The series debuted on April 3rd, 1978, and ran for six episodes. The BBC wasn’t interested, so Shubik took the project to Thames Television. It was a hit with critics, and the producer of the teleplay, Irene Shubik, hoped to turn it into a regular series. That teleplay was called Rumpole of the Bailey, a reference to the Old Bailey, which is the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, where Rumpole plied his trade as a defense attorney. But it wasn’t until 1975 that he finally came up with the character whom, at first, he called Horace Rumbold (the name was changed when it turned out that a real-life barrister already bore that name). Some of his early radio and TV plays featured characters that can be viewed as precursors to Horace Rumpole put-upon barristers struggling for a foothold in the legal profession and largely failing. After retiring from the bar in 1984, Mortimer continued to put out a book or two a year-most but by no means all of which featured Horace Rumpole-until his death at 85 in 2009. For the next 35 years or so, he pursued dual careers, as a barrister specializing in the defense of free speech and criminal defendants, and as a writer of stage plays, radio plays, teleplays, essays, memoirs, and novels. The following year, aged 25, he was called to the bar. His first novel, Charade (1947), was based on that experience. He graduated with a law degree from Oxford in 1943, but then immediately went to work writing documentary films for Britain’s Ministry of Information. Mortimer was born 100 years ago this month, and when Rumpole first appeared, he had already been earning a living as a writer since the 1940s. The brainchild of barrister-turned-writer John Mortimer, Rumpole first appeared on television on December 17th, 1975, in a BBC anthology series called Play for Today. The fact that he began his career as a made-for-TV character rather than in the pages of a book, or even a magazine, seems to have worked against him. Horace Rumpole deserves a place alongside Bertie Wooster, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, James Bond, and Father Brown as one of the best creations in all of British popular fiction.

Rumpole of the bailey john mortimer