James Burge

Charles George James Burge, QC (8 October 1906 – 6 September 1990) was an English criminal law barrister, remembered for his defence of Stephen Ward in the Profumo affair in 1963.

[2][3][4] He practised in the chambers of R. E. Seaton, Q.C., an established "criminal set" in Queen Elizabeth Building, Temple, London.

[5] He succeeded Seaton as Prosecuting Counsel to the Post Office at the Central Criminal Court in 1943.

Ward took an overdose of sleeping tablets near the end of the trial, he was found guilty of some charges in his absence, but died without regaining consciousness.

Mortimer's 2009 obituary in The Daily Telegraph confirmed that Rumpole was, in part, based on a chance meeting in court with James Burge: In the early 1970s Mortimer was appearing for some football hooligans when James Burge, with whom he was sharing the defence, told him: "I'm really an anarchist at heart, but I don't think even my darling old Prince Peter Kropotkin would have approved of this lot."