Horace Rumpole

Horace Rumpole, fictional character, a barrister featured in many television scripts and novels of John Mortimer.

The rumpled, disreputable, and curmudgeonly Rumpole often wins cases despite the disdain of his more aristocratic colleagues. He is fond of cheap wine (“Château Thames Embankment”) and Keats’s poetry and refers to his wife as “She Who Must Be Obeyed” (an allusion to the title character of H. Rider Haggard’s She). First introduced in a 1975 BBC television drama, Rumpole reappeared many times in a television series that ran in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Mortimer based several books on the character, beginning with the story collection Rumpole of the Bailey (1978). Leo McKern played Rumpole in the BBC series.