in touch about how I was getting on, and I worked not so much

directly with George, after a time, as the firm started to grow, and particularly when I

came back from Brussels, but with David DeKahl[ph] who really I think set up a

proper Company Department. But I only saw that when I got back from Brussels

which was in '63.

In terms of, I'm just trying to get a sense of the system of articles at that time. You

would be articled to someone on the basis of sort of personal knowledge; does that

mean that actually you would naturally gravitate towards their specialism just simply

because you were articled to them rather than developing something that you were

actually interested in?

No it wasn't, it wasn't as clear-cut as that, because I was articled to George, it may

have been by chance, I'm sure, because I had been introduced to him some time

before, he made sure that I, you know, he would have a place available, I can see that

that was probably right, but I didn't sit in his room ever, and I've seldom actually kept

one of my article clerks later on in my room, it was a matter of choice, and there were

plenty of people where they could get very good experience. It was less personal than

that, although he certainly did take an interest. But I did sit in the room of another

partner, and of course George wouldn't have done conveyancing and I did sit in Gear

Martin's room for a time, and, I got a pretty good experience. But it wasn't that

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090A

personal a thing that you were really linked, you linked your career to the man you

were articled to, and indeed one wouldn't necessarily want that because you wouldn't

necessarily know what kind of part of the law you were going to follow up on. But,

Gordon Simmons and George Dennehy[ph] didn't have article clerks sitting in their

room, they were much too grand for that.

And what would be the relationship between the articles, those two?

Between the article clerks?

Mm.

Oh very very friendly. After a time I came to share a room with Alan Fisher[ph], it

was called the Glass House, it looked like a 19th century glass lift, probably had been

at one time in Threadneedle Street, and we sat in this and sort of rather exposed to

everybody's passing gaze. Everything was very tiny and would have been seen as

rather makeshift then. There were telephones, I think the telex was just coming in, of

course there was no fax. Gordon Simmons was wildly interested in office

improvements, and I can tell you more of how I suffered from that when I got to

Brussels and then when I got back into London, but he was very interested in that.

People can't now conceive, and I'm almost ashamed to say that you know, the telex

was new, but it was new everywhere, it wasn't that there were other things available,

and what an inefficient invention it was really. Would it be appropriate to give you

some kind of feel for how the office actually worked?

Absolutely, yes please.

There was a typing pool, elderly ladies most of them, sat there and gossiped and, in a

way that I, you know, never having done any National Service had never heard the

like, it was quite incredible. And some of them are still alive, as pensioners. I'm

proud of that, I actually do remember quite a lot of names from that time. We keep in

touch with our pensioners, I think we're very good at that, and they come in to parties

and they will certainly come for a centenary party very soon. There were some big

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090A

anniversary parties given, not just as I arrived, '56 was of course the 60th anniversary,

I missed that, but I do remember the next decade, '66, and you know, every decade

after that. So that, I think there was a feeling of activity, and terror; I think that to be

asked to go just down the corridor to Gordon Simmons, it was very much the

headmaster's study sort of thing, not actually to be reprimanded but there was just this

great gulf. And, all that was very friendly. And, in those days luncheon vouchers

were the thing, but Gordon, this is very typical of him, we didn't just buy somebody's

luncheon vouchers, you know, for use in cafés and restaurants or whatever, we had to

have our own, which of course greatly limited the number of places that would take

them, and it was printed on these luncheon vouchers, as it had to be by law if you

were going to get any tax benefit, or not have a tax disadvantage, that you couldn't

spend them on alcohol, groceries, and all this sort of thing. But, for your three shilling

luncheon voucher we used to walk across London Bridge all the way from

Threadneedle Street to the George at Southwark, I'm sure you know it, where you

could have your beer and a very very good sort of ploughman's lunch and still have

some change for your groceries on the way back. Well you're not supposed to get

change. And then as the firm grew it became really quite impossible though Gordon

Simmons was slow to recognise the fact because, you know, the cashiers were sort of

getting, `Who are you?' and sending out cheques and postal orders for some minuscule

amounts. Well it had to start limiting the number of places that you could use these

luncheon vouchers in and they had to abandon the system, but it was very typical of

this sort of air of patronage generally that we had to have our own, although nobody

else did. And, it was in many ways a very easy existence. Before the word processor

and the fax, it was another era; those really changed the whole pace and stress of life,

very much for the worse as far as the professionals are concerned, though not perhaps

the worse for their pockets because they've grown very much, but I think they were the

great...the great change came then. I went to meetings, negotiating meetings, always

with another solicitor or a partner. It might be for some huge agreement for lease or

something of this kind, or acquisition agreement. The corporate lawyers, the

Company Department, tended to regard themselves as a cut above for some reason,

the humble conveyancers as the conveyancers called themselves, `I'm only a humble

conveyancer' in this rather joky manner, and quite senior partners used to say this

across the table. But for all that they still marked up a draft agreement, initially in red,

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090A

the first set of [INAUDIBLE], and then in green, and then in blue and however it went

on, in manuscript with riders clipped on. And at the end of that negotiation it would

take a long time to have this typed, and thought could be give to it too, where all that

has gone. But the company lawyers and the IP lawyers also had to follow that sort of

format, and while it was expected that an agreement would take a long time to be

negotiated and prepared for an engrossed signature. And we did not have quills and

deed boxes, we were ahead of that, though many many firms in London still do, fifty

years later, forty, fifty years later, still have deed boxes around the place. I think we

were apart from that image, and Gordon I think was one of the people that prised us

away from that, quite rightly. But things were of a completely different era, and a lot

of people find that very hard to see just how far things have moved in a fairly short

time.

But documents and agreements were typed?

Yes.

By the aforesaid typing pool?

Typing pool, or secretaries, and that began to grow, but it was typed in that way, yes,

yes. And drafts were got out. Now the typing pool was, I won't say supplemented, it

was rather the other way around I suppose, by partners' secretaries. Article clerks had

to get their work done as best they could by getting on the right side of somebody in

the typing pool. Partners of course, and some solicitors too, you know, had their own

secretaries and of course if you were sitting and working for a partner or another

solicitor you could have access to her as a secretary. So, it was, as I dare say it is in

some ways still now a question of making oneself agreeable and getting on the right

side of people, and making sure you got taken around. And people were very friendly,

I think the sort of, the awe that the Senior Partner then inspired was not a bad thing,

and they didn't do anything to get rid of it, I think they quite enjoyed it, but below that

the younger partners and solicitors were extremely friendly, well disposed. And as I

say we used to walk across, three or four of us, the bridge, generally the same place

who were so accommodating to us with our food.

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090A

And, the article clerks were male?

Yes, they were male, as far as...for quite a long time. I can't remember who was the

first female article clerk. We were very very early on though to have female

solicitors, and among the very first in the City to have female partners, we have a very

high proportion for the City of female partners, I think it's about 12, 15 per cent,

which is quite a high number, considering how many... And that goes actually for a

broad range of practice areas too. So I think we've been fairly forward on that.

So you were in another male world in a sense.

Yes, that's true, that's true. Didn't trouble me unduly. Perhaps it should have.

And, it just interests me that, you know, Gresham's and to a certain degree Cambridge

and then...

Yes, that's true. I had a social life at home. I didn't go to Cambridge or come to the

City and find that I was working with girls, I didn't expect that, of course Cambridge

was then very very, unless you went to Girton and Newnham, you weren't going to

find girls at King's. So, that wasn't a trouble. There were girls on the Law Society

school of law courses, and there were plenty of girls, you know, studying at

Cambridge, but not in your own college. And there were no girls at Gresham's, quite

right, that's absolutely right, at that time. But, I had a social life, and it was partly

because of the traumas of social life that I accepted this offer to go to Brussels, it was

a wonderful interlude, to get away from some of those stresses.

Do you want to talk a little about that?

Shall I?

Mm.

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090A

Yes. I had I suppose a rather mixed social life in that I was quite close to article clerks

here; they didn't come home to Bayswater, and the people that I may have spent the

weekend with or gone to the theatre with didn't come and meet me in the City. But, I

remember being a member of a little group, I think they were all Jewish, who had a

little investment club, it was a social thing really, and we used to meet, it must have

been on a Sunday of course because some of them would have been Orthodox, and

that was always very boring to me, that one couldn't meet and go out with a lot of

these people because they couldn't. So I suppose it would have been on Sunday

afternoons which is not a very exciting time of the week I don't think anyway. And

we used to go out really walking, that kind of thing, and I planned actually to do one

or two trips, and I remember somebody Cedric Foulkes[ph] who I don't think did

anything particular, but lived in some block of flats north of Regent's Park, and

various other people, Alfred Magnus who was a Sephardic Jewish family, and...

These were people you had met through your family?

Yes. They were just social connections that I had met in various ways. I can't even

remember particularly, and I am not in touch with any of them now, but I remember

being pursued by a girl who was much more educated than any that I had bumped into

up to that time, but was pursuing me too hotly for my liking. And I remember a

conversation with my father which was I thought very perceptive and beautifully

handled by him, I may have mentioned this before, I don't know. At that time we

went most weekends to visit either his mother or my other grandmother, and I

remember particularly one Sunday afternoon my father driving this old Rover, a

massive car, through sort of, towards Golders Green somewhere to visit my

grandmother and he was saying in very tactful terms that he thought that, Rebecca her

name was, was really quite interested, and that probably I didn't realise that I was

actually enabling her to think that I was leading her on, or not discouraging her. I was

actually quite shocked because I hadn't realised that it was so apparent outside. My

father handled it quite beautifully, a model, because he didn't want to say very much

and he didn't want to antagonise me, and I actually greatly appreciated how he handled

it, even then.

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090A

End of F5090 Side A

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090B


.....will have the kind of `Decline and Fall' kind of ring about it now, but it was a

wonderful solution for me of this little domestic uncertainty that I should be invited to

go to Brussels, and that happened at that time, very much at that time, not by any

outward forced coincidence of these things I'm quite certain, but...

So what was the problem with Rebecca then?

Rebecca was strident, and I think would not have been a very good match for me. I

didn't break with her roughly or rudely, I think she was, as I was impressed with her

that she had been reasonably well educated and knew a bit of Mozart and had actually,

I'm not sure where she went to university but she had got a degree, which was

relatively unusual for people that I knew socially outside the office, I think she was

pushy. Maybe, it wouldn't have necessarily been seen like that now, but I didn't want

to commit myself to, you know, going out with Rebecca. I had been out with her

occasionally but I didn't want...it was, you know, `Are you going out?' `This is my

boyfriend.' That wasn't what I wanted. And I had actually got a fairly clear-cut idea

that it was unlikely that I would marry a girl from Jewish north-west London, partly

because of this, because if I, you know, was the first member of my family to go to

university, it was very hard to find friends who had...certainly they were very able,

very brilliant but hadn't actually had much in the way of after school education. So,

that was a difficulty. And my father's warning I think was very timely, because I

could easily have found myself entangled, I suppose that's...

So, was he saying to you that he didn't think she was suitable, was that really what he

was saying?

No he was much, much more perceptive than that.

But, was actually his underlying message nonetheless?

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090B

No. I think that was his thought but it wasn't a message; his message was, I don't

think you realise that you are getting yourself entangled. He didn't say whether he

thought it was a good thing for me to stay with Rebecca or go with Rebecca or not.

The message that came across is, and I think he was right, I didn't realise, I was

unsophisticated, that I was getting myself entangled. She did, and I knew that she did,

and before I had had this conversation with my father I felt that she did, and was

taking advantage. And when I realised that my father could see that, I resented, not

him at all, but I resented that I had been put in that position, and perhaps it was very

naive of me, no doubt it was. But it couldn't have been done by her, Rebecca, except

in the knowledge that I was naive, and therefore she was - I suppose I'm rationalising

it now - she was using that, because she actually was out to get me. And I think that if

it had worked and I had, you know, liked the idea of inevitably getting engaged to

Rebecca, because there was no such thing as a sort of casual dating in those days, and

of course remember I was still living at home, not very good for me, I had continued

to live at home in fact until I went to Brussels, and that was the first time I left home

apart from of course Cambridge, but then I was only living at Cambridge during the

term time. So, that was...that was actually quite a blow to my pride, that I had not

handled this well, that I might have been if you like discomposed by all this. My

father handled that beautifully, he didn't say he thought she was unsuitable; that would

have probably been counter-productive. He had had a very difficult time with my

immediately older brother, and I may have mentioned that I'm not sure, and, I don't

think because of that either, I think he...I suppose he might have thought, a word to the

wise, he just didn't say that. If he had said that, that would have been worse. It was a

very well handled conversation, and I don't even think I reacted very strongly in the

car, and it was very, very good that it was in the car, you know, we got out and went

in... I thought it was very very beautifully done, and the more I think of it, the more I

think it's a model in many ways. Of course it's not likely to recur now, because people

are more sophisticated and casual affairs, nothing at all, but to have a casual affair

then had consequences, inevitably, and so, I think they could see very clearly that, my

parents must have seen that I was this very definitely unsophisticated chap who was

going to get caught if I wasn't careful. Nothing as direct as that in the conversation.

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090B

I was interested in this, if you like almost a cut-off between your working life and

your social life, they seem to be quite separate. Was that typical or conscious?

It wasn't conscious, I didn't set about making a sort of dichotomy like that, but it

certainly worked out that way. I didn't have close friends from other law firms, I

didn't have close social friends that came to work in the City until much later. And I

think I probably had a very narrow, sheltered life, and I was complaining of being

sheltered when I left Cambridge, but I didn't develop well socially, either in the City

or socially at home in Bayswater and all that went with Bayswater either. And, I

suppose that may have been worrying to my parents, I'm sure it was. And it's a

product perhaps too of not wanting to dance and not wanting to, you know, go out to

what was then a new scene of course; the Fifties and the disco was just beginning to

start, not even the disco but just café life of a rough and ready kind was just beginning

to start. So I think they were concerned, and if this was going to be the beginning, and

what was I, in my early twenties still, mid-twenties, then it was perhaps a bit late but

at any rate it wasn't a very good start, I think that's how they saw it. Things moved

very quickly after that of course, but, I think that it was a very very timely...

So was it typical amongst other articles to have this slight dichotomy between work

and...?

Yes very definitely, I'm sure that's so. I think so, I think working life was one thing,

and certainly among article clerks I think that was how it was, and you went down to

the suburbs or you commuted out of town and you were either engaged or married or

had friends around, but I don't think you had an opportunity, or a particular wish, to

bring friends from the City to your home, or to go out, out of hours. That was a thing

that developed, rather self-consciously and very successfully, later on, because, as the

firms grew larger they came from, they knew each other's backgrounds very much

more, and it was, there was much more possibility of entertaining in each other's

houses and things of that kind. I can't remember any other article that I brought home,

and that wasn't, you know, for any matter of principle at all, until a much later period

that would have been.

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090B

And what about, thinking more of partners now, or solicitors rather than article clerks,

in terms of socialising with clients, would there be any socialisation at all between

them?

Not with articles, I think it would be unusual to take article clerks to a party at a

client's house, very unusual. I think that partners, certainly the older partners, were

seen as remote. Gordon was some exception to that later on, and we had the usual

sort of junketings in the office at Christmas, but George Dennehy[ph] for example

was terribly remote from all that, and I do remember memorably that he did come to a

Christmas party on a sort of linoleum floor place in Threadneedle Street and, he was

persuaded to come in and he carried this cigarette very elegantly, a kind of elderly

Noël Coward figure he looked, and one of these famous ladies from the typing pool

came and threw up all over his beautiful shoes. I remember him sort of drawing back

in sort of horror. [LAUGHS] It's the kind of sight that you can't ever wipe out of

one's mind. I don't think he came again in my memory. And it was that kind of

atmosphere. So, I don't think that they were unfriendly, I don't want to give that

impression, and Gordon Simmons was actually very much better than that because he

used to have cricket matches at his, you know, out at Essex at [INAUDIBLE] or

whatever the name of the house was, not that I played cricket, remember I'm not very

good at cricket, but... And things began to develop much more. We have an S & S

club, [INAUDIBLE] club, and we have a review, I wrote a letter to the review when

we opened the, when I opened the Brussels office, that sort of thing, so it's much the

same sort of period. And, it was light-hearted, people got on very well, but I don't

think they mixed their social lives at home, or elsewhere, and their office lives. I

think that was probably, now you're asking me, nobody's ever put it to me quite like

that, I think it was almost deliberate, didn't want to sort of lay everything on the line at

once perhaps. I'm rationalising that, you know, quite a few years after the event,

nobody's ever pressed on that.

But you were suggesting that partners would visit clients socially.

Yes there was some social connection certainly, there must have been, although I, you

know, don't remember that for quite a long time. And of course when I would have

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090B

been a partner taking a client to the opera or something, fine, no problem, later on, but

not commonly at home, although it became more, obviously one would do that much

more and go to clients' homes later on as a partner certainly. I can remember some

clients' comes very much later, in later years, John Denny[ph] for example, yes, very

much so, because he was the sort of person that liked to invite you to his home, and I

went down with Dalia and, you know, even with my children, and that was...but that

was even then a bit unusual, although I found him congenial. Some partners who

went shooting for example, Sir David Wilson, you know, went shooting up in

Scotland or wherever with Sir Denis Mountain; I was invited, I didn't particularly

want to spend my weekend with them so I didn't go on those sort of things. Tony

Ratcliffe who was the chief general manager of Eagle Star, a very congenial man

indeed, used to go to the opera. So, I think one found a way, but I don't think I was

invited or expected, and he didn't expect to be invited to my home. It was then

becoming quite a big firm, and unless you did know somebody quite well socially I

don't think there was a great effort made of that sort. Now I think more self-conscious

efforts are made, and I think people bring in many more clients through social

contacts and the other way around.

Mm, it's interesting. You mention that most of your friends at least at home were

Jewish.

Yes that's right.

Again, I'm interested in your continuing feelings about your Jewishness really.

I think it was actually a kind of inertia actually. And I saw friends, John Barratt for

example and others too, that I went down to the country to stay with, and they came to

me in London, and their parents, because Lady Barratt as she became, you know, was

the sort of person that tended to, if you asked her son, and she might come too, you

know, it was like that, I remember it very well, she came to my 21st party, and she

was very good, she was really delightful. My parents, most unusually, you know,

went to stay in their house in Summerhill, it was in the Midlands at the time, before

they had moved to Bath at the beginning of the Sixties, and it was good and we got on

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090B

very well. And, I think that was exceptional. We all went off to Stratford, you know,

for days at the theatre and that kind of thing, and that was something that the Barratts

greatly enjoyed doing and we did too. We might have gone for Christmas and I

remember going with my children and going to Shakespeare there, you know, some

years later, that, and they would drive over and, terrific time. And...

So your friends were Jewish simply because they were the friends you would have

associated with through your parents?

That's right, yes it wasn't a conscious thing that, when I'm sort of Bunburying[ph] kind

of thing, that when I was down in the country I only saw gentiles and up in town I

only saw Jews.

Or the other way round.

Or the other way round. But, living in a flat in Bayswater I didn't set out to make any

particular set of friends. I think this must have worried my parents, they didn't say so

particularly, and in fact I suppose a different cast of personality would have reacted

differently to their suggestions. I do recall for example that they wanted me to be

friendly with a man called Steven Laurie[p], much my sort of age whose father was

Michael Laurie[ph] who was a great property tycoon, not because the father was a

property tycoon but because my parents were friendly with his parents and they

thought it might work out very nicely, but often those rather heavy-handed things are

counter-productive, and so it was. Generally they were not heavy-handed and I was

still rather inert. So, I think that, we're talking about a period when I was working

very hard at Law Society exams; whatever social life I had at that time was partly with

friends from Cambridge, because I continued to see some of those in London who

came up to see us both, I continued to see some of those in London and at weekends,

Cambridge friends, who were generally very much more exciting, either than the

office or than casual, not very serious acquaintances, largely Jewish, in Bayswater. It

had, rationalising it afterwards now, a glamour about that sort of life which was

exciting. I do recall Lady Barratt making very earnest efforts to interest me in finding

somebody for John, in none too hushed a whisper. I recall also that just before they

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090B

again moved down to Bath her saying in again none too hushed a whisper, `This is the

man that Mary' - that's John's older sister, `is going to marry,' Martin Scott, you know,

and I'm sure it was in everybody's quite audible hearing. And I recall being one of the

ushers at that wedding, and I greatly enjoyed it, and I think all John's friends from

Cambridge, John was the best man and all John's friends from Cambridge were ushers

in this church, and I had never had, as you might imagine, had to walk down the aisle

in my Moss Bros gear to say, `The bride has arrived'. Peels of organ music.

So were you going to synagogue at this time?

I did a little, yes. I didn't go regularly every Shabbat. I did go at New Yar, and at

Kippur. And that was at St. Petersburgh Place. But it was lapsing fairly fast, and I

didn't keep up with that, for example, as Amnon, my elder son, did after his Bar

Mitzvah, in circumstances much more agin if you like, because he was, if I was in a

minority in Gresham's he was in a pretty severe minority too in Winchester. But I did

go then. I was rather a goodie-goodie I would say, I didn't smoke, I didn't drink. I

remember that my father rather indicated that, you know, Jewish people didn't drink,

not that they were teetotal but you know, it was one of the vices that you did associate

with, you know, drunkenness. Of course I saw an enormous amount of drunkenness

in Cambridge and in the City, but it didn't appeal to me particularly. I never enjoyed

smoking, and I recall, of course my father did, and that moment of coming out after,

coming out of the synagogue after Kippur was something incredible for him. We used

to walk from our - shall I just tell you about that?

Mm, please.

We used to walk from our flat in Inverness Terrace, it was quite a nice flat, the area

has changed a good deal, we walked a quarter of a mile perhaps, a little more, to St.

Petersburgh[ph] Place, for Kippur, and when we came out of the very stale air of the

synagogue after, some had been there, you know, all day, we came out at about sort of

teatime, about 3, that was not the end of course, my father sometimes stayed in all the

time, but he generally came out for an hour or so, we walked home, rested for a little,

obviously didn't eat or even clean your teeth, water musn't pass your lips, one was

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090B

self-conscious about all this. And then, having laid down for an hour or so we used to

walk back. I remember my father just put a packet of cigarettes in his inside coat on

the return journey, obviously he didn't open them, and then when he came out, almost

fainting because we were very conscious then...the first thing he used to do was to

light a cigarette. I don't how he could have walked home. But his moment of sort of

beatification was not to be missed. He didn't enjoy it, perhaps it's not beatification,

but he had to go through it. And we had his huge cups of tea before breaking our fast

back at home and it was all ready. And, I remember that very well. But I didn't

smoke. I didn't do anything very much it seems.

And at home, were you still relatively observant at home?

No. My parents kept a moderately kosher house in that I think the food, you know,

the ingredients were kosher, but they weren't kept separate in the way that would have

been required, and you didn't wait three hours between your milk and meat or

whatever. I was contemptuous of those things but not in a way to offend anyone, I

wasn't going to say, `Why do you go in for all this nonsense?' And my parents weren't

eating kosher food out, they didn't consciously go for prawns and bacon, but it wasn't

a problem for them if it was the kind of restaurant that did serve those things, and I am

quite sure that, you know...I think they actually got it about right. None of their three

sons or any of their grandchildren, you know, became rebellious about this, `Why

don't you keep a kosher house?' and so they were lucky in that sense perhaps. But, it's

difficult, we always said, as everybody does I'm afraid, people draw the line in a

different place. But, after my, Ken, my middle brother's marriage, and he went to

Canada, I think they must have felt they had got it wrong in some way, not that they

should have kept a kosher house or anything like that, don't misunderstand me, that

they had misjudged it, that he had gone away and, I think they did consciously relax a

bit, and I think my mother was very upset deep down, she never went on about it but I

think that she was upset, I think it was a great loss to her.

So family occasions would be the four of you, would they, or, the three of you? Your

other brother.

Alan Carr

C736/02/05 F5090B

My other brother, well he had got married, and he lived in Stanmore and then Mill

Hill. He married in 1949 so...

So would he come with his wife...?

On Friday night he would come, yes, and, week in, week out, it worked like that.

They must have gone at some stage to her parents', whether it was alternative or not I

can't remember exactly. But yet another stifling pattern set up, because it was the

dreadful regularity of those things, particularly as Daphne, my sister-in-law, she was,

there was nothing bad about her but she just sat silent.

End of F5090 Side B

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091A


So maybe that's where we could start.

Yes. Forgive me if I'm not absolutely on the spot, because I'm doing the same thing in

parallel with this for our history, so, while it's good for me it may be more confusing

for what gets[??] on the tape.

As I remember it last time we had just begun to talk about your early years in the firm

and I think you had just begun to describe being summoned in and said that you might

be, you had been asked to go to Brussels. I wonder if you could start from that point

again and just remind me of the circumstances of you being sort of summoned really.

Yes. I may have mentioned but certainly it's relevant that I was one of a rarer species,

a gentleman article clerk, in the sense that I didn't take a salary, then £300 a year I

think, but came without a salary, because I had to learn some law and went away for

fairly generous leave. The other advantage was that I could move into some of the

more interesting departments, they weren't very fully-fledged at that time, and I got

into the Company Department and came more in contact with Gordon Simmons, who

was really substantially the owner of the firm, I think I mentioned the nephew and son

of the twins who founded the firm, and he with George Dennehy[ph] were well

recognised to be the pillars of the whole establishment. Gordon was keen to establish

in Europe, he had led something of a recruiting campaign for more article clerks and

solicitors, potential trainees, potential partners, and it was quite revolutionary to pay

article clerks, although I hadn't taken that particular bait. And not very long after I

qualified, in 1961, and I was starting to establish myself as I thought in the Company

Department, I was summoned in to his office looking out over into Threadneedle

Street, No. 1 Threadneedle Street, a great address in those days, and he said would I

like to go to Brussels. At that time nobody in the office knew that we were going to

open an office, much less who might go there to do it. And that time was I suppose

about the New Year 1992[sic], and it didn't take me very long to come back and say,

`Yes I would like to go. And my salary, because I was getting a salary then as a

solicitor, was increased to £1500 a year, and I went down to Ealing to a little Polish

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091A

lady, of all persons, to teach me French, because although I could read French I was

much too shy to speak it. And I remember telling her the plot of Don Cowel[ph] and

other things of this kind, in French, which was thought to be probably the best way of

getting me ready to go. And we opened on the 4th of July, and I sent a fairly

exuberant letter to that effect to the editor of the `S & S Review', announcing that.

The negotiations between Heath and De Gaulle for Britain's entry into the Common

Market were in full swing. We wanted them to succeed as a business, we had many

clients who were in any event heavily involved in things that would be affected by

competition law, and it all seemed very exciting. I was the only person, apart from the

secretary I shortly engaged, in the office, which was at 82 Rue De Namur, just inside

the old Boulevard above a rather distinguished oriental carpet shop. It had not very

many offices, it didn't need very many; it had a nice skyline with a roof or hard

balcony that you could get out onto and see the Palais de Justice and bits of old

Brussels. And it was a good place to be. I had personal reasons that I may have

mentioned before for being glad to get away from London for a time. I found a flat,

and I had to start finding some clients.

So, just to sort of go several steps back, first of all was it an unusual step for a firm

such as Simmons & Simmons to open up a European office?

Yes. There were other offices I think in Europe, I think in Paris certainly we were not

the first; we were certainly the first City firm to open in Brussels, others hadn't taken

the E.C. negotiations themselves that seriously. Other who did open in the ensuing

months closed, or merged them with other European offices that they had. We stuck it

out, so it was...it wasn't a dead end, we had a lot to do there, despite the breakdown of

those negotiations, but it was certainly very unusual, and there weren't many City

firms with European offices, but we were the first in Brussels.

Do you remember what Gordon Simmons said to you in terms of a brief, what sort of

brief he gave you?

I sent this message back and it was published in the `Review', although he wasn't the

editor he spoke for the editor, let's put it that way, and I said we had established a

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091A

bridgehead on the Continent of Europe in a sort of Churchillian phrase, and he sent a

fax back - not a fax, I'm sorry, a telex back, saying, `Consolidate bridgehead. Good

luck,' and that sort of thing. He was very proud of the Brussels office. It was in fairly

easy access by boat and train, he didn't enjoy air travel, he preferred to get up early

and drag everybody across with him by train, and he made a lot of contacts there. It

was very clear that there was a great deal to be done by us in building up European

contacts, not just clients but with local lawyers; not just Brussels but Antwerp and

Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, as well as Paris. So that it was a good centre for

that sort of thing. I and my successor, John Calvert[ph] who was a property lawyer

who came to take over from me after about ten months, had to really get to know

officials in various departments at the Commission, which was itself not such a huge

bureaucracy then as it is now, and those contacts were very useful. Brussels was I

think rather different from now, a bit provincial, good cinema, not much else in the art

field that was very very different from anything you could see in London. But it was

quite a different atmosphere, and it was very good to see how `avocats' operated, still

as a study in the back of their own private houses. You had to know the right person

for the right sort of advice. The idea of the big Anglo-Saxon corporate firms with

departments and many partners was still to come, it was not well-known in London

yet, but it was certainly much more developed in London than anywhere on the

Continent, and I think it was the growth of the E.C. itself which stimulated the change

in the law in 1967 for partnerships, legal partnerships to be allowed to have more than

twenty partners.

Of course.

So it was ironical that we had seen how unprepared many Continental law firms were

for the competition, and perhaps this was one of the things that stimulated the wish to

grow and retain talent that would otherwise have split off very quickly.

So the idea was to attract European customers rather than merely acting on behalf of

British customers with interests in Europe?

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091A

Both, but certainly...certainly both, and certainly be able to find advice for U.K.

clients over there, because while we could advise on E.C. matters, and certainly U.K.

English law, we couldn't advise on Belgian law or German commercial law, and it

was very important to get to know firms who were competent to do that. And side by

side with the establishment of the Brussels office the firm became a member of one of

the very first of the, what would now be called network of legal clubs, it was called

the Club d'Abogados, where one of the top firms of Madrid and ourselves took a lead

in establishing contacts with, generally one firm in each of the main E.C. and then

west Europe generally. And, it was more than a social club. Guerrigues[ph] was the

name of the Madrid firm, and still is, and Antonio Guerrigues[ph] took it very

seriously, and gradually expanded this club to many of the top firms in Latin America,

and he had some of Gordon Simmons' great drive, and it's been a very successful

enterprise for like-minded firms to work well together in quite a loose association. I

think a model of its kind in many ways. But they have to be of like mind, not those

who want to be so tight in their arrangements that they lead to very strict associations.

And those two developments, our own Brussels office with this Club d'Abogados was

a very important development.

And how were you organising your work? I mean you said you were on your own

with a secretary, how were you, what were you actually doing?

The secretary was very competent, she herself, Regine Olo[ph], was the daughter of a

Brussels avocat who just answered an advertisement, and she was very competent

indeed, we were very lucky to get her, and so competent that in fact she got married to

a young partner in, I think it was Dewy Ballantine[ph], one of the top American law

firms anyway who had an office Paris, and Paris had an overriding attraction I think

for anybody from Brussels who was a woman, just as most Belgian men seem to look

to London, I think that's still possibly a generalisation no doubt but possibly true. But

she was very competent. The actual work load, a lot of it had been prepared

beforehand. There were dates for filings of agreements that might be thought

restrictive and fall within the Treaty of Rome where they governed trade within the

E.C., or could affect such trade, and even though the U.K. was not and didn't then

become a member, agreements of that kind could be caught. And there was a great

Alan Carr

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deal of work to be done of that sort, and we took on an assistant to help with that sort

of thing. When it became apparent that the negotiations were not going to succeed,

`De Gaulle Says No' was the headline of course when it broke down, it became very

important to get out much more and travel. We had clients who wanted to set up

factories, wanted to get involved in all kinds of activity in the Common Market, not

only U.K. clients, U.S. clients. I had already started to act for a company, not now in

existence, called American Can, which made tin cans for beer and all the rest of it by

very modern processes and they were establishing themselves in Hamburg, and I went

there to see German lawyers and set up agreements for them, get them registered, all

that sort of thing. So it was a great fillip to our practice that we had this base; we

could get to know officials in the Commission, they like that, and when clients came

over to Brussels we could provide them with a base for their own negotiations as well

as for instructing us. It worked quite well in that way, but it was long and hard. What

developed much more slowly was advice on Belgian law, Belgian commercial law,

and that hasn't taken off as well as perhaps it might have done. I don't think the

potential was seen until we were quite long-standing members of the Commission.

But in Paris for example where we have established much more recently in the

Eighties, we do have what is in effect now a complete Anglo-French partnership,

wholly owned within the firm, and that's very important to be able to give advice, not

just in two languages but on three systems of law if you take in the E.C. as well, with

credibility in London and in Paris or wherever to have partners who can have the

same, command the same respect in both capitals with French and English clients;

that's now I think the beginning of a proper global partnership when repeated outside

Europe and in other centres, but Brussels was very early days for that.

And what were most of the clients you were dealing with in those days, what were

they principally interested in? Purchasing properties, or purchasing...?

Less real estate, which would have involved really finding a Belgian notary, but

pharmaceutical companies, we acted, as I may have mentioned, for Beecham Group,

and, this was in the days before their merger with Smith Kline which was relatively

modern, and they had many agreements for development of penicillin and other things

at that time which had to be registered, considered for registration. The actual

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background to the work was probably done in London or elsewhere, but the filing of

these things and advice on the E.C. implications could be done from Brussels and

from London, and it was very useful to be able to have a base to do that sort of work.

So there was a background of that kind of work. Insurance also developed, we acted

for Eagle Star, and insurance and pharmaceuticals I suppose are two good examples of

international regulated businesses, insurance particularly a regulated business, so that

the implications of the Common Market, even in those days, were making themselves

felt. And it wasn't only the established clients at the U.K. that were providing a flow

of work, we did find people coming into the Brussels office who later, with their

connections, provided household name clients in London. I remember an outfit called

Nig[ph] Securities, Nigger-Brown[ph] for printing, which was later taken over by

Ozerlid[ph] which was a well-known, and probably is still quite a well-known name

in reprographics or whatever the word is, that brought us... At the time of the

takeover we came to know the managing director of Ozerlid[ph], and through no fault

of his own as we were later to establish there was a reference to Department of Trade

inspectors in England, I was back in London at that time, and I acted for him in

presentations to the inspectors, and that brought us a whole new line of clientele. He

was later approached by Rothschilds to lead a management buy-in for BSM, so that

there's a direct line between the Brussels office and the connection which led us to act

for BSM and still we maintain that through all kinds of buy-outs and flotations and all

the rest of it. It's a good example of a household name client that came to us

originally in one guise or another through the Brussels office. And there have been a

number of others. The actual legal work, corporate work, was much less out there, but

it was the change of scene in every conceivable way that was so refreshing. And I

originally accepted to go for six months and stayed for ten before my successor was

found and groomed to take over. He had arrived in the firm the same time more or

less as I, qualified at much the same sort of time, John Calvert[ph], and some of the

things that one heard about the Brussels office and its strengths and limitations have

not gone away from international offices ever since, however big the firm. To some

extent they are an act of faith. We couldn't expect, and I had to make this clear, taking

my career somewhat in my hands, to Gordon Simmons who after all owned the firm,

that you couldn't expect the Brussels practice, the actual work that was done in

Brussels, to pay for itself. He knew that, but he at the same time as being broad brush

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091A

was also, perhaps rightly, rather petty by modern standards, so that if you took a client

out for dinner, practice development or something of that kind, quite rightly for a

young solicitor you had to give a good account of why the money was being spent. It

would be seen differently now, but the impossibility of a practice of that kind

conducting practice development, being on the streets in many different seminars all

round western Europe and doing enough work to pay your own rent, and that meant

the rent of my small flat, was actually fairly obvious but I felt I had to spell it out. Of

course I've heard many more eminent people lecture on those things since. And

Gordon very generously acknowledged that, he didn't want it to be seen as any kind of

criticism.

And what did he deem to be practice development then?

He expected clients to be looked after, and obviously he and other partners in London,

and I was certainly not a partner at that time, if possible would come over with a client

and do that, but obviously it was expected that where the client had an office in

Belgium or France that I would be more naturally the person to look after him. So

that as long as these things were properly charted and looked after, then I think he

realised that one actually had quite a strong point. Where it became more difficult,

and we had to take on more staff, was where you had clients in England, even though

not a partner I was beginning to get clients in England before I left, and certainly by

the time I came back to England, who wanted to use the Brussels office. And while I

was out there it was quite impossible to do a job for them in Brussels and do all the

other things for the Brussels office. I think it was just a very natural inability perhaps

at first to see that it wasn't just a department that he could pick up the phone to and it

all happened, and didn't involve any cost. But, I wouldn't want to exaggerate that, it

was just that Simmons & Simmons had been a fairly small concern, and he rightly

wanted to enlarge it and I think he saw that it was a different City firm from the others

and still is very different.

Was there a premium charge for the client then for the, you know, for using, having

access to the Brussels office?

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091A

No, but there wasn't enough staff initially to do his legal work, and do practice

development which meant going perhaps to Düsseldorf or to Amsterdam, there just

weren't enough people to go round. So that in a way it was a tribute to our success,

that's how he put it, that we had started to build up some clientele, or the need to go to

visit lawyers, and I couldn't be at the end of a phone all the time.

What did the local law firms think about your arrival?

I think we had good connections, and the fact that it didn't seem to be creating a huge

precedent where all the other top City firms came and stayed and set up vast offices, I

think meant that they weren't switched off the idea. Steven James[ph] was at that

stage a partner, and was to become Senior Partner, my predecessor in that role, and he

was really given the task at about this time of setting up an international department,

and I think he saw that a lot of the points that I was making were fair points, and

although I wasn't an international lawyer and was never in the, what became the

Intellectual Property Department, patents and trademarks and all the rest of it, but was

a corporate lawyer, that there was a limit to how much you could expect a small

branch office to achieve. I wouldn't want to exaggerate the...there wasn't an argument

but I thought we ought to get the thing straight before John Calvert[ph] came out, and

establish himself as my successor. It would have been very unfair to him if he had

been expected to go through the same sort of hoops. When I came back to...

Sorry, so were you seen as a generalist when you went, despite your interest in

company...?

I was seen as probably a person with the right personality to go out there, and an

administrator, fairly tidy-minded, and the actual work that we could foresee at the

outset as requiring to be done was something I could certainly take on.

But that changed?

And that began to develop, and began to be...required more people; I don't think it

required enormous skill. I wanted, I was quite sure even at that stage, because I had

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091A

got to know a little bit more about company law, I wanted to be in the Company

Department in London; even if I had been a partner in that department I don't think I

could have done much more in Brussels because it was much too early days, and in

fact I don't think any of the City firm partners now would actually have a corporate

partner, an English corporate partner, in Brussels, it would have been rather a waste.

But, I think that's why Gordon Simmons saw me as the right person to go out there,

because I, you know, had enough sort of nous to get around, although I had not

enough French, initially.

And I was interested in the connections that you developed with the European

Commission there which as you say was, it was fairly early days.

It was very early days, '56 of course, the Treaty of Rome, I forget precisely when they

established themselves with the Commission in Brussels, couldn't have been more

than five or six years, and it would have been very early days indeed if we had actually

entered the Common Market then, but they were already ready to receive people, and I

think it is probably a Continental trait that as long as you go and introduce yourself

they are prepared to have an informal conversation, not necessarily directly on any

particular problem, but just to say who you were and why you were there, they were

flattered by that. And it then gave a name, somebody you had shaken hands with, to

DG4 or whatever it might have become later on. Those sort of contacts are worth

quite a lot, simply because it enables a conversation to start and get on an easier

footing that much earlier.

And did you develop a social life around these contacts or anything?

Not so much in my time. I think one tried to do that. While the negotiations were

going on I think that was more difficult. There were three embassies, as I may have

mentioned, in Brussels at that time, there was the U.K. Embassy to Belgium, the U.K.

Embassy to the Common Market, and the negotiating team down at the Métropole.

When that closed I think people assumed that there was going to be more of a

breakdown generally, less professional contact; I think that has been proved to be

wrong, we were right to stay put. We had not opened the Brussels office on the back

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091A

of those negotiations, Europe was, you know, very much the flavour, and while we

would have liked them to succeed then it didn't actually, as I've said before, make that

much difference because a lot of people were doing business in the Common Market

and that was enough in many ways to get us involved.

Presumably people had been doing business in Europe before, and the only thing that

changed was the creation of the Common Market, is that what you're saying?

Yes, but that was set up before we established our office, and the Treaty of Rome and

the regulations made under the Treaty of Rome continued to affect people who were

trading in the Common Market.

That was the principal reason for the...?

Yes. And the Article, Article 75 and Article 76 came more and more to have an

effect, not because we finally joined the Common Market, but because we had clients

that were trading in Europe, whether within the Common Market or affecting trade

from outside. So that was the actual immediate need, and rather than give that sort of

work to somebody else, it was thought a good idea to do that kind of work.

Somebody would have to go with luggages and luggages, you know, if there was a

deadline, for filing these things, and while a lot of these things were prepared in

London it was much better to have our own office and do it from there and see where

it would lead. Perhaps not for me to say where it has led, but personally it was a good

experience. I was the corporate solicitor that started it; an English conveyancer as he

became, conveyancing partner, John Calvert[ph], took over from me, and from him

we had a litigator, John Bradshaw[ph], and Paul Chazal[ph], who finally has now

become international client partner, who speaks lots and lots of languages, took over

very soon after that. So it came, when it was more established it came into the hands

of somebody who was an abogado, understood all that sort of thing very much better.

By that time we were actually in the Common Market I think.

How large is the office now?

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091A

Now there is one partner who came to us from Linklaters, another partner on the E.C.

side. The Linklaters chap really does more in the nature of what is starting to be a

Belgian commercial practice, and about four solicitors. It's not large, it'll never be that

large, it's too close to London to be like our Paris or Hong Kong practices, but it's got

a base there, it's respected, and for a time we've shared offices with, first the Madrid

firm that I mentioned, Guerrigues[ph], and then by a German firm who has come to

share offices with us there as well. So, it's certainly developed very much. Where its

strength really is, and I think this is quite well recognised, is that those early contacts

with the Commission.....

End of F5091 Side A

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091B


.....on the back of those early contacts, and we have a strong Competition Department,

the law has changed a great deal, the OFT over here does some of it, but a lot of it is

done in Brussels. And I think that does get some of the sort of success story which

has taken a long time to bear fruit, if you like, putting it that way. And it's a parallel to

what's happened to competition law really if you take away the Brussels, Treaty of

Rome, aspects, in the Seventies, I can say from experience that references to the

Monopolies and Mergers Commission were done in the Company Department, and

the tactics for those were fought out between the lawyers and the merchant banks

involved. Now the first rumblings of anything that might look like something that

was referable, whether it was referred or not, are dealt with in the Competition

Department, and that's the growth of specialisation, whether it's got E.C. implications

or not. So, that was a good time to get involved with those sort of things. It certainly

was helpful to me in my later career, not that I went back to Brussels but to see a little

bit how it would work.

And, so you were there ten months.

Ten months, yes.

And what sort of hours were you working when you were there? Was it a hard job to

do, from your personal point of view?

It was a hard job to do in the sense that you always felt at the end of a line. Gordon

Simmons might walk into your office in London of course, and it was a little bit like

that. Not that he was an unreasonable man but he carried a good deal of weight and

authority. When you closed your office door in Brussels you could hear the chatter of

the telex and you wondered whether to just go back and see what it was. And to that

extent it was a responsibility, a good thing. But Brussels did have some

compensations, it's a very pretty place. I had a flat within easy reach of the office and

the Avenue Louise which is a very nice, pretty part of Brussels, I quite liked taking

clients out to Waterloo, and all that sort of thing was quite pleasant for a time. But it

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091B

is, I still think it is a little bit provincial, and I don't think that if you were living in

London or Paris that you would want necessarily to set up permanently, although

Anthony Or[??] has been there twenty years and loves it, and, more than that actually,

so that, not everybody agrees, perhaps some people like to live in a smaller place.

So you came back.

I came back in, must have been around April, May '93.

'63.

'63, I beg your pardon. Freudian slip no doubt. And, things began to take off much

more quickly then. I suppose there was a certain amount of éclat to come back to

London after that experience, and I started to get handed to me or pick up some quite

significant corporate clients, some very old-established ones, the George Cohen 600

Group I did some joint venture work for, and, although they have never become a big

client they have remained independent, and I was introduced to them as somebody

suitable to look after their corporate work, and I stayed with them for quite a long

time. And then Eagle Star really became an important client for me in its own right,

although they had been with the firm, we had been with them for a very long time

indeed. And in the Sixties that became a really much more lively connection, not that

I claim credit for that, they made a rights issue I recall, I think it was in 1969, which

sort of transformed their position as a City public company, and early in the Seventies

negotiated a double bid for a huge property company, they were already pretty large,

in property at that time themselves and they were going to double their portfolio, and

at the same time, it was a double bid, they wanted to acquire Grovewood Securities,

which was a conglomerate. Well this was unheard of for a composite insurer, and the

authorities were rather worried about all this, and it was referred to the Commission.

The takeover code was in its infancy still, very early, and we did in fact get the thing,

the bids lapsed and the City code had to be changed to require a condition to be

written into bids that if they were referred to the Commission before they had gone

unconditional then they would lapse. And we argued, I argued, because this was a

tactical matter where we convinced Eagle Star this was the better line to go than the

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091B

aggressive financial adviser, it was Hill Samuel, who I think were very good people,

they would have preferred to argue that this was the smart new way of doing takeover

bids and insurance companies were going to do this a great deal in the future, which

would have scared the Commission. It was an unusual situation because Eagle Star

had significant stakes in both the companies they were bidding for, they were both

recommended bids, and I'm sure it was right as well as being absolutely the fact that

these were defensive moves which weren't likely to create a precedent. And we, on

the reference to the Commission, must have been Christmas or very early in the new

year of '74, at the time of the three-day week, we had on our hands a full-blown

reference of both bids to the Commission, which was a very exciting time. You

remember that one side of the street went dark for three days and one side stayed

bright, and I remember Sir Brian Mountain who was then Chairman of Eagle Star very

kindly gave up his office, which was fairly large, at Threadneedle Street and at about

3.30 every January afternoon when ours was not an illuminated day, the rooked[??]

flunkies came in with candelabra and his office, which was renamed the Monopolies

Commission for the duration, work continued there. And that was on written

memoranda, plus the full panoply of a Commission reference and hearings, both

acquisitions were cleared and they subsequently took place. And that was a big

experience for me, because it showed that if you could get through to clients at the

right level, and that meant a chairman and the quite brilliant chief general manager

who was Tony Ratcliffe, that they would listen to, not just on the one hand this and on

the other hand that, which is of no use to anyone, but they would listen to tactical

guidance and they would allow you to put forward real argument, not in their place,

but you came to take a position which I think is very very typical of the City, I won't

say at its best, not for me to say that, but you shared the commercial decisions to some

extent with them. You didn't make them, it's more what happens in New York

perhaps, but you could see things from their point of view, from a board, a director's

point of view, from a chief general manager's point of view. The references I don't

think could possibly have succeeded without Ratcliffe and indeed Brian Mountain,

who was quite an elderly man then but any rate said that he had learnt a great deal

from the reference, and that kind of charm was... And he said this to the Commission.

Ratcliffe was an extraordinarily brilliant man who was an actuary who really rose

absolutely to the top of the insurance profession; it's very patronising for me to say

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091B

that but I mean that is so, the BIA and everybody else had him in very high esteem,

and he was the chief spokesman on all these things. Another thing that I learnt from

that reference was that it's not intelligent I think to assume that in a recommended bid

the sides won't discuss the raison d'être for the bid. Earlier, in a matter I hadn't been

involved in, there had been a bid for Boots by Glaxo, which had been followed by a

bid by Beecham; both those bids, and we acted for Beecham, were referred, and it was

the wisdom in the City that you musn't compare notes, because that will be held

against you, but how you could have a recommended bid without the boards of the

companies talking to each other and well understanding those things, eluded me, and

here in this particular case that I was closely involved with, it seemed to me that

although each board must be separately advised, and have its own financial advisers

and lawyers without any question, it wouldn't make sense if the thing didn't add up,

any more than if you put out your bid document it must make sense to the

shareholders who clearly must understand that this is something which people wanted

to happen, not fighting against themselves. And so it was a properly prepared

submission, led by Eagle Star because they were the bidder, and it carried more

weight in that way, I do believe.

Does this mean that you would organise, say a round-table discussion with other legal

advisers in the parties concerned? I mean would you physically do that?

We would let them see our own submission, but in the actual documents obviously

now it's understood that you must have all the figures on the monopoly side of it.

You've got to get together the right monopoly figures, you've also got to get together it

seemed to me then the right merger figures, to show that nobody should be suffering

as a result of this. This was a time before later, dare I say guidelines emerged in

Whitehall on these sort of subjects, when public interest issues were sufficient, if the

Commission so found, to wreck a bid, where they needn't necessarily be competition

issues as such, the scope for this kind of reference is in some ways narrowed, but in

those days you had to explain that what the board of the target company would be

afterwards, why there was no particular reason to fear there were going to be loss of

jobs, on the contrary, that they would be encouraged.

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091B

What were the other criteria that determined whether it would be an approved bid

under the Monopolies?

Well, it was this general issue of public interest which was particularly relevant,

because the fact that they...

We're talking about the Sixties and Seventies now, are we?

Yes, yes. Apart from newspaper mergers that we weren't concerned with, which

raised even wider sort of, and vaguer public interest issues, in commercial terms there

was no monopoly problem, although this composite insurer which already owned, to

everybody's admiration, a great deal of very valuable property, and was going to

double perhaps its interests in property, that was going to create no conceivable kind

of monopoly, and that was thought less of a problem. Whether it was right for them

to do it through the medium of a public takeover bid was then less well known, but

that wasn't so controversial as the proposal to take over a listed conglomerate. That

did attract a lot of attention, although the numbers weren't so huge. Here was a

company, Grovewood Securities, John Danny[ph] was its Chairman, barrister-at-law,

who had built up through joint ventures and other means, interests in a lot of quite

significant U.K. companies. And you had a situation where the Bank of England was

encouraging City institutions, whom also the Eagle Start therefore, to accept

responsibility for companies in which they had invested; what better therefore than to

ensure that John Danny[ph] remained with his very large stake in Grovewood, close to

Eagle Star. Tugging against that, but in fact accepting that there was no reason for

disquiet, was this public interest fear that composite insurance companies had no

business launching themselves into the industrial scene. We were able to show that

we already had something like 20 per cent I think it was of the Grovewood share

capital, that we were represented on the board of Grovewood through our deputy chief

general manager, that they had kept their affairs quite separate from Eagle Star but

that John Danny[ph], putting it rather crudely perhaps, was going to make his killing

at some stage or other, and while he would like it to be with Eagle Star, because he

had worked with Eagle Star, they had invested in this company, perfectly legitimately,

he would want to sell out at some stage, he wasn't going to be immortal, though I

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091B

think he's still alive. But that was the argument. And similarly with Bernard Sunley,

Eagle Star had this substantial investment and it was if you like a short-cut to buying

the properties individually, to take control of it in that way. So, the important thing

was to reassure the Commission that it wasn't going to create a precedent and it hasn't.

I don't think any other composite insurer has gone into this kind of scene, it grew on

its own facts. You could have presented the thing quite differently, you could have

said, Eagle Star have built up this stake, this is what they want to do now, and yes,

they may want to do it again. And that I think would have caused quite unnecessary

disquiet, but you can understand that somebody coming at it from a financial point of

view might have wanted to argue that this was the great technique of the Seventies,

and why not? I don't think, though, it would have served the boards of those

companies very well. So, I think that was the line we had to take. For me because I

was close to Eagle Star it was a great opportunity, and also with Grovewood, because

it was the kind of argument that they could well understand. Bernard Sunley had had

taken out of it the non-property elements for which we didn't act, and for them it was

really much more of a short-cut to buying the portfolio. They didn't retain a City life

after that, they weren't listed of course once the acquisition had gone through, and I

don't think there was anything particularly controversial about it. But Grovewood did

have a life afterwards, it was wholly owned, but they were given and left with a great

deal of autonomy, they changed their solicitors, and we were allowed to act for them

and that was delicate, but Eagle Star respected me enough to know that I wasn't going

to tell everything that came from the Eagle Star boardroom and that John Danny[ph]

knew that I would exercise a lot of discretion the other way. He was very loathe to

change his auditors, and anyway it was a relationship that worked very well, until

Eagle Star itself came under threat in the early Eighties. I've gone into that at some

detail because I think it shows, certainly how I was able to develop but I think to some

extent how the City and its institutions developed too.

It's very interesting. I was interested by the whole idea of public interest, and you

were just hinting that you felt that the concept of public interest had changed between

the Seventies and the Eighties. Could you say a little bit more about what you meant

by that?

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091B

Yes. I think that the words, the public interest, are still part of a Monopolies

Commission brief if you like, but the guidelines have changed because there are many

things, it's thought too wide and too vague to use the public interest in its very general

concept as sufficient for turning down a bid. And it's become linked very much more

to competition issues. But in the time that these particular proposals were put before

the Commission, they had the power to turn things down on much more general terms,

and...

Such as?

It may have been that the BIA, not in this case, could have said that they didn't think it

was a good thing for an insurance company to become direct owner of an industrial

company, and that might have been in some mysterious way against the public

interest, they could have got involved in union negotiations, say, and that might not

have been thought the right way for an insurance company to carry on. It's worth

remembering that Eagle Star was a composite, it still is a composite insurance group,

but it was Eagle Star Insurance Company, it was an insurance company that was

making the bid. They hadn't set up Eagle Star Holdings even, that came a little later,

but even so it wouldn't have masked the fact that, what funds were these being used?

Were they shareholders' funds, were they policy-holders' funds, were they suitable

investments, these properties, for policy-holders' funds or, in Grovewood's case,

insurance, or I should say shareholders' funds? All those matters could be said to be

part of the public interest without being spelt out in a schedule to an Act.

So those were the guidelines as opposed to the Act?

Yes. The guidelines, the Act did have the phrase, `the public interest', it listed one or

two I think of the areas that could be public interest, aside from monopoly matters as

such where there was at that time a 33 1/3 per cent interest in any particular, it came to

be reduced, that. It wasn't that there was any monopoly problem here in Grovewood

because their interest in British industry was minuscule, that didn't give rise to

concern; it was whether it was right that potentially insurance policy-holders' funds

might be used in this way. Now one could have given undertakings, I'm sure that

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091B

Eagle Star's policy in doing this kind of thing was discussed, but, you can see it's a

very vague concept to talk about the public interest being in some mysterious way

involved in that. And one could have seen, if you had gone the other tactical

approach, some kind of spectre being, I think quite unnecessarily, raised, that, yes this

was the way aggressive insurance companies are going to go on in the future, and you

could see that the Commission might have been concerned about that. Remember in

those days it was not possible to - I'm not going to use this word frivolously - to buy

off a reference by giving undertakings to the Office of Fair Trading beforehand, that

was thought quite wrong, whereas now, because the public interest matter has been

narrowed, largely to competition matters and to some extent employment matters, that

you can rearrange by, agreement with obviously the target company if they are in

agreement with you, that things that are likely to trouble the authorities will be put

right in advance. That's something which is acceptable and very openly done. One

hears of these guidelines and in a particular case they are applied. That was not

possible in the early Seventies, and you can see one of the reasons why, if in the

Sixties you weren't even allowed to talk to the board of a company after a reference, it

was not possible to talk, and often in fact bids came unstuck for poor reasons, simply

because when it came to it, the board of a bidder and of a target, however much in

favour of the bid, got it wrong, they hadn't actually got a clear idea of these issues.

Not that it was a question of rehearsing a story that was not true, but when it came to

it, if they weren't allowed to talk about these things in advance, emphasis came out

very differently. And I'm sure it did come out with some differences, as you would

expect, on this occasion. I know that not only the board of Grovewood for example

made its submission, but John Danny[ph] and his family made their submission too,

and they said that they would prefer to be able to sell to Eagle Star whom they knew,

otherwise this company could get into wrong hands and be broken up. And then, and

this is, I came to see this later when I was acting for Grovewood, and I wasn't acting

for them then, then you would get a situation where all kinds of assurances and

undertakings that he had given to, say scientists or, a very important company called

VG Instruments as it acquired later, or in direct industrial companies, they had done

joint ventures with him on the basis that they knew John Danny[ph], and through him

Eagle Star. They knew that funds would be available, they knew that the assurances

would be worth something, whereas if they got into wrong hands or whatever it was,

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091B

they might not. So, he had a personal angle to it, but it wasn't one that worked

inconsistently with the raison d'être for the bid.

And, whose decision would it have been in those days to refer a bid to the

Commission?

It would have been the Office of Fair Trading.

And, the way in which they have looked at bids, for referral, has that changed?

That has changed, because of the...

Regardless of what you've said about the pre-negotiations and so on.

Yes, that has changed, largely because when we came into the Common Market and

that whole sector developed, there were...bids came to be looked at, not only in

London in these circumstances but in Brussels too, the whole scene has become much

larger in that way, and it's been necessary to ensure that if something really was going

to work on the monopoly aspects and on any other public interest issues that were

recognised in London and Brussels, it couldn't be turned down or shouldn't be turned

down for some quite unspecified, vague problem. So, I think to that extent we have

come more in line with Brussels, but it's still not I think impossible that something

will give rise to disquiet and maybe rightly so. Eagle Star saw the change of course

very very markedly in 1981 to '83 when Allianz, the German insurance group, led a

dawn raid on Eagle Star, the City was stunned, and acquired 14 per cent in a day, and

brought that up to 28 per cent at the end of a week with a tender offer. Now, an

enormous amount of paper was written because the board of Eagle Star tried to fight

this off, and was successful in that sense, they got a tremendous price years later for

the rest of Eagle Star, but that this should be done overnight by a German insurance

group in a hostile way without consultation or reference to the board of Eagle Star

was, you know, was thought to be wrong. And they, of course Eagle Star were rather

boot-on-the-other-foot here, they were arguing that there was a public interest here

because those funds, if the bid had been successful, and there was a full bid launched

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C736/02/06 F5091B

later, could come under the control of the Allianz in Munich, and there was no level

playing field, because you couldn't get control of Allianz, there were cross-

shareholdings on an enormous scale, and still are I dare say, between Allianz and

Munich Re. And banks and other institutions in Germany traditionally have

controlling interests and stakes and cross-controlling interests and stakes so that if you

launch a bid for a public company like that in Germany it can't succeeed, no level

playing field therefore. Now that was thought to be then a public interest issue, and

now I'm talking about the early Eighties. Well that failed, we were at the height of the

Thatcher swing at that time, and although the OFT listened to those things there was

no reference.

[INAUDIBLE] they looked at it in that way rather than the other way. Rather than

looking at trying to build in some sort of protection...

That's right.

...which is effectively what existed in Germany, they had looked at it as... So, was

that a shift then? Was the OFT significantly shifting?

Oh yes, oh yes.

And where was that, where was the pressure for that coming? From the Government?

Definitely, I've no doubt that that was so. Whether it was directly in the way

legislation or guidelines, there were all kinds of guidelines given, but the fact of what

you might call, I don't think necessarily rightly but what might be called a nationalistic

view that all these policy-holders' funds, and they were very considerable, could come

under the control of somebody in Munich, I'm not saying it just because it was

German, it could have been anywhere, without any control, could happen, you know,

overnight. Of course it didn't happen, because BAT came in as a white knight, and

was more susceptible to the kind of regulation that insurance and banking and those

sort of things involved. But there was a very marked difference that Eagle Star, for all

its connections, could not get this referred to the Monopolies Commission. It tried

Alan Carr

C736/02/06 F5091B

hard with the Commission in Brussels, and with more chance of success oddly enough

in some ways, and it tried hard with the cartel office in Berlin, much less chance of

success there simply because there was no competition, Eagle Star were not big in

Germany; they had offices in Europe, and that was of interest to the Commission, how

would they be allowed to develop? But the prime argument in London was that there

was no control over these huge policy funds if they had ever come into unfriendly

hands if you like. Now...

But that was a political view that was taken, rather than, to do with the feeling towards

the free market at that time, rather than...?

There was a great deal of concern in the BIA about it, the feeling that overnight

something, an institution of that kind, much bigger than its shareholders' funds, could

by a dawn raid, and there was a second dawn raid launched two years later, followed

by the full bid, 1983, there was great disquiet that this could happen without any

publicity. And that leads on to a third stage. I'm just pursuing this argument because I

think it's quite interesting. There are controls.....

End of F5091 Side B

Alan Carr

C736/02/07 F5092A


Yes. The chief control, or regulation about the way in which control should be

exercised over insurance company, by extension also a bank, is whether the

management or the controller if he's a shareholder is a fit and proper person to

exercise that control. Now the mechanism for that is in the insurance division of the

Department of Trade. They listen politely to the representations you make; they're

secret, they don't publish their findings, they don't say why X is not a good chap, or Y

is a jolly good chap. You don't know what success your representations are or aren't

having, unless the thing is halted in some way. We made strong representations at the

time of the Allianz bid when, and clearly we were not succeeding, because there was

no interruption, there was no reference, a reference to the Monopolies and Mergers

Commission would have probably have been the only way in which the thing could

have been halted at that time, pre control being assumed. When BAT emerged on the

scene the thing had been largely prejudged the other way, they wouldn't have launched

their bid, which was satisfactory and recommended by the Eagle Star board unless

they knew that they were going to be acceptable to the authorities; they already had

insurance interests, they had bought a company called Farmers, and curiously we had

helped them indirectly with their own fit and proper person ruling as suitable and by

extension something which the California authorities which is where Farmers were

established, ought to be pay attention to. So we had worked with BAT a little bit in

that sort of way. But when BAT launched its bid they only had to establish that they

were fit and proper people, and of course being based here as an English company

they didn't have much trouble with that. The argument though generally as to who

was a fit and proper person never came to be thrashed out at a Monopolies

Commission hearing, and justified in a Monopolies Commission report, which is of

course published. And I still think that that is an unsatisfactory state of affairs, and it

came to be tested out finally in 1989, because at that time Eagle Star had been

acquired, early '84, by BAT, and then Jimmy Goldsmith and Packer and James

Rothschild formed an outfit called Hoylake and launched a paper bid nominally worth

13 billion for BAT. And we were involved in the defence team, primarily to look

after the insurance and banking interests. And there the point was really quite subtly

proved, but only to our knowledge after the event, because again we made

Alan Carr

C736/02/07 F5092A

representations that it was wrong that people who knew nothing of insurance, and who

only wanted to sell off these interests to God knows who, they hadn't been pre-

arranged these sales, were going to be allowed to get control of Eagle Star and Allied

Dunbar, which changed its name from Abbey Life or whatever it was called before.

This was quite wrong, we said; we thought we were making some progress but you

could never tell, you just could not tell. The Hoylake bid was not referred, but of

course by that time BAT had Farmers, a California regulated insurance interest, and

the lady who was the regulator in California held her hearings in public, because that's

the way they operate there. And we found subsequently that all kinds of undertakings

had been given to the DTI on an `as if' basis: if they had control of Eagle Star, this is

what they would do, this is what they would do, this is what they wouldn't do. And

we only found out about those things because they had to be declared publicly before

the insurance commissioner in California, in quite a different set of circumstances.

And I think it was wrong, and we've said so publicly we don't think that's good that

you should operate two different standards where the same arguments about fit and

proper come into it. And, it was the same people after all who were going to be these

controllers. In fact the Hoylake bid failed, but I do think curiously enough that there

is a public interest issue there that you should have if you like a level playing field, at

least to the extent of the arguments being heard in the same sort of way in the different

jurisdictions. And I've now followed the argument through with you, you see, in three

or four different ways. For us it was, you know, a very valuable experience, and I

think that can only happen with experience. For us it was a tremendous introduction

to BAT, who have City work obviously in a way that Eagle Star itself does not,

because it's the quoted company, nobody's going to be able to buy Eagle Star or Allied

Dunbar unless they do something about BAT, either agree it with BAT or make a bid

for BAT. But, the fashionable thinking then was, maybe it was tactically right, I don't

know, it cost a great deal of money for Goldsmith and others, was that it was wrong

for BAT to have these different sector legs, that at that time BAT were wanting to

down-grade the tobacco side and get into financial services and Argos and other

things of that sort. Since then they've de-merged Argos and kept just the financial

services side. Now of course tobacco seems to be on the up-swing with the former

Soviet Union and China being very valuable markets, so there are a lot of economic

considerations come into this. But it was a great shock to everybody, for us a very

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C736/02/07 F5092A

pleasant one, to read all this stuff coming out of the insurance commissioner's report

in California.

I'm interested in this, the relationship between public interest and national interest,

which seems to be coming up. I mean when...how do the two relate, and, it seems to

me you're saying there was a shift in the Eighties.

Yes, yes.

I mean, can you say a little bit more about how, from your experience, one, public

interest relates to national interest? Because what you seem to be saying is that from

the Eighties there was actually less, national interest was of less importance in the face

of, you know, a belief in the free market and the free market should operate within a

European or a world context.

Yes. Oh well the arguments I think were more apparently nationalistic at the time of

the Allianz bid, and that was their weakness, I have to say that. Of course nobody

could launch a bid over the head if you like of the Allianz board for Allianz, so there

was no level playing field. But that itself might not have been thought a very serious

problem, and in fact I dare say would have succeeded in their bid unless BAT had

launched theirs; they could possibly have given undertakings or something of that

kind. It was more openly nationalistic in that case, simply that the control of funds

were getting into the hands of a board that was not susceptible to direct control from

London. And certainly it appeared nationalistic, and that was a weakness of it. But

the point became much stronger when it became a question of what fit and proper

actually meant. They already had U.K. insurance interests, however small, I think

they had bought Cornhill or something like that, they did have a company. Nobody

was going to say, and nor should they have said, that these people weren't fit and

proper to run U.K. insurance interests as such; the fact that they had made a bid over

the head of the Eagle Star board, clearly you couldn't be saying that that was not to be

allowed to happen. So there was no, the argument was nothing like so strong, unless

they were going to run down Eagle Star's operations in favour of their own or

something of that kind. That was a very difficult thing to argue, and the argument

Alan Carr

C736/02/07 F5092A

would not have, it didn't succeed, it didn't matter in the end because as I said BAT

came on the scene. But it was a different argument, and it was a compelling argument

I believe in the case of Hoylake's bid, because there it wasn't nationalistic primarily;

it's true that Jimmy Goldsmith lived in Paris, and Jerry Packer lived in Australia. It

was quite clear that he didn't have a distinguished record in financial services. James

Rothschild, yes certainly did, but here they were buying this thing for a break-up, they

knew nothing about insurance. It would have been therefore I think a disaster,

because they couldn't have assured somebody. What would they have said to the

thousands of people employed in these businesses? What would they have said to the

policy-holders? We are going to manage your business successfully? Or we're going

to sell it to X? Or we're going to try and get the best price selling it to Y when he

turns up? None of those could have been satisfactory. And there was a public interest

issue there, I think, which in fact did carry some weight in California, was seen to

carry weight in California, because it was published. It might have carried weight if it

had got much further in the U.K., we don't know. And it was a very unsatisfactory

inequality in the way the matter was looked at, on very much the same criteria. So, I

think it would even now be very difficult for a hostile bid to be made for insurance

interests which couldn't give a satisfactory background to the whole thing. Yes we

know how to do insurance, we are acceptable, we're the right sort of people to do it,

and we know how to manage those businesses to the advantage of policy-holders and

all the rest of it, and we'll do it in an open way. That might make some sense. But to

do that without the consent of the board, or being able to show that you've got the

right credentials, I think is something which does raise those sort of issues. And

certainly the background, I mean, there was a very famous photograph taken of the

triumvirate who were Hoylake in the early Eighties, and it wasn't a very good team.

The economic justification, whether BAT should in fact be a conglomerate of this size

with financial services being an important part of it, may or may not have been

compelling, but it certainly, they weren't the right people to be as it were a sort of

warehouse for these insurance interests until they found a buyer, and I always thought

that was the weakness of their case. But once again those arguments are made in

private, to the OFT on competition issues, we didn't see their submissions, nor did

they see BAT's perhaps, and we didn't see what arrangements they came to with the

insurance division at the DTI either. And of course you might say, as I think is being

Alan Carr

C736/02/07 F5092A

said, and will be said again later this week, you can't have everything done in private

with a barrister or somebody by your side, or cross-examine every witness that is

assisting in these kind of inquiries. But you get a feeling for when it's working

properly or not.

So why did so many of these British regulatory systems work in that way, in your

view?

I think that there has traditionally been a wish, say in the Bank of England or the

insurance division at the DTI, that character references if you like, in the full sense of

ability to run that kind of business, shouldn't be something which is public, they don't

want that to be open to testing in that sort of way. It's the way things have been done

for a very long time. It came under much more scrutiny of course with BCCI, and

whether the thing was working properly there, and long reports have been written

about that collapse and whether the system was working properly. It's come under

some degree of scrutiny again with the man in the Far East and Barings. That has

been the way things have been done here. But the contrast is very stark with Farmers

and BAT and this lady in California, because traditionally they'd been very much more

open, very much more protracted of course too, and the way the litigators and the

corporate lawyers work so closely together in the States is partly due to that, things are

much more open. It does mean I think that a lot of quite legitimate acquisitions

become too much lawyer-ridden, and obviously it's quite a fine line in working out

whether there really are anti-trust or fit and proper person objections, or whether that's

being used for an illegitimate purpose to stall what is a perfectly legitimate merger.

But if you can't have it tested in public, it's very difficult, particularly where one

branch of it does come to the public and one branch of it doesn't.

So you would favour personally a more open system?

I think so. The law changed a little bit when it became clear that there was a 15 per

cent trip-wire if you like, that, whereas the City code only required a public offer at

over 29 per cent, 30 per cent, the change of control happened, directly or indirectly, at

15 per cent for an insurance company. So you could be launching a bid for X

Alan Carr

C736/02/07 F5092A

holdings, but it had an insurance company somewhere tucked away and that

potentially led to a problem with the DTI. Clearly it couldn't really be thought to be

right that some great utility or something, or conglomerate, had set itself up with that

to make itself immune from a change of control, and that didn't arise in the kind of

cases we've been discussing, but it's very necessary to operate the regulations so that

you have an equal looking at the thing, and if it's going to be potentially looked at in

public in one part of the world then a similar sort of standard ought to apply.

And, what about the make-up of the OFT and the commission itself? I mean can you

say a little bit about how the membership of that is decided? Because presumably, in

a closed system that's actually fairly crucial, isn't it?

Yes, very definitely. The only reference I sat in at before the commission at length

was the one I mentioned in the Seventies, where Eagle Star was the bidder for these

two rather diverse companies, and I think the system is somewhat similar still, you

still have people who are members of the commission, and then a panel is made up for

particular references.

Depending on the nature of the reference.

Yes, yes. I mean I remember a lady called Mrs Inchbold who I think, and still under

that name owns a school of interior design, she was on the, a member of the

Monopolies Commission, but she didn't sit in on our reference I don't think. And they

tried to make up a panel that would, you know, be well equipped to do the job. I can't

remember the particular members of our panel, I think it was given a very fair hearing.

Other references have tended to be much more on competition grounds whereas this

had no competition element in it, as I mentioned before. And one of the things that's

most striking, I think is a very good thing, is that great tycoons of industry, you know,

have to attend at the OFT in, you know, very humble circumstances, and that's not a

bad thing at all, because the OFT in a sense provides some kind of trial dummy run,

and it's only if the Director-General is convinced that he ought to advise a reference

generally that a reference takes place. The emphasis is always quite interesting,

because - I'm trying to get this right now - if the commission, if there has been a

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C736/02/07 F5092A

reference and the commission is satisfied that there's no public interest issue, then I

think it's still the case that the Secretary of State can't block it. But if the commission

is not satisfied and says there ought to be some safeguards, he can let it go through

nevertheless, he can take some undertakings or something of that kind. And the

emphasis, there are all kinds of guidelines have emerged, whether things should be

referred or not, how the Act should be applied, those things have changed a good deal,

certainly since I sat in at this Commission thing in the Seventies, and I'm quite sure it

should carry on and be extended. But there's no question of the public sitting in at

these things. I haven't sat in at a U.S. anti-trust thing, a Department of Justice thing,

but I think that they can be very protracted. We saw at Simmons a bid of a very

different kind by a U.S. company we were acting for, Browning Ferris[ph], which led

a hostile bid, I think it was last year or possibly eighteen months ago, for an English

company called Atwood, this in the environmental business. And there there was an

interweaving, I wasn't acting, I had moved on to where I am now unfortunately, it

would have been a great fun one to do, but there was an interweaving of U.S. and

U.K. restrictions, and the bid had to be subject to a lot of different conditions

potentially being referred in the U.S., potentially being referred here. In fact control

passed, it was, even though it was a hostile bid it was the first time that this particular

company had ever launched any takeover bid, although it was huge, it was a huge

company, much less a hostile one. And, it was launched on U.K. basis being a U.K.

target, but a lot of effort had to go into getting U.S. and New York Stock Exchange

and U.K. Stock Exchange and code and the various regulators to agree on how it was

to be implemented. It did work I'm glad to say. But, it wasn't so delicate as character

references, like fit and proper are, or appear to be still, to the Bank of England and the

DTI. I think that is a difficult issue, I mean I'm not trying to say glibly that it's

something that should always be fought out in public, but it does work out in very

unexpected ways.

So, the people that are scrutinising the fit and proper representations, are they going to

be known well to those people that are actually making the representations, generally?

Where it's a change of control, and it's an agreed bid, for example if X insurance

company, public or private, whatever it is, has been carrying on business in the U.K.

Alan Carr

C736/02/07 F5092A

for a long time, and somebody is bidding from the U.K. or not, they will introduce no

doubt the bidder to the DTI in just the same way as if the bidder was going to set up

business over here. And there will be an opportunity for them no doubt to make that

introduction and then for some kind of testimonial or reference to be taken up. If the

bidder already carries on business in the E.C. now, things will be a lot easier; or if he

has an insurance subsidiary over here, a lot easier. If it's hostile, it's much more

difficult. And if he's got no interests over here, and you go along and say, you know,

`This is a hostile bid, we don't think that he is necessarily the right person to run our

company and our business,' often you don't even know what the bidder has already

said. They may have been able to give some very good assurances. You're not told

the answers, you play, you make your case, this is certainly what's happened in my

experience, and you're not told, `Well, we think...' There's no debate. I can't say you

say what you like, but you're not told what assurances have won the day. Whereas on

the financial side of the actual bid, the bidder makes his statements in his offer, take a

different kind of case, Forte and Granada, and rightly or wrongly it's played out, it's in

public. What actually influenced a particular shareholder in, if you like, something

which doesn't have financial services regulation as an extra dimension as in the other

case I mentioned, I don't know. There is some criticism sometimes where somebody,

some big shareholder, an institution, is going to cast its votes and shares in a particular

direction, that can come under public scrutiny and they can answer it or not as they

wish. But where there are clearly public interest issues, because otherwise you

wouldn't set up legislation with a fit and proper test to it, and that's not just a question

of having the right finance, it clearly goes to character and experience and record

elsewhere and all those sort of things, which are vague, then it seems to me that you

should have some better idea of how you're doing in your discussions with these

authorities. It was a difficulty and it was known to be a difficulty in the Hoylake case

that there were unequal parties. They joined together in this great affair, a lot of them

with a great deal of wealth and wealthy connections who put in vast sums of money

for this bid which failed, but they weren't all, you know, double A credit, free of any

kind of taint, and that provided an opportunity. But you could never actually tell how

you were doing, whereas it was only later as I said that we could find out indirectly

that it had been quite compelling, because it was all produced. But that was more by

luck than the way the system would have worked here in other circumstances.

Alan Carr

C736/02/07 F5092A

There is a lot of evidence that the system has let us down quite badly though, isn't

there. I mean I'm thinking of Azil Nadir, BCCI, Maxwell in a different way. I mean,

is it...this is a leading question I suppose, but is it not surprising that the system has

continued in the way it has?

Yes. My firm, I had better declare some interests here, because on the BCCI one we

acted for quite a considerable time for the majority ruler in Abu Dhabi, who had

together a 77 per cent stake or something of that sort in BCCI, and I think they are

known to have criticised the system in that way, and there was a report on the

operation of that system, and that was published of course because they were obliged

to come out with a particular report and there was a lot of disquiet. Then on the

Barings one, I don't think we had a direct involvement except for a trustee or

debenture I think it was, which had an interest for a certain type of bond holder,

creditor, and that was not really going to the question I think so much of the system,

although it would certainly I must say have had some relevance to how the board of

Barings, which is relevant to the regulator and had allowed certain things to happen,

and that's clearly a public interest matter. Outside the scope of an insurance or

banking type business, and those two clearly were within that scope, it's more difficult

I suppose. I don't think we've had any involvement with Azil Nadir; I have had

involvement with Brent Walker, I emphasise Brent Walker rather than the family, we

still continue to act for Brent Walker under, I think its fifth chairman since. That

company didn't have regulated businesses in that sense, although at one time it

certainly had gaming board companies, i.e. companies which were in leisure and

gaming which had regulation in that sense too. Maxwell is a different kind of case,

and whether the system has worked well there I don't know. We've not had a

closeness I believe to Maxwell's affairs at all, and on a different tack that is why, I was

senior partner at the time, I didn't think it was right that because we had an office in

the City with no involvement either way in any part of the Maxwell thing, we had not

acted for any part of it, that we should be asked to donate something to rescue the

pensioners, although there was a great deal of, many letters were written to us and no

doubt to other solicitors and accountants. I could understand that without accepting

any legal or moral obligation, if you had taken fees in a particular set of circumstances

Alan Carr

C736/02/07 F5092A

from a particular client, you might say you would like to make some kind of

contribution, but in any other circumstances I thought not. And I think a lot of City

firms did feel that, and that's rather a different question. I think that the whole

Maxwell case is still going on, isn't it, and the question whether there's going to be

another trial and all that sort of thing very hard to tell. The only time, and that's going

back to the Fifties now, we didn't act to be involved, but he, Maxwell, Robert

Maxwell himself of course, had been involved in Pergamon, and he was very much

criticised by the Department of Trade inspectors in their report, and said of course,

and only recollected by those with a long memory and finally repeated later on, that he

was told he should never be a director of a public company.

End of F5092 Side A

Alan Carr

C736/02/07 F5092B


.....at the Pergamon...

Yes, it was, the criticism that was made of him was attacked because natural justice

was brought in on his behalf by his advisers, my firm was not involved, that at that

time Department of Trade inspectors could make quite strong criticisms without the

individual himself really hearing anything about it until it was all in print. And there

was quite a lot of litigation about that and the guidelines changed, and then when I had

to do, before the Department of Trade inspectors in quite a different case, nothing

whatever to do with Maxwell, the Ozerlid[ph] one, it was not easy, because one had to

have strong arguments, but it was possible to say that it was wrong to publish certain

things and you were shown things in draft, and you could argue before the inspectors,

or in correspondence with the inspectors, that they shouldn't use certain words. And I

remember that a particular word was, they wanted to say of our client, that he was

`resentful' of certain things, and acted accordingly. I think `resentful' is pejorative, in

the context it certainly was, and they changed it to `angry'; `angry' has the sense of

suffering an injustice rather than resentful being very pejorative. Now, if you like one

of the things that Maxwell established was that you should have the chance to see that

kind of thing and try to get the balance right; if they didn't like your argument they

could go ahead, but you did have a chance for somebody who actually would have

been damaged, wrongly, by certain words being used to make a case. So I think that

that shouldn't be forgotten about Maxwell, although we didn't act for him at any stage,

that he did make one or two points. But of course it only needed another twenty years

or so to go by and a large number of people would have been very glad to act, and the

system certainly didn't work. I don't think I can comment beyond that because I don't

know that the answer is really clear yet, or whether it's fair to do so yet. We do seem

to have a very very long time-span now between Department of Trade references and

reports and then possible criminal proceedings before the thing gets right through its

expensive course, and I do understand a lot of disquiet about that. I don't know what

the answer is quite honestly. Very difficult for advisers who are working for a board,

whether under let's say a Maxwell type chairman or not, may have been acting for the

company for a long time, to know where that might lead. I've been fortunate in a way

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to, you know, have been in the City for long enough to see quite a large change in the

emphasis on these things, but I think it is quite difficult, very difficult. Very easy for a

chairman with a strong character, put it that way, to feel that advice that is given to a

board of which he is chairman, is given to him and his family too, something which

we have had to make a sharp distinction about at times, in the Brent Walker case for

example where that was on public record that we were not acting for the family and

we were advising the board, and continue to advise the board. So that, that's one we

got right, but I hope that...it's something that's...it's very difficult, and I think that's

always the case, professional advisers have got to be very clear about.

We're skipping about a bit.

I'm afraid so, yes.

No no, that's fine, because it's raised a few issues that I want to talk about next time. I

thought if we could go back a few steps. We're sort of mid-Sixties I suppose, and...

Mid to late Sixties perhaps, yes.

Yes. And you're married by now.

Yes, so we can...a personal thing, yes.

Do you want to say...

Yes yes, by all means, yes.

...just tell me a few words about that.

Yes, certainly. Yes, I had been glad to go to Brussels, it enabled me for personal

reasons apart from anything else to think over a lot of relationships, and I came back

in April I think it was, April or May, '63, and any entanglement that I might have got

into didn't really seriously loom after that, if only because I did meet my fiancée as she

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turned out within six weeks to be. I really understood that in Brussels, for reasons that

I touched on before I think, I was unlikely to marry a girl from Jewish north-west

London, and that became clear, however well educated, it didn't seem that it was

going to work, although I hadn't met a very large number but the one I had met was

very well qualified in many ways. I met Dalia at a concert in a garden in Highgate;

little did either of us know that we would come to live in Highgate many years later.

That was very nice, and it was in the summer of '63, and she was a daughter of a

lawyer and the sister of, and sister-in-law of lawyers, as they turned out to be later.

She was sabra born, she worked for Zim[??] in Israel and she was over in England for

about a year or thereabouts working for the Jewish Agency. So she had a lot of very

good credentials, and she sang in opera, she sang Mozart. So, this was all very nice,

and I remember that we went, I invited her to come down to Glyndebourne, things

were very different then, come up twice today hasn’t it. And, you will see the

amusing side of this, you could either take a picnic, as you can now, or you could eat

in one of their restaurants. Anyway, the weather wasn't so ideal, we went to one of the

restaurants. This was very early days, I didn't know her very well, I thought she could

possibly be very frum, Orthodox, in food matters, so I ordered very Orthodox things to

eat from their rather limited menu from that point of view, and I think it was sort of

salmon and strawberries or something like that, which was acceptable. She was very

worried that because I had ordered this menu, I must be Orthodox. [LAUGHS] In

those days there were very very few Orthodox people in Israel, very few. And we

established that neither of us was particular troubled about that at any rate, and went

from strength to strength. So that, well within six weeks we were engaged.

That's very fast.

That's very fast, yes. And, I hadn't been to Israel at the time. As I am reading now in

an excellent Deptford Trilogy novel, parents are much more understanding and

knowing about these things than they sometimes let on. The circumstances were very

different from where I've just read that, but, I didn't have to have any hints from my

father or mother or anyone else, but I actually told them at one breakfast on the

Sunday morning, whatever it was, that I was engaged and wanted to marry Dalia.

They had met her of course, and she was living in digs, very very cheaply, because

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things were very cheap in the early Sixties, and they were highly delighted with her.

And my father-in-law, as he turned out to be, came over from I think, her family were

in Strasbourg at the time on holiday and her step-mother, because her mother had left

when she was about 6, a very nice woman, but I didn't meet her then, and her two

younger sisters were all very anxious to come over and see us, but he very wisely

came over by himself, and it was all sorted.

What sort of work was Dalia doing then?

Dalia worked for a man called Levi Gertner[ph] who ran the Jewish Agency,

somewhere near the British Museum their offices were, and she, having worked on the

press side for Zim[ph], this shipping firm in Israel, worked for the press side of the, as

his secretary really, Gertner's[ph] secretary. And her great skill was that she knew

Hebrew, which was her mother tongue, she also knew French, and pretty good English

too. She was also very personable. And there was a sort of succession of these

secretaries who had similar qualifications, and we knew them quite well at that time.

She used to run for example summer seminars for people who were kibbutznik

manqué shall we say, I mean, it was a great time, as you may remember, I don't know

whether you've ever visited a kibbutz but a lot of people, gentile or Jew used to go to

the kibbutz, and I think that's one of the, it was a very refreshing time. Israel was a

very different place then, I only visited it when I went out to get married in December.

George Dennehy[ph] when I told him that I was going to get married he thought, a

very good age, 27, and went with his blessing. [LAUGHS]

Were you relieved?

We were given... Yes, very relieved. And we were given a carriage clock by the firm,

which was very nice; unfortunately it was stolen later, but it was a very nice gift. And

the first time that I had been to Israel was, as I said, to go out and get married, and I

am glad to say that our tour of Israel was made together and alone before the wedding,

which was very good, Dalia took me around and in every sense it was very good. And

I then stretched my father-in-law's abilities, because he was a lawyer, I said I want to

go to Iran for our honeymoon, this was in January '64. Because I had been in the

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summer of '63 - sorry, summer '62, let me get that right, just, well on holiday from the

Brussels office for a time, and that was the only condition I had before going to the

Brussels office that I had got this arrangement with a friend from Cambridge who was

in the British Council who had invited me, it was a great opportunity and my first visit

to a real Third World country. And I wanted to take Dalia to this sort of Arabian

Nights world. Easier said than done, because, I said she's got to have a passport

showing her married name, and of course we had only been married three days before

we left, but he was very good at that sort of thing and he did get that organised. And

we flew to Tehran in January, very very cold, at one time it wasn't going to be possible

on this flight; of course it was not possible to fly over any Arab countries, we flew

over Turkey and then over Iran towards Tehran and it was then announced we were

going to go on to Delhi because it was not going to be possible to land in Iran, but

then suddenly later in the evening it turned out that it was possible after all and we

landed in Tehran. It was wonderful, extraordinary place of course, point four aid[ph],

the Shah all over the place, quite glamorous in a way, he had not got too big for his

boots, and, it was quite exciting. We went to Isfahan and found that Moshe Dayan

was an enthusiastic visitor in Iran in those days, very different atmosphere as we can

see now. We went to Shiraz, and Dalia got tummy trouble, and she remembered

enough Arabic I think, she wanted mint, and I forget now what they call it, it's not

mint [FRENCH ACCENT] anyway, but she remembered a word that finally, it'll come

to me later, that produced this, and it got her better. And it was heavy snow all over

the place, and it was cold, very cold, and Isfahan, I remember we went to the bazaar in

Isfahan and she was wearing her shoes and my shoes on top of them, and inside her

stockings and my socks, and she still looked like Charlie Chaplin with an umbrella, it

was impossible to get warm. And of course I had been there in August '62 so that, I

hadn't been quite prepared for this. Anyway we went back through Rome, and

somebody on their honeymoon trip, Dalia on her honeymoon trip from Israel, all her

clothes had been made, not because it was a very wealthy family but simply that, you

know, you had your clothes made and they were very nicely made too. And when we

had left Europe it was still the era of the stiletto, and very high heels too, because,

very smart. When we went to Rome we both went to the opera, and overnight in Italy

the shoes had changed, they were thick chunky Cuban heels, and Dalia felt like a sort

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of peasant from the back woods of Andalusia or something, it was really very strange.

And it was very exciting.

Was there any suggestion about you moving to Israel? I mean obviously not, but I

mean at the time what was the feeling about her settling permanently in London?

My father-in-law was highly delighted that I was a solicitor, not yet a partner, in a sort

of top-ish City firm, and I was embarrassed actually because there was a sort of an

announcement to our marriage put in the `Jerusalem Post' which, on the edge of

advertising, acceptable now, not then, I imagine, to the Law Society, but no questions

asked. He was very enthusiastic about that. He was a lawyer himself, he - shall I tell

you? Is it worth saying something about that?

Yes.

He was himself from Sephardi stock, and he was educated in Paris. I think I may have

mentioned that he was also, when he became a lawyer he had among his clients the

Roman Catholic sort of hierarchy and went to Rome a great deal, so he was of quite a

broad bent. He had worked for the British Mandate authorities, unacceptable of

course when the State was set up in 1948, and that's why he had then, you know, well

into his forties taken up a new career as a lawyer, and I think he pursued it with a good

deal of success. But it wasn't commercial law, he actually liked doing criminal work

or, this rather special work that he had for the Papacy[ph]. He did act for a lot of

Arabs, which was also rather unacceptable in many ways, but he knew Arabic

extremely well and, as he said, they had a case. Things have changed a very great

deal, wheels have turned at least twice since then. A lot of what he said rubbed off on

me, I'm a great admirer of his. He had extraordinary knowledge of Israel historically,

he had in effect been Governor of Galilee and he knew all about the Horns of Hattin

and used to love taking people round. And then he came to live in Haifa and his

office was in No. 3 Hassan Shukri, which has a wonderful sort of Turkish feel about

it, and indeed it was, the downtown Haifa was just like a little Turkish, everything on

a tiny scale, beautiful stone buildings. And, it was romantic in a good sense. Israel

itself isn't that romantic, it's not a Third World country, but you could still believe a

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little of that in the Sixties. I used to go a great deal to Israel with Dalia, every second

year, sometimes every year, and, a very exciting place. But attitudes changed,

particularly after 1967, and I remember the most, the most perceptive remark that I've

ever heard about Israel, I'm sure an awful lot of remarks, was Dalia saying in bed on

the sixth day of the Six Day War, `We've won too much. We'll never be able to make

peace now'. And I thought that was an extraordinary remark, because the idea of

greater Israel and all the arrogance that that brought forth, and the impossibility of the

Arabs, through a good deal of fault of their own, I'm not going to say it's a one-way

thing, ever to sit down and talk, of course has been with the world, and still is to some

degree. And, I did think it was an extraordinary remark because nobody else ever said

it in quite that way. My father-in-law was to some extent, but only to some extent,

swept away by the euphoria. The Suez thing, which of course had happened long

before really, in that timescale, had caused him some despondency, but after '67

attitudes did change quite a lot.

Did your own feelings about Israel change significantly through marrying Dalia?

They came to. Oh yes, yes. On a very personal level, I had found somebody who I

was in love with, who was Jewish, unassailably, who was not religious, that too was

good; who had national feelings but was not a nationalist; who got things right, was

very practical, a Virgo like myself; who enjoyed being in England. She has been a

long time in England now; her own attitudes to Israel have changed much more than

mine. She's gone through a period of intense hostility to Israel. In the last six, eight

years she's become immersed in what you might call New Age thinking, she goes to

India regularly, every year, Sai Babari as I call it, the...and she knows I call it that,

because I don't share some of those thoughts. I'm not hostile to them but I'm not

swept away by them. But she is a great believer in him as an avatar. She has

translated from English what was originally I think in Telugu or something like that,

an Indian dialect, but she has translated a lot of his sayings into Hebrew. The thing

that excites her more than anything in a positive swing towards Israel now is that there

is a movement in Israel for that sort of thing, there are people excited and interested

about it, that they want to know more about that. No problem in my mind about that,

but she went through a period of intense hostility to the very nationalist Israel, which

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is not a very pleasant state of affairs, I don't mean for her, I mean for Israel, I think it

was unpleasant, but I think she was too condemnatory in some respects. To an extent

I find that very difficult, because she knew nothing really about the murder of Rabin,

she was in India at the time; she's never really sort of caught on to that side of things,

although she sees how squalid in many ways a lot of the attitudes of the far Right in

Israel are. I don't think she saw Leah[ph] Rabin on the television, which was a very

moving speech I thought. So, I don't agree with Dalia always about it, which is

curious because when I got married to her we were very much in agreement about

these things, but that's I think more the change in Israel perhaps in some in some ways

than the change in us, and you don't always change in the same direction. But now

she's very encouraged from her point of view to see how things are developing. She's

more remote from day-to-day news and politics in Israel, although she now, to assist

her in translating she takes Israeli papers again to sort of try and get her vocabulary up

to date and that sort of thing. But she does get a great deal of satisfaction out of the

kind of world that she has come to. She goes to lectures and does a lot of spiritual

healing. She has a very very full programme, and less time - and this is quite open

among us so I don't want you to feel that I'm telling you something that I'm

complaining about - less time for her own family. So, we have two grandsons, one in

England, one in the States, and there's another child on the way in England, and the

amused understanding is that I am to be the grandmother and the grandfather, and

that's OK, because I am very close to that sort of scene and enjoy it, and when she sees

her family she's very, you know, good with them, but she doesn't want to be involved

in that now, she brought up three children. And I'm very glad because I think of, I've

got to be very frank, I think of the three daughters-in-law of my parents, I think she

was rightly the favourite; I think she was very good with my mother, closer to my

mother and her own step-mother than to her own mother in many ways, and that was a

problem to her, because after the Six Day War my mother-in-law, Beatrice, Dalia's

mother, came to England, at our invitation, but it was a very very stressed time. A

very dutiful daughter who had a very strong-willed mother, who wasn't really her

mother, who had left when she was 6, but who felt that she had some obligation

nevertheless to her mother. Room for stress there, and it appeared, it was difficult, a

very difficult time, in fact in some ways that brought us together closer than we have

been since. And, I mean that's Dalia and me. But, my parents came from Bayswater

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all the way out to Hendon where we lived initially, and even those five miles led me

to think that you should never go anywhere near your children unless you are strongly

advised to do so. My mother-in-law had come from Israel, led me possibly to take a

very laissez-faire attitude, I don't like to lay down the law. That's why I think I

mentioned to you in an earlier session that, I think my father got the balance exactly

right when he wanted to get a point across, I can see now how well he did it. I don't

think I've always been so tactful. Maybe I've been thought to be tactful by my

children, I don't know. I get on with them pretty well, they're very different. And...

And did Dalia give up work when you got married?

Yes, almost at once. We did a lot of alterations to our house in Hendon, and, that was

very exciting. She lived with me in Bayswater with my mother for a time, because my

parents only moved out to Hendon about five or six years later, and, I think that was

quite a stressful time for her, though she's very practical, Dalia, and now an excellent

cook, she has since then become vegetarian, in keeping with this sort of Third World

kind of New Age things. She learnt cooking with my mother, who is not actually a

wonderful cook, she had certain things she did very well, and that was quite stressful

in many ways, but she enjoyed it, I think she was very very good. When my mother

went to Canada where my next-up son and wife were living to look after their new

children, you know, when they emerged, one of them was born, Dalia ran the house in

- the flat I should say, in Bayswater, and my father was highly delighted, she cooked

nice things for him, and I remember him giving her a set of china, you know, to show

how much he had enjoyed it. And he really had enjoyed it. My father's a very

generous man, a very nice man. And, yes it worked very well, we had a nice house to

go to, which I think had cost something like £5,000 and we put quite a bit of money

into it, another 2,000 or something, and, it was a four-bedroom house, it was very

nice. And, it was a good place to bring up young children, because it had a little patch

of garden, but I was stifling there after a time and so we moved very fortunately to

Highgate in the back of the...

Why were you stifling?

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I think it was suburbia absolutely at its very worst. And when they built the Watford

Way extension into the M1, and you had to go under a subway to get across to the

Underground, not only were there no bookshops anywhere near, not that there were

any to close, but you couldn't even walk across to your neighbours properly. We lived

in a place called Crespigny Road off Vivian Avenue, NW4, and the only positive

thing that happened, Simmons & Simmons weren't acting, was George Walker did the

Brent Cross shopping centre, hence Brent Walker. He sold out, again long before we

came on the scene, but that was a very good development and it was a very good place

for us to do our shopping when we moved to Highgate because you could, you know,

things stayed open late and you could park your car and all that sort of thing. But

Hendon I don't think is a very attractive place to be, particularly since the Watford

Way thing which was happening in the Sixties when we moved in. And we made a

lot of alterations, and we had an architect, and I remember that an architect, I don't

know how we had found this chap, John Deal[ph], who is out at Walton-on-Thames,

and he came to Bayswater because we hadn't of course moved in at this time to

Hendon, and my father sat in at a few of these meetings, and John Deal[ph] quite

rightly thought that he was getting too many of my father's ideas about this. So we, I

remember it was quite fun because we went down in the cold spring of 1964 to

Walton-on-Thames, you know, to instruct our architect. And he was very good, he

understood a lot of things that we wanted and got it right. And it was a nice house, I

think it was as nice as it could be made without almost pulling it down, but you would

have still been in the same stifling locality. And, we stayed there twelve years, and

were very lucky to see this very beautiful estate being built off Highgate West Hill,

where we've lived ever since.

End of F5092 Side B

Alan Carr

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OK. I wanted to pick up where we left off last time. I think we had got to the sort of

late Seventies, middle, late Seventies.

Yes.

And I think you had begun to talk about some of the changes in the firm that were

apparent around that time.

Yes.

What were you doing in the, what position did you have in the firm in the mid

Seventies?

In the mid Seventies I was becoming a fairly experienced corporate finance partner,

we still call it the Company Department I think. It was a time in the firm, and I've

mentioned one or two of the transactions, where we were beginning to become

experienced in a number of unusual and heavy transactions, not least nationalisation

came up at that time of the aircraft industry, which I worked on with Patterson[ph]

who was a senior corporate partner, and Alastair Neill[ph], now managing partner of

the firm, and something that was protracted over a period of about four to five years,

and that was very interesting because of the insights into the way government

operates, and we had an absolutely fundamental role in that in advising the board of

Hawker Siddeley and its subsidiaries, what they could and couldn't do in the period

when, a rather sinister phrase, `assets were safeguarded' under a Bill that hadn't been

enacted. And it was a kind of, big brother was watching you kind of thing. We hadn't

seen a nationalisation at close quarters before, and this was very high profile because

it was the same Bill that dealt with the shipbuilding and aircraft, and two of Hawker

Siddeley's major subsidiaries were involved in that.

How did Simmons get the business for that?

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We had acted for Hawker Siddeley for many years. One of the major industrial clients

that we had had from the Twenties, Tommy Sopwith and Biggles and the Camel and

all that sort of thing, as I now understand more clearly from the history of the firm that

we're working on, in another quarter, and we had remained close to them, and still did

a great deal of their commercial and corporate work. And that continued after the

nationalisation, a great deal of very detailed lobbying and work was done in

instructing other professionals, again I think we were able to, because of our

knowledge of the business, able to take a fairly central role among the professionals

and prepare memoranda as a starting point for any discussion they had with counsel

and merchant banks and accountants. And after the nationalisation, they themselves

did a very good negotiation on compensation under the new Act, and Hawker

Siddeley was still a major force in the sort of British engineering for some time, and

we continued to act for them and still continue to act for their businesses after the

takeover by BTR, and indeed we act on other parts of the BTR empire now that

weren't Hawker Siddeley. And I think it is one of the things that distinguishes the

firm, that we've always had more perhaps an industrial than a financial practice for a

City firm, and that's been a fairly distinctive feature. Beecham of course as I've

mentioned before in pharmaceuticals, and Eagle Star in insurance, those have not been

the sort of ready-mix if you like of City firms, but we have elaborated into wholly new

areas, financial, since then, and telecommunications and things like that.

What sort of contact did you have with the Government during the nationalisation that

you've described?

It was mostly through the board and its chairman who was Sir Arnold Hall, and seeing

at very close quarters the correspondence between Arnold Hall and Tony Benn, who

was a very very skilled operator as Secretary of State for Industry. It had been

absolutely sort of written in stone that these two industries were going to be `taken

into public ownership and control' I think the phrase was, and there was tremendous

opposition to that, particularly at that time, because Labour didn't have a massive

majority, and it was controversial. But these things have happened, and of course now

one has seen that's preparation for wheel-spinning the other way around, because we

find we're acting for Railtrack in the privatisation of that when it's floated off, as we

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hope and expect in two or three months' time. So, everything is a preparation for

something, usually for the thing you don't most expect.

And, what was the view at the time within, amongst your clients, towards

nationalisation?

Among the clients?

Mm.

I think that perhaps it's true to say that the boards of City companies tended to view

with disfavour that. I don't think that even at that time, if we were talking about the

first half of the Seventies, which is when this particular nationalisation started, I don't

think that nationalised industries had a very strong track record. I'm not saying that

necessarily British industry under private ownership had a very convincing record

either, but certainly it was put together, we had thought, in a fairly haphazard kind of

way; the tests for selecting which bits of the industry were taken into public ownership

had not been that well thought out. There were all kinds of improvements to be made

in the legislation, which was perhaps a bit surprising because it wasn't the first by any

means, although it was one of the last major nationalisations I suppose that have taken

place in this country. Quite interesting that it went through and was implemented

within five years of the Thatcher Government coming to power and a marked swing

the other way.

So on a day-to-day basis, what were you responsible for doing during that

particular...?

I was a partner, and was working with Patterson[ph] who had been looking Hawker

Siddeley on a wider basis for a long time, and my particular concerns in it were to

prepare various papers for the board of Hawker Siddeley and the two subsidiaries

particularly that were being taken into ownership, so far as we felt able to act for them

both, which I think for most of the time we did, on what their duties were as directors

to the company and its shareholders and creditors with this threat looming. And that

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became quite detailed, attendance at board meetings, not in a formal sense but actually

allowing the board to, you know, have the benefit of one's own commercial response

as well as the legal yes's and no's which weren't always as clear-cut as they might be.

You can't really make a Companies Act work simply by announcement that this is

something which is going to happen. Something appears in a manifesto and is

elaborated on by somebody, you can't say, well that's got to restrict now how the board

carries on. So there were a whole range of legal and commercial issues came up and

very detailed and complex financial issues came up too in relation to compensation

and how that would work; in relation to past transactions, the HS146 was one that

comes to mind that had been negotiated I think with the Department of Trade and

Hawker Siddeley and how that would be operated in future, to what extent that was

seen as some partnership between the company and Government which would or

would not be a precedent. And, it was very interesting to see that at very close

quarters.

Were you drawing on any other precedents for this sort of advice that you were giving

to the company?

In the firm we hadn't worked on a nationalisation, on either side, and we had not been

in that sense a political firm. We had to do with lobbying, we had to see a Bill, an

important Bill, very closely affecting a major client's interests, going through

committee where it was necessary to ensure that people were properly briefed to make

the right sort of points, to provide a plank later on after enactment for negotiations on

compensation. And I think that worked well. I believe we did use initially some

parliamentary agents, because it is a whole field in itself, as I'm sure you know. But,

the only other experience that I think we had as a firm of nationalisation was, Booker-

McConnell as it was then known had sugar estates in Guyana, and a team went out to

negotiate the basis on which those would be nationalised, that was also in the

Seventies. But it wasn't nationalisation in quite the sense we had understood it over

here, there wasn't that much negotiating to do. There were important actions that had

to be taken, and compensation to be negotiated, but it was in a different scenario,

although an important part of Booker's business at that time.

Alan Carr

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So was one of your roles during the period of nationalisation essentially a defensive

role, defending the company's interests from Government effectively, and making it

difficult for Government if you like?

I think that was so, and I think that was, not to make it difficult or to delay it until the

Government fell in that sense political, but negotiating on behalf of industry, if we had

such clients, for the best deal and guiding them through that very difficult period,

because they were a board of directors looking after a company, and they came with

that particular problem. So we weren't political opponents of nationalisation in

principle, offering ourselves rather like ambulance chasers for, you know, if anybody

who has got that particular mission in life we would guide them; it was the other way

round, where we found ourselves acting for companies who had been well established

clients long before, not chasing the ambulance therefore, who found that they were

under threat. And this was not a case of, well, we might not take a particular job on

because the Government would instruct us, that wasn't part of the discussion. Nor

was it part of the thinking, if this is implicit in what you are saying, that we wouldn't

act for a company because we had a political objection to representing a board in

those circumstances; these were in both cases well-established clients whose board of

directors certainly needed advice, and advice on how to comply with the letter, and as

was I think argued at the time in some sense the spirit also of unenacted legislation.

Guidelines were not all that easy, and some very difficult issues arose. I think we got

it right, I think we would have gone to prison [INAUDIBLE].

Was there a closeness between the company and between the Conservative politicians

who presumably were supporting the company in its opposition to nationalisation?

There were certainly, that was certainly the case, but I don't think that was what was

guiding us. Obviously if the Government were defeated on various provisions in a

Bill or more likely in committee where majorities and votes count for so much more,

simply because of the structure of a committee, then that was for the politicians. It

may or may not have helped. I can remember there were cases, don't ask me to quote

specifics here, but there were cases when one would have liked something to go

through rather than for the Government not to be able to pass it, because we had

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C736/02/08 F5093A

actually, we felt we had actually secured a good provision, something that was going

to be workable but which for political reasons the Conservative opposition might have

thought differently. Not looking at the specific effect on the Bill as a whole, but on

the political effect on the Government, to be defeated. They weren't always working

the same way, i.e. the commercial and the political interests.

And what was the...can you remember the feeling in the City at that time towards the

socialist government, the Labour Government? We're talking the late Seventies aren't

we.

We're talking the late Seventies, we're talking in the last years of the Harold Wilson...

And Callaghan.

And the Callaghan Government. I think there was a feeling that the Callaghan

Government was a very weak Government, that it - and we're talking about the Lib-

Lab, that kind of era I believe, that it was unlikely to get an new majority and actually

remain in power. But I think it was really until the very closing months of that

Government, the winter of '78/79, and the rubbish in the streets episodes, I think that

until that period, nobody would have been absolutely certain that there was going to

be a new Government in power, a Tory Government in power. Attitudes to the new

Conservative regime, you know, were very...they differed quite widely, and it wasn't

part of our business to be involved in politics as such. Some people obviously had

had a political career more than others, but...

Presumably any City firm that you asked would say exactly the same, that they are not

political.

They have clients who they represent. They're not always on the Blue side of the

border. For example, I remember, I think Nicholson Graham & Jones as they were,

acted for the `Daily Mirror', and other City firms have acted for union interests, and

have been very good at it. We acted for many years for the `People' and the `Daily

Herald', which weren't either of them I think Tory papers, and we had strong

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093A

publishing interests as a result of that. We also acted for the `Telegraph' at the same

time. You didn't have to have a political credo to qualify you for acting or to

disqualify you for acting for particular interests. I think that's very important. I don't

think that one should, either as a City firm or in any other capacity, limit the range of

people you are prepared to advise on grounds that are wholly political, I don't think

that's acceptable.

So do you have an ethical policy for the sort of work that you are prepared to do as a

firm, and if so has that changed?

Ethical is a little different from political.

Perhaps you would explain the difference between the two.

I can imagine that ethical considerations arrive for particular regimes if they become

so extreme that nobody should be taking instructions. For example, for certain

totalitarian regimes, I can imagine that could be a difficult issue. I can recall that a

Middle Eastern regime did approach the firm later on, this would have been I think

late Seventies, early Eighties, about advice that they would like to have on certain

policies they wanted to pursue, and we were very glad to have the opportunity to turn

that down. But I don't think that we would wish to be in business, or feel it right, and

I mean this as a moral point, to be in business on the basis that only Conservative-led

boards of directors need apply for advice, or the other way round, and I think that that

is actually quite important. There must be a question of degree, it seems to me,

between that and the kind of regime which I wouldn't be ready to advise in any

circumstances.

But have you been approached by firms within Britain for instance who you felt that

you weren't able to advise?

I'm sure we have, but not on political grounds. We've certainly, I've certainly turned

down clients for whom one, or potential clients for whom one felt unable to, a) get a

suitable reference, b) that they would actually necessarily take advice, c) that they

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093A

would share advice as it should be, not just for a chief executive or a company

secretary in giving you a phone call, but among the board. Acting for such, any major

corporation or individual is a question of trust and confidence, as it is amongst

partners here, and it's understood that you should not take on work simply on the

grounds that you have given some legal advice unless you have a very good idea it's

going to be followed and then used appropriately and not abused. And there were

cases later on in the Eighties where financial people came for advice, I don't think, is

it appropriate for me to mention names? I certainly can do so.

Mhm.

A chap who has just come out of jail, Peter...

Clowes.

Yes, Clowes. Came for advice. He wanted to do a group reorganisation in the last

days I think it was of a March, which was their group's year end. We had never acted

for him before, or since. I thought that the thing was hurried for reasons which

couldn't be properly explained to me. We weren't put in touch with the auditors in the

way which we should have been. It's perfectly proper to want to complete deals and

restructurings by a financial year end, but the reasons have to be explained, and very

fortunately I turned him down, and that was my decision then. The collapse followed

very quickly, within weeks of that, and we had to explain our fleeting relationship

with this man and his group to the regulators in the City on the financial services side;

it was fleeting and we were not defending him at all, we explained that we had not

taken on the job and why, and that was the reason why. I think there are always

difficulties about acting, accepting instructions for groups of companies where you

don't feel that you are getting the ear of the board, and I think that is absolutely

crucial, it's a matter of trust and confidence, and that's I think been very much the case

as I've matured as a partner and the practice has grown that you have to feel, your

partners have to feel, after all their livelihoods are on the line, every penny, farthing

that they possess is potentially at risk, you have to feel that you do have that trust and

confidence, and sometimes you can be engaged on a group's affairs where you are in

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093A

doubt, and that does raise very difficult issues. They're not political, they're ethical

but, nonetheless very...

What structure is there within the firm for making those decisions then?

Well we have a Risk Management Committee which is I suppose one of the starting

points. And, we don't take on new clients without a reference, we try to follow up

that, sometimes it's very difficult to follow up if you're asked to take on something

urgently. And that's been made more cumbersome, but I understand the reasons very

well, by the money laundering laws which have come in much more recently, for all

solicitors, this is not just something for the City, but if a solicitor is asked to take on

business in circumstances which give rise to suspicion, he has to follow that up and

ask a lot of very difficult questions, and he's at risk, and his partners are at risk, if

that's not done. That's only one expression, I think because of the drugs laws and the

money laundering situation, and to some extent I suppose security, terrorism and that

sort of thing, which brought in those things as matters of regulation. There are also

very difficult ethical, professional ethical questions about conflict, which we've

always taken very seriously, and that can arise when you're acting for Government or

major corporations and their directors, and have arisen in very sharp cases of late.

Perhaps for us the most striking was through contacts in the Gulf we were asked to act

- this is not me personally but one of my senior corporate partners was asked to act for

the Government of Abu Dhabi as controlling shareholders of BCCI, and that was a job

well performed, as we believe, over a critical period of negotiation for them, but a

conflict opened up for this firm, which has had some publicity, because for reasons

which we don't think at all justified, New York attorneys believed that one of the

actions of one of our partners out there was open to criticism, and indeed legal attack,

though he was an English solicitor working for the Government of Abu Dhabi in Abu

Dhabi. That's still in dispute, but because we couldn't advise our client, the

Government, and retain this man as a partner as we have done, we felt it right to put

our resignation on the table. It was not accepted at first. We got to a stage where we

told them that you must take advice elsewhere as to whether you should accept it,

because quite honestly we thought our position was not tenable. They wished to hold

it, but... It's that kind of role which is extremely difficult. And the machinery for

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093A

assessing those things I suppose is, to talk to your senior partner; to make sure that the

team that is running the job are people of the greatest integrity and experience; to

make sure that you have a strong risk management committee who look at those

things for that reason only, to assess whether it's the right thing to do; where necessary

talk to the ethics people at the Law Society. And a whole jumble of issues arise in

that way. Always remembering, and this is very important, that it's unlimited liability,

and sometimes you can be attacked for acting or for not acting, and that can be, very

difficult issues arise, can arise in that way. And the media don't always follow that in

a glib report of something put out by some attorney somewhere or other, don't always

see that there is a background. I think it's also the case that some matters are pursued,

if you want me to comment further on this, tell me if it's going on too long, some

issues are pursued by justice in one form or another for political reasons, and that I

think was the case with some of the prosecutions, or indictments or arraignments or

whatever that were brought by the authorities in the States against some of the people

in some of the Middle Eastern countries on banking matters, many of them wholly

justified, but some may think pursued for reasons other than strictly New York or U.S.

justice reasons, but that is something that has to be looked at very closely.

So the Risk Committee...

Risk Management.

Management. Who is on that particular committee, where are the people drawn from?

It's drawn from partners' experience from all our major departments, so the senior

partner and the managing partner sit on it, and the chairman of it is not always one or

other of us but somebody who has experience in that field, and it usually tends to

bring up his successor from there, somebody who has sat on that field, sometimes a

property partner, sometimes a litigation partner, but somebody who has had

experience of those issues, and professional indemnity issues as well, all now very

much to the fore with the question of limited liability for partnerships and whether

that is something which is appropriate, can be set up in a satisfactory basis, and all

that follows from that.

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093A

And has there been a shift at all in whether you go out and get work or whether work

comes to you? I mean how far has that changed?

I think there's no change except in the sense that sometimes times are leaner than

others. When you are leading, as we have done over quite a considerable period, a

huge expansion, in opening offices overseas, in recruiting for a corporate department

or a banking department, then you do need to have work to satisfy the enlarged

departments. It's no secret, on the contrary we're very pleased about it, that we have

actually brought in I think a tremendous increase in our Corporate Department for

example. Since I've been Senior Partner in 1992 we have opened offices in Milan,

Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, that is a very substantial expansion in terms of heads

around the world, I think it's about 1500 people now, and somewhere around the 30th,

33rd firm in the world, so it's a major responsibility and one wants to be sure, so far as

you possibly can, that we get it right, and I think that nobody could ever say in any

firm that they always got it right, there are very fine issues arise.

Do you think law firms like Simmons & Simmons have become a competitive

industry, in a way that they perhaps weren't twenty, thirty years ago?

I'm sure that we have. I think that if you take, say, the period of the mid-Eighties and

the enormous pressures on law firms then to, particularly in the City but not only in

the City, to provide service on, acquisitions and mergers would be one field, banking

matters and all the allied major City practice areas, then that was a period when there

was a lot of work about, and very often the legal teams in the.....

End of F5093 Side A

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093B


.....was talking about the expansion in the Eighties.

In the expansion of the Eighties we were working with many clients, some of them

many new clients, some of them existing clients of long-standing in the expansion of

that time. And in-house counsel in major clients were under pressure to get work

done, and were not concerned at that stage about building up their own teams to deal

with very major jobs which they wouldn't have repeat business for internally. When

the change came around 1990, in 1989/1990, and the recession really became much

stronger and many companies were under attack, either by creditors or by the Fraud

Squad or the SFO, things began to change, and we have worked with, for example in

Brent Walker, with a group through five chairmen, from the time of the big

expansion, which is when they came to us as a client in the Eighties, right the way

through to the present time. So it was not only acting for that company under its

chairman, George Walker, who had built up the group, but acting for the board at the

time of his removal from executive office and indeed from the board later on, not an

easy personal thing for the partner involved but something which you have to always

distinguish between acting for a board and its chairman personally; we did not act for

the chairman personally, an issue that arose in his trial by the SFO, or the proceedings

brought by the SFO. However that was established, and he went elsewhere for advice.

We still act for that board through all the highly complex negotiations with the

bankers and other creditors through various restructurings where a lot of the issues

that I have mentioned to you in general terms came up most acutely. A restructuring

for example that lasted from the autumn of 1990 to the end of March 1992, where an

enormous effort was put in by the firm, the largest that we had ever had to do in one

protracted series of negotiations on, negotiations for the disposal of various parts of

the group where a transaction came right up to contract in various cases and then

didn't take place, where the same thing happened to different parts of the group, often

with Government clearances being required and not actually happening until the very

last stage. The firm was at risk for huge amounts of costs at that time, not that these

were fanciful sums but they were sums which were recognised to be owing, but the

bankers at the time didn't feel able to pay us that money in advance as it were. And I

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did raise an important ethical issue with the Bank of England, speaking for the City,

that it was not right that a board of directors couldn't get competent advice simply

because they didn't have lawyers with sufficiently long pockets, because we were

financing that, and they recognised that that was an issue. Part of the other issues

arising in the restructuring of Brent Walker were a group which had gone to hundreds

of banks at different times, not all of whom recognised London rules on how to

behave in a restructuring which made the whole thing very much more complex. At

any rate we did come through that period, the board was changed, we acted for the

board under its, Lord Kinnersley became Chairman, and it its subsequent Chairman,

and we still do act for them. So that's the kind of issue that's very important to

distinguish. You might have a chairman with strong ideas about how he's going to run

the group if he's chief executive also; you might have a chairman with strong political

ideas. But you have to focus on the board and its business, because that's what we're

there to look after, and what we can be attacked for if we don't get it right.

So the Eighties was the really great period of growth for the firm?

Yes. In the aftermath of that - well, a great period, the Seventies and Eighties I would

say was a great period of growth for the firm. In the recession we lost very few people

by comparison with our size. We built up other skills if you like, in international

insolvency and national insolvency, for Brent Walker and subsequently as I mentioned

the BCCI case which was the largest bank fraud that's been known. We did not act for

BCCI at any stage, we were acting for its majority shareholders. And that was a

period of very heavy stress for a lot of people engaged on those teams.

And how many people would you have had working on something like that?

At one time, and this wasn't over the whole period, I'm sure you appreciate, on the

Brent Walker thing there were a hundred people involved, on property teams, on

accountancy teams, on teams that had to go abroad. A pressure out of all proportion

to the size of the firm as it was then, or indeed almost any City law firm. There's a big

distinction to be drawn between the big U.K. law firms, City firms in almost every

case, and firms of accountants, where the numbers and the size of the firm are very

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093B

much larger. But, that's something that we came through, the Brent Walker thing, and

we are still dealing with those matters. And the question has arisen more sharply

since where companies look to build up their in-house lawyers, because they want to

save money and feel that there's not going to be that much transactional work which

they need to farm out. Now we would be I think well placed on that, because we've

always worked with in-house lawyers on the big transactional jobs, where there is a

role for them to play, and we've worked for them over a long period both before and

after those transactions, and I think that one of the hallmarks there is that you have

long-standing clients where you know you can be called in for the big jobs that we're

well placed to carry on. Where we've worked I think successfully is that we've

seconded people to them when they need people, and that's worked well because they

understand our ways and the clients' ways. We have worked well with them on

Government matters, major clients tend to be interested in your contacts with

Government. We've made several heavy secondments to Government, Edward

Troupe[ph] left the firm, had to give up his partnership totally, so it was more than a

secondment, to go about six months or so ago to advise the Chancellor of the

Exchequer, and he's left for a period we think of two years or so, subject to the

Government remaining in power. We have people on the committee of ACAS, Janet

Gamer[ph] who is our senior employment partner and built up that department has an

enormous reputation in that field, is on the ACAS appeal body, council I think they're

called. Steven Trowmans[ph] is an environment lawyer, it was announced recently

that he's advising the Government of Rumania on its environment policies. Now,

that's good in itself, but it's also good because clients realise that you have that sort of

expertise which you can't have overnight in an in-house legal department, and they

value that. In our training brochure, which I dug out for our afternoon session this

afternoon, we may want to put it on a collage, the history of the cover - the firm, we

emphasise that that kind of experience we share with the individuals who go, or we

receive on secondment, in a kind of partnership, not in a legal sense but in a

commercial sense. That's very important, that trainees that come here should feel that

they're going to get that kind of experience. We have seconded people to the OFT, the

Office of Fair Trading, to Brussels and the Commission, and many other important

things where they can build up their skills and experience and knowledge of the

individuals concerned, for the benefit of ourselves and of clients. Now, that's been

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093B

something which I think we've been able to offer which some of the national firms

outside the City or outside London have not been able to do, and it's obviously very

important that we should have some edge there. Some of the smaller, or then smaller,

national firms did make a policy, understandably, of trying to make inroads and

undercut City firms. We have taken on work on a basis which provides enormous

value for money for the client, for example the Railtrack privatisation which has

involved, must be more than a hundred people of all the skills, both property and

corporate particularly, as well as very senior commercial and competition department

skills, over a long period, and there is a question, as always after such a major high

profile job, is there life after Railtrack, you know. People will have to be given the

opportunity to take a complete break, to adjust, to get their breath back.

So when someone's working on something like Railtrack or Brent Walker, that

particular individual will work full-time only on that particular case, will they?

Not quite, it depends who he is. The senior corporate partners running the Railtrack

thing have to keep close to Government and the board on the flotation proceedings,

and a lot of those negotiations are political, witness the question of the amount of debt

to be left in Railtrack. That's not a political question in the sense of, you know, which

side you're going to vote in the House, but it's a political question because it's a high

profile job and it will be in the FT the very next day. Privatisation itself is political,

but we are acting for that board, as is known. Those who are working directly on the

flotation documentation will be working on that night and day for weeks; risk

management issues arise there, that you must feel if you're in such a team that there

are people who are not working day and night on that who you can bounce things off,

who can bring a fresh mind to it. Verification is the procedure known in the City for

checking prospectus material where every statement that's made has to have a

responsibility accepted for it. It can be very laborious, a very unpopular procedure, as

you can imagine, but it has to be carried out. And boards of directors welcome it

because they see that it does actually lead to peace of mind for investors and directors,

it's what it's about. So some of those teams will be, for example in this particular

case, the property people or working out very complex commercial agreements, they

are working on a very heavy timetable and a very heavy workload, often with people

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093B

who have not, in the client's group, who have not had that kind of pressure on them

before, who aren't always there to deal with our queries at the end of a phone. Very

complex, very stressful for - any flotation is, but when there's a political thing at the

background and the uncertainty that has arisen over this, as to regards the timing of it

and the Government's majority to see it through, very difficult issues arise. So, I think

everybody here will be very pleased when it's happened. It will show that we've been

able to handle the most high profile and difficult flotation of recent times. But it

always arises where there's a deadline and that kind of pressure. We've had other very

heavy flotations in the office in recent times. Nynex and General Cable are

telecommunications companies where we've done the flotations for them in this

country, and very highly skilled people involved on that who always help, and this is

actually quite an interesting point, that you come out of such a job not realising that

you are unfit.

Physically?

Not realising that you are unfit to lead teams and carry on work for a time, not

realising that. It's only when you've gone away, as we ensure that people should, that

that period of inertia and exhaustion follows. That's why it's so important to have

people have the opportunity to bounce and to assess how people are getting on,

whether they're going to stand up to that degree of strain. The stress of a very

prolonged high profile job can't be exaggerated. It's not something you charge for, in

the sense that, gosh, we're going to sting a client because of that, but it's actually

something that has to be understood, because you're going to lose that person's

services for a long time. Sometimes people don't recover completely, they're drained,

their capacity really to work that kind of, under that kind of pressure, or even to have

those lively ideas, for the benefit of the client and the team itself, is very much

impaired, sometimes for a very long time. So, those are actually very important

issues, and it's not just because you want to do your best for the client, of course you

want to do your best for the client, but you've got to realise always in your mind when

you're doing that, that, are you doing the right thing? Are you alive to those things?

Are the issues that should be, always there? Because the press may have some

questions to ask you, your partners may have some questions to ask you; you must

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093B

always be alive to those things. So that's why I think that political and ethical

questions, although they're very important, are too broad necessarily to give a picture

of what lawyers have to take aboard.

Are you suggesting that there's been individuals that have been working on complex

cases who haven't worked at that same level again in their working careers?

Oh yes, of course, I am suggesting that, I'm stating it.

And how typical is that?

I don't think it's typical, because I think that where something is so prolonged I think

that difficulties do arise. I'll give you, I can't, I don't think it's right for me to name a

particular name, but in the Brent Walker restructuring where it went on and it seemed

it might go on and on, I had to raise with the board whether people on our banking

team, the property team seemed to me to be fine, the corporate teams advising the

directors and negotiating heavy agreements in their own right, but whether the

banking team, under which enormous responsibility was, whether he would actually

see us through: not us, I mean the clients through. And I said, I must, please, double

bank here. That was my judgement because I was leading the team; I wasn't involved

in every day-to-day issue but I was the team leader, I must double bank here, because

it won't be any good to you, Brent Walker, if we're negotiating something and there's

nobody here with that degree of knowledge of what's going on day to day in that team

to step into his place. And they agreed. As it happened, that only arose at quite a late

stage, and the man, who was a very skilled and competent person and very ready to do

it, the learning curve in such a situation was so great that there was really not much he

could do. And this other partner was heavily drained for quite a long time.

Fortunately it wasn't, you know, a forever situation, but you do find that there are

people who are to some extent scarred by that experience, they have, you know,

contributed a very great deal and there are physical - you can't call them only physical

- physical, psychological, mental fall-out of stress is becoming much better known as

a result of these things.

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093B

And what sort of support do you offer within the firm?

We offer support in the firm chiefly while it's going on, we try to foresee that and we

understand it better, we offer support in the firm in the sense of, you know, the

necessity of people having a break afterwards. We don't foresee it in the way that

some of our competitors do, though less now than I think they did, we don't have

sabbaticals as such. There was an argument for them at one stage, and it may come

back again when we've recruited, as there has been a recruitment drive, and you need

to have a lot of people to have an arrangement for sabbaticals as you know. But, I

think we provide that degree of support, and of course if somebody wants to take early

retirement or something like that because they don't feel that they're...and that's not

happened at a senior level as far as I am aware but could easily happen to somebody

coming up for that and wants to go five years early or something like that, we will

obviously recognise that and make whatever award we could for it. But I think it's

only when a firm has been through that degree of pressure. And I'm not talking now

about, say, the six months that it takes to get a flotation done, say, which is stressful

enough; I'm talking about the prolonged negotiation and re-negotiation of transactions

which a whole restructuring, financial restructuring, privatisation involves. And I

think on things like that, we're not as well briefed, I don't think the City as well briefed

as it should be. I think it's happening very much better now.

But you don't have a welfare officer or...?

Oh, I'm sorry...

Personnel.

Oh yes we do indeed, we have very...yes we certainly have personnel, and have

recently, not so long ago, recruited a very senior personnel, a director of personnel,

Anita Devell[ph], who has come to us from another City firm who knows her way

around very well on those sort of issues. More difficult for her, but not impossible;

she's not a partner but she has a great deal of authority and personal skills as you

would expect. She runs a big department now. And, yes, I think these things would

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093B

be much more readily understood in her hands. Personnel tended to be understood -

this is not derisory at all - in the sense of somebody who looked after secretaries and

people who weren't lawyers, but we do understand it and this other appointment that

I've mentioned to you has, very much with this in mind, got this kind of thing in mind.

We do have welfare, we do have very strong employment policies too. We're not

talking only about the partners here of course, we're talking about solicitors, we're

talking about secretaries and the kind of physical complaints that are much more

widely recognised now than they used to be. So, I think that it's part of the maturing

of the firm.

I was just interested, I think the last session or the session before we were talking

about the relative cut-off between work and home, and I'm wondering how far the sort

of pressures you've been talking about spill out in the home environment, and how

you as a firm are dealing with that during, in the period of intense pressure that you

were describing.

Yes, that kind of pressure is inevitable. I think you have to have an understanding

wife and if possible children who are not so young that they do need a great deal of

their father's attention at all times. Part of the mythology of the firm with a senior, not

the senior but a senior, corporate partner that worked with me on the Brent Walker

matter, on the corporate side, was a telephone call that he had from George Walker as

Chief Executive and Chairman, a perfectly legitimate call, but, it was to him at his

home, and you expect to be phoned at home and you expect to have to come into the

office sometimes from home at funny times. But this man's, this partner's wife took

the call and, I've always applauded this and George Walker knows it, she told him,

`Yes, my husband will come to the phone, but he's just reading to Dominic now, and

he will come back to the phone in about twenty minutes' time'. And Dominic was

aged 5. And that was the right priorities, and I was very proud of that, because some

clients, for perfectly good reasons, are very demanding, and there's no such thing as,

when you're working on those sort of things, that a client shouldn't be able to reach

you, and it's the last thing you want a client to be able to say, and I'm not talking out of

our own self interest that he wasn't able to reach the company's solicitor for advice on

crucial matters. George respected that man. And, it can't always be like that. I think

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093B

the most unpleasant personal incident I've ever had was, after I had gone to bed, so it

would have been about 10 past 12, getting a telephone call and being asked, would I

come into the office because the people who were actually involved at that particular

time weren't represented at a senior enough level and questions were arising on

matters which they weren't told that they were going to be dealing with. And of

course I said yes. I don't drive so I got a mini cab to bring me in. The only time that

I've re-washed my face having gone to bed, it was a very unpleasant procedure. I'm

quite prepared to stay up all night on the job, but to get out of bed was miserable in

the extreme. And of course the place was, you know, blazing with light, it's very busy

here sometimes at night, and that's OK, but to rejoin that sort of throng after having

gone home is not much fun. Weekend work is of course another area, very much

impacting on what you've said, where we do accept that it can be necessary, overnight

work can be necessary. I think I mentioned in another context that one of the first

questions that civil servants ask on teams for privatisation is, `Do you have a 24-hour

word processing?' and whether that's abused in the sense that they make use of a

service which they know is available when they don't really need it. I don't mean

abused in the sense of any criminal thing, but if the service is there, why not use it, is

something that's been in my mind; whether that's right, but people are put under a

great deal of pressure. It's not all people all the time though. In different jobs,

different people, often corporate people, often property people in certain transactions,

property people tend to have a more even flow of work, for which they're answerable,

for which they've got timetables on big jobs which they've got to comply with, and

you supplement your team as necessary, in certain cases with paralegals or others who

are on fixed-term contracts, which is something which we would not have known in

the Seventies or Eighties, early Eighties, but which now have become necessary.

People shouldn't be under any illusion, sometimes they are given new contracts or

given permanent employment afterwards, but a lot of things you can only provide the

service on a basis that the team will shrink afterwards. And that happened out in Abu

Dhabi too, where people were taken on for particular jobs, of verification or

preparation of documents and things of that kind.

And what proportion of your current work-force are on full-time as opposed to

temporary contracts?

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093B

Oh the overwhelming proportion. I mean I can let you have figures and breakdowns if

that's something that you want to have. The overwhelming proportion in all our

offices are permanent employees, but it can happen that you do need to have that kind

of supplement, and people are very glad actually to have that experience, but they've

got to be part of the team, a team is something that's permanent, it's not just, you don't

have a permanent, or rather you don't have a shifting team of paralegals, or people

who are not members of the, you know, it would be just as necessary for particular,

supplementing particular areas.

And the team will stay together between...will you restructure teams for different

cases or different clients, or will the teams stay together between different...?

If you take restructuring, that is something which used to be called insolvency, they do

stay together. They work cross-departmentally, because they have a litigation side to

things, they have a corporate side to things, and they have a very very specialist

insolvency experience. And they do stay together, but they don't...and they tend to do

that kind of work, that's a very specialist skill which works in that sort of way. It's not

only the same people working for each client though, and we're not in that kind of

scenario at the moment, so they are out if you like looking for work for receiverships

and liquidations where some of the contacts that they've made will continue to keep

their skills as required. The M & A lawyers were working, mergers and acquisitions

lawyers were working of course much less in the period 1990 to '92 anyway, those

skills are back in favour. Some people say, this may well turn out to be right, that

privatisation is the last big privatisation in this country, it's certainly the most

complex.

The Railtrack?

The Railtrack. Yes I'm sorry, the Railtrack privatisation. And so, we are glad to have

that degree of experience. We had before that dealt, and still do advise, the Ministry

of Defence on dockyards and related matters there, but this is certainly very complex,

it's important experience. It may not be the kind of experience that one will need

Alan Carr

C736/02/08 F5093B

again, any more than the nationalisation experience is directly required again, but no

experience is wasted, and certainly the Railtrack experience is directly relevant to jobs

which we quote from other offices, high speed trains in Taiwan or whatever, electrical

nationalisation in Thailand where we have teams tendering or working from our Hong

Kong office. And that is what an international law firm really means. We should be

at the stage one day, we're not yet, we wouldn't pretend that, where it's a seamless

service round the world, that Hong Kong is sending us work in London, that Shanghai

is calling in Paris, and that is what one would like to achieve, but there's only so much

you can do in a lifetime, or even in a century.

Let me just pause there for a moment.

End of F5093 Side B

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094A


One of the questions that's been intriguing me, I was hoping we could talk a bit about,

is the way that you negotiate with a new client before you actually start.

Take him on?

Yes. I mean we've talked about whether you would take them on or not; we haven't

really talked about, you know, the financing if you like, I mean how you actually agree

a relationship from the outset. Can you talk a bit about that?

If it's a wholly new client that one's not met in any scene before, that's a little unusual,

I'd like to just explain that, because you might meet somebody who has become

finance director of X, but you knew him in another life, and so to some extent if

you've acted for his company or for himself personally he was his own reference and

referee, and you didn't have any particular difficulties. I've mentioned the other type

of case where we had no point of contact, we weren't allowed to talk to the auditors,

and where the interview was pretty short, and the answer was no, thumbs down. And

generally we would wish to take up a reference. We'd like to speak to a merchant

bank or brokers or whoever it is, that we could establish a rapport with. Vital where a

major job was in the offing where you would be working with that company's or

individual's accountants anyway, because a great deal is said by that. I've tendered for

jobs in this country and indeed in China where those issues are extremely difficult,

and generally I've been introduced to a board by a merchant bank or some other

commercial connection and I've gone along to meet the board and as I hope inspired

some confidence, and agreed to take on a job. Sometimes it's a relationship where

they haven't got a particular job immediately waiting, but they know that their current

advisers aren't equipped to deal with something that they've got in mind or a particular

negotiation that they want to conclude. As regards terms, we quote rates for the job,

hours for, what our hourly rates are, those are available, they're published, we don't

hide that. If it's a job which is going to be very long-term and we can see that that is

so, we can say to them, we can be flexible about these things, and all kinds of very

thoughtful ideas have been worked out on that. Value for money is something we

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094A

hope to provide. Money for value too is something I'm more concerned to stress of

late, because, well for some of the reasons we have discussed already today. But

basically a senior and experienced partner in a particular field obviously will

command a higher hourly rate than somebody who has just become a partner or

somebody who has only got eighteen months perhaps qualified experience, and you

don't want the experienced partner doing himself the work of a junior; delegation is

extremely important. We like to think, and complex ideas about realisation and

utilisation and all that sort of thing come into all this, that an equity partner should

keep himself and three others busy, not three other equity partners but three assistants,

busy, that is a good sort of ratio, and that does happen in some departments more than

in others. We are driven by the market in that sense. You can't always achieve what

you would want to achieve, but with all that a partner now recognises that he has to do

in the way of risk management issues, keeping those sort of thoughts very much in

mind, satisfying the client, providing solutions for his difficulties, practice

development and getting in new work, it's a very demanding role to be a partner. And

we do not believe that it's enough to be a good lawyer, that's taken for granted, that he

will be a good lawyer, that he will make himself available as necessary, but he's got to

have a lot more skills than that, and personality, and the acceptance of some of these

other roles which don't go down so easily, and I won't pretend that I've discharged all

of them, for example giving seminars and talks on particular specialist areas, is not

something that I've had the opportunity to become good at, but now a lot of my

younger partners take that in their stride.

What other skills?

What other skills?

Yes, would you expect partners to have?

I think the prime skill is the ability to say, `I want to come to this next board meeting,

and I expect the chairman and the chief executive to be there, because I've got to talk

to them about this rather difficult matter.' And if you're told, no, then you've got to be

in a position to say, put it on the line and make sure that the firm's position is totally

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094A

clear, if necessary record that in writing. It's very difficult, because those are

questions of judgement as to when you do that, and as to how you carry that out, and I

think that says a lot for practice development, you have to have that ability. I think

that, among other skills I think it's the ability to have, is more a human matter in the

sense that I think people assume that the sort of pastoral role is only senior partner's

job; well, yes, in that sense we're all partners in the whole firm, it can be so and we

have in-built procedures on appeals for everybody to come to the senior partner if they

feel they've been badly treated or dismissed or whatever it is, that all those things are

built into handbooks, but much more than that I think is the training if you like, the

preparation for that; whether you're going to become senior partner or not is in

handling big teams, being sensitive to situations which might be building up which

others may not have sensed. Being open and receptive to people coming to tell you,

`Did you know that X was suffering from so-and-so?' and you may very well not have

known that. So a lot of issues of that kind are I think absolutely vital. Firms have

changed a very great deal from the time when it was a family firm, and the sort of

days of the Governor as the staff would have called Gordon Simmons, who was the

last of the family partners, senior partners, and we went into another era, not

immediately but it was the beginning of another era when he died. Now I think a very

great deal is demanded, not just for staff but for everybody in the firm of that kind. I

think the initial part of your discussion was, how do you actually decide or get the

client to decide to take you on, and that is extremely difficult, and one isn't always

successful in the sense that some things you are taken on to do and do very well, don't

turn out to be financially rewarding, but they are things that you take on because they

do give you profile of the right kind. I went to Beijing as I may have mentioned, if I

have just tell me and I won't repeat it, I went to Beijing in January '94 to North China

Power, a company which is supposed to provide power for 120 million people in

Beijing and that part of north China, to a place which, Dickensian but seemed very

complementary[??], terrible conditions, and we went there with Warburg because they

wanted to meet Warburg, and we took a very high level team in from Warburg, along

with China lawyers and a team from our Hong Kong office, and they were pleased

that the senior partner from London had come out to tender for this job along with

these others. And I may have mentioned before that we got this job, Warburg did not,

by working with Salomon[??] on the eight-share[??] issue, which will actually make

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094A

the shares for this company when the market becomes right for it, listed in Hong

Kong. Now that is a very long-running job. An enormous effort is being put in, but,

as they're entitled, the Chinese negotiated extraordinarily tight fees, and that is

something which certainly won't be a rewarding job financially but has given us very

high profile there, everybody was full of admiration that we had got that job and done

it and done it well. One of the things that was recognised then, I think perhaps first by

me but by others since, is the responsibility to give work experience and training to

people from, if you like Third World, and we have done that, and I think that's

absolutely vital in, it wasn't a question of going to one meeting in Beijing, being told,

`You've got the job, just sign these terms and conditions,' that wasn't the case, the

thing went on for months, as General Motors have found in Shanghai where that

particular thing was fought out in public between General Motors and the Chinese

authorities and with Ford and Mercedes, who's going to build the cars for the new

China. General Motors won out as it happened, must have been very painful, it went

on after deadline after deadline, in public, yes they've got it, no they haven't got it. So

it's very important that professional firms can be ready to, to some extent recognise

the efforts of clients, and I'm not suggesting we were acting for General Motors in that

particular negotiation but it's illustrative. We do have secondees from China, there are

one or two in the office now, who came not directly from China but have done some

kind of legal degree, Master of Laws or something in Dublin, who knew people we

knew well in Dublin and have come here, who have done, say, nine months in our

London office, will then go on to the Hong Kong office and then back to China to

practice. Now that's something which perhaps ten years ago or more would not have

been done by City lawyers in any significant way at all. Accountants maybe, I think

accountants have had the resources and understood through audit and things like that

which is an international service provided anyway for a big group, that it was good to

have friends who understood their way of doing things in different parts of a client's

group. Here the thing is very different, but we do recognise that's very important and

explained that we felt it was important when the former Chinese Ambassador came to

lunch here in those discussions.

And have you done much in Eastern Europe?

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094A

We have not opened an office there, and that's examples of another kind of initiative.

One of our younger corporate partners did follow up an initiative in Latvia, and went

there. We had somebody, a trainee, now a young solicitor, with us who had a Latvian

parent and who could speak the language, and we have given advice on jobs in Latvia,

and Andrew Ward who is the partner concerned who led that has actually picked up

some jobs of various kinds. We don't envisage opening an office in Eastern Europe

for some time yet; I think the two - and this is speaking personally - that I think we're

very glad not to have opened, are Tokyo and Moscow, and...

Does that mean it was discussed?

Oh yes. Oh yes. To some extent one is dependent on having the right clientele and

practice for opening offices in particular places. Our Hong Kong office, which was

the second overseas office to be opened at the end of 1979, had been there a long time,

was a natural place, being long-established in Hong Kong, to make a bid for a licence

in Shanghai. As I think I may have mentioned we were the only U.K. firm to get a

licence to open in Shanghai in 1995, and that caused, rightly caused, a great deal of

excitement, not just in the firm but in British industry, and we had the clients too who

were interested in just that. Tokyo would have been a place to open an office for

bankers, enormously expensive place. We didn't have the banking clientele that some

of our competitors had. We couldn't see that that was actually something we wanted

to do, it would have been I think a terrible drain on resources which we would never

have replaced. We visited Tokyo a very great deal, both from London and from Hong

Kong, very experienced banking lawyers were there. We had secondees in law firms

there, we had a scholar who went out on a United Nations - sorry, I beg your pardon,

an EC Japanese scholarship, Tim Ferdinand[??], now in our Hong Kong office. And

that's paid off. Slaughter & May closed in Tokyo and opened in Singapore, they also

closed in Frankfurt. There's no golden rule that you have to have an office in a certain

place; you make a success of your business, a legal business is a business like any

other, got some extra things to it no doubt. But, we're very glad not to have opened in

Tokyo. Part of the justification of that came recently in Shanghai, because Isusu[ph],

a Japanese motor group of course, decided after seven presentations to them to

instruct our Shanghai office on all their work in China, and that was through our

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094A

contacts, we were introduced to them, or reintroduced to them, by Nagashima, which

is a Japanese law firm with whom we have the closest possible links, through work

done together and one or two secondments. They knew us, and we have a consultant

in that part of the world who reminded them in good time through our international

client partner that this is just the kind of thing we would be good at doing, and it

worked very well. We wouldn't necessarily have got the job by having an office in

Tokyo, and unless you have a very long purse and the right kind of Japanese banking

clientele which is going to keep that office busy, not a very good thing I would have

thought to have. Slaughter & May seem to think so anyway. Moscow is a different

scene, and eastern Europe, coming back to your original point, and indeed central

Asia, because we do act as I mentioned before for BAT, but we can't act for them on

their tobacco interests because we have other clients in tobacco, and we were asked to

take on joint venture work for them in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and China itself,

years ago, and I had to refuse, very unwillingly on my part personally but we have

commitments and that's where conflict is vital. We act for Gallagher and American

Tobacco, and American brands generally. And so that's where, yes to financial

services, no to tobacco for them. And that very much determines in some ways how a

firm develops. You grow with a client, but there are certain things you can't, roads

you can't go down. So I dare say we would have had an office, not in Tashkent

perhaps but in, I would have thought almost certainly in Moscow, where BAT have

expanded very heavily and have been...I mean, the tobacco industry is unrecognisable

from what it was at the time that BAT bought Eagle Star, when it was thought to be a

dying industry and needing to diversify into finance and financial services.

So in terms of the financing of these individual clients if you like, you seem to be

suggesting that your margins have changed somewhat in the last five or ten years.

Yes I think that they have. They don't change in the same way all round the world all

the time, we are market driven in that sense, we have to recognise that, and certainly

have always been ready to recognise that the long jobs do require special terms to be

negotiated.

Like Railtrack?

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094A

Mm?

Railtrack would be an example would it?

Yes, and that I think is very much in favour of the client in many ways, that it may

take...you can't judge how long a job is going to take in terms of human time and say,

it's going to cost that, take it or leave it. That's never been possible, we've charged

hourly rates and we've been ready to justify the time spent. But you might get to a

stage, I don't want to be quoted in any particular case, where you say, whatever it is,

we won't charge more than X hours a day, more than, we would have to show what

has been charged, we're not going to charge a flat rate of hours but not more than X

hours a day for fee earners in that rank, and it may be that they are in fact well over

that, that's part of the knock we would have to take.

And you negotiate that at the outset?

So far as we possible can, yes. Yes. And some of those things of course can be under

scrutiny elsewhere, because the Government can be involved in that. It's not just a

commercial discussion between a major client and its board of directors; the kind of

talk that, you know, a lot of money is being spent on the privatisation of this, or the

nationalisation of that, you've got to expect that whether you like it or not some of

these things are going to be discussed. I was under personal, heavy personal interview

in `Legal Business'[??], I can dig it out for you if it amuses you, for the Brent Walker

costs, where you know, a figure of some millions over two years can readily be

thrown at you because you've got to be ready to deal with that. The actual rates

charged and paid over the whole period for the number of fee earners and partners

involved, and the risks taken, because we had to pay out of course counsel's fees for

advice which the bankers' lawyers got just as much as we, sometimes ran into seven

figures at particular times. And where you can't actually say in the middle of the

thing, `Well we're not going on any more.' Although Allen & Overy in the same

article put up a partner and said, `Oh yes we would be quite prepared to say we

wouldn't go on any more,' and they got away with it in particular circumstances, but

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094A

you can't always do that, and we certainly didn't feel able to. And the Bank of

England, when I spoke to them about it, it was early days then for this kind of thing to

happen to lawyers, didn't say, `Well you had better tell them you can't act for them any

more.'

And what would be [INAUDIBLE] accounting...?

There is a public interest if you like, we were to that extent carrying the can because

this particular board of directors and the City had to see the job done. There is a kind

of public interest in it too. Yes we did get paid in the end, but it was a great period of

stress and [INAUDIBLE].

So do you not invoice monthly as you're going along?

Sure you do; you don't get paid monthly always.

So with Railtrack you would invoice the Government on a monthly basis?

It's not the Government, it's a company, we invoice... We are instructed by Railtrack,

the board, which is...

Sure.

So you invoice. Yes, you agree arrangements for invoicing, but if your bill isn't paid...

I'm not suggesting in a particular case there that it hasn't been paid. You have a

structure carefully negotiated and you have to deliver, people have a regular discipline

of billing, and they have to justify every hour, every half-hour, whatever it may be,

within that. But I could have billed daily, Brent Walker, it wouldn't have mattered,

would it?

No.

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094A

And, obviously it's good for the client and for the partners to know how they're getting

on and where they are, but extremely difficult actually to have a clear idea of whether

the bill is going to be accepted, even within agreed guidelines, because if you are

going through a second time of negotiation on a particular complex thing, there's

either a learning curve for new people coming on the job or there's a question of a

client saying, `Well that was abortive last time round, but it took just as much time

and skill, it wasn't our fault that it was aborted,' you have to always be prepared to

look again, even at the agreed guideline. So, very difficult issues arise. Now I recall

this figure of £10 million was what was quoted in this interview, and it may have run

up to something of that sort over this very long period, but I had to remind the

interviewer that in fact at one time we were more than £3 million at risk, and you can't

take a charge, you can't take any security for that debt, and the bankers...

How about Railtrack, I mean how much is Railtrack worth to Simmons?

Do you know I don't know the answer to that in cash terms; I ought to but I'm not

running it. What it's worth to Simmons is to see that job done, that's what it's worth to

us. What it will have earned for the firm in fees over the whole period, I don't know,

and we don't know even, if you were going to count the days, weeks, regularly to the

31st of May when it's supposed to have happened, we still don't know I dare say what

will actually be charged or logged or paid.

And are your rates pegged in some way to other competing law firms?

Well, we recognise that there's a market out there, but I don't think we would offer in

that famous first interview, somebody comes to you as a client, will charge you X or

twice what this firm in Leicester charges or half what Slaughter & May are charging.

It's not pegged directly in that sense but you do recognise that...

So you're blind tendering in the normal way, often?

Yes, or, more to the point, clients often look for a beauty parade, and you are not

always told directly why you have not got a job. And you don't always lose out

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094A

because yours is the highest or lowest tender. They do much more, clients are much

more sophisticated now, and sometimes you can in fact be very very well placed than

the lowest, but much more important is when they actually tell you, and I take it we

can speak confidentially when it comes to the publication of these things, recently we

led a team to the Welsh Development Agency for whom we got work which will be

for at least two-and-a-half years, because we are going to be their regular advisers, and

they've already sent in three jobs. We were not the cheapest among, either City or

other firms that tendered for that, but they were impressed. And that was a complex

document and in a series of interviews put in by people cross-departmentally who well

understand what a client requires. It wasn't a question of a waste of public money at

all, they will get very good service, and that's always very rewarding. Sometimes you

are told, `Well, we weren't really quite sure what you meant in the document about

your fees,' and that was where you had indicated, these are the rates but on long jobs

like a Monopolies Commission reference, not a merger reference but something that

might affect the whole industry, we would obviously be prepared to negotiate and

discuss if we were instructed. It wasn't a question of, `What would you charge for

doing this job starting in three months' time?' And the client, yes, was a bit uncertain,

and they found somebody else, got the job, or nobody had been appointed because

they didn't really know quite what it was they wanted. It's not always on price, they've

got to have that general confidence, and we work on it[??].

And will you tender for jobs on the basis that you should be seen to be tendering for

them rather than on the basis that you actually want the business?

No, I think we would always tender for them because we do want the job, and regret

not getting a job. There's a lot of follow-up with those things now. We would always

follow up what was the problem, why didn't we get it, who did. They don't always tell

you who did, that, you know, [INAUDIBLE].

How do you find out?

Mm?

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094A

How do you find out?

Well sometimes a name might go on a set of accounts, or it does come out in the

wash. Obviously with some of the privatisation things, we I think came second on the

privatisation of Steel, and I remember going along, and we were less experienced in

those negotiations then, we took I think about ten lawyers, and perhaps it was too

many but you can't always tell, sometimes it becomes a bit blurred. And in a lot of

cases, a lot of types of work, not just Government or privatisation work, say project

finance, you don't get the job because you haven't got the job before, and that is itself

a very difficult experience. There are areas of practice where they only want to go,

not just to the best firm but the firm that's got what seems to them the most relevant

recent experience, and that's where, I mean, a lot of questions of judgement come into

it, because, for the clients and for ourselves. The Railtrack experience will be very

worthwhile, we hope, but that wasn't I think a negotiating point at the time that any

fee structure was agreed. But I think we do understand that in-house lawyers can shop

around, particularly in times of recession; they can build up relationships elsewhere.

We have always got to be in a position to provide a really top service, value for

money, and those are very important.

What sort of means are there for having contact with competitors?

Well, it's not so much, if you are implying, you're putting in a tender, what's your rate

going to be then. You don't know even who is putting in for the jobs, you're not told,

`We're inviting you to tender and X Y Z are on the list too.' You may or may not see

them going in or coming out of somewhere in a particular building, that's purely

chance. You don't know what's in their documents obviously, and you don't know

why they got the job and you did not. You might suspect, you might have somebody

who would be reasonably forthcoming; I think it's terribly important that you do

understand more of these things. The whole, and it is a technique, some are afraid to

use the word, of presenting for jobs is something which everybody has to be much

more aware of, practice development is important, and we have had some guidance on

these things. Not rates or anything of that sort but on how to actually present what

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094A

kind of things, how to present your document, why you are a distinctive firm, why

they should come to you, and how to carry that out in an interview. But...

And is the longevity of Simmons significant in that sort of presentation?

Not directly I think. Obviously it is I think of interest that we have been around for a

hundred years, but we were a very different firm even forty years ago, which is about

when I turned up, and I think it is of interest to, and slightly more than sentimental

interest but not much, that, you know, it's done on our own bootstraps if you like, we

haven't merged on a big scale, I mean taken over, and the twins that founded the firm

certainly perhaps would have applauded that. I think there's...people should feel that

it's been a good place to be, a good place to work.

End of F5094 Side A

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094B


What I was trying to get at is whether there's a sort of new and old school within, and

whether there's a distinction between the older firms and the newer firms that grew up

in the Eighties.

Yes there is that, but there are plenty of, well certainly some people in the City would

not regard us as one of the older generation of firms simply because we've been

around for, I won't say a mere hundred years, but for a hundred years. I think we have

been a middle-size City firm for quite a long time, although it was very slow to start. I

think that it goes to the questions of credibility and I think character in that sense, that

we have been around for a long time and have done some important jobs. I think that

we are ready to take on high profile jobs in the areas which we think we are good at,

and City firms generally tend to limit those, and we have too, not exclusively to

particular areas but they tended to be, because business is largely looking to the City

for advice, or have done up to now, corporate finance and capital markets and

litigation and all that flows from those. We've had some quite significant add-ons

because of the way the cookie has crumbled, and I mentioned some of those

pharmaceuticals and financial services generally, and industry, it's been an industry

driven thing in a very large way. But those are matters of luck to some degree, so it's

a broad-cased City practice. How it works internationally itself is fascinating,

interesting, and about one-tenth of the firm is in Hong Kong, which is very significant,

and we have a New York office which doesn't practice any law, it's a marketing office,

that's significant too, and what sort of law it should practice, you know, is very much,

if it practises at all, or whether it should stay there, all those are quite difficult

strategic issues. Whether one should have limited liability or incorporate, all those

sort of things are other things coming to the fore.

And how are you perceived by the older firms within the City?

I think we're seen very much according to the sort of ratings that we get. We're about

seventh or eighth in the City, very good in particular areas. I think we are generally

regarded as pleasant people to work with.

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094B

Who isn't...?

That's right, that's right.

...regarded as pleasant to work with?

There are firms which are more difficult. I'm not talking about the sort of top dozen

firms, I think some firms are more difficult to work with and make more difficulties.

It depends to some degree on questions of experience. Others have huge shoals of

lawyers available at beck and call, and we have to be extremely competitive in terms

of fees and availability to match that. Historically we have not been a great capital

markets firm, we've built up a team, teams there, and that's something where we have

some catching up to do, but we can match that in other ways; I don't mean just on

questions of price but in other areas. I think we have a very strong record in acting for

groups of companies over a long period and for people they acquire or if they are

acquired. We have shown good record in getting to know the new owners of the

business and working at any rate[??] for part of the enlarged group. I think that's

something that does speak for itself and is good. And I think things have rightly

changed a great deal, not just in numbers and the number of offices. I think

relationships are very much better in some ways in the office, although unavoidably

you cannot know everyone, there are about 800 people, 900 people in this island site,

you cannot know everyone, you do your best. This particular management suite that's

sort of been around for eighteen months or so is a bit isolated, it was there because

nobody else would take it, because who wants a ground floor office with very little

other light? Things of that sort.

How are you perceived yourself in your current role within the firm? I mean you

mentioned there had been a sort of breakdown of this sort of almost paternalism or

family involvement. I mean how do you think your role is perceived now?

I think I am seen as probably too distant, and I don't go to every single function, I do

enjoy the ones I go to. Now of course unavoidably one is preparing for these

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094B

particular celebrations which I always knew would come at the time I'm going to be

retiring anyway, and I think that's actually been quite a good thing in many ways

because the new team can get introduced at a time of greatest publicity for the firm,

that's excellent, and I think that I am involved in a lot of those celebrations and in a lot

of the publications which we are bringing out, and that I think is itself a very good

thing. But, I can always say that I was the first senior partner that was elected, it must

mean something, and that's the system now, and the managing partners are elected and

that's the system now, and we have actually had a first, possibly since I saw you last,

and that is we now have a managing director elect, because when Alastair Neill[ph]

retires at the end of '96, our director of finance who is an accountant has been elected,

not a partner, not a lawyer, not a fee earner, to be managing director, and we'll have to

find another director of finance. Now that's a first among the big City firms, I think

it's quite interesting, and I think it does show among other things that we are open to

looking for talent where it's to be found.

When did the...?

Not that there weren't any partners, you know, able to do it, but you know, one was

looking at this.

When did the election, the system of elections come in though?

'92, when Steven[ph] James retired.

And how does it function?

All partners can vote.

And how are nominations arranged?

Well, there's a system of nominations, any equity partner can, you know, put himself

down as a candidate. It has to be in the London office simply because that's where our

preponderance of numbers is at the moment, but the Hong Kong partners and other

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C736/02/09 F5094B

partners can vote. If you are nominated you don't need to have a secondee, although

some people, generally you are known to have some support somewhere, and it's very

much the, not first past the post, what is it? You know, if there's a...maybe has a clear

majority at the first ballot...

Alternative vote?

Not an alternative vote, we have terribly complicated strategies elsewhere, I'll come

back to that in a moment, but for the senior partner you just have a simple majority is

what you are looking for at the very least, and if you don't get that out of four

candidates, say, then...

A single transferable vote.

The...no, you have to have another poll.

Oh right.

So in that sense the bottom two will fall away and you fight it out between the top two

until you get somebody who has got a majority. And, I think that itself, it's not

somebody who emerges in the Macmillan sense, in the Macmillan era political sense,

it is more open, in that sense I think it does give somebody some authority, but at any

rate that is the change that came in in 1992.

And what was your own experience of that process?

We don't allow canvassing so I just allowed my name to go forward and be

nominated. And, I wasn't entirely passive about it either, but I mean, the arrangement

which still stands is that you are allowed to put out a short message to partners about

what you think you could offer, but you are not supposed to canvass and I did not.

And you, certainly, if any group of partners want to come and have a session with you

to explain better what it is you are...how you see it, that can be done, and I suppose if

there were a multiplicity, you know, there's four or five candidates, two or three

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094B

candidates, whatever it is, it might be a good idea if they could all be present at one

sort of session, but, I've not known that happen. I have certainly known, because I had

my own experience, you know, partners from various sectors, practice areas, friends,

whatever they were, came along and wanted me to fill in a few things. I remember

asking, I made it clear the system is, the senior partner five years, but if you want to be

elected for a shorter term then you must say so then, not later. So said, well actually

it's going to be a bit less, and I said that then, and they came along, and some people

came long and said, `Does that mean you wouldn't allow your name to go forward a

second time?' And I said, `No, but I'm not standing for five years, and between us I

don't think I will. I think, you know, 39 years will be enough.' And I think that was

right.

How many opponents did you have in the contest?

Two others. I don't know how many votes I got because [INAUDIBLE] counted the

votes.

Was it a secret ballot evidently?

It was a secret ballot, and, we don't count the votes. There's a partner who's sort of in

charge of these constitutional issues and you fill in your form and you send that to

him, sealed, and you send to him also a separate piece of paper which says whether

you've voted or not, or confirms that you have voted and then when the nominations

have closed and the votes have taken place they get sent round to the accountants who

are scrutineers. Well I got used to this. The transferable vote and all that kind of

thing comes in, we had other committees, perhaps I should just touch on that.

Mhm, yes please, yes.

We have an elected managing partner and we have an elected senior partner. We have

a PAC, a Partner Appraisal Committee for incoming partners and we are sitting, we've

been sitting here most of this week in here at that, that's elected too, because the senior

partner and managing partner are ex officio on that, can't be the case and won't be the

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C736/02/09 F5094B

case for the managing director because he's not a lawyer, and it wouldn't be

appropriate for him to have a voice. We can always call him in where that's

necessary. But the other members of the PAC, there are three directed elected ones

for this purpose and they come from different slices of the equity. So there were five.

That's very important, and you learn more about the firm in their sessions than in any

others.

One of the things I wanted to go back and just talk a little bit more about, we were

talking about the relationships between this firm and others.

Yes.

And the first question I suppose is the sort of elective system that you've described, is

there any evidence of that system coming into use in other firms in the City?

Yes I think it's certainly, I think that at Nuttalls there was some publicity, perhaps six

months or a bit more ago, they have a slightly different system but I think they did an

elected one where they have two managing partners and a senior partner, and the two

managing partners are elected so as to be like that, they don't...and their terms expire

at different times. And I think they and others in the City are catching up on us on the

desirability of having female partners, that was another area where were I think very

much to the fore. I mentioned Janet Gamer[ph], Catherine Hilton[ph] was in charge

of the Brussels office for a time in the early Eighties I think it was, and Janet

Holway[ph] and others, we've had a number of very successful women partners, and

now it's extended into the corporate and very much the capital markets field too. So

that's something where I think we were ahead of the game, and very fortunate...

So what's lying behind this outbreak of democracy then?

A revolution in the streets. [LAUGHS] That's not wholly flippant. I think that times

change. Even the Tory Party recognise that. We're not in the Macmillan era, and I

think people feel more comfortable that they can say what they feel quite openly, that's

important. That wasn't always the way in the City, and I'm sure it's still not the way in

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094B

many parts of the City or in, you know, some of our competitor firms, I don't know,

but I think it is actually very important, and I think particularly important, and we're

not there yet, where you are an international firm, because people can't take on

assignments and feel they're totally removed from all that's going on, and they aren't,

they do come back, but these are important things and they should have a voice on

them, it's their future very often. And I think we have certainly been I think rightly to

the fore in a lot of those matters. Now, the way in which the firm has grown has I

think partly been responsible for that, the fact that Peter Richardson, who was the

senior partner after Gordon Simmons died, there was no pressure on him or reason for

him to want to introduce such a system; different systems of equity have been in

favour in the City as they have in New York and other parts of the States, and I think

that some of those lead to a more democratic approach than to those which, you know,

are seen to be more autocratic, seem to be more in the nature of an investment. I think

that we're quite pleased with the system we've got for the time being, and it was only

brought in comparatively recently. But, nothing's perfect and I'm sure things will

continue to change.

My other question related to mobility between firms.

Yes.

I mean you've hinted that there's more contract work now, although the vast majority

of the people that work for you are still full-time employees. But how far is the

mobility between firms, and has that changed at all?

I think the mobility between firms, it's not a question of a team suddenly going on the

market in shoals of people, I don't think it's like that at all. But what you do find is

that people can leave, that's a loss to us in the sense that if you've trained somebody

and got a relationship with them, they may go to a client, they may go to industry, they

may go to a competitor, and that's happened many times over, but not in huge

numbers. Then they feel that a lot of competitor firms have had people come to us

and stay and become partners here. Nothing really changes, I believe, that

fundamentally. When Gordon Simmons came back from the Second War with

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C736/02/09 F5094B

George Dennehy[ph], those two were effectively the senior partners, Gordon was the

senior partner and he saw the need for a huge recruitment. I was taken on, Alan

Fisher[ph] who you're going to meet at lunch soon was taken on in the Fifties as well,

and, no reason why he shouldn't, you know, chat to you about it if it's of interest. It

was of interest because we also recruited at the same time a lot of solicitors from other

firms. Michael Holmes[ph] came to us from Linklaters, David DeKahl[ph] who was

for a long time, in fact before I became senior corporate partner, he ran our Corporate

Department for about fifteen years, he came from Freshfields. Steven James[ph] who

was senior partner was at the Bar; Sir David Wilson who set up our Tax Department

was from the Bar. And you could go...quite a big number of them, there was a huge

recruitment drive, not just because of loss of numbers after the Second War as such,

but that was a very big time, very big expansion. And that went through the Fifties,

Sixties and Seventies. Now, we took on people in the Eighties as well, there was a

period of recession as we've discussed, and now we are expanding again. Whole

sectors that people didn't think about, like employment law and capital markets, which

is not just an appendage of banking as such but that whole area is areas where we've

grown. Very difficult to grow because you need people of skill and experience and,

very difficult, but I think we've always gone for people, of late, you know, with very

good degrees in almost any subject. We don't only look for the Law graduate.

Mathematicians seem to be doing extremely well in financial services, and the sort of

formulae you need for complicated instruments.

Where are you recruiting from?

We go to Oxbridge, we go to Bristol, they've got a very good law school, and really

the other, Southampton I think has provided us with some very good people too. Very

important that we should keep in touch with all law schools. And in London, King's

in London has also I think got a very good law school, we've had some good people

come to us from there. We have a recruitment partner and a huge team of people.

People usually come to us for a training contract after they've done a stint with us in

the summer as a vacation student, I think I may have mentioned in another context we

had one year 1800 people apply for 70 posts, vacation studenting, so it's a huge job

simply running through all those things, and it's... We take the milk round, as it used

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C736/02/09 F5094B

to be called, of the universities very seriously. We have had people, and do continue

to get people, of extraordinary talent. Fulbrights, we've had two Fulbright law people

go to the States out of the five that have been on offer and we think we've got the fifth,

there's one coming through now, I mentioned Tim Ferdinand[??] who went to Tokyo

to learn Japanese, I've seen one of the letters he wrote back to the head of his

department, an amazing document, he's an amazing person. Tremendous stresses.

They have the Winchester[??] system of hot-ups[??] there you see; if you didn't get

your 75 per cent or whatever it was necessary to get through then you were put

through it again and you were expected to get 90 per cent. Incredible pressures in that

environment, he responded to them; not everybody should be even asked to do that.

He was given this award from Brussels, the people in the E.C. And there are people

of great talent and also of great charm. I think to be responsive to those sort of

pressures doesn't disqualify you from a social life. You should see the dragon boat

team in Hong Kong, of which he is a great part. The Hong Kong office is a very

exciting place, because it's that much smaller, you're still, you've got all the skills and

the various people involved, but you know, it's 100 people and not 800 or 900 people,

nearer 1,000 now, here.

And do you seek to approach people yourselves, or do you like for people to come to

you? I'm thinking now of the first recruitment from colleges.

I haven't been on the rounds for a long time. We do have a stand, you know, in the

City, like Freshfields or Linklater, anybody else of various...and we certainly go to the

universities, to the law schools, to the law tutors and have relationships with them.

We invite them to come up to London on a particular day to have a look round, but

that's something that you would expect to do. It's all very different from the time

when I just turned up for an interview not knowing any, having any idea what went on

in an office. They have a chance to tour the London office, and they have the

opportunity to do a vacation course with us which is four weeks, two weeks in one

department, two weeks in another. By the time they actually sign up a training

contract, if they're offered one, they have had a chance really look around a bit, and, I

mean that document there will be attractive to them because it will show them a little

bit about the firm, they can see, and I can certainly leave one with you, of the...each

Alan Carr

C736/02/09 F5094B

year we have a training course, we have a lecture theatre here which I think you saw

last time, which has a lot of facilities and other facilities, training rooms outside, and

that's something we provide for in-house lawyers of clients if they wish it, as well as

our own trainees. We invite politicians and leaders of business to come in and give

lectures to them there as well. So you really feel that you are participating in

something. I think that the training that people have now is first-rate and it was

almost unheard of when I became an article clerk, you know, 35 years ago, whatever it

was.

I mean are the...do you have a relationship with tutors where tutors will say, `There's a

particularly bright one here, you might want to talk to him before anybody else does.'

Oh yes. Well, I think that, the experience I had when I was around, that you addressed

a number of law and/or other potential graduates at Cambridge, you might know the

law tutors in a particular place, and you would invite...it's not easy, they're quite

sophisticated in, you know, they've seen Slaughters, they've seen [INAUDIBLE],

whatever it is, and they'll give you a good time too. And they ask pretty good

questions. Now it may be that they then give John Bradshaw or whoever the chap is

on recruitment that time the opportunity to see them They won't see them up at

Cambridge I think on a one-to-one basis, but they would have the opportunity to come

to London which is much more fun because you have your day out and you actually do

have the opportunity to see the office and other partners. But they're quite

sophisticated in asking you questions. Obviously if you are sending a number of

teams round then it's not like the old appointments board was in my day. It's made

much easier, and rightly so, for people actually to be selective, to know what are the

questions to ask. They have a hand-out from which they can ask sort of things. It's

done on a fairly professional basis.

And the remuneration that you're offering, will that be the same for all recruits or will

you vary it depending on...?

No, it would be the same for all article clerks, and they get, every six months, they do

for rounds, four seats in their two years with us, and they generally would expect to

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C736/02/09 F5094B

get a rise as they go through, and that's market driven. We tend to be a little bit ahead

of some of our competitors and a little bit behind others. But, I'm going to be seeing

some at the end of March, the beginning of April, who come in for a lunch, they may

have the opportunity of looking around on that day. I've been asked by the

recruitment people to do that, which I am quite glad to do, sit down and have a good,

jolly lunch. We also have a special lunch for those who get a 2:1 or first-class degrees

in whatever the subject, and they have a little envelope which...I don't know what's in

it but it's several hundred pounds for whoever, you know, I think it's £600 for

somebody who got a First and £400 for everybody who gets a 2:1. Because we do

value that. And we have, you know, a big long table and, as we shall have...we're

going to have a slighter smaller one today, but, they have the opportunity of meeting

different people here, long-established partners, and not only partners, solicitors too,

in the various departments, have a few drinks, and it's very good. Actually value

excellence among all these things. How on earth partners are supposed to choose it

I've no idea, but...

And the majority of people you are taking are still law graduates?

No, I should think it's about 50 per cent.

And has that been a change, a shift?

I think it's changed, changed, and changed back again. I think, I wouldn't be

absolutely firm on that, I think it's about 50 to 60 per cent are law graduates. I and the

last senior partner have certainly been history graduates. Bill Knight, senior partner

elect, is a law graduate from Bristol. Peter Wilson, I don't know what kind of

graduate he was. The senior partner before him, Gordon Simmons, hadn't got a

degree.

And how many people are you taking did you say? Did you say 80?

We take 80, it will come up again to about 100 - sorry, we take about 50 or 60 each

year, which means that we have about 100 to 120 trainees, because they've got two

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C736/02/09 F5094B

years. So...and that's not directly related to the number of people that come on the

vacation course, because not all of them come to us down the line as trainees anyway,

but we would probably want to give that kind of experience to people who have that

potential, and wish, if they know anything about it, I did not of course, I wasn't offered

that opportunity anyway.

OK, I think we'll pause there today. I think probably we need another final session as

there are still a few things I need to...

[INAUDIBLE] I feel guilt a bit about it, but anyway, you've told me that others have

gone on and on and on, so I'm just going on and on.

This is very interesting for me as well, so I hope you're finding it a help.

Well that will be post-New Zealand, you'll come back refreshed.

End of F5094 Side B

Alan Carr

C736/02/10 F5095A


Right, now last time we were talking about, as I remember it, recruitment strategy at

Simmons.

Yes.

And I wanted to sort of move on from that and sort of, and finish talking about the

structuring of staffing at Simmons as it is now.

Right.

And talk a little bit about sort of promotion paths and specialisation and so on.

Yes.

Which we had sort of touched on, but I would quite like to get a view of how it is now

and how you feel how well it works, or doesn't work, and whether you would do it

differently.

Just the sort of topics the legal professional press are on at me about all the time, so I

feel fairly well rehearsed. [LAUGHS]

Really? So, well perhaps you could describe how Simmons is currently structured in

terms of departments and specialisations, and promotional path within that structure.

Yes, I'll attempt to do that. I'll start by describing the City office, which is still very

much preeminent in numbers. The overseas offices to some extent reflect that in a

smaller scale. The major department is Corporate, inevitably, for a big City-based

firm, and that has a number of special practice areas we can come back to. It's called

for one reason or another Department 5, and it has as...not the same in terms of

numbers but perhaps in terms of importance, a Finance Department which is banking

and capital markets, which has grown more recently at Simmons & Simmons because

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C736/02/10 F5095A

we're not historically as you know a firm that advised merchant banks, we've come

into that area more recently, it's also very important. And there's something called

Department 9, which, I suppose it's got some kind of past justification but it's a

commercial Intellectual Property and Competition Department which looks after the

Brussels end of the practice and E.C. matters so far as they are distinguishable from

general practice. A difficult area to describe in a single term, called Department 9.

Those are the main commercial departments, and working with them all the time is

the Tax Department, which has also grown, that's got a number of specialist areas.

Slightly aside from them historically or, in the longer past, the Property Department

was much the largest in terms of numbers; it's still very important, it's not got the

preeminence it had say thirty or forty years ago but it's still very large, and that has got

three or four groups. And there is a very large Litigation Department, Department 7.

Those are the sort of main independent departments, each one has a DMP, a

departmental managing partner, and sometimes in addition a head of the department

which is more a dignitary kind of role. The DMPs all sit on an operations committee,

which is chaired by the managing partner, Alastair Neill[ph], who is elected; the

DMPs are not elected, they emerge, or at least there's no firm-wide election of them,

they are chosen inside the departments that they're going to be managing.

By who?

By the equity partners in that, and the salaried partners as well, I'll come back to the

distinction, almost without a difference, but in the department. So the managing

partner and the international managing partner, who is chosen by the managing

partner, these are fairly recent arrangements, the last year or two, and if his choice is

confirmed by the partnership at a partners' meeting, sit on the Operations Committee.

And that makes for eight or nine people who are lawyers, I'll come back to our new

managing director in a minute, you probably haven't heard about him yet, sheltered

life in New Zealand on your holiday. And, we also have a lot of support staff who

come to Operations Committee meetings, I mean there's a head of IT with a bit

department under him; there's the head of know-how, who is a lawyer and has got

people in each department working under him; there's a very important marketing

director who is herself a lawyer from another firm, but very highly trained in these

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C736/02/10 F5095A

matters; there's a very highly qualified director of personnel. Those are the main

support heads and they all have large groupings, some would say too large, but they

have to get used to how the world is these days, groupings under them, and they are

fairly hierarchical and very highly qualified and have to be. And I can come on to

what happens in some of those groups later if you wish it. And those are the main

people on the Operations Committee, which is the main executive office, sector, in the

firm. The managing partner however is really under enormous pressures, Alastair

Neill[ph] manages it extremely well, and he was very well chosen and he was the first

to be elected in March '92, because you saw at that time the beginning of the very

natural breakdown of the chairman/chief executive officer if you like, which was

Steven James[ph] who played that role very successfully in the Eighties, and he was

senior partner from '79 to '92, so he knew a good deal of how it worked, and he had in

fact been de facto managing partner for eight years before that when Peter Richardson

was senior partner. So he knows, he's still around very much, so, he will be at our

dinner in eight days' time, he knew the firm extremely well, no one better, but it was

impossible to run as it had been run, and that was an experience in commerce and

industry and finance as well, and although that was formalised for PLCs and listed

companies, that institutions didn't like the idea of combining the offices, it was an

impossibility in a big professional firm, we thought, and I think were right. So on that

executive side Alastair Neill[ph] is the managing partner; he had been in almost every

major department, a very varied career in the firm, he was a litigator, he had been in

Department 9 working for Beecham and others on pharmaceutical matters, and he had

come at a late stage of his career into Department 5, the Corporate Department, where

he had worked for Hawker and BTR and a lot of major corporate things too, so he had

a terrifically wide experience of the firm as a lawyer, guaranteed right of re-entry in

our constitution for the managing partner to come back into professional life as a

lawyer, not so far ever been taken advantage of, because he was too good to lose as

managing partner and they extended his term a couple of times until his retirement at

the end of this calendar year.

What's the relationship between a senior partner, i.e. yourself, and the operations

[INAUDIBLE]?

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C736/02/10 F5095A

I do not go to the Operations Committee, that's not a personal choice, that's I think set

in stone. When we rewrote the constitution in 1992 when I was elected senior partner,

we went in for a period of rethinking generally about our way of doing things. We

had had a Management Committee which had a lot of partners on it including me; not

because of that last point but generally it was a talking shop, nothing ever got done,

and the Operations Committee, which is complemented by a number of other

committees I'll come on to, does get on with things and it is an executive office and

run by Alastair[ph] very well. We then, Alastair[ph] and I, were responsible for

bringing in some management consultants and getting some ideas together about how

we should reorganise our affairs, I think the first of the big City firms to do that, and I

think that after a good deal of heart-searching it's going to pay off and be a very

successful reorganisation. But, I've always thought, and I'm quite sure that, you know,

in a new regime, which is what it will be, quite rightly, the institutions must adapt.

They won't be set in such a way that they can't operate properly under new people, and

one can see some of that coming about, but before I describe the change I would like

to mention some of the other committees and then we can come into particular

practice areas if you wish it.

Sure.

The other major committee is a Strategy and Policy Committee which the senior

partner chairs, and a Partner Appraisal Committee, which is actually unlike, not quite

true to its name; it actually appraises people for partnership rather than looking at the

performance of existing partners, but that will come, I don't doubt. And I chair that

committee, and the managing partner has sat on that and does continue to sit on that

ex officio as well, and in both those other committees, the S & P and the PAC, apart

from those two ex officio members the others are elected directly by the partnership in

bands. Our system in the equity is lock-step, which has - does that mean something to

you? I don't mean to be patronising. I only put it that way because it's now going out

of fashion I think. We used to have an investment system of shares which worked

very well in the Seventies and Eighties and thereafter, but it is not a very suitable way

of recruiting the very best talent, and it went out of fashion, you have a lock-step

system, when you come into the equity you come in on the ground floor and you go up

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to the plateau, there's a ladder, and the ratio is 2½ to 1 or whatever it is, so you start at

a level and go up to a level, and it's inevitable, and you've got to be pretty bad not to

make the top. That's the bad way of putting it. Generally I think it's worked quite

well, but, and I'm sure it's a lot better than some of the newer products of the

American professions, eat what you kill, is not a very attractive mode for carrying on a

professional partnership, but it has some people saying that's the right way to operate.

You can see the sort of carnivore instincts of the Thatcher era there. And there are

other ways in which our own system no doubt will be improved, that's more looking at

the way the equity works rather than the way the firm is organised, but they obviously

repercuss. So we have eight members of the S & P, and there the talking shop to

some degree. They have done some very good things though, they brought in this new

constitution and recommended it to the partnership and argued it out with the

partnership and got it through, and I think it's been a very good thing. We now have

weekends where we go away and debate those sort of things, and it's all a very much

better, more open society. The PAC is the, really the most important committee in

many ways because in its deliberations and material that comes into it, it sees exactly

where the firm is going, and with the S & P, the Strategy and Policy, they look at what

are strategic appointments to be made, where particular departments need

encouragement, whether a particular candidate's appointment, election, whatever it

would be, actually fits in with business plans which we now have in a fairly formal

way.

That's world-wide?

Yes. And, I'll come back to the world-wide, I don't want you to misunderstand that,

we do not yet have global equity, we have London equity, but of course there are

plenty of people in our overseas offices who have some London equity. How you

move from that to global equity is not quite so easy, they promise to introduce a draft

to look at in the next few months, it is a red hot topic. But, we have, we generally

work on the basis, we have a financial year that ends at the end of April, and like most

of our competitors we tend to announce the appointment of new partners as from the

1st of May. When you're working on budgets and all the rest of it, that's not a very

sensible timetable, and it would be better and I think I managed to persuade them that

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after I've gone, i.e. the next time round they may do it in October, it would make much

more sense, simply because the diary is so crowded in the first three or four months of

the year.

How many new partners are you appointing?

We have appointed eight.

Is that typical?

Yes, it is, it is, it's about right. Sometimes it's been ten or twelve even, it depends if

you've had a very lean patch. People are chosen on merit and what they can contribute

to the firm, that's what it's about.

Which means, what does merit mean?

Merit means that, are they going to add value?

In terms of...?

Yes, in many ways, not just fees, fee earning capacity. Are they going to, you know,

add to the importance of a strategic department? Have they got any particular skills

with clients? Have they got any particular skills in training people? Are they ready

and willing to carry some of those skills overseas? Because we always ask people,

long before they come up for promotion, you know, `This is an international law firm,

how is it, tell us about what you think about that.' And of course when they're hot

from university, `Oh yes, a tour of duty in the Gulf or Hong Kong, terrific.' By the

time it's all simmered down a little bit and there are young children or even worse,

slightly older children going to school, it's more difficult, that's a fairly common

experience. But generally it's very important that we should have people coming in

who see that that's exciting and want to be part of that. So, merit, I don't mean only a

meritocracy in the sense of pounds or dollars or whatever it is; I think it's in the

question of, will they contribute, are they excited about it, and will they add value to

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their part of the practice? Which indeed means the ability to work not just as good

lawyers, taken for granted, long hours, taken for granted I'm afraid, but also that they

have practised development skills, that they understand that they've got to go out and

when they're partners particularly, less of their time, a lot less of their time will be in

direct fee earning and engaged in other things. That doesn't mean only going the

opera, but it actually does mean seeing the importance of keeping close to clients and

seeing that you are providing a terrific service, that you can organise teams to provide

a terrific service.

And what you do you mean by long hours by the way?

Weekends, persistent weekends. We have floated Railtrack since I saw you. I was

not involved in that, Bill Knight, the senior partner elect, led the team on that, that

was the biggest single job that the firm has taken on, people have been working on it

for three years, it was a very difficult privatisation, and dogged with political

uncertainties right to the very last, an extraordinarily complex matter engaging

arguably, I would say this to anyone, arguably too big a job for us, but a very

important hurdle for us to go through. I suppose that any firm that's been engaged on

any major privatisation has always thought at the time it was too big for them. But it

was an extraordinarily important thing and a lot of time and experience had been

devoted to it, and I'm sure it will repay, not on dollar or pound fees, partly on that, but

there were obviously very closely monitored rates, but on the basis of the experience

that we will get and the credibility that a job of that kind gives.

Any casualties?

Yes, I'm quite sure there are, but I don't think as far as the client is concerned, or the

relationship, but you can't do a job like that and find that everybody is happy

throughout, there are a lot of exhausted people. And the way that whole job was

organised, with the client's knowledge and consent, you can't, you know, bring in

people at a moment's notice, you are working with a team of bankers and client, and

be sensitive to Government and all that sort of thing, it was an extraordinary

achievement of organisation, quite apart from the technical skills of writing a

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prospectus for Railtrack, and when people asked. And I'll give you an example, you

know, how are we going to explain what are the risks of a Labour Government?

Printed Clare Short's speeches. And that was the only way one could do it. And

people, you know, must assess those things. But it was a very very difficult job,

technically very difficult, and marked an important shift in the way the firm has

carried on very big jobs, because, as I was going to describe, I've told you some of the

major departments, I haven't given you the numbers of people involved, I've just said

which were big and which were smaller, but in the Seventies and Eighties the trend

was for specialisation, and you called in, usually Department 5 Corporate led because

of the nature of the deals, teams from other departments sit round a big table. But it

tended to work consistent if you like with the sort of ethic of that era, on the basis of

specialisation, you got the thing done in a particular way. Now, on a major job like

Railtrack, and the trend was working this way in the collapse of Brent Walker where I

did lead teams, where there are skills cross-departmental. The Railtrack matrix, so-

called, the Property Department has actually become very commercial. The skills

needed for the flotation of Railtrack and endless other problems were cross-

departmentally. That doesn't mean you've got a conveyancer, you know, writing the

prospectus, but it does mean that a lot of skills work in various departments, it's not so

rigidly separated, and I think that is actually going to be a growing trend. So, when

we want to give the so-called seamless service in Paris or in Shanghai that they get in

London, a client gets in London, we've always insisted that people should be

commercially minded and have a commercial approach, but they've got to have

experience of working in teams that have provided that service in different places as

well.

Are you suggesting then that big jobs like Railtrack can actually mould and shape

structures within the firm itself?

Mm, yes very definitely. And I think that the bankers and the clients know that. Very

definitely. Since we were together before we've done a bit more of our history as I

told you, and so my interviews have helped me with that, and vice versa. It was very

clear to me that there were a number of jobs that the firm did, important jobs that the

firm did, in the Seventies, and even more in the Eighties, which gave us credibility for

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the next stage of our development. Well Railtrack is one of those in the Nineties. The

major ones of the Nineties have been Brent Walker, the collapse of Brent Walker, the

restructuring of the banks which went on for two years. The credit, financial credit

that we had to give the company through that, because we couldn't, we didn't think we

could walk away from it, we were acting for the restructured board, and other

solicitors acted for the banks which ran into a very large sum of money, something

like £3 million at one time, and the Bank of England, though very sympathetic and

wanted the thing to succeed, weren't able to suggest any means in which we could

actually be covered at various times. I led the team at that stage, all this has been

ventilated in the professional press so there's no secret about it, and it was a very

important job for us. Not only therefore the acquisitions, because we acted for the

board of Brent Walker from '85 onwards or so in most though not all of their

activities, but through the restructured boards we have acted for them and we still do

act for them, and it's still as a single group a major client but it was a great risk for a

City firm, or any firm, to take on, and that's been an experience of other firms too

since then, and the line which a firm of solicitors can take with its board of directors

or the chairman of its board of directors in those circumstances, has to be judged on

each case. So that was difficult but it gave us an enormous credibility certainly. And

that was followed by acting for the majority shareholders in BCCI, which was a bigger

job and that went for three years, our involvement in that, and a very highly skilled

international insolvency practice has emerged from that. We could do it before but

until you've actually done it you don't, you can't say that you've done it, and the

organisation of that job was an amazing affair. And that has been followed, as I say,

by Railtrack. A lot of partners find it difficult to believe that there will be other very

big jobs, you know, life after Railtrack, but I do recall saying just the same thing about

life after the Brent Walker restructuring. Partners who are used to a professional life

must be ready to go out and, you know, find work, and of course it is coming in.

So roughly what percentage of your turnover and activity has Railtrack been

responsible for?

A high proportion, I couldn't give you a figure, partly fortunately because I don't know

the figure, but it's a very large proportion. More than that though is the proportion of

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people who have been engaged, who have got to be satisfied that there is sense in it

all, and that means for partners that they're going to be given the opportunity to do

something quite different, and also for staff. It also means organising inevitably for

any major job now, paralegals, who are not slave labour as some might think but who

are not trained and haven't set themselves when they came to do other than a contract

job, and there are quite rightly, and it has to be organised that way, people, particularly

on the conveyancing side but in other departments too, who come as paralegals, may

work on a big litigation area, for example on the BCCI matter, and when there's no

need for them then they accept that that's what their job is, and then they've not come

to us on a permanent basis. So, all that requires a great deal of organisation and time

and a great deal of care, and the anxiety of people feeling, are we ever going to get

other big jobs? I've been around sometimes and I can assure them that yes, you will,

but unless they come in in big terms it's very hard for people to believe that.

So is there a job that ethically you wouldn't be prepared to take on?

Oh yes, oh yes.

Can you describe...I think we've talked in broad terms about the sort of, the business

ethic in your decision, but we haven't really talked about the, if you like if there is a

moral ethic behind your acceptance of business ethics[??].

Oh yes.

Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Yes. There is an example of one that I turned away and that's the chap who went to

prison - gosh, [INAUDIBLE] their names. And whose wife has just become bankrupt.

Peter... He ran investment companies and promised all kinds of things for retired

people in terms of annuities and was found to have an awful lot of yachts in the south

of France and things of that kind. You possibly vaguely remember it, the name will

come to me as we speak, but... He came out of the blue with no particular reference,

because he wanted a reorganisation done, I think I may have mentioned this to you, by

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the end of a March, a financial year that... And it wasn't satisfactory that we should

set up something like this without a proper reference or knowing anything really about

his business, which alerted me to that. But then we're talking about the Eighties and I

had been around a little time, but it's very important, I was calling this back to myself

at the time but I have always said, and there have been other cases, there has to be in

any lawyer, that's something you've got to do, feel in the air you breathe really when

you're being trained, but certainly in any partner, that there's a distinction always

between the firm and the client, and the client must know that that is so because

otherwise you can't do a good job for him, you've got to be able to stand back.

But there is nonetheless some reflected involvement isn't there, there, I mean it's an

association with the success or otherwise of the client.

Yes, oh yes, you've got to associate yourself with the client, you've got to be able to go

through all the agony that the client goes through, very definitely. You've got to be

able to make the client know that you understand the commercial problem he's facing,

and we don't go as far as the American lawyers and actually make the decision for

him, we try to share the thought process with him, that's very important, I think that's

what being a commercially-minded lawyer means. We're not shadow directors; I

think American lawyers doing their job over here might well be in some occasions.

But the client, the chairman, the CEO, the board, whatever it is, must know that you

can assess the thing from his point of view and that it's not just as, you know, the very

worst kind of lawyer is on the one hand, on the other hand a long letter of which way,

but actually there's no guidance. Now you do, you might well write a long opinion,

but there are bullet points and at any rate the client knows exactly where you stand,

and that's the next part of the discussion is, where you stand, because it may be that

there are things which the client implicitly or expressly is asking should be done

which can't be done which, that's no way that we can assist.

But there must be cases where you feel uneasy.....

End of F5095 Side A

Alan Carr

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I was just thinking of an instance where you were maybe acting in the Third World

where there is criticism of methods that are used by companies within the Third

World in terms of labour rates, or there may be polluters of some form or another. I

mean there are, I mean, international companies which presumably you've acted for

where you may have been concerned at some times about their activities.

I'm sure that's so, it's inevitable that that is so, and that's why the partner who is

running a matter, a group of partners, the team, must always be very sensitive to

anything that they are asked to advise on. Now I think there is a distinction here

between a company which is doing something which is lawful but which is open to

political criticism or environmental criticism or Greenpeace of whatever, that kind of

thing, not saying that you could always say, well it's lawful so we can advise it.

Sometimes that's a sufficient justification and sometimes it is not. I don't think it's for

the lawyer always to say, `We're on the side of Amnesty International,' I couldn't

caricature that sort of thing, but there is an area, an important area, where the client

must always know that you can't identify yourself with him just standing back, and

you've got to do two things, and I think that is actually where the stresses come more

than in the hours, you've got to do two things. The client must feel that you do

identify yourself with the success of what he is trying to achieve, but up to a point, and

there comes a point, sometimes, not very often but sometimes there comes a point

where you've got to say, `We don't identify ourselves. We may risk losing this client

or we may have to sack you'. And that does happen.

Have you got an example you could quote?

Yes. I don't want to give personal examples, we've got to come some time to -

obviously we speak on a confidential basis, but I think that, I mean I've got to have a

better idea to some degree of what happens to this material - but obviously the Brent

Walker case did give rise to great difficulties because we had on occasion to assess

what officers, directors, very senior people at Brent Walker were saying to us, and

what they were saying to other professionals. It is I think not acceptable in any

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circumstances for the director of a company, public or not, to say, `This is what I've

been told by my accountants, and by my other solicitors. That's all right then, isn't it?

This is a statement that's going out to the public, to the press, now.' That's put very

crudely and obviously on that basis nobody would say, `OK, just put my name at the

bottom as well'. But on a less crude basis, it is actually a trick that's very often played

and can be very difficult with very heavy responsibility for saying no. And that is one

such case. I don't want to go into detail because as you know the chairman in that

particular case at that particular time was never convicted, although I had to give

evidence against him for the SFO, in quite minor way, but the interesting thing about

the case from my point of view, and from Simmons & Simmons' point of view, is that

he tried to argue that it's public knowledge in preliminary arguments and proceedings

that my evidence and Simmons & Simmons' evidence generally shouldn't be given

because we were acting for him. Of course one of the difficulties obviously, he

couldn't always distinguish, perhaps not sufficiently often distinguish between himself

and his family and the company. He could I think when he needed to, but we argued

that that was never the case, that we had always presented our advise for the board, he

was CEO and chairman, and they were our client and he was not. That can be a very

painful and difficult matter. I had to sack him, and that's been on the television, you

possibly saw it, rather crudely put but he put it quite fairly in some ways the night he

was sacked, May the 29th 1991, this was the company he had built up. He had got a

board of directors, the bankers were standing at the table with a midnight session, and

I had to go along for the company and advise the board of directors at which this man

and his wife were members, that they would have to remove him. And as they

couldn't remove him, because they didn't have that power, only the shareholders could

do that, they would have to sack him and take away all his executive role, leaving him

on the board until he finally did resign, that the shareholders were going to remove

him eighteen months later, rather a different story. And when you've worked very

closely with somebody, and that was a man who had a great deal of political, or a

great deal of charisma and a great deal of extraordinary commercial skill, finding that

as praise, it was a very difficult thing to do. But I think one's got to be able to do that,

that was put in very very sharp form, and it didn't happen in half an hour either, it was

five hours through the night with the threat of, I think a very sincere threat by the

banks that they would put the receiver in the next morning if it didn't happen. The

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banks actually wanted him removed from the board and I had to convince them that

there was no power, nobody in the room could do that, they didn't have the power, and

they had to go down this other road, which was all that the board could do to avert

receivership. And it's that kind of, you can't always be ready for something like that,

and I certainly wasn't expecting it earlier in that week, to occur then, but, it's a very

difficult thing to do. And then to be asked to give evidence by the reconstituted board

for the SFO also provides tensions, not that we were in any difficulty about that or felt

that there had been any conflict, but it's not a very easy thing to do that with your

former client in that sense, or the head of that client, sitting in the dock opposite you.

So, those are some of the tensions I think that emerge. Some of the others... And

that's reflected in, you know, what the firm can do and what the firm can't do, what the

firm should never do, and I think those are things that, that's what experience is about

I suppose.

Did it take a toll on you personally?

Oh yes, very definitely.

In what way?

I don't think you can work closely with somebody and then find that there's a kind of

reversal, that you are now having to turn what you know of him against him. Very

difficult. I don't think I felt it at the time for a second, because I knew I would have

do that and that was, you know, it was right that he should go on trial, probably right

that he should be acquitted, you know, that's what happened. But he described very

clearly, if you haven't heard the tape you should see it because although it's very crude,

we were not giving any assistance in the programme, he I think was quite fair; he

didn't refer to anybody by name in the firm, and we didn't act of course for him in

those proceedings, but, his life really is at an end. He may, you know, have a

commercial career in the Soviet Union or wherever, but you can't not feel that. It's

happened before in a different way. I acted as you know from earlier interviews for

Grovewood Securities, and their chairman, not for him personally, was John

Danny[ph], and when Eagle Star was taken over by BAT this conglomerate that they

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had acquired was of no interest and BAT disposed of it, not just like that, it was done

in various bites of the cherry, and I was acting of course for Eagle Star and BAT in

that disposal as they had always been the client, and for Grovewood. But a man who

has built up a business, as he had done, and he was 75 plus at the time but it didn't

seem to matter to him at all, couldn't tolerate that that was being taken away from him.

Perfectly legitimately and not the solicitor's doing, it was his shareholders. They

weren't the public, they were the companies that now owned them and that was

something he couldn't tolerate. And I had to deal at a board meeting and hear him say

a lot of things which he should never have said by way of criticism of what was going

on, and his unwillingness to sign things and things of that sort, it was very childish in

many ways. But that does take a kind of toll, it would be foolish to pretend it doesn't.

Nothing at all open to any kind of criticism, it's just that the way a client can react, and

I know since that, my wife and I and family have been down to see him at Nottley

Abbey[ph] and all the rest of it, and he had been very friendly in the nicest possible

way and taking us to the races at Brands Hatch and all the sort of thing that, corporate

hospitality in their Grovewood Group which was very very nice. In fact throughout

the whole group he couldn't speak to anybody; he couldn't speak to his secretary, he

couldn't speak to his own officers in the company, the corporate secretary, he

couldn't...he couldn't speak to, he was a damaged person. And very few people at

Eagle Star and Grovewood have been able to talk to him since. So that, I think it was

a very unfortunate experience for him, and you know, much better if he had actually

been able to organise his life so that he wasn't always so wrapped up in his business.

So those are things that...

I mean from your personal point of view in terms of what are, nickname perhaps,

coping strategies, I mean do you have your own techniques for dealing with the sort of

pressures at work that you are under? I mean how do you...?

I am not a fee-earning lawyer now and haven't been of course for some time, since I

became Senior Partner, so looking, I've got to put myself back, did I have, or probably

I didn't have sufficient, and probably that left me short of temper and patience in later

life. I dare say there are; that kind of stress is better understood now. I tend to be

sceptical whether that can actually be, whether you can learn not to suffer from those

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sort of things, I think it's human to suffer, I think you should to some degree expect,

that if that's going to happen, then it will happen. I think, I had those two particular

examples. There have been earlier things of a much more fleeting character where

people who have become I think very successful in every way on the kind of basis

we've described as well as just in the commercial way, very good corporate and

commercial lawyers, at a very early stage one was having to say, `Look, what you're

doing makes a lot of sense but you've got to stand back, you've got to learn to stand

back and say that this is Simmons & Simmons, and say to the client, if necessary, get

the difference clear. There's always an area that, you know, you've got to consult

about, you can't just accept an instruction'. And I think that is something that people

have to be sensitive to from an early stage. It's one of the reasons why we would not

want to make up a partner in an overseas office, coming back to where this particular

conversation started, unless they had had experience and were known to have

experience in London, and were known to the partners in London, simply because

there is a preponderance of partners there, or at the very least that a majority of the

partners, an overwhelming majority of the partners, where they operating, say Hong

Kong, knew them well and knew London well and had come out from London. It's

often thought to be a little bit patronising that London thinks of the overseas offices,

in theory you should think of them, you know, all the same number of sides on the

table, the same size and it's all global, and in theory that can happen, not very likely to

happen. but it's terribly important that there is a common ethic, and that clients will

have an understanding that it's a tough ethic and that people will take an unpopular

and difficult decision, and sometimes, and the first example I gave you in London, I

don't think I need go into detail perhaps, they attempt to block the operation of that,

and that's very serious, because if you write a letter for all directors and it doesn't get

through to all directors, that's very serious because you don't have the trust and

confidence, and that's what it's all about. And that is, those are the words, perhaps I

should have started at the beginning, it's all a question of trust and confidence, and

that has to be very very clear from the beginning, and if you feel that you haven't got

that then you have to know where to draw the line. And that is not easy simply

because of the commercial pressures, employees, not in our firm so much but in the

client, who pull the rug, a lot of people can go under, and that is part of what stress is

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about, and you can't I think do early morning exercises to prevent that happening to

you.

We've talked about the selection of partners. I wonder whether we could just finish

off with a structure. I mean you talked about the City and the London structure.

Could you explain how the overseas operation sort of slots into the overall structure?

Yes. All the overseas offices, at present there are eight, and they all have greater or

lesser role on the legal advice side with the exception of New York or, perhaps I can

dispose of that. We have never practised New York law or any form of U.S. law; we

don't hire U.S. lawyers either in New York or London, it's a show, a sort of, a window

on the world. It's very useful for clients and for partners going to the States or being

introduced to London. There's an argument whether we should be more aggressive in

this field, Clifford Chance and Allen & Overy mode, and the bankers in many ways

would like that to happen among us, I mean, the Finance Department would like that

to happen in a way, it would be a big departure for us to do that and we haven't done it

yet. So there is an equity partner there, and some staff, and we share the facilities

rather like a barrister's chambers in a way with a number of other law firms that we

know well.

What's your own view?

Mm?

What's your own view?

My own view is that it should not go on as it is. I think it's, it's a kind of hostage to

fortune, it's expensive, it's worked quite well, but we should either close it and not

have an office in the States, or find a way of getting at least a minimum practical

assistance we need there, and that's the view funnily enough of the partners out there.

But it's a difficult decision. In the last years, last ten years certainly, perhaps a little

more recently than that, the U.S. authorities have been much more rigourous than the

authorities here are; a lot of U.S. firms operate in London very easily, and recruit for

Alan Carr

C736/02/10 F5095B

their U.S. and/or London offices, and have imposed requirements simply on the

strength of their exchange and banking strengths to require U.S. legal opinions to be

forthcoming, a very simple and effective device which actually precludes a number of

firms from making big capital markets in the banking departments, unless they do take

on U.S. lawyers who will write those opinions for them and that's a declaration of war

which may or may not be successful. We've not gone down that path hitherto. We've

actually had successes in different overseas markets, I think that's going to be the case

very clearly in Hong Kong and Shanghai, taking together, which is about 10 per cent

of the firm, and much our biggest operations, and we have a number of very

successful European offices, and the only other one is Abu Dhabi at the moment

which has a particular life of its own if you like, it's never going to be a huge thing in

terms of the number of people, though it has a lot of specialist skills, it has two equity

partners out there, about five lawyers, and that's happened in a little more than a year.

And one recognises that that's not going to be a huge market for commercial

enterprises as London or Hong Kong is, that it's linked to government in the sense we

don't only advise government or government institutions of one kind or another. The

barter for things that governments need is quite a highly skilled, I'm not talking about

legal services here, I mean defence and other materials that they buy for things like

that, there are quite specialist agreements that have to be drawn up for that and require

quite significant skills, and that's an area we have got some very competent people

operating in. So that that's going to be I think a successful practice of a different kind,

smaller scale but worth having.

So each of the branches has a managing partner?

Yes. And they produce budgets; they, within their budgets they can recruit people;

they can operate fairly freely; they can do practice development; they can make

themselves heard in London as necessary; they, if they are sensible and as they should,

keep tabs on the kind of work they are sending to our other branches or are receiving

from other branches, very important. And they are autonomous in that sense, not I

think in any very effective sense, they are in very close touch particularly with e-mail

and all the other sort of modes of contact now. They sometimes have access to

consultants that we have, former partners or even present partners that go out there,

Alan Carr

C736/02/10 F5095B

and one very important person in all that, not just attached in any specific way to the

overseas offices but to the overseas clientele is that we have an international client

partner who I think receives that title, though he's a pretty senior partner, not that he

was ever the senior partner but a very senior chap, who has enormous language skills

and contact with the various networks and things of that kind as well as with a lot of

overseas clients, and does get around and use and see a great deal of our overseas

consultants. So he was close to people in Europe who gave that kind of advice back

in the Sixties, Dr Weinreb from Rumania, Sacha Weinreb who really taught us all that

we know of E.C. law in the Sixties, and others in Dr Chien from the University of

Tokyo who is a great expert in banking law and law generally in Japan, and knows his

way around very greatly in Taiwan as well as now in China. People of that sort are,

those two names I've mentioned, Weinreb and Chien are important people who many

people in the firm never really know about, but overseas practitioners certainly do

need to know about. And Massimo Cohen who has a great number of banking

contacts and skills from Italy is used as a consultant, and our international client

partner, Paul Chazal[??], works closely with him too. So that's something which goes

on through the overseas offices and side by side with them, because we don't have an

office in Tokyo and don't intend to have one, we don't have an office in Taiwan, but

it's very important in presenting for jobs in the whole way in which those sort of

presentations are run up, very successfully, because that enabled us to present

successfully to Isusu[ph] Motors and to beat off six competitors, when they

announced that they would employ us only in China, which was a very important

thing for the Shanghai office so soon after it was set up last year. So that was a good

step.

So how are the branches co-ordinated from London?

The branches are co-ordinated through the international managing partner. He...

Who is based in London?

He is based in London and travels pretty extensively, as you can imagine. He still has

to organise in this particular case a bit of Department 9 called 9C which is the

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C736/02/10 F5095B

commercial end of it which had a very heavy role in Railtrack and which another

sector of it is heavily engaged in telecommunications and the growth of that practice.

There are other, of course there are plenty of other partners in that sector, but he is

interested in both, that he has I think, he doesn't have a hundred per cent of his time

needless to say on fee earning, it's a much reduced fee-earning role, but he does have

to see how their budgets are prepared in London in that part of the practice as well as

keeping a close eye on the way in which the overseas offices are doing. He doesn't

manage them but he keeps an eye, a close eye on them and sees that they prepare their

budgets and papers and accounts on the same basis as London. And he reports

primarily to the managing partner, but he can come, and does come, to Operating

Committee meetings as the managing partner, and he can get called into these other

committee meetings, like the managing partner or the S & P as necessary rather than

just for every one, and similarly for the PAC where it's necessary where we have an

overseas candidate particularly, where it's important to hear what he's got to say. And

that's worked quite well, it's a fairly new experience, it's not logical in every way, it's

more logical here from the international client partner but I think, to some extent

adapted, as has been our way generally always.

But there isn't a forum for managing partners from the branches to come together?

No, that hasn't happened. We don't have as it were a meeting of the overseas partners,

a sort of overseas partners' club as such. It was suggested, and I think I rather regret

that we didn't have some of our centenary meetings and celebrations, because you

know we're in the middle of that year, you know, in one of the foreign overseas

offices. It's just a very expensive thing to organise. I'm sure that as the firm develops

we will have an annual meeting or whatever it is in one or other of the overseas

offices. They did get together, we had a partners' weekend, a very important partners'

weekend at Keble, and another one at Robinson, I think that was in '94 and '95, and

they were, they came over for that of course, and I greatly regret we didn't have a snap

of the discussion on our overseas, our foreign offices' strategy, because it was, all of

them were on the dais together and it was impressive, we are an international law

firm, you could see it. It was good.

Alan Carr

C736/02/10 F5095B

And how many partners was that at the time?

From the overseas or generally?

Overseas.

Oh there must have been fifteen at the very least, no much more actually I'm sorry, I

was thinking of the people on the dais who are managing. There were six then

managing partners from overseas on the platform, but there are now twelve Hong

Kong partners and two in Shanghai, and we've got two in Abu Dhabi, and many more

than that in Paris; Paris is after Hong Kong the major operation overseas. And a lot of

those are French, there's an equal division in effect between those who have trained as

French lawyers initially and those who have trained as English solicitors, and each

have got the other's qualification, with the exception of one lady, who has made us a

multi, whatever it is, partnership, Marie Caroline Moisinec[ph] is a avocat but not a

solicitor. And so we are a multi-disciplinary partnership technically, and we don't...as

she's an avocat and practises as a litigator, there's no reason for her particularly to

become, to get a solicitor's qualification as well, which is rather good.

So if you are a London-based partner at Simmons & Simmons, what sort of salary, if

it's possible to pin-point, would you expect to be receiving?

We obviously in a very competitive business we pay what is necessary to pay, not on

an individual basis, so there is a structure, and, I think when you qualify as a trainee, a

trainee comes into qualified status, you get something of sort of late 20s thousands,

and it will go up to the late 80, 90 thousand with seven years or so experience. It's not

rigid like the accountants which is much more rigid and hierarchical, the number of

years before you can hope to achieve preferment has always been I think more rigid in

the big six or eight firms, and generally perhaps throughout that profession.

Obviously what an equity partner can hope to receive is, he has a share of profit,

doesn't he, and that's something which, you know, in theory the sky's the limit or he

had better go back to getting a salary somewhere. I mean that is what...

Alan Carr

C736/02/10 F5095B

But there's no salary at all, if you're an equity partner, it's purely equity, a slice of the

profits?

Yes. I have explained before that we have some.....

End of F5095 Side B

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096A


Equity partners.

An equity partner is still somebody who is an owner of the business with his other

equity partners, and may share equally in the equity or have a structure as I explained

earlier. A salaried partner is not a partner, he's an employee who is called a partner,

and that's perfectly legitimate. He's held out as a partner, but, and as regards the

outside world he is a partner. I can say to you that X is actually not an equity partner,

he's a salaried partner, but it gives him a status. It's more than on a board of some

PLC where somebody might be called director, or in a subsidiary of a PLC might be

called a director, but isn't really, they have some kind of a board which doesn't really

have any function at all. It's different in a professional firm, if you call somebody a

partner, for all practical purposes as regards the outside world he is a partner, but he

doesn't share in the profits or the losses, he has a salary, he can be dismissed.

So how many equity partners are there against non-equity partners?

That's the question always asked. Well we have...I'll be perfectly frank with you, it's

about 80 per cent, rather more, much more actually, about 85 to 90 per cent.

Are equity?

Are equity. And a number are salaried. Salaried partners now have, rightly, a great

deal of risk if you like, because they are held out as partners, they can be shot at as

partners, because that's the risk they assume, and it gives them a great deal of status.

They therefore are open to attack by clients on negligence claims, subject to the

indemnity they get from the equity partners. That's quite an interesting question for

professionals these days, not just in law offices of course. The concept of a salaried

partner is not something that we have invented, but it is something which we have I

think made much of in the sense of, that it has been an important part of the way in

which the firm has grown. I don't think anybody sat down and said, this is how we're

going to do it, it wasn't a master plan, but it's very important, because, as you recall

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C736/02/11 F5096A

the people that set up the firm were twins who had no connection, started their articles

at 16, qualified at 21 and immediately opened an office. Gordon Simmons who was

the son and nephew joined them 35 years later, it was not exactly a family connection,

he was the last to join. So, how has this firm grown? And one of the ways in which it

has grown is that, a phrase that got into the foreword of the history, is, it was a young

partnership, it was a career open to talent, and it was a firm open to change, and if we

look at the career open to talent bit, we were able to attract people at times when

we've had massive recruitment because people didn't feel it was a closed shop, they

didn't feel that they could never make the grade. You could make the grade, subject to

all the things we discussed earlier. It was a career open to talent. Now, until the '67

Companies Act of course there was a limit of twenty partners, and so none of the law

firms could in fact put in large numbers of partners, and we were able to attract people

who wanted to come to us from other firms, because they could see no career

prospect. We had salaried partners, that was a wonderful idea. Why? It gave a

person of ability and experience the opportunity to practice as a partner. Clients

would be phoning up sometimes, `Why isn't so-and-so a partner yet?' Delighted when

somebody went on the letterhead, because we had letterheads with hundreds of names

as you know. Yes, they felt, the client felt good, our affairs in the hands of a partner,

he's been promoted, and that's good. Very good for the individual. And in the

fullness of time they became equity, there was a very very good stepping-stone, and

usually took, around two to three years later, that's what happened. Of course,

economics come into these things, and when the Companies Act was amended and

there was no limit at all on the numbers of partners, and we entered the Seventies and

even more the Eighties, firms grew enormously, and our competitors could appoint

partners if they wanted to without limit of numbers, and we also grew very extensively

and then people started talking about the salaried partner bulge and what will become

of it, and all the rest of it, just like the baby bulge or whatever after the Second War.

So, it has been a very important part of the growth of the firm and not at all something

that one should shirk from explaining because it's very important. Now, what that

proportion is, how they should be remunerated, how they should actually participate in

the management of the firm as opposed to the risks of running the business, a legal

business, is always going to be debated, but they come to partners' meetings in almost

every case, and being very frank with you, except where an individual position is

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096A

being discussed or something that affects the remuneration of the equity as such, it's

very hard to draw the line there, where promotions are being discussed; the work of

the PAC is not debated with salaried partners, because in theory they can be here

today and gone tomorrow, they are employees. And that's worked pretty well, and it

does give people the opportunity, not only now, because the firm is so big, of being

judged by clients and being given the status to bring in more work and show what they

can do, but it also gives them a marvellous feeling of peer support, which is what it's

all about now. It's not enough that the Tax Department, [INAUDIBLE] there's a

bright litigator, you know, on the next floor, who's been promoted, but what's very

important is that in your own Corporate Department, your own Property Department,

whatever it is, they know that somebody has made the grade, that can be very very

good for morale. And that's not the reason for a promotion, it's got to be on, you

know, business plans, that people should feel part of what their own practice area and

department are doing, that they can see, yes, they're shown because they've not yet

been promoted, they are shown and discuss in detail on the working out of their

budgets for that department what they're going to be doing, and they can produce their

own business plan and say yes, that's what I'm going to be doing, these are my goals

for the next year. And if that fits in with it all, and he's the right sort of person who is

going to be, we think, a good partner in that sense and fit in very well, then that is

what we would be recommending to the partnership. The PAC doesn't do it, the PAC

only recommends it, and it's now become very much more formalised and rightly so.

They discuss the strategy of these appointments with the S & P committee, there's an

overlap of course in the membership, and not a complete overlap, and if it doesn't

make sense then it doesn't happen. So there are two, in effect two lots of

recommendations. The other thing I perhaps ought to mention...

Sorry, can I just.....[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Candidates don't just come along and say to the PAC, `I'd like to be considered.' You

have to be sponsored, you are sponsored almost always by your DMP and/or any

particular partner that you've been working with. There's quite a formal form to fill in,

looking at a lot of different aspects of the man's career, whether he's been articled with

us, very often not but we do have a lot of people who come up on the inside track do

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096A

with training. Whether he's served abroad. All those kind of things, any points

known against. The candidate sees all that, that's pretty open, and that's shown to him

before he comes up to PAC for his interview. There are other stages before that too,

stuff is circulated round the firm, among equity partners: we're talking about equity

partners who see this material, it's very important it should be kept highly confidential,

and if they've got any points to make in that department, so, let's say a Corporate

partner is being considered and stuff is sent round to other departments, and they have

a meeting, any problems known, any good things known, any personal things known,

and they tend to come direct to the PAC, but otherwise the DMP's responsibility to

have a meeting, discuss each candidate, and what's known about him and send

material to the PAC. It's very important to do that, and that things shouldn't come up

at the last minute, pro or anti.

And when you say personal, you mean personal professional or personal?

Oh there can be in a big partnership somebody who doesn't want to ventilate

something he knows; not a very good thing this, very seldom carries any weight let me

tell you, but doesn't want to ventilate some problem he had in working with X on a

job; it might have been a purely personal matter but it's something about the chap's

character he didn't like. It didn't actually affect the way the job was done, but there

was a problem about getting on. And, I know this can be caricatured as, you know,

well, like a sort of star chamber, he will throw in his bid in the lion's mouth sort of

thing. But it's not left like that. It's very important that somebody who has got

something to say has the opportunity to say it, even in that kind of way. If it carries

any weight at all we ask the chap to come in and talk to us about what he's written

down, it's not done anonymously, and it may be very important to get over that

particular hurdle. The personal ones as such don't actually carry that much weight,

because they can usually be resolved, and that's actually one of the rather important

reasons for having that kind of mechanism, because there's no point in having

somebody brought in, overwhelming acclamation, and somebody feels they didn't

actually say something that was quite important, and there can be some personal

problems, that, you know, we don't hear about, it's a big firm. There's an island site

and a little bit round the corner with over a thousand people, so it's quite a

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096A

responsibility for, you know, getting this right. The next stage is that the sponsors

come in to a meeting and they discuss their candidate and why it makes sense - there

may be more than one candidate in a department - and it's got to make sense in the

sense that he's going to add value to our practice and not work against the various

guidelines that we have for promotions, which are not rigid, and generally, I've got to

say it would be a good thing. Then we see the candidate, not immediately, the

candidate comes in. A big step for him, or her, plenty of lady partners made up, more

I think, the majority this year were female. And, that's very important, how they

present at that kind of interview, very very important.

What's the average age?

This year I think we had people of around 30 to 33, something like...that was youngish

but not particularly young. And we made up one or two older ones also, but, some of

the older people were not getting through, that's happened before. And there's

no...and you can be sure that after the event goes through, let's just take that thing

forward, we'll come back to it because questions of age and experience come in to all

that, people can feel very sore about it. So, the PAC make up their minds, and it takes

months, not many many months but it does take...because the process starts in January

and comes to an end at the end of, in March, and then the joint report is made, or the

PAC make a report, the S & P comment on the strategic implications of it and the

partnership decide in an April meeting, and that night they get the answer. You know,

it's quite a sweaty time you can imagine, and it's very important to feel that you've

been very fair, and often people can't see it that way, not so much the candidates I

think as the sponsors. And it used to be before this mechanism and committees were

set, unfortunately a very political thing between the departments, but I think it's much

better organised, and the PAC has always had, I've got to say this, you know, a great

deal of praise for the way they have looked at the implications. And they're not going

to put somebody in simply because there is a business need; they're not going to put

somebody in on merit or because he's done quite well or been in the firm first, though

a good approach to things. But, there isn't a business need. Or, he'll never make the

kind of lawyer that we will need in the particular place. All those things have to come

into it. The sponsors then have a formal session, even though they know the answers

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096A

because the reports have been debated in a partners' meeting. They come in and see

the PAC, and there's a debriefing and it's explained in very great detail how the PAC

came to that conclusion, and then we see the unsuccessful candidate separately, take

him through it, is this the end, is there going to be an opportunity later on? A lot of

things. And that's very important.

And is there normally another opportunity?

Yes. If he's got as far as that, there ought to be another opportunity. Sometimes

people are brought into the PAC, not as a dummy run, that would be a very stupid

thing to do and it doesn't often succeed, but people come along early, and we think

that a year will actually improve some particular things, and we say so. So...

What's the drop-out rate then of applicants? How many succeed?

Those that leave or drop out altogether?

No I was thinking of those that are put forward by sponsors who are not successful in

any given year.

Very few, very very few. I can't recall somebody actually leaving then and there.

Sometimes, and it has happened and one feels, my God what are we wasting our time

for? Somebody is known to be coming up for a recommendation by the PAC but

suddenly feels, `Oh I've got to go back to my family firm in the Antipodes' or

something. Or, `I'm stressed out, I'm going to leave, I'm going to join, work for a

client.' And that does happen too. Curiously they come back.

What's the success rate of those that are sponsored and obviously remain within the

firm then?

Sponsored and remain within the firm, and come round a second time?

Mm. Or...yes, yes.

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096A

Oh people get through. People know...

So how many people get through each year basically, of those that are put forward?

I think you're speaking in terms of proportions rather than numbers, because it's the

business need isn't it rather than just a hard and fast, you know, we're going to make

up 10 per cent every year or something of that kind. But it is quite a high proportion,

and of those that don't make it, they can almost certainly expect to make it again if

they are around. But, I have to speak highly confidentially, we've been speaking on

the basis of people making it as salaried partners the first time round and then there

will be an expectation that after a couple of years' or so successful performance as

salaried partners they will not be automatically made as the equity, certainly not, they

come up again to the PAC as a candidate for the equity. Of course we know them

very much better, but it's still a big step. And, obviously at some stage they will go

into the equity if they wish to go into the equity, not always but their expectations can

be very high as I said, there's no, floors and ceilings don't exist, and it may be that they

can't afford to. We have had some people come back to us years later who've been

salaried partners, went away to do something quite different, have come back as

working solicitors, who have come up for salaried partnership, yes or no, not always,

come up through that again ten years after leaving, whatever it might be, for equity.

No, sorry, won't work. So there's nothing inevitably about it, and of course the

sponsors of these people tend to feel that there's a sort of, `Well obviously he's a very

experienced solicitor, he's performed extremely well', you know. They can't see that

actually from the firm's point of view that's not necessarily going to be the right

appointment, but he could come back again.

What's the financial commitment for an equity partner then?

Well, there's no limit to the risk is there? We don't have limited liability in the legal

profession.

No. But the likelihood is of considerable gain, if...?

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096A

Yes, sure. But, you know, there is no guarantee, or when the gain will come.

So is there a significant jump financially from salaried to equity partner?

Up or down?

Well you tell me.

There was an expectation in your question.

I suppose there was.

[LAUGHS] We're not in the Eighties. Times have changed. I think people

understand that there is a risk. I'm not saying we're all making huge losses, we're not,

but the idea that there will be endlessly growing numbers of partners all making huge

sums of money was fanciful even then, but isn't right or, you know, desirable. But of

course if somebody has come from another world, been making a very great deal of

money and able to perform outstandingly for the firm, there's an expectation on his

side that he's not going to lose out, or, he might say, `I can see that two years down the

line, three years down the line, yes I should be doing extremely nicely. But as it

happens I've got teenage children and there's no way I can take a drop of that kind,

even for two years or...' You see that's the kind, you can imagine, the kind of

consideration that people have to take account of. `And so I'll stay as a salaried

partner then.' Probably at a very high salary. So there are a lot of considerations that

can come into that. Somebody can have an expectation, but if you are actually

running a business you will need to have regard to that, and partners must invest

musn't they. So, there are a lot of quite difficult considerations which, it isn't just the

automatic kind of feel that it may have had in some places, less with us I think, in the

Eighties, you know, like the bankers lending money on houses.

But Simmons is still successful as a company in...?

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096A

I hope so. I haven't heard anything to the contrary since I left it, the evening

yesterday.

Well that's why I asked the question. I mean how do you perceive the success of the

company in terms of your competitors?

Well that's the third leg isn't it. A young partnership, a career open to talent, a firm

open to change, because I think that was essential. I think you have to be able to

change, able to accept that things, not ethically, those shouldn't change, but that the

way in which you do things internally must change. That you are much more

democratic, that you discuss things. You see what I haven't gone into a great deal

with you is how the departments themselves operate. They're big, they're very big.

And Jerry Walter[ph] for example who from the 1st of May has taken over the

Corporate Department, is in charge of an enormous part of our practice, and rightly so,

he's an excellent man. But the consultations that go on in which, down to the last

secretary, they can participate in and should participate in and people should know

what's going on and discuss it, that's a firm open to change; that's not how it would

have happened in Gordon Simmons' day you can be fairly sure. And, I think that's

actually very good. There can be too much talk, and I think that not everybody, you

know, responds as well as he or she should, but I mean generally it's a very good

thing. We were among the first people to bring in female solicitors in big numbers

and have got, what, about 15 per cent or more of the partnership are women, and that's

a very good thing. We have got, you know, quite significant ethnic commitment too.

I don't mean in the sense simply of fancy names on a letterhead, but you can't practise

in Hong Kong and China without accepting that you must find the right people to be

there. And language is important too. That doesn't mean we don't have problems, and

I don't mean with the ethnic side of things, but that we can recruit in a part of the

world where the standards are different. They may be white, and we have every

reason for high expectation. There's a constant need to be close to people who've

grown up in a different environment. And that's why there's no seamless service that

can be provided in Dakar, you know, it doesn't make sense. Much as the management

consultants, or the accountants, you know, would like you to have an office in every

part of the world, all providing sort of the same sort of cloned advisers that might be

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096A

available in the City or not. So, it will never be like that, but it is very important to

feel that you are one firm, and that's terribly difficult to achieve. I don't think we're

there, but I think we accept that it's a good idea, a good idea to talk, a good idea to

appraise. And that's the other angle, we have a very formidable, I told you we have a

director of personnel and before she arrived, but certainly now that she has arrived, we

do appraise people. I'm not talking about partners or candidates for partnership or

senior solicitors only; secretaries, everybody should have the opportunity to come in

and talk to somebody in their department and say, `This is what I'm doing.' `Yes.'

And she's got a form, and he's got a form, whatever it is, to fill in beforehand to think,

what am I going to achieve, where am I going? Half way through the year, or

certainly at the end of the year, have I done it? Am I getting there? And you must

know as well as anyone, you're in a big business too, if I can call the Library a big

business, that those are necessary things, important things. Difficult to achieve. And I

think a lot of people, myself included, don't take readily, say, to the IT world, it's very

difficult to adapt to something like that, but...

I want to ask you about that actually. It's something we've touched on a couple of

times. I wonder if you could say a few words about the impact of IT on the business

in the last, I suppose ten or fifteen years in particular, and [INAUDIBLE].

Certainly in the last ten years it's become incredibly important. I'm sure in the longer

period fifteen may be right, but it's become very very important in the sense that we

have to send, and rightly so, people away to be trained, we have to get people in for

training. Whereas we were in the vanguard of people who gave legal training

internally, it's a very important thing to be doing and it wasn't done widely in the City

when we started to do it, and we've got a lot of facilities for that, we were not so well

tuned, I guess, on the IT side of things; we are now, and that's a painful and very

expensive process. But it's never-ending in the sense that... Do you know, when we

get to the year 2,000 there's a great risk that all those things will be wiped clean

without anybody knowing that that's happened?

How so?

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096A

Why? Because I am told, and I was only told this yesterday and I don't serve on IT

committees and I don't understand how they operate, but this seems a mis-operation,

the systems read the last two digits, and they will see nought-nought when we get to

2,000, and a lot of stuff will disappear.

It's an interesting idea.

Mm. Now, we've lost a number of records in the past anyway through systems not

working as they should, and one pieces things together. But, I mean I had only heard

this yesterday, and the firm who was hosting us at lunch, a very nice City firm, you

know, this came as news to them and I think they're rushing to check the position a

little bit.

But do you still have a large paper archive?

No. Oh sorry, no no, we have a lot of files that are still on paper and not microfiche,

and they are stored, not in our premises but by people who store files, and there are

great difficulties on risk management and generally for clients in sorting papers and

knowing which you can burn, which might be called back for evidence or whatever,

that's a great difficulty for lawyers about those. It's not a question, oh that's six years

old, burn it, you know, it doesn't work like that, even if you could sort things as

thoroughly, and that, it is a great difficulty. But the question of what is on paper

archives and what should be on some other form of record, I'm sure it's growing, we're

getting more skilled at it, and it would be rather disastrous if we found that it was all

in vain, we should have burnt, had a big bonfire ten years before. [LAUGHS] Or

perhaps this is a better way. But, anyway, I mention it to you because, whether or not

that happens, and I'm sure we'll find an answer to that before the millenium dawns on

us, but, systems as we all know come down, and people complain, they're entitled to

complain. We've told them that they're going to be dependent on IT; if they can't, the

system comes down. And that's not easy, and when you have a very big job,

enormous, hundreds and hundreds of documents for Railtrack, you know the various

things in some ways that have had to be negotiated, and masses of documents that

have had to be negotiated, not just for the flotation but setting the thing in place, the

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C736/02/11 F5096A

negotiations with the various franchises and all the rest of it; not very pleasant for

somebody getting those things out to find that the whole of the last half has fallen out

and they didn't know, fallen out in the sense that it's lost, and has to be reconstructed

in some way. Those things can happen, in building societies, in banks, they can

happen in accountants, possibly even in libraries. But, they can happen, and you do

feel, there is a kind of feeling for somebody like myself of helplessness, because it's

not a question of, you know, just coming in and dictating something for a few

mornings or whatever it is to get it right; a feeling perhaps that, you know, the fax

made life harder, but this is making life very much harder, it's taking it into a sort of

inhuman kind of basis where you can't actually foresee what might happen or the

amount of staff that you might need to put it right.

I was also thinking about, the whole basis of the legal profession is on a physical, the

emphasis has been on a physical document hasn't it, an exchange of physical

documents which are then signed. I mean how is IT perceived within that process? I

mean, in the legalistic basis if you like of exchanging faxes of documents, is that fully

accepted now within the profession?

Well a fax still produces paper.

But it's not...presumably a facsimile signature is not a real signature.

No that's not...that's not acceptable. I mean, in my naive way in the Eighties I thought

that it was, and it was, a satisfactory mode; if you had to have something signed in

Australia you could fax the text and it could be signed there, live, and then a reputable

solicitor who was looking after the document for you sent you a fax message or a

written message to say, `I am holding the original signed document, copy on the fax

coming back to you'. And you knew that it was there, and that was perfectly

acceptable. You didn't pretend that the fax signature was the real signature; the real

signature was in Sydney or whatever. That was OK. Now we have e-mail

communication between our offices and with one or two other people too, quite a lot

of other people as well. Not everybody pulls down their e-mails, I don't, I've got the

thing, the screen there and my secretary pulls them down and weeds them out for me,

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but of course in pulling them down she's burning paper again. On the other hand, to

bring in the suitable disciplines for the use of that kind of material is very difficult.

The trite one is that somebody says, `I've lost a hairpin' or something, and you know,

you find you're reading this kind of trash on the screen.

End of F5096 Side A

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096B


Then your voice[ph] mail's going to be enormously time-consuming, particularly

added to e-mails and faxes and, you know, personal messages and things.

Yes, frightful.

I mean do you view your own e-mails, or are they printed out for you by...?

I don't see them in green on the screen because I find that very tiring and exhausting

and I get, my secretary tends to pull them down and she, I can rely on her discretion

that if it is hairpins and, `We're closed in Belgium tomorrow because it's St. Nicholas'

or something, you know, then she won't pull them down for me.

But the standard memo system within the firm now is on e-mail, is it?

Yes. I'm not saying that it operates then in every case, but that's the standard approach

certainly, unless the system is down between here and Abu Dhabi or something, you

know, that can happen, but generally what you said it right. And then quite a lot of

things are stored on hard copy, because I can't keep going back to a voice mail[??] or

something and somebody say, `I want that paragraph to say "Highly Confidential"'.

So it tends to get pulled down or sent round on paper. I don't think we burn less

paper, somehow. I know we're a bigger firm but I somehow doubt that we have less

paper, and the fax didn't make for less paper either, and you tend to send, you tend to

make copies, unnecessary numbers of copies of things, and I'm as guilt as most people

in that way, but, a lot of people make copies. And it's a disease. I think it's extremely

useful, and produces a great deal of stress that was never known, and in that sense I

think...

You mean in terms of things arriving much more quickly?

Yes, I think it started with the fax and the idea of, which is an Eighties idea isn't it, of

New York, London, Tokyo, and the sun never sets on this particular sort of

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commercial exchange or banking exchange or whatever it is, and so our Banking

Department in particular, our capital markets, they could send something off and they

knew inevitably that when they came in in the morning there would be something on

their table. Yes that's very nice in a way, but there was no end to it in that sense, and I

think that is very very stressful. The contrast in the early days, old days, was, I did

some of my original training in a conveyancing department; you sat down over a lease

perhaps, or even a commercial agreement, whatever it was, the drafts were exchanged,

red, green, magenta, blue, brown, amendments, and you could go to yellow and

goodness knows what, and highly drawn plans, specially done in a part of our

Copying Department, we had skilled people to do plans. And that was a process that

went on a long time. And then it was all agreed, and it had to be copied, three weeks

release could be.

And now?

Mm?

And now?

And now, of course word processing was the beginning of it wasn't it. You had, as I

mentioned on an earlier occasion I think, you know, you had to satisfy Government

departments when you were tendering for major jobs, or any job that you had 24 hour

word processing available, that was a major product of the Thatcher era.

Privatisation, that's what it came to mean. Unless you had the staff that would do that,

you wouldn't be considered. So, word processing turns it round very very quickly

indeed. You ought to add, `If necessary', but clients aren't like that, and the sort of

people that were doing very big deals in the Eighties, not privatisations, knew that the

facilities existed because you were a major City firm, and you stayed at the tables in

your negotiations; this is going well, let's stay with this. And, regardless to some

extent of expense, which is foolish, because the people working needed three teams or

something of that kind to see things through, plus, and this is important, the thing

people didn't check, it wasn't an automatic thing to work a word processor, somebody

had to check it, and that had to be somebody possibly close to the job. So it became

Alan Carr

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very expensive in professional time, not just copying time. And those were some of

the stressed things of the Eighties because those sort of negotiations sometimes did go

on through the night. Sometimes for very good reason, sometimes for less good

reason. And it wasn't the solicitors who were saying, we'd like to stay all night, you

know, it tended to be clients. [LAUGHS] And that I think was where that side of

things took off. Now you find, not that that is so much the demand: it can be the

demand, and there's usually a very good reason for it, but if something's got to be done

by a particular time, and everybody is prepared to participate, you can't do it on your

own, you've got to have somebody else, lawyers on the other side with something

equivalent in the way of...they can contribute, and clients on both sides who are ready

to be there and to contribute: not always understood, it's not just a question of one

firm, nevertheless, now you find that those efforts through the system being down can

be lost. Now I haven't had to work through that, but I do know that that is something

that happens from time to time; it's rare perhaps but it can happen, and I think that is

adding a sort of inhuman side to it; it's not just a question of a secretary being ill and

you find a replacement, it's something...

Is it also distancing your relationship with the client do you think?

I suppose if you have to say to a client, `The system's down and we've lost half the

document; we'll put it together as quickly as we can,' that can't exactly make for a

closer relationship.

My thinking is more in terms of just not having to meet clients, you can exchange

documents, you know, electronically if you like without actually having to meet.

Yes, I don't think lawyers have found that that's something... You can do that of

course, and clients like to be on e-mail communication and that sort of thing, but the

business of a solicitor is generally to advise and to negotiate I think, and I don't think

there is a satisfactory substitute for doing that when necessary, you know, in a room,

physically. I'm sure that there is a lot of work that can be done on the screens between

the two offices, but I think that the kind of work that inevitably they're going to look

for at a high level they will - a senior level - they will look for somebody to be there to

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C736/02/11 F5096B

advise them. And some of that's very unpopular, understandably so. For example on

a flotation you have a verification process where every single statement in a

prospectus has to be verified, and clients get intensely irritated, though it's for their

protection and they can sort of say, `Yes I see that,' but they can get intensely irritated.

The age of somebody's grandmother sort of nonsense kind of thing is the kind of

question you get. But when they don't answer the questions, or won't set up the right

mechanism to get them answered really satisfactorily like that, you know there's

something wrong. And the rules get changed.

Have you explored sort of tele-conferencing, video conferencing and so on?

I know that one or two of my partners have been into that. It's not the same, I'm quite

certain it's not the same. At some stage, I'm sure it will do part of the job, but at some

stage things have to, as you say, be signed. Somebody's going to sign off on a

prospectus, and that whole board of directors and its advisers are potentially liable for

hundreds of millions of pounds. Now I think on a tele-conferencing you can't see

everybody all of the time, I can't believe that on a small screen that's possible, and I

think if you have a point to make, it's not well made in that kind of way when other

people presumably in the room can be talking. I'm afraid it's one of the things you

have to sometimes assert. It's very unpopular. You have to lead a meeting, and a lot

of people I think very naively on their part don't seem to see that that's actually very

important, that when you've got, let's say you're going to launch a prospectus, or that

you're going to advise a board on a major acquisition and this is the time to sign up on

it. There could be forty people round the table, not just directors but bankers and

goodness knows who. Somebody's got to take them through that. And people

wonder, well how come this minute was drafted before the meeting was held? And

I've had to say many times in court, as any solicitor, `Well of course we drafted it

beforehand, this is what we had to cover, we had a draft mark on it, and these were the

blanks that had to be filled.' They weren't filled automatically, and sometimes the text

[INAUDIBLE] had a framework, you had to take people through that framework.

There are a hundred documents here of different kinds that had to be produced.

Somebody's got to take a meeting through that, that can't be done on a telescreen.

Somebody's got to be there with the documents, somebody's got to be there to speak

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096B

for them, and I don't believe that that will actually ever be replaced. There are earlier

stages no doubt when they will be changed, but I think it's...it doesn't show a closeness

to how a board of directors receives advice from solicitors.

So are you suggesting that that hasn't really changed, in your working career?

That part of it hasn't. There has been change at the stages leading up perhaps to those

fairly, those sort of, climacteric[??] situation, but it can't be replaced. I'm talking

about perhaps significant and sizeable transactions. Let's come at it another way and

that is, some of the people that are considered for partnership and made up too, you

have to consider, well is he going to take, or she going to take, somebody through a

meeting like that? Answer: no no, absolutely not. He's talking to the tax manager of

some, you know, multinational company, that's where he's making his impact. And

that's not going to be necessary. He's got to be able to sit next to you, corporate

partner, on one occasion out of a hundred perhaps where he's got some input, and

believe me he'll have to brief you on how to make that input because he's not actually

really talking the same language. A pensions partner or something like that who has

his important slot of an agreement always to do, very very good with his opposite

numbers, but it is opposite numbers; but he's not going to be the ideal chap to take the

chief executive or the chairman through what he's on about, if it comes to that, if it

comes to that. So I'm talking about the top transactions at the crucial stages of them.

But, I think that kind of personal communication is still going to be very important.

And I don't think you can sack somebody on a screen either, really very effectively.

But, it's I think a very difficult thing to combine, IT and all that goes with it.

A couple of other things I just wanted to ask you actually which we haven't covered in

the sessions, and one of those is the relationship which you have as a professional

with the Law Society, and I guess particularly the recent changes in the Law Society.

Do you know, that will be a very short part of our discussion, because as a firm we've

not played very much role there. I think we've...people have not served on the Law

Society or gone for the big roles at the Law Society. We've served on various

committees, tax and company law and things of that sort. We were lobbied by people

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096B

as candidates for various offices, and that was left to partners to respond or not as they

wished, there was no firm line or guidance given. And that's really it. We're well

aware of the dissatisfaction with the Law Society in various ways and with the

complaints bureau they've set up, whether it's effective, and from time to time the sort

of more trade union side of the bodies that look after, or think they look after, the legal

profession, rear their head.

Are you therefore minimising the role of the Law Society?

No, I'm just minimising our involvement in that, and I don't have, I'm afraid, very

strong views about the Law Society one way or the other. I probably should have, but

I think that their affairs are not always well organised. They've set up some very

helpful guidance mechanisms which then tend to get watered down in the silliest

ways. I don't think they've resolved a lot of problems about, which is one of the big

things of course now, PI, professional indemnity insurance, that sort of thing, are

becoming increasingly expensive for firms, who go well beyond Law Society

requirements anyway, to get cover, highly publicised of course, like the accountants

who have brought a lot of this on other professional firms, and what the answer to that

is is hard to know, but clearly I would have thought it must be pretty clear that the

kind of billions of pounds that in theory each partner might incur liability for up to the

last penny of whatever he's got, wasn't actually in people's minds when it was thought

that you shouldn't escape personal liability. I mean it doesn't really make very good

sense. I'm sure they will have to find a way. I don't think the Law Society has been

very effective in giving a lead on those things, and of course there have been unhappy

politics there, as in other places.

Would you favour a stronger Law Society then, or, I mean do you see it as a sort of

anachronistic organisation?

I think it's very, really very very difficult to find a body that will be an effective, give

an effective lead, to the whole of a profession which is so very divergent in size and

ambitions. I'm not a property lawyer, the firm had and still has a very large property

department, but I wasn't very impressed that it was...the Law Society were so slow to

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concede in the Sixties, Seventies, that, you know, the conveyancing monopoly must

go. Now that's very easy for me to say because I haven't got a practice in Willesden

Green or whatever, Ely perhaps. So, there's a whole area of the profession who may

have thought the Law Society was doing a great job for them. I would have been very

happy, it's very cheerful and easy for me to say, you know, that that monopoly should

have gone and then people come to a respected professional for a job which they

know that...they do require skill in handling it rather than a last ditch campaign to

protect registered conveyancing in Peckham. And I think that that's where - I've

caricatured it obviously, but that's where I think the big firms got out of line with the

suburban and smaller firms and rural firms. I think we were right, I think, that

monopoly went and had to go, and people have got round to finding other areas of

practice. There are many more things for lawyers to be doing now perhaps than tithe

redemption, searches and all that sort of thing, and I think that is actually a very good

thing. Exchange control went at a stroke. You've got to accept, my last bit wasn't it,

open to change. And I think that inherently the BMA or whatever it is, or the Law

Society, or the Bar Council, aren't I think going to help that, they're not going to help a

whole profession change. But unless you do these days, you're not going to do too

well. So I've not been very close to that, I'm afraid I've been rather a critic.

Skipping along to something else which I know we haven't talked about enough, and

that's the other activities that Simmons is involved in. I'm thinking of the charitable

pro bono activities.

Yes.

I mean, I'm interested that you collect art for instance, and there is a partner who is

responsible for collecting art.

Yes, yes, that's right.

And I wonder if you could just sketch in general terms the sort of policy ideas behind

that side of the business.

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096B

I think that's, the pro bono work and the whole feeling of a responsibility in many

ways, not just in charity and, I know you're not...I'm implying that, because you're

talking about art too, is one of the most important developments I would say almost

directly produced by the Thatcher era. And what I mean by that is, and that wouldn't

necessarily be said by everybody of my sort of age group, that I think a lot of people

came into the firm rightly feeling that they must give something back, that, and I'm not

talking about partners, I'm talking about people who came in who wanted to put

something back. And at quite an early stage, I think this started with us, where people

who were solicitors, not partners necessarily, sometimes partners too, wanted to have

some time out from the office to serve on some Citizens' Advice Bureau, or whatever

it was, and then the firm should make some sort of contribution in financial terms to

that as well as in the time of the solicitor concerned, and things were quite hard for

people, I'm not talking about solicitors perhaps, in the Eighties, and I think people

really, it was a direct response to that. Then I think the whole question of a more high

profile commitment rather than a series of individuals came up, and we certainly

wanted to play a part in that, as whole groups of litigators for example, not for the

publicity but to achieve some publicity because they looked for, you know, acted for

people on death row in Jamaica who were there waiting for years, not as publicised as

it should have been, and felt very strongly about it and did take that on. And then in

the Eighties I think Steven James[ph] gave an important lead on this by taking Bart's

and their children's cancer ward, which is the most highly publicised thing for the firm

to give a covenant for them, and of course it was the profitable and prosperous

Eighties, and this was the segment of the population which was not getting its... And

that was done, and this is the important point about it is, it's not the cheques you write,

I'm sure you can appreciate this very well, it's because people feel they can participate

in the efforts that you are giving. And that, we did a pantomime for the children at

Bart's in which everybody had the opportunity to participate; our new managing

director - I haven't spoken about him yet have I, he's an accountant, not a lawyer - you

know, always liked his bit of acting, does that sort of thing for them there. We always

entertain the nurses and professors and people at Bart's to a tea, and Christmas things

and all that kind... It was a very personal thing because it's nearby, you could go and

see it, and they could come into you for some celebration or have this party in their

ward. And that was the important thing, it was a personal thing which actually

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C736/02/11 F5096B

produced something, and it was very good and will continue. And then, it was also

felt in a very big way that, centenary year, again there has to be, and we were the first

to think of this obviously, a very positive sign that we wanted to put something back.

And so we have the Solutions for Children, Solutions being our own approach

generally, the solutions ethic that we want to provide solutions for people and not

just...on the one hand, and on the other hand. And so Solutions for Children, we

wanted to raise money, this was for the NSPCC. And on that, we didn't just say, `Oh

the NSPCC, they'll do.' What was done was that a young litigation partner and

another, but principally he, did the rounds, and this wasn't the senior equity people at

all. They did the rounds to find a suitable charity, because unless a lot of people are

going to feel this is the right thing for us, and want to participate and fund-raise and

all that that implies, it won't work, I mean that was part of the new understanding, and

that's a true understanding. And so he did interview a lot of people, and he found this,

and he was shown a few videos by these people, and he produced what had been

said[??] by the Chief Rabbi's piece, did I give you that last time round? Yes I did.

And that was also fairly eloquent. But the videos were frightening in the sense that, I

mean, we had a presentation to staff to launch the centenary thing, in particular this

appeal, and it was all very upbeat, and then the third section of it, there was a fourth,

the third section was that, just a few moments before, `This man will speak to you

about the children's thing, he's going to show you a short video'. And this was real

lump-in-the-throat stuff, it was very hard to think how you are going to continue your

presentation after that. But, with a little practice, you know, you knew that everybody

was going to be affected in this way. Anyway it's been a very good thing, and it links

in a way, because it's a children's thing and the Bart's children thing is another, and I

think that is a very good way of tying things up, and so we are supporting them as well

as Bart's this year, and there's a lot of fund-raising activities in which staff participate.

So when you say fund-raising, that you put a certain amount in from...?

The firm will, you know, underwrite or put in directly out of profit, but it's not done

just by cheques. If somebody writes in to me and says, `Look this is the so-and-so,

orthopaedic something-or-other, and it's a very good cause and I'm sure you could

contribute,' I have to say, `This isn't a great big company with a managing director

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C736/02/11 F5096B

writing the thing. Partners are individuals and they make their own arrangements.

But as a firm we are already doing X and Y, and yes it seems sensible that we should

do something for you, or no, and we regret we can not do something for you. And I

hope you can raise your funds elsewhere.' It's that kind of approach and it has to be.

But, what we do is, you know, sell badges - I ought to be wearing one today oughtn't I;

I think I was the other time. You buy badges, which are NSPCC things which we've

been wearing for three months or so but have only started I think generally in May,

three or four days ago, and you engage in all kinds of, and people are very fertile in

thinking up ways in which...a cold sponge was going to be thrown at me on, I think in

the stocks, on the 19th, but then people didn't want to be bothered to come in for the

weekend to do it, so it's going to be some other occasion. But, you know, that sort of

thing. And a lot of matches, sports matches played and that kind of thing. People are

very good at working out that. And it is actually very important, although a single

cheque would no doubt do it with less time spent, and maybe raise a larger sum, who

knows, it is actually terribly important that people should feel they are part of this.

And just as on the business side they've got to buy into that too, is that the phrase?

Mhm.

They must know what's going on and feel they're part of it, and actually want to be

part of it.

Does the firm do, I'm trying to think how to phrase this, no profit or, represent good

causes...?

Pro bono?

Yes, in a pro bono way, or, for the costs only?

Yes. No we do, we do, we certainly do some work of that, though usually it's related

to the various things I've mentioned, which is...

Which is a campaign.

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096B

Yes, Citizens' Advice and that kind of thing, and those sort of things, we would

certainly advise. That would perhaps bring me on to the paintings side of things,

because that actually arose out of Stuart Evans', corporate partner, interest in

contemporary art. A lot of people regarded it as derisory for a long time. `What's

that?' sort of, you can imagine how boring some partners can be about that. But in

fact it's caught on very well, it's regarded as a very good collection, we had an

exhibition of it I think while you were away, and we support a lot of things at the Tate

and our two most successful entertainments to celebrate the centenary were the

Cézanne thing which you heard about before, and a lot of people felt that that was the

best corporate entertainment they had been to actually, it was a nice size, well done,

very simple, and everybody wanted to go to the exhibition as it happened. So, I think

he's, you know, largely applauded, and very widely applauded for that, and it has

meant that he, because of his knowledge and contact with the Tate, we have actually

got some work on the bank side, a project, and I think that's something that works

both ways. I'm quite sure we do not charge the last penny for a lot of his efforts, and

they feel that they've got somebody in the City who is open to their...

But isn't that all, I mean, presumably also an investment on the part of the firm?

Yes, I think it is. Gosh it seems to be going up rapidly. I was very interested and, I

don't know whether you saw it, this man in a turban, which is a very...and I can't

remember the name of the artist, I would have bought it long ago because, I could

have bought it, he had some for sale, he was authorised by the partnership to sell a

number of these things, and of course the price had gone up quite markedly in the

years since we've had them, and I liked it very very much, and there was this

exhibition, it was just outside the conference room you sometimes come to. And,

when they turned a lot of lights on, I found that it was actually not red on black but red

on blue, which was very striking but it wasn't quite what I had expected, and also it's a

very large painting to have in a home, my own home I mean. So I haven't yet bought

it. Do you mind if I.....?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Alan Carr

C736/02/11 F5096B

Sorry, we were just talking about the art as an investment.

Yes. I think that's been a familiar idea in the City, probably for some time, certainly

merchant banks have, you know, some quite, if there is such a phrase, good modern

art around, and we've had a number of these things, they were always caricatured as,

you know, rather distractions from the important conference that was supposed to be

going under their sort of gaze. But, I think that that is so. I don't think they were

necessarily bought primarily for that, though it was thought that they would make

money rather than lose it, but it was right to, not sponsor but provide some support for

people who were producing that sort of art when they were producing it rather than

buying it after they were long since dead, and I certainly did go along with that very

readily. And I think he is quite good to stir people up.

Provoke?

Yes, to a degree. Again, that's perhaps not regarded as the major role of an

international law firm, but I think it does have a part. I think that people shouldn't feel

that they've come to a place that's stodgy, that you can foresee every single move. I

think that, I think you have to stimulate if not actually provoke, I think it has to be an

exciting place to be; it has been actually, and I think that is very important.

Let me just stop the tape there.

End of F5096 Side B

Alan Carr

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Turning to you now, I wonder if we could just explore your personal involvement in

the firm as Senior Partner. I was wondering whether it was possible to identify your

key achievements.

As Senior Partner?

Maybe as Senior Partner, but also within the firm generally.

Yes. As Senior Partner I don't think they've been very marked, if you just said, that's

what the Senior Partner has done. I think I've very much bought into the changes that

have occurred. I haven't been a great spokesman for them outside the firm. I've

known, you see, when I put my hat in the ring on others' recommendation in 1992 that

I certainly wouldn't stay on beyond 1996; I said then it's going to be the middle of our

centenary year, it's going to be something like four years, and I know, as I see it then, I

don't think I'll want to seek an extension. I wasn't just drafted for the job, but it wasn't

my idea initially and so I didn't want to be too much selling a big plan for the future if

you like when I wasn't going to be part of that, and didn't want to be around, 60 is time

enough, I thought, I still think, and I've confirmed that since. So I have certainly gone

along with it very readily, and the investment that that has required has not produced,

if I can pre-empt that point, a huge immediate return, but I think that was something

that I was putting back, not personally but I think that's something that people should

accept is highly desirable to do; I don't take a great deal of credit for that but I think

that is part of what my role has been. I have also had a part to play, a little bit more

behind the scenes perhaps, in making sure that those who weren't so obviously buying

into it, came to see the sense of it or at any rate stopped talking so loudly about the

non-sense of it. And that's included people who are no longer with the partnership but

I've had to put at ease about it, and I think that has been actually one of the chief

advantages of having a split senior role with a chief executive officer, i.e. a managing

partner and a senior partner who looked at strategy and policy and promotions

primarily, and wasn't doing, or trying to do, the day to day. Sometimes it has seemed

like the day to day though, because having management consultants around, having

Alan Carr

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task forces and all the various things that you can imagine going on at weekends, not

just for clients but in our own affairs, is a crowded agenda, but I think it is actually

going to work, which is the important thing. We've always been a pretty

entrepreneurial thing, we wouldn't want to do something simply because it was done

but because we think it was going to be a good thing to do, and we would achieve it.

So that's part in short form.

But what...I mean in terms of the qualities that you have brought to it, what do you

think those were?

I think in some way, I mean there is still a very important thing that can't be done on

the screen, I think, and that is, there is a pastoral role still, and I've tried to do that and

quite enjoyed doing that. There have been some stresses, I've tried to work with

people who are going through that. I don't mean in the medical sense, I think there

are, there always are in a large partnership as opposed to a corporate thing where the

things work rather differently, I think there can be a lot of difficulties and some of

those I've tried to help with, I think I've been reasonably successful. On the other

hand I've not been a great spokesman for the firm, I don't think I have played a very

public role for the firm. I knew that I wouldn't, and I was told, oh that'll be shared.

Would you have liked to have done?

Yes in some ways. I don't feel that others have done what I ought to be doing in the

sense that I, you know, feel I've been cold-shouldered into a corner, that doesn't arise,

but you can only do so much, and I knew very well where I thought I could contribute.

Naively I thought I could [INAUDIBLE] law as well, but they all think that for a time.

And, I think in retrospect and certainly perhaps in a year's time I'll think I enjoyed it

very much.

Looking back at the legal side of your career as a pre senior partner, I mean what

would be the highlights, or the low lights I suppose as well, for you?

Alan Carr

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I have been a corporate partner, even in Brussels I was really a corporate man; I went

back from the Brussels office in the Sixties to rejoin the Company Department as it

was called then, I've been a corporate man at Simmons & Simmons and a corporate

partner, and I rose to be head of the Corporate Department. I think that was probably

my greatest contribution, because I did go through some of the things that I've told you

about since, and I think that how those things are dealt with is partly from my

experience, and I hope it's been a good experience that was worth sharing rather than

something that one wants to skate over as quickly as possible, and you have given me

the opportunity to talk about that which was good. I think that it is a very exciting

life. I think that...it's very difficult to pick on some highlights, because you really, I

feel that I have had the opportunity to see some extraordinary people performing

extremely well, and being in a particular firm for so long it is a matter of great pride

when that happens, that people actually do come through. And some of those people

have been, you know, working, I won't say quite as grandchildren but have been

people brought in by people that I have brought in, and one of the nicest things that

was said about this year's promotions to the equity was not me but one of the other

members of the PAC saying, `Oh, well he's grown up in a good school,' because he

happened to be, and it wasn't just said for my benefit, he happened to be in my group,

in the Corporate Department. Now that was a very pleasant thing to have happened to

me; he wasn't going to be staying in London, he's going to be abroad, going abroad as

somebody who really did put the firm first on a number of occasions, who's seen

regulators and people through a great deal of trouble where we've been in high profile

situations; who's been ready to take a bit of eastern Europe under his wing and go off

to Latvia; and who is now going to take up a posting in Abu Dhabi. So, this was a

very brilliant First from Oxford who wasn't necessarily always going to be

everybody's first choice. Very, you know, this was actually very rewarding, because

other people with more superficial abilities, sticking it out at a particular desk,

possibly got promoted earlier, not necessarily so. But, yes I did enjoy that very much,

and that's happened more than once, not this time but with his predecessors.

Are there any key turning points that you could point to in your own career?

Alan Carr

C736/02/12 F5097A

Yes, I think that, not so much key or crucial turning points because I've never left the

firm, so that wouldn't be one, `Oh thank goodness I left X and went to Y,' it wasn't

like that. But the way the firm has grown has had some turning points I think. I was

very glad to work with Steven James[ph], I think his was an extraordinary

contribution over a very long period, some of which I saw quite closely, though he

was a bit senior to me, and I think that that will be very very warmly recognised. It

never is by the immediate successors, is it? And I suppose the opening of

international offices, I had a very small part in the Sixties with Brussels and only came

back to it as Senior Partner really; I didn't have much part in the opening of the Paris

office, but with what's gone in in the Nineties and the way that I think will be a very

successful strategy is something I've been very pleased about. And that's one fragment

of the, not quite pro bono but feeling of responsibility, which I have always

emphasised to those where we open an office overseas is that you can't expect just to

come there and do the work and go away again, like some project which you manage

and go away. We didn't do that in Hong Kong, we've been there a long time, '79, and

it was only in 1980, long ago, that we were making tours round Hong Kong and

China, at the beginning of the Nixon sort of era, or at that time. And the important

thing which the Chinese in particular, and it's true I'm sure in many places, is that you

will have that commitment to them, that you are going to train them, that you are

going to give them work experience, and that will include in Hong Kong in your

China office and in London, and that's natural, that's not something where it's the price

that's being extorted, that's something you should be offering. And I saw that that

point went home at a very senior level, a man who most people don't really know

played a part, Mr Marr[ph], who was the PRC Ambassador to London, a very urbane

man, and he must have been told that yes, you can accept an invitation to lunch at

Simmons & Simmons. And it was a reasonably grand affair, obviously His

Excellency, all this sort of thing, but he was a very very easy man to talk to. And I

said that this is I think very important, and I don't know whether this is something you

get from everybody that comes looking for a licence but I'm going to put it on the

table now, because I think it is, that is how it should be, and I have to say, if it's

confidential, that he got that point across in Beijing. And initially, initially, it's

changed since in Shanghai, initially we weren't the first choice, we were one of several

that Shanghai authorities wanted to have that licence, but there was one licence given,

Alan Carr

C736/02/12 F5097A

and one only, and we got it. And I think that's part of it, I think that it shouldn't be

seen just as the right of a very large firm to have that; you've got to accept a

responsibility, and I think that's actually something I value.

Would you describe yourself as competitive?

I as a person, or...you are looking now for a personal answer?

Mhm.

Yes, I have been certainly, and probably you can't change that. I've been told that I am

modest, I don't value that particularly as a quality, but if that's the way it works out. I

am very competitive in professional terms, and always have been. There was a time

in, a very good example and quite a laugh line now I suppose, in the Sixties,

Seventies, when they started introducing targets and billing figures, I had no difficulty

in logging plenty of time and charging appropriate rates for it, and clients were very

ready to pay. And I remember a marvellous man called Michael Holmes[ph] who had

come to us from Linklaters and beyond that from Eton, saying, `Oh I see, Alan, you've

won the cost stakes again'. [LAUGHS] So I suppose I am competitive, aren't I. But I

think that you can be competitive in more than just rubbing somebody out of the way,

whether that's appeared or not I don't know. Don't answer that.

Have you had to do things that you've regretted?

I've done things that I have been sorry to have to do; I don't think that's quite the same.

I don't think I've, fortunately I don't think I've done something which has been

unprofessional or dishonest, I mean that, but I've, obviously I've had to make people

redundant in my time, and that's a horrible job. That's the...you know, very

unpleasant. And I had a great respect for, I'm going to mention a name, Sir Noel

Davis[ph], who as you know ran VSEL and was a client I was very close to, he had

come from the 600 Group and provided a great deal of work for us in VSEL when he,

you know, it was taken over; there was a lot of work done by us as a consequence in

some ways because he valued our approach to life. But what he had to tell me, long

Alan Carr

C736/02/12 F5097A

before the takeover I hasten to say when he was in VSEL of the huge programme of

redundancies, and he said, `Every one comes back to you,' and he felt them personally,

and I think that was right, and I haven't forgotten that. I haven't had to do that on a

huge scale, I think the firm has been reasonably fortunate, and obviously I don't see

everybody that's made redundant anyway, but I think it is a very heavy responsibility.

He certainly felt it that way and I haven't forgotten what he told me.

So do you think you have to be tough?

Yes, I think you do have to be tough, we did make some redundancies. Whether one

should be so tough that one has no recollection of it afterwards is another question. I

don't think so. I don't think one should say, this is the way businesses are run, and it

doesn't actually worry you, you go home and you have no thought about it at all. I

don't want to be haunted by it, but I don't think it actually improves the quality of

anybody's life or approach to things, you know, `Oh what was that? Oh yes, oh...' We

must have made some redundancies, I'm sure I did, but hardly any recollection of it

five years later, I don't think that's... Equally I don't think one should be so sensitive

that one, you know, remembers every word of a conversation in that kind of way.

Would you have liked to have worked somewhere else?

Not in another law firm. I once thought when I came back from Brussels in the

Sixties that I would look around and see what was going on, and what little I saw I

didn't like. It might have been better in some ways, because we didn't...I wasn't

recruited elsewhere and I've been around a very long time at Simmons & Simmons,

perhaps too long for my self or for the firm; I think they could have made their minds

up about that if they had wanted to a long time ago. So I have enjoyed being at

Simmons, it's been like a series of ever-increasingly larger firms, and it was a good

break for me to go to Brussels and to come back and things, and you know that on

personal grounds and in every way. And, yes I have enjoyed my career. I was asked

to become managing director of a business, Grovewood Securities, I would have been

working with this man I mentioned, this chairman. I'm very glad I didn't take that on

but it was an indication of what he wanted to do for me. He was a barrister and I was

Alan Carr

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a solicitor, he wanted to practice in the courts of course, he wanted me in effect to take

over his role. That would not have been a good thing for me to do. I was very excited

at the time, when a client wants to pinch you, you know, it's a tribute, and it was

known anyway at the partnership level anyway. I'm glad I haven't done that. I think

I'm going to have a fairly busy retirement, but you never can tell until you've gone can

you, when you retire.

What are you planning to do?

I will travel a bit more, but that's easily said. And I've got a contact now through my

son Dan with a man called Charlie Waite[ph] who is an internationally acclaimed as

they say, landscape photographer whose seminar I went to, or lecture at a seminar I

went to at the R.G. Soc. years ago, long before Dan met him or that I ever thought I

would meet him again, and he does some very good courses, and I will do some of

that. And, I would like to go back to the history thing, and on a slightly different key

from the history of the firm, which has been interesting, very interesting, and I often

wish that these interviews had been completed a little earlier, not, I mean a year or two

earlier rather than...because it's certainly quite good at unlocking a number of things

that one hasn't turned one's mind to for a long time. But, if there are opportunities for

some research, archiving or whatever they are, I will be looking out for them. I'm

going to renew my subscription, dare I say it, probably, to the London Library, which I

picked up from my father, and Amnon used and all my children have used for

academic purposes of one sort or another. But if I get used to how to work the PCs

and all that sort of thing, maybe I will be going to another library. I was horrified to

find at the London Library that you can't find anything on the old card indexes any

more. [LAUGHS]

Are you going to do any law?

No. Not as such.

Consultancy?

Alan Carr

C736/02/12 F5097A

No. Not even pro bono advice to... [LAUGHS] I think I give quite a lot of pro bono

advice to my children. But, no, I don't want to keep on directorships, though that is an

acknowledged path isn't it, you keep on a few directorships. It works very well for a

lot of people, Steven James[ph] does, and I think that's a very worthy thing to do.

He's a very active man and his advice is, you know, cherished, and he and the firm are

friends and I think that's good, good for him, he feels fulfilled and very good for the

firm.

Which reminds me for you to tell me about the MD.

Yes. Yet another first for Simmons & Simmons. Am I competitive? We elected not

a managing partner to succeed Alastair[ph] at the end of the calendar year, when he

retires, but our director of finance, who is Alan Morris[ph], and he will therefore not

be a partner because he isn't one now and can't become one. He's not a lawyer, he's an

accountant, so he's going to be managing director. Now, he came to us, I mean he

originally recruited us under Steven James[ph], and he's been director of finance, one

of those people who sit in at the Ops Committee and a good deal more influence than

that, since 1992, so he's pretty well qualified, he knows a lot about us, he's ambitious,

that's a good thing, and he's very able.

But he's not a lawyer.

He's not a lawyer, but he's still been elected by the lawyers at Simmons & Simmons,

by the partners at Simmons & Simmons, to take on this role. So we have to watch

rather carefully, you know, those things he can do and those things he can't. He can't

get that close to clients, putting it rather crudely, because he's not qualified to do that,

but he has a lot of qualities, and I think it will work very well between him and Bill

Knight, who will take over my job in September.

Are you happy with that?

Yes.

Alan Carr

C736/02/12 F5097A

Did you have a nominated successor, or a favoured successor I should say?

I did not. I didn't go into that. I am happy that I will be succeeded, at that time; I have

no wish to prolong that at all, I think 39 years is quite a long time to be in one firm.

It's changed a lot, and I think it's good, I think he will, he's what, nine years younger

than I am, something of that sort, I think he's got a lot of opportunity, and has carried a

lot of partners through pretty difficult times, and I think that, you know, he was the

choice, it's a good choice, and I think he's quite a bold chap to take it on too, not just

because it's after me, heaven knows, but I think it's a very big time for law firms, isn't

it. I mean, you hardly open a national quality daily or weekend paper without seeing

something about the latest law firms that are approaching this problem in that way, or

that problem in this way, or...and I think it is actually a very, very busy time. It's hard

to remember that solicitors were a profession nobody knew anything very much about.

They were very discreet, they couldn't advertise; while you saw the man in the wig at

the court room, you never really saw the solicitor, and that was their pride. That's

rather different now. And the fact that I could have said to my uncle at Cambridge, I

don't really know what goes on in a solicitors' office; I know what my GP does, more

or less, but...

Do you think we've lost anything along the way in that demystification?

Yes, but I think it's something that was probably worth losing. I don't think there

should be too many regrets over that. There's that wonderful play, `The Voisey

Inheritance' which, I forget who it was, was it Galsworthy? Probably not. I don't

know who it was, it's a wonderful play. Peter Richardson, the senior partner '71 to '79,

the litigator, was very very fond of that play. Do you know what `The Voisey

Inheritance' was? It was the son who, his father died and he, because he was a

solicitor in the family practice I think, and he woke up to find that his father had been

fiddling the books for years. I'm not saying that all solicitors were like that, but things

were so sort of wrapped up and behind the scenes that, perhaps it wasn't a very good

system, I don't know. I don't regret that it's not with us now. Equally there are other

pressures of a very different kind that we've discussed, particularly I think the

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C736/02/12 F5097A

mechanical pressures rather than the ethical ones, which, you know, there's no time

when it's easy to practice, I don't think so. But, very difficult.

What's been lost then, that you would have wished to have...

Kept?

...kept?

Well I suppose it was very nice in a way if there was a cosy state of affairs where you

could advise as a sort of éminence grise. I don't think it actually really existed; I think

that if you were doing transactions which involved advising businesses, corporations,

then there has to be a way in which you identify yourself somehow or other as the

adviser, or you will be identified. I don't think that means grabbing the limelight, I

think it means accepting that in the business world the advisers in that business world

have got to be identifiable. Perhaps rather simplistic answer, but I think it's true.

Would you have done anything differently?

I'm sure I should say yes to half a dozen things, but I can't think of them just now.

Would you have liked to have become an academic historian rather than a lawyer?

No, I'm going to do that now. [LAUGHS] I don't regret, I think, that I didn't go in for

research. I did it for a time. I think that that would have been, certainly when I left it,

and possibly even now, the world of intense competitive professional practice, a lot of

professional politics, I was fairly very sure of that when I left Cambridge. Not in my

second year but at the end of my third. I've kept out of the professional politics, sort

of Law Society thing as we discussed, partly with that in mind perhaps. But I think

that there a lot of dead men's shoes waiting to be filled, are there not, in the academic

world. I don't call it academe like some of my... [LAUGHS] And I suppose in the

Civil Service to some extent too.

Alan Carr

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I couldn't possibly comment.

No no.

Well Alan Carr, thank you very much, I've thoroughly enjoyed our sessions, and, I

hope you have too.

I have. It's certainly opened my eyes a good deal, not least to myself. [LAUGHS]

Thank you.

Thank you for not saying, `This is your life'. [LAUGHS]

End of F5097 Side A

Side B is blank

End of Interview

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