Wig begone - Charles Courtley

A tongue-in-cheek, quirky tale of the ups and downs of a young barrister’s life – before the age of political correctness.Charles Courtley, a newly qualified lawyer without a penny to his name, plunges into the archaic world of the Bar as it was thirty-five years ago. After a stroke of beginner’s luck – and a taste of Edwardian good living – he soon becomes well practised at battling away in the criminal courts, conducting court-martials in Germany and on one horrifying occasion actually appearing in a commercial court, ‘winding up’ companies of which he knows nothing!His clients range from a defendant who is found sadly lacking in the genitalia department to an Italian motorist charged with assault, who claims to have been savagely attacked by an elderly lollipop man wielding his road sign. On top of that, there are instructing solicitors who never pay him and even one who has departed this world altogether, yet still manages to operate on a shadowy basis from the vicinity of the Bow Road flyover in East London.Court-martials take Charles abroad, where he encounters a German policeman’s dog, whose canine expertise is deemed to be perfectly sound evidence, and samples a night out on the other side of the infamous Berlin wall, just making it back to the safety of the West.