Albert Haddock
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Most of the JC’s heroes are men and women of fiction — not writers, but creatures of it — and A. P. Herbert’s magnificent creation Albert Haddock is no exception, though his adventures have such an air of veracity about them that they have, on occasion, been cited as authority in real litigation.
Haddock is the fellow who at spring tide navigated his punt on the flooded Chiswick Mall, and paid his outstanding taxes by delivering the revenue a negotiable cow “of malevolent aspect” and “menacing posture” on which he had written an instruction to his bank to pay the necessary sum to the revenue. He was arrested for causing an obstruction. Haddock’s defence? It would be “a nice thing if in the heart of the commercial capital of the world a man could not convey a negotiable instrument down the street without being arrested.”