Horace Rumpole, an Anarchist at Heart‘I get together with John, he asks me if I feel like doing another. When Mortimer wrote the very first Rumpole script as a BBC “Play for Today”, he first wanted Alastair Sim (“but he was dead”) and then the Shakespearean Michael Hordern to play Rumpole. Click here to subscribeIn some ways perhaps Rumpole is the barrister Mortimer himself never quite had the courage to be. She Who Must Be Obeyed (the wonderful phrase is from the novel She by Rider Haggard—Mortimer had a liking for sensational fiction) is Hilda Rumpole. Incidentally, Rumpole would have been the much inferior Rumbold, except that there really was a barrister called Horace Rumbold.