THE ADRIAN COOPER RESEARCH FUND
THE ADRIAN COOPER RESEARCH FUND
His Honour Judge Adrian Edgar Mark Cooper
24th May 1948 - 9th February 2008
“There was a lot to Adrian. There was a lot of Adrian. He was not always a beacon of optimism; but he had a most amiable and affectionate personality - and a very loud laugh.
He was a giant of a man. Six foot six in his socks, his brightly coloured socks. Their high visibility was fortunate, as with a lofty centre of gravity on his bicycle he would in recent years navigate Hyde Park Corner; his mind plainly elsewhere; snowy white hair; ill-fitting helmet pushed back on top; in a long tweed sort of rabbitting jacket. And this often early in the morning along the Thames tow path or through Richmond Park, with Virginia leading on her velocipede.
Adrian had been a prime specimen at birth in 1948; and was dearly loved by his sister Clare and his parents. His mother was not always well, and he became particularly attached to his father Dick, a cultivated man of books. There was Cooperesque anxiety when sending the nine year old Adrian away to school in Shropshire. But he took to it like an outsize duckling to water; and later confessed that never again was he as highly motivated as during those four years at prep school.
He won a scholarship to Shrewsbury, where he was taught by Frank McEachran on whom the character of Hector was based by Alan Bennett for The History Boys. Adrian excelled academically, and rowed - but was increasingly sensitive and less happy than at prep school or university.
He chose Lincoln College, Oxford, where his father had been. He read law. Not working too hard I am told, because his brain was sharp enough to master in minutes what for others took hours – and because he had a quite prodigious memory. Thus freed from hours in the law library, he allowed himself to power the college eight on the river, the first eight you should know; no mean physical feat even by the standards of the university Blues who were later with him in Chambers, a feat Adrian never spoke of later. He was the most modest of men.
The rest of his university days were plainly spent more aesthetically, becoming inexorably the quintessential Oxford man which he was to remain – and I do mean that as a compliment.
He was a fund of abstruse facts, of anecdotes, and aphorisms, of quotations. What Adrian did not know of the history, literature and lives of the 19th century was not worth knowing, but his reading was not limited to that period. And unlike others with an appetite for enquiry, Adrian remembered it all. It was this that made him such engaging company at any gathering, along with that laugh and his self-deprecating character – for you could never have called Adrian a know all. Only when pressed would he, reddening further his already ruddy face, perform the reluctant party trick of answering correctly who was, say - foreign secretary in Palmerston’s second ministry. Truly remarkable; not useful in the slightest; but therein lay his quirky charm - and in the fact that he would read with equal pleasure, and remember with equal detail, the News of the World and Hello magazine.
Amongst his other favourites were Dr Johnson, Lytton Strachey, PG Wodehouse and Oscar Wilde. He may have emulated Wilde in wit, and when younger in snappy dressing [he was not immune to bow ties], but physical attraction for Adrian lay in a different direction from Wilde’s: it was at Oxford that he started his relationship of over 20 years with Averil Wormald, fellow undergraduate. They married in 1971. Despite their separation they remained fond of each other to the end.
Most importantly, Adrian and Averil had Harriet, Isabel and Constance, three charming and intelligent daughters who were deservedly the daily (and I mean daily) joy and great pride of Adrian’s life, and through whom he lives on for all of us.
He sailed through his Bar exams, became a pupil and was inevitably taken on in what are now Henderson Chambers at 2 Harcourt Buildings. New tenants were sent far and wide in civil, family and criminal cases. The work was plentiful, and in the seventies properly paid from the public purse, as well as by insurance companies and private clients. Of the three junior tenants in the annexe Adrian got the cream of the work, and not just because he was better turned out than the other two.
They were happy times for Adrian, especially with his girls.
In the 1980s and early 1990s the main insurance company for local authorities and its City solicitors came so to trust and rely on Adrian’s sound judgement that they sent virtually all their litigation to Chambers. Particularly after the drought of 1976 there was a vast quantity of this. If a house subsided or moved, the householder or householder’s insurer could sue not just the builder, architect or engineer but also the local authority whose building inspector would have originally approved the foundations. Many of these cases came to trial on Adrian’s advice, and were very often then won.
Despite success at the Bar, Adrian increasingly cultivated a veneer of self-effacing pessimism, particularly as to his health. He would be muffled to the ears against the mildest spring breeze. He was very funny with it, and affectionately known as Ee-Or. His manner was not unlike the lecturer who said he would demonstrate Murphy’s Law, and held up and dropped a slice of buttered bread; and who, when it landed butter side up, said: “There you are, that proves my point”. Adrian seemed genuinely to believe he would never be sent another brief.
Yet if you caught him on his own he would be humming. He had a fine bass voice, loved music of all sorts; and once on a long walk intrigued the distant inhabitants of a French village with a not atonal version of The Pirate King .
In the late 1990s the Bar became more difficult and cut throat. Adrian perhaps lacked the inclination as well as the ruthlessness to elbow himself above others and reach the very top. His interest switched to his sittings as a Recorder and judging. This coincided with the great happiness he found, and has had for the last twelve years, living a truly contented life with Virginia, and her Arabella and Henry - Professor Virginia Murray as she is, distinguished toxicologist, being now as well of course Mrs Adrian Cooper. Adrian became very fond of his two step-children, and they of him.
Far too late – as it has tragically worked out – Adrian and the Lord Chancellor realised that in him was the perfect circuit judge. That is what he became in July 2004.
He had none of the usual judicial vices. He was not impulsive, irrational, arrogant or lazy. The family have had remarkable tributes from those who appeared before him at Southend and Basildon. Speaking of his great courtesy, wisdom, judgement and unfailing kindness and consideration for all persons involved in the system. His manner of rebuke of a professional for falling below what was required was to express disappointment - which coming from him cut to the quick. The Essex staff admired, I have to say adored, him – they have taken a bus to be here. They and the other judges miss him intensely. Four of us, with four bicycles, had many happy mornings on the 8.30 out of Fenchurch Street; all attempts at discretion ruined by Adrian’s rumbustious laughter.
He said he was like a pig in clover in the job. Why? Because he was dealing with people; and people were his interest. He was especially good with the sad whom he thought worth trying to re-integrate into decent life. Virginia has a letter to Adrian from one defendant who has made good against all odds, a letter thanking Adrian for giving him the chance. Yet he could be gratifyingly fierce in sending villains away for long spells. He said when ill, I hope I did some good as a judge. More good than he realised: people were liable to be better after contact with Adrian, at least in the short term.
He had come fully into his own, and delighted in it. And he had the prospect of another thirteen fulfilled and immensely worthwhile judicial years.
After just two, in May 2006, he was found to have an inoperable brain tumour; with the prospect of little more than a few months’ life.
He was extraordinarily brave, brave as a lion. There was not a whiff of self-pity, only anxiety for Virginia and his children. His approach, with Virginia and all four girls and Henry, was to set about enjoying every day as it came. Everyone was welcome at Burnsall Street, and there were endless comings and goings of family and friends, with cheerful evenings and dinners inside and out, and much wine. And Adrian talked, including sometimes for the first time about his own life; and he laughed.
He played outrageously on the earlier pessimism he had adopted; saying this turn of events was beyond his wildest dreams; more than chuckling at the cartoon of the Hypochondriac’s Clinic in which the consultant re-assures the patient by saying “Don’t worry - something serious will come along soon”; and at the notion that the hospital must have mistaken for a tumour what was only his outsize memory; and laughing with Arabella, when she was told the news, that at least bird ‘flu from the Essex marshes could not get him now. And he produced for his own girls maybe the worst of his awful puns: “I will never lose my sense of tumour”.
The reward was twenty unexpected months. Twenty months in which two happy weddings were celebrated: his own with Virginia; and Harriet’s, whom he was able to give away last December to Edward Clark whom he liked so much. The admiration of the rest of us for him and the whole family, the families joined through Adrian and Virginia, over those twenty months is unbounded. – for Virginia, for Harriet and Ed, for Izzy and Constance, for Arabella and Henry, for Clare and Graham her husband; and indeed for Averil.
His illness became unsustainable in January. He had his last ten days very calmly, and graciously, as always, in the Trinity Hospice. Though long expected, his death - his cruelly accelerated death - was shocking.
These tumours, we are told, are rare and under-researched. That is why Adrian’s two professors, from the Royal Marsden and Burnsall Street, are enthusiastic about a research fund at the Marsden now established in Adrian’s name.
So, you see, there was a lot to Adrian, a lot which few of us realised in full.
And maybe it is because there was so much of Adrian - of this huge, gentle, affectionate man - that he will be so missed.
Everyone loved Adrian, and rightly so.”
This address was given by His Honour Judge Daniel Worsley at Adrian’s memorial service on Thursday 6th March 2008 at Chelsea Old Church.