LORD GODDARD
SIR,—Bernard Levin really cannot be allowed to get away with the show of sweet reason which he has carefully adopted over Mr. Blom-Cooper's excellent reply to his attack on the Lord Chief Justice. What Mr. Levin is saying is this : I agree with most of what you say in Lord Goddard's favour, but I still think he's a rotten Chief Justice for certain reasons which I made clear in my article.
It is not as simple as all that. When we began to write our book we felt much the same as Mr. Levin feels now about Lord Goddard. But we found as 'we wrote what Mr. Blom-Cooper already knows —that Lord Goddard is a much more considerable and complex figure than people like Mr. Levin think. With the Lord Chief Justice's ideas about the value
P# )f retributive punishment we disagree—as the book shows. Mr. Levin describes it as a sharp, unfriendly little study, but the book is angelic compared with his own bitter and utterly unbalanced attack on the Lord Chief Justice.
This is the point: you cannot legitimately look at Lord Goddard solely from the aspect of his atti- tude to crime and punishment. By doing that you exclude all consideration of the mercy he has shown, and the good he has done the law—as we make clear in the book. If you agree—and Mr. Levin says he agrees—that the Lord Chief Justice has done all this good, then it is ludicrously unfair to set about him in the way in which Mr. Levin tries to set about him. You cannot admit on the one hand that the subject of your attack is a many-sided man while at the same time you criticise his whole standing on the basig of only one of those sides. This is what Mr. Blom-Cooper is getting at, and if Mr. Levin carries on in the way in which he is doing he mustn't be surprised to find that he is not the only one who wishes he were dead!—Yours faithfully,
ERIC GRIMSHAW GLYN JONES
115 Great Arthur Home, Golden Lane, EC 1
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