Rumpole of the Bailey (TV Series)

Rumpole's Return (1980)

Leo McKern: Horace Rumpole

Quotes 

• Horace Rumpole : Obituaries can never be lively reading.

• [Rumpole arrives home after losing a case. Hilda has been spraying the room with alluring perfume and has an open bottle of wine ready for him] 

  Horace Rumpole : Rather odd smell in here, isn't there?

  Hilda Rumpole : Is there?

  Horace Rumpole : Distinctly strange sort of smell. Like a mixture of RC churches and old flower baskets.

  Hilda Rumpole : Oh, that's not very romantic, is it, Rumpole? It's lavender water. It's the lavender water that you give me every Christmas.

  Horace Rumpole : Oh, sorry. I didn't recognize it.

  Hilda Rumpole : Since we met, you've given me 40 bottles of lavender water.

  Horace Rumpole : Well, I don't know what else you'd like the smell of.

• Prof. Nathan Blowfield : Mr Rumpole, what would you say was the most important case during your long career?

  Horace Rumpole : Oh, the most important case was undoubtedly the Penge Bungalow Murders.

  Prof. Nathan Blowfield : The Penge Bungalow? What did that decide, exactly?

  Horace Rumpole : It decided that Rumpole could win a murder alone and without a leader.

  Prof. Nathan Blowfield : Did it turn on a nice point of law?

  [Rumpole holds up his glass of blood-red wine] 

  Horace Rumpole : No, Professor. It turned on a nice drop of blood.

• [Rumpole is getting to know the client who he will be defending] 

  Horace Rumpole : You work, do you not, in the office of the Inspector of Taxes, Clapham Division?

  Hubert Simpson : Yes.

  Horace Rumpole : Well that's not a criminal offence, I suppose... although it will hardly endear you to the jury.

• [Rumpole is cross-examining pathologist Professor Ackerman about the blood type on a note found at the murder scene] 

  Horace Rumpole : Is it not possible that after my client had written this absurd message in his own type-A blood, and kept it, the antigens would have faded and the blood would have become less easy to classify accurately?

  Prof. Ackerman : That could be so.

  Horace Rumpole : And in that case, would not the blood on this paper give you, as indeed it did, a type-O result?

  Prof. Ackerman : [thoughtfully]  I... think the hypothesis you advance... is a possible one.

  Horace Rumpole : [to himself]  Ah, bless you, Ackerman. May you have many happy years in a mortuary ahead of you.

• [Rumpole has announced that his stay in Florida with his son was just a holiday, and that he is not retiring after all] 

  Uncle Tom : How long will you be staying with us this time, Horace?

  Horace Rumpole : How long? Oh, who knows how long. You know, I well remember that awful old Lord Chief when I was first at the Bar. He gave an eighty-year-old man fifteen years for persistent theft, at Bodmin Assizes. "But my Lord," the old man said, "I shall never do fifteen years." "Well," the old Lord Chief encouraged him, "you must just do as much of it as you can." And *I* will do just as much of it as I can.