Bill King: 49 not out!

It is rare nowadays for anyone to get close to amassing 49 continuous years in employment of any type. Rarer still (and more impressive) is it to find a person who has served just one organisation with distinction for that length of time.

William King (Bill to everyone)  has served Chambers for one year short of half a century. That  fact bears repeating. Bill has clerked the present and past members of what is now Landmark Chambers for close on 50 years. He has seen name changes, mergers and moves. But, Bill has never changed employer. He is the last remaining link, the golden thread, that ties the existing members of Landmark to their illustrious legal ancestors in  2 Mitre Court Buildings, 

Bill came to work at 2 MCB for the first time on the morning of July 3rd 1972. He had long lush shoulder length hair which was then the fashion. It was a style which the rather grand almost Edwardian members of Chambers found disturbing. As we now know: they needn’t have troubled themselves, Bill’s hirsute phase was a vanishingly short one. But, photos of Bill’s early years in chambers show the new employee as a shy teenager with a (rather less flamboyant) “drummer from the band “Sweet”” look. Trousers had flares then. Especially Bill’s trousers.

And, just to position us a little more clearly in time, on Bill’s first day at work, Edward Heath was prime minister, Lord Hailsham was Lord Chancellor and Donny Osmond was at no 1 in the charts with Puppy Love. Brian Clough was in his pomp having led the unfashionable Derby County to the first division championship and it was (again) a mediocre year for Bill’s Spurs. Some things change little.

Bill’s first job as a clerk was to chase away the Chambers damp, (even in mid summer) by lighting coal fires in each of the members’ rooms in MCB. It often took until lunch for all of the fires to be set and Bill would be covered in coal dust for the rest of the clerking day. His flares were a fire hazard.

The set was then a mixed-chambers led by Sir Joe Molony QC who was a fierce prosecutor of the most violent of murderers and also Chairman of the Bar. All the clerks found him daunting. Bill found him terrifying, at least at first. 

Chambers was soon however to move in a different direction.

Post-war reconstruction was far from complete. The Town and Country Planning Act was refreshed in 1971 as part of the attempt to speed up the rebuilding of Britain. And Bill began clerking two of the up and coming new town planning lawyers, Frank (soon to be Sir Frank) Layfield and Lionel Read. These men built prodigious practices and were the early leaders (along with for example Geoffrey Rippon, Michael Fitzgerald and Roy Vandermeer) of the new Planning Bar. Layfield and Read collected a group of other “planners” around them at 2MCB including the mercurial Monique Viner and  as a result a set with a planning speciality was born with Bill at its very heart. 

Because of all this, Bill became known to all of the top planning solicitors. They trusted his judgment, appreciated his calmness and noted his honesty. They liked his shy, sardonic wit and enjoyed his company. These attributes have always  characterised Bill’s clerking and are still always remarked upon by solicitors who instruct those of  us with planning practices. And to these qualities must now be added the deepest experience and knowledge of the planning world over 49 years.

Bill has clerked barristers who have built much of our planning system, have delivered strategic planning to London, expanded (and opposed) expanding Heathrow, constructed Britain’s roads, ports and railways, promoted nuclear and other power stations and altered ( and opposed the altering) of London’s skyline. There is little in the planning world that he hasn’t seen.

In the late 90s  2MCB moved about 30yards to 1 Serjeants Inn and grew so quickly with Bill now as senior clerk and Lionel Read QC as head of Chambers that it soon needed to move again to Eldon Chambers just off Fleet Street.

Eldon Chambers then merged with the powerful 4 Bream’s Buildings (a set with its own remarkable history)  and, Landmark, a unique chambers housing planning, public and property specialities was born.  There, Bill led a stable of some of the best known planning silks in the country.

Bill is a quiet, diffident and self-effacing man. (Unlike the legendary clerk Geoffrey Carr) he does not have a trumpet. But even if he did he wouldn’t blow it.  It is a testament to his qualities that stellar practitioners such as Christopher Lockhart-Mummery and Christopher Katkowski (who joined Bill’s team from 4 Breams Buildings) soon came to appreciate and to understand his understated but expert approach to clerking.

I have been clerked by Bill for all of my life at the planning bar.  Put simply, I cannot begin to say how much I shall miss him.

I shall miss the concerned and compassionate care he shows us his charges. I shall miss his wicked sense of humour and his only too quickly exhaustible( but still hilarious) pit of jokes. (Bill King is a man with a joke for every occasion….. and we’ll hear it again tonight). I’ll even miss the hour-long “have you got a minute to run through some cases” phone calls usually timed to coincide with the second half of tense Welsh rugby matches or some-such but always salted with humour and other off the ball incident.

But, Bill is not all lost to me. Bill is a keen golfer. Indeed, the only thing which would stop him, on retirement, immediately joining the Seniors Professional Golf Tour is his complete absence of golfing talent. I on the other hand am a brilliant golfer. But only when no-one at all is watching. So, there will always  be a fairway somewhere where we can meet up to share our golfing disappointments and also importantly to remember the very happy and productive decades we shared as colleagues and friends.

Diolch o galon Bill. 

Russell Harris QC