Interview with David Salter

Why law?

By accident! I went up to Cambridge in 1966 to read classics. Like so many people of that generation, when I got there I discovered everybody else was far brighter than I. And I thought, ‘Gosh, I can’t spend 3 years at the bottom of this group just reading classics. I’ll try something else’. I also had an A Level in music and so I switched to music and again I found everybody else was far brighter than I was! So I said, ‘I want to change again’. They were very accommodating. I then moved to archaeology and anthropology (I think they needed the numbers!).

All in your first year?

All in the first term! I didn’t like arch and anth one little bit. And I said, ‘I don’t want to do this’. They said, ‘Well okay, you can have one final, really final, choice and that is it. What’s it going to be?’ I thought I’ll do something that is completely new to everyone and law at Pembroke in those days didn’t have any distinguished pedigree whatsoever – it had as Director of Studies a fellow called James Campbell who had been invalided out of the army – don’t forget we still had veterans of World War II back then. He’d left the Bar because he couldn’t hear and couldn’t go into court. He was very bright, but he didn’t really want a northern grammar school boy. He was a Harrovian and was surrounded by Harrovians. But I cracked on with it; they told me I’d got to stick with it and I stuck with it and I never regretted it.

It was there that I met Alan Ward. He came to teach because he was really at the very, very beginning of his career at the Bar. He came up on Friday night and stayed Saturday morning and he taught. In my first year he taught me crime and he was a great teacher. He loved to shock – some of the things he said during those supervisions I still remember now but can’t possibly repeat. Then he returned in year three to do family law, and I think that really was the foundations of my wanting to do family law. At the time the university had John Hall, who was at St John’s, who was a brilliant teacher. He was a solicitor, he was ex College of Law. But between them, I think they really fired my interest in family law.

If you were being supervised by Alan Ward, one might think he would have talked you into going to the Bar?

One thing I was utterly convinced of was I didn’t want to go to London, but equally I didn’t want to go immediately back to Yorkshire. It didn’t occur to me you could go to the Bar and go to Yorkshire, or indeed anywhere else outside London. So I went to Norwich. I did articles, as they then were, in Norwich with Mills & Reeve.

Did you have any connection to Norwich before you got there?

None whatsoever! The truth of the matter is I went to the University Appointments Board and they said, ‘All right, what sort of place do you want to go?’ and I said, ‘Well, you know, some fairly pleasant provincial city’, and they said, ‘Well, how about Bristol and Norwich’ and the two firms suggested were Burges Salmon in Bristol and Mills & Reeve in Norwich. I applied to both. Mills & Reeve offered an interview first. I went for the interview, they offered me a job and that was it. Now, compare that with the experience of graduates from any university today who are writing hundreds of letters.

You said not London, but why did you have no particular desire to come back to Yorkshire at that point? Simply because you wanted to just live and work away from home?

I knew I would come back to Yorkshire eventually, but I wanted to experience another part of the country first. I was very lucky in Norwich because there they had Bruce Wilson who was a wonderful, wonderful family lawyer, but the one thing he couldn’t do was market himself. That wasn’t his style, he was a great family lawyer and he attracted some big cases from all over that part of the world and a bit further afield as well. I learned an awful lot from him.

I qualified in 1972 and the deal was that, if they gave you articles, you had to agree to stay for 2 years – they’d invested in you and you had to repay by staying for 2 years; and so I stayed for 2 years and after that I came back north to Yorkshire.

Did you specialise in family law from day one or was it a mixed bag?

No, it was very much a mixed bag.

Were there four seats back in those days?

There were four seats, the last seat I did was with Bruce Wilson. When I qualified I did a bit of everything – conveyancing, general civil litigation, crime, certainly family law.

What was family law like back then?

Well, I can remember the decision in Wachtel coming through and I can also remember the name of a client whose wife had committed adultery and he couldn’t understand that, following Wachtel, he was going to have to pay her maintenance. He just could not get his mind around this fact. That was a really seismic moment.

Did that resonate in the way that White did in 2000? Was it the sort of equivalent of its day in that sense?

It was.

There was a lot of legal aid back then. Undefended divorces were still heard in open court. At the beginning of that period you still had to have counsel – solicitors were only able to do them from the early 70s. That was a great money spinner for the Bar, the junior Bar, at that point. A wonderful time.

Amongst the work I did, one of the senior partners was the Under Sheriff of Norwich which meant that he had two real roles – one was the ceremonial role which meant that when the Assizes and the Quarter Sessions (pre-Crown Court) came to town he had to turn out in his morning suit and greet the judges. At that time, the Recorder of Norwich was Michael Havers QC MP. My principal, who was a high-earning commercial lawyer, would turn up and do day one and then for the rest of the Quarter Sessions he’d say, ‘Well you’ve got to go, so go down to Moss Boss and hire yourself a morning suit and put it on my account but before you go, come back and let’s see what you look like’. I came back with a grey waistcoat and he said, ‘Where do you think you’re going? You’re not going to ***** Newmarket – go back and get a black waistcoat!’

Michael Havers was charm itself, gosh, could that man work. He had an incredible work ethic dealing with constituency business.

So, it was a very different working culture in the 70s and 80s compared to today?

Yes, no sandwiches at the desk for lunch.

If you look back now to the kind of family lawyers at that time, who were the big names?

Certainly at that time, when I was in Norwich, the big cheese was Margaret Puxon QC. She was a dual qualified medic and family law barrister. She had chambers in London, Ipswich and Norwich. She was famous for never reading the papers – that’s what cons were for to find out what the case was about!

So, you saw out your contractual time with Mills & Reeve?

I saw out the 2 years. I returned to Yorkshire in 1974. I had a brief time with a Harrogate firm and realised it was far too small. Then I joined what was then Booth & Co in 1975, so literally 50 years ago, when it was celebrating its bicentenary and this year it celebrates its 250th anniversary. It’s now Addleshaw Goddard, of course. It was a great firm to join.

You joined as a specialist family practitioner then, did you?

No, even at that stage, things were very generalist. I did general civil litigation and for a time (this will amuse both of you) I ran a computerised debt collection department just as it was being set up. But my heart wasn’t in it.

You’re a cynic about his computer skills, are you, Ellie, given your reaction to this revelation?

I would suggest diplomatically that he was not renowned for his technological prowess although his internet shopping skills are legendary!

So I eventually managed to manipulate my role into a family team and I was lucky to be able to do that. People came along, I’ve interviewed some wonderful people who worked in that team. I think I went into pure family probably in the early 80s.

Was that pure family money? Or, when you specialised, did you also do children work?

It was mainly money, I’d say about 75%. There’d still be an element of legal aid, but of course that gradually fizzled out. The firm was a commercial firm, it was mainly banking. When I joined Booth & Co, 60% of its turnover was derived from Yorkshire Bank. I remember George Cox, who was then Senior Partner and hadn’t been Senior Partner very long, said, ‘If Yorkshire Bank walk out of that door we are f****d’ and he was right, so he spent most of his time trying to move us away from reliance on Yorkshire Bank, which eventually became part of Australian Banking Group and then Virgin Money and so on and so forth. It was exactly the right thing to do.

What do you remember as being some key cases that you dealt with over the early years at Booth & Co?

I can remember one involving Alan Ward who I don’t think was yet in silk. In the mid-80s the client was an income millionaire. To be an income millionaire in the mid-80s you’re making real money and he did that from coal. Now, of course, most people think, well hang on a minute, coal was nationalised. Yes, of course coal mining was nationalised but other parts of coal were not. Coal washing was never nationalised and by extension to by-products, soap and all the rest of it. He formed fixed-term partnerships, quite sophisticated things, with another well-known northern industrialist and they made a heap of money. His marriage was not going very well and I said, ‘Well, we’ll go and see Alan Ward at 2 Dr Johnson’s Buildings’, as then it was. Off we went to see Alan who convinced him, marvellous advice, that the best thing he could possibly do was not to divorce his wife because it was going to cost him so much money. What he had to do was to buy her a fantastic house, put his wife in this fantastic house and just keep her happy in every single way and then he could carry on with his mistress, which he did and it worked very happily, saving him a lot of money. His wife died first and he eventually married the mistress when he was in his 80s. I went to the wedding …

Pre-nup?

They were past the pre-nup stage!

So who else would you have been instructing through the 80s?

Another one that comes to mind was Margaret Higgins, Nick Wilson’s wife, who gave up the Bar really prematurely, I suppose. I went to her with a case, again I can still remember the name. This was another Yorkshire businessman. This guy had nothing at the time of his divorce in the 50s. They had divorced before the 1970 Act and the 1973 Act. So there were no lump sums available. The wife came back when he sold his business for a huge sum amidst a good deal of publicity. There was no clean break and the wife wanted her share of the pickings. And, again, good, sensible commercial advice. It was going to be a wonderful academic legal argument, you could have really enjoyed it and charged a fortune. We bought her off.

Am I right in saying that before 1984, with the tailpiece, the court didn’t have the power to impose a clean break?

That’s right.

But parties could agree a clean break by consent, and then there were all those cases that said they couldn’t then come back for more.

That’s right.

Hindsight’s a wonderful thing and we all look back and think, ‘Did we really need White to tell us what White told us?’ If you look back to the 80s and 90s, do you ever remember at the time thinking, ‘Is it right, that the non-working spouse just got her reasonable needs’? And if that was just 7% of the assets, it was 7% of the assets?

It was Potter v Potter, wasn’t it? It was sort of balancing reasonable needs against what was available, and the one-third rule, and it was just accepted as a norm. I can certainly remember, I don’t know where you were in your career Nick when White was decided.

Three years in.

I’ve used the word seismic before, but that was truly seismic. People were picking up phones immediately because they realised that the advice you’d been giving a moment ago was utterly wrong.

Were there ever discussions in the office with people before Dart or anything like that in 1997?

I don’t recall there being discussions or debates about the perceived unfairness of it all because the social norms of the time were different then. Undoubtedly, the outcome of White, once that decision was made, you could see the tide had turned.

Although famously Mrs White only got 40%

Yes.

Did it feel that women, if it was mostly women, got a raw deal or it was just what it was?

It didn’t seem to be immediately a source of overwhelming concern by the profession at the time, but when White was released, it was apparent that there’d just been this seismic change and clients certainly had to adjust incredibly quickly. There were all those cases, do you remember, in the immediate aftermath, everybody was wanting a departure. There were all these departure cases, ‘I’m special’ – everybody was special and had made a special contribution.

So talk us through Booth & Co, the mergers, how did the firms develop?

It was Booth & Co who proceeded to merge with Addleshaw Sons & Latham in Manchester and became Addleshaw Booth & Co. They did not have a family team in Manchester, so that meant that we now had a family presence in another major northern city, which was great. And it was at that stage that Nigel Shepherd was recruited from Lace Mawer to join us in the Manchester office and that really got us motoring. We now had two family partners and at this time we had all sorts of people coming: Helen Jeavons, who’d been an assistant to Helen Ward; we had Eleanor Harding, who is one of the brightest lawyers I’ve ever met; and then Alison Bull joined from Burges Salmon, who came to Leeds initially, then moved to Manchester and is now a partner. Philip Way, of course, was homegrown.

Your trainee?

My trainee, and he stayed on.

My only articled clerk in the original sense, because trainee solicitors are on contract to a firm whereas articled clerks were to an individual, was Lyn Ayrton, who of course is still very successful with Lake Legal.

Going back to the Addleshaw Booth & Co theme, eventually they took over Theodore Goddard. They hadn’t, at that point, got a family law team – Blanche Lucas, David Hodson, Hilary Rogers – they had all gone and, with them, that great tradition of having acted for Mrs Simpson during the abdication crisis. They still had a thriving private client department – Paddy Grafton-Green – very much into the pop industry – they acted for the Rolling Stones and so on and so forth. Because there was no family law team down there, that meant there was another wonderful opportunity to operate out of London, which we did, but we did it remotely. We could offer a London-standard service but at provincial rates and we did not at that point have any resident presence in the London office.

So when we first met and when Ellie joined you, you were Addleshaw Goddard, would that be right?

Yes

In the lateish 90s/early 2000s?

Yes.

And that went on until 2008 when Addleshaws made the decision that they wanted global commercial dominance and opened up in the Far East, in the Middle East, everywhere, even Scotland, and family law did not really fit that profile. Off we went and they treated us very, very kindly and generously and we moved really rather seamlessly and happily to Mills & Reeve in 2008. Had it been 6 months later, it would not have happened.

And that was because of just the global financial crash?

Because of the crash. I think all of the team came across. By this stage, Nigel had grown the Manchester office and Alison had gone across there. We had a lot of lawyers in Leeds including Jo Grandfield who’s now in charge of the London office.

And did Mills & Reeve have a family team when you joined them?

Oh yes, very much so. It was principally Roger Bamber and Caitlin Jenkins in Cambridge, Nick Stone in Norwich and Mark Saunderson and Andrew Breakwell in Birmingham.

But Mills & Reeve Family was much more known in Norwich and Cambridge then than it was in Leeds and Manchester, for example?

Oh yes, absolutely.

The family team established new offices in Leeds and Manchester?

Oh yes, sorry, I’ve not made that clear. In 2008, there were no offices in the North. Mills & Reeve only had offices in Norwich, Cambridge, Birmingham, London and a small office in Portsmouth. The challenge was to open two new offices in Manchester and Leeds, and in Manchester they very successfully took over a firm called George Davies, which was a sports law firm, and developed that and that did very well for Nigel in Manchester because of the propensity of the football profession to get divorced. Whereas in Leeds we just took people on and grew organically; there wasn’t really the right match with another firm. That was really it. I retired as a partner in 2011 and I stayed as a consultant until 2018. Philip retired a year ago, in 2024.

Your name is synonymous with the treatment of pensions on divorce. Where did that specialism really grow from?

I think it started with wanting to know a lot about a little and there wasn’t much to know at that point about pensions, back in the early 90s, because there was no earmarking. I got involved in various SFLA (now Resolution) committees, because there was a lot of perceived unfairness. There were groups like Fair Shares, that you can probably remember, that were very concerned that women were losing out, as indeed they were. Pensions were not understood, they weren’t valued and they weren’t taken into account. It was a diabolical situation. There was huge resistance in the pensions industry to doing anything at all about it because the idea of shadow membership within a scheme was just technically too complex for them to comprehend. It took a lot of persuasion. Maggie Rae was extremely active and persuasive. Pat Hollis, a friend of Maggie’s, did a lot. It really all began with the battle to get earmarking underway, which came in from 1996.

Forms A issued after 1 July 1996. I was taught well David, by you!

1996 – in the lead up to that I can remember, on behalf of Resolution, going to see James Arbuthnot (now Lord Arbuthnot), who was then Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Social Security as it then was and, of course, subsequently the hero of the Post Office scandal. He said, ‘well, this is what we’re thinking of doing. We think the answer is limited reform because the pension industry doesn’t really want us to interfere as such with the pensions, but we can do earmarking – we can use existing remedies against the pension itself’ and he said, ‘do you think this will work?’ and I said, ‘well, yes, to a degree, but there’s one fundamental obstacle – the remoteness rule’. He said ‘what’s that?’ I told him that if you look in section 25, it says you can only take into account assets that fall in within the foreseeable future, and case-law, Milne v Milne, determines the foreseeable future as being within 10 years. So, if you apply that to pensions it means, if you take normal retirement age as being 65, if you’re not over 55, this is useless. It means that any wife being divorced under 55 is not going to find your earmarking reforms of any use whatsoever.

And he was very thoughtful, he was a barrister, he was making loads of notes. He said, ‘you’re right’, he said, ‘well that’s easy, what we’ve got to do then is we’ve got to say the remoteness rule doesn’t apply to pensions’. I said, ‘that’s a very good idea’ and if you look in the amended section 25, that’s what he did. The removal of remoteness applied immediately to attachment and, in the fulness of time in 2000, it also applied to pension sharing.

Was it Resolution’s campaigning that got Parliament interested?

It was Resolution spurred on by groups like Fair Shares who were understandably concerned.

I think we did, in the fairly early stages, have a pensions committee to try and get reform. At that stage, there was an overwhelming ignorance about types of pensions. There was no question about ignorance of remedies because there weren’t any, the only one was offsetting and, if you did engage in offsetting, nobody had any idea as to how you valued the pension anyway. And of course, once earmarking reached the statute book then the campaign continued.

Who came up with the idea of using, what I think comes from the Transfer of Undertaking Regulations, the CETV as was, as the value? Am I right in saying that was a kind of off-the-shelf way of valuing pensions?

Part of the problem was it was being dealt with by two different departments because the Ministry of Justice produced all the family proceedings rules, whereas anything dealing with alterations to pensions were dealt with by the DWP, so you had two different departments dealing with it with two different timescales, and not really communicating terribly well. The Valuation Regulation really was a convenient way of doing it. It was just a snapshot and it was cheap, it was cheerful, it was there already, everybody got it. It was a good thing to do and people soon learned that it had got its shortcomings and there were times when you had to get a PODE involved.

I know Nicholas Francis refuses to use that acronym, he hates it. Do you have this visceral hatred for the PODE acronym in the way that Nick does?

Well, it’s an Edward Hess creation, isn’t it? I’ve no particular dislike or like of it really.

How did your involvement with PAG come about?

Well, that was a very interesting group, wasn’t it? Because you’ve got Nick chairing it and Edward as number two. I chaired the legal committee. There were various subcommittees within it. It did an enormous amount of work but the burden was carried by Hilary Woodward from Bristol University, and then Cambridge University, and she did a huge amount of work and I think without her the whole thing really would have foundered, she did all of the legwork. But it did get people talking – it got actuaries talking to lawyers and it got actuaries talking to actuaries because there were a lot of differences of opinion between them.

Can you recall now what caused the biggest rows? What caused the blood on the wall?

I really can’t recall. All of those meetings took place in London at the end of the court day and, thinking back, it’s quite remarkable that as much was achieved as was achieved.

Are there any pension reforms that you would like to see, to the rules or legislation?

I think a lot of things have been ironed out. There’s some tinkering around the edges that can be done. The Pension Attachment Annex needs attention. The one substantive reform that I think is a great shame relates to pension attachment, which is that death benefits are really quite important and you cannot currently make a pension attachment death benefits order in favour of a child. That would be a very useful addition to the court’s armoury.

I dealt with a private FDR about 3 weeks ago and the husband had got a sizeable SIPP that he was drawing and he really wanted the family to have the death benefits, but he didn’t want his wife to have it. I managed to persuade him that she should get some of it, which could be a section 25C order, but then when it came to the child, there’s got to be an undertaking and a trust deed. It’s a legislative oversight.

And what about the Part III jurisdiction to facilitate sharing English pensions after an overseas divorce?

Well, you’re absolutely right, that is a totally anomaly since we left the EU. Jurisdiction should alternatively be determined by where the scheme is administered. If it were, it would overcome a lot of the problems.

Because that was a mechanism that you and David Hodson had identified to use the Maintenance Regulation, reg 7 loophole, wasn’t it?

Yes.

Did you enjoy your time on the FPRC? You were there from the beginning of the FPRC?

I was there at the beginning. I’d previously been on the Matrimonial Causes Rules Committee which never met. They just sent you the rules to sign, which did rather presume that you agreed with the contents, but you didn’t seem to be given an option. Whereas the FPRC was very different, it was great.

And that was the 1991 Rules that replaced the 1977 Rules?

Yes. But we’re talking now about 2010 changes. Philip Waller was the absolute star, his knowledge was utterly encyclopaedic and if you asked him a question, he’d always knew the answer.

Were you a stickler for compliance with the rules in practice and when you sat?

Well, it’s always good to be able to find ways around them. If you know the rules well enough, you can find ways round to achieve the right result.

Am I right in saying that you were the lead author of PD 27A, so we have you to thank for the bundles direction, do we David?

No, not at all!

You say that now.

This is now going to turn into a no comment interview, isn’t it?

No comment! It’s very interesting, that committee was chaired by a number of different judges. James Munby chaired it for a long time and he had a very short fuse with the civil servants who would sometimes come up with all manner of excuses as to why things hadn’t happened. I ended up feeling very sorry for them, the way he pursued them relentlessly, but effectively.

So is there any particular rule that has got your fingerprints on it that you look at the Red Book and you can still think, ‘that’s mine’?

Oh dear me, I’m sure there must be many that have got my prints on. I do remember the presumption of death rules which are in CPR Part 57 that we were consulted on, they were wholly deficient. I remember James Munby was there and the draft rule said what had to go into the statement. I said there was no indication as to when the person was last seen, and he looked at me and said ‘what a very good point’. I thought, ‘I need not say any more. You can do the rest, you can take it out on the civil service’.

My admiration really was for Philip Waller.

He was a superb Senior DJ.

Yes. I don’t know if he ever wanted to go on the High Court bench. Of course, he was promoted to the Circuit Bench.

And looking at other things you did out of work. You were SFLA Chair?

I was SFLA Chair in the late 90s, yes. And then I was president of IAFL European Chapter.

Did you enjoy that?

I enjoyed it no end. It was a huge privilege.

And then global dominance?

And then President of the full academy after a 2-year break. As European President I organised conferences in Krakow and Rome. Eleanor King spoke in Krakow and Ernest Ryder spoke in Rome. In Krakow, Prue Leith came, not because I know her very well (I do know her) but she was the then partner of one of my former clients, now deceased, sadly. Sir Ernest Hall was the owner of the only being I’ve ever successfully defended on a death penalty charge. He had a dangerous dog and he said, ‘David, they can’t put this dog down’. It was at Bradford Magistrates. I successfully got the dog off and we were always good friends afterwards. Now Ernest Hall was a very successful industrialist, owned Dean Clough Mills at Halifax which he made into a huge centre of liberal arts. He was a fine pianist and he trained at the Royal Northern in Manchester alongside the likes of John Ogdon and the whole Manchester school, Peter Maxwell Davies, all of that group. He still played, he’d recorded seriously all three of the Bartok concertos and he wanted to play Chopin in Poland. I said Ernest, ‘I’ve got a solution’ so he played Chopin in Krakow and brought Prue Leith.

A wonderful use of Addleshaw’s marketing budget was IAFL, wasn’t it, David?!

We were very lucky and the people who are still involved in organising meetings for IAFL are still very, very lucky. With the main Academy we did one year in Singapore which was fabulous and then the final year we did in Harrogate because, when I’d been president of the European Chapter, I was far too democratic. I said, ‘Do you want to go to Krakow, Copenhagen or Harrogate?’ They voted to go to Krakow so I thought, ‘right, that’s it, from now I’m going to decide’. So we went to Harrogate and we got all sorts of comments about ‘What are we going to do in Yorkshire? Are you going to take us down a pit?’ (I won’t tell you who that came from!)

The main Academy meetings at that time were held in September and this particular Saturday night in Harrogate coincided with Last Night of the Proms. I decided we were going to have our own Last Night of the Proms, which looking back was probably a little bit insensitive because there were a lot of Americans present and we had all these Union Jacks. We had a brass band which was absolutely fabulous because the conductor had judged this to a T and he got up and said, ‘well actually I’m a solo horn player but unfortunately our deputy conductor is ill tonight and so we haven’t got anyone to conduct whilst I play the horn solo. I wonder if any member of the audience would be prepared to come out and conduct the band’. Nick Mostyn got straight up, came to the front, took the baton, tapped it on the music stand and he said, ‘Can I try them out?’ The soloist-otherwise-conductor said, ‘Yes, of course’. So he’s conducting them and then he’s speeding up and picking up mistakes. He took to it like a duck to water! It was the most fabulous, fabulous cabaret. I said to him at the end, ‘Have you rehearsed this?’ He hadn’t! It really was just fabulous. Pure Mostyn!

And there was I thinking before now it was the Eurovision Song Contest of 1982 that put Harrogate on the map and no, it was the Chapter of IAFL!

At that point, the Academy was making a very crucial transition that had been started by the previous president, Ian Kennedy, from Melbourne, Australia, from being a holiday club for rich Americans, to being a serious body with a proper educational programme and an agenda to be involved in the family law arena. So we started proper educational programmes, we started an exchange scheme for young students wanting to experience family law in a jurisdiction of their choice, and we started an expansion programme seeking out Fellows in unrepresented jurisdictions. This was really quite troublesome to some of the Americans because they didn’t like the idea that we were going to bring people in from jurisdictions that couldn’t perhaps aspire to the way they wanted to have their meetings. We got far more members in from new jurisdictions. Fortunately, they’ve embraced that totally and it’s running very smoothly now.

Having obviously now retired from full-time practice, do you miss practice?

No, not one bit. I don’t have to record time. I don’t have to deal with HR departments, I don’t have to deal with any of that at all. I just enjoy writing and I enjoy doing private FDRs.

You had a long stint in judicial office, didn’t you?

I first sat from 1985 as a then Deputy Registrar and continued through various roles up to Deputy High Court Judge in 2011 – until I finally retired in 2022 at the end of the pandemic.

It’s relatively rare for solicitors to be Deputy High Court Judges.

I think that’s right, Nick. I wasn’t the only one but one of a very few in the Family Division.

And sitting full time never appealed?

I never applied for a full-time appointment. Partly for the reason Nick Francis gave in his FRJ interview – the system just hadn’t adapted to realise that people outside London have a life elsewhere.

But for that, could you see it as appealing, or was it that you wanted to do it in addition to doing the day job?

It wasn’t just about money. As a number of recently retired judges would acknowledge, and I suspect some serving judges would also acknowledge, the conditions are just deteriorating to an incredible extent; they do not make it an attractive option. The workloads are getting greater and greater, there isn’t the support and the environment in which you’re working is less than satisfactory. A flushing toilet is not too much to ask for, is it, with a door that locks!

You’re asking for the earth David!

So you’re still doing the private FDRs?

I’m still doing the private FDRs which I enjoy. You get cafetieres of coffee, chocolate biscuits, air conditioning and even flushing toilets – what’s not to like?!

Looking back now over a hugely successful career, what are you most proud of?

I think certainly that pension sharing reached the statute book, undoubtedly that. I think that IAFL making the transition from being a holiday club to being a really influential body that is well thought of and that people really do like to be part of it. And the fact that the firms with which I was lucky to be involved – Addleshaw Goddard and Mills & Reeve – really were leaders at the time. Along the way, I met some wonderful people, it’s the people that make it interesting. Sometimes it’s the clients, not always, but usually it’s the people. I think most family lawyers do enjoy the company of people.

I think it’d be quite difficult to do this job if you’re not a people person, I think you’ve got to be fascinated by people.

It’s not like doing commercial work. Every case is different.

You still seem to have a fairly full-on family law-based life.

It’s not too full on. I do one or two private FDRs a month and the writing I just fit it in when I want to fit it in.

What do you do in your spare time?

I’m very much involved in old cars – like Alvis. I’m still involved in church music, still involved in music generally.

Has that always been a lifetime love, music?

Well, yes, as I said I read music, briefly for a fortnight. Although I did study the organ for the whole 3 years I was at Cambridge, so I kept that going.

You weren’t Pembroke’s organ scholar?

I was not, no. I studied with Arthur Wills who was at Ely at the time. I took the RCO diploma whilst I was at Pembroke. The reason I applied to Pembroke, it was a spooky thing really, was I’d been fascinated when I was a schoolboy by the music of Arthur Bliss who was an English composer born 1891, who died in 1975. When I was a schoolboy, I founded a youth orchestra and only precocious schoolboys can write to people who are Masters of the Queen’s Musick – he and I prefer the original spelling! – I wrote to him saying ‘Dear Sir Arthur, I’ve founded a youth orchestra and I’d like you to become its President’. And he wrote back to say he would be delighted. People wrote wonderful letters in ink in those days, and we started a correspondence of sorts. Arthur had been to Pembroke and I thought, ‘if he can do it, I can do it’ and that really was the reason I applied to Pembroke.

I’m now Chairman of the Arthur Bliss Society. We’re just celebrating the 50th anniversary of his death this year. We’ve achieved 217 performances of 57 works which is staggering – we set out to achieve 50 and we’ve got 217 spread across New Zealand to California. Tomorrow, I’m going to hear the rehearsal of the world premiere of his Viola Concerto that we have managed to have orchestrated because he always wanted it orchestrated but never got around to doing it. So tomorrow I shall hear it for the first time in Leeds and then the performance will be in Ripon at the end of this month. That’s very much keeping me going. You meet some incredible people in the world of music, you really, really do. Totally different from lawyers.

Different. Not better, just different!

Different. Absolutely different.

If you hadn’t had a career in family law, or obviously as a star striker for Barnsley FC, where could we have seen your talents employed?

I don’t know, I suppose I did always have an idea about becoming a cathedral organist but I was never good enough to do it. I always remember the dean of my college said to me when we were talking about music or law, he said, ‘There are lots of fairly average lawyers but there are not many average cathedral organists’. And he was so right!

That’s a very good piece of career advice, isn’t it?

So final question for you, as we’ve put you through your paces, the Desert Island Discs question. What book are you taking and what music are you saving from the waves?

The book would not be Butterworths Family Law Service or the Red Book, I can tell you that!

You’ve just disappointed our entire readership now by saying you’re not taking the full volumes of Butterworths to a desert island!

I’d take some Trollope, some gentle reading. For music, I’d certainly take some Bliss, some Britten, I’m very keen on English music. I’d take some organ music, some Bach.

And your luxury?

Oh, dear me, a wonderful meal like this! With some wonderful chilled white wine.

David, thank you.