Rumpole of the Bailey interest in nineteenth-century anarchists, especially the Russian Peter Kropotkin from whom the title of the play was drawn. The character's name was later changed to Horace Rumpole when it was discovered that there was a real barrister called Horace Rumbold. The title of the play was briefly changed to "Jolly Old Jean Jacques Rousseau" before settling on the less esoteric "Rumpole of the Bailey". Mortimer was keen on Michael Hordern for the role of Rumpole. When Hordern proved unavailable, the part went to Australian-born actor Leo McKern. Mortimer was initially unenthusiastic about McKern's casting but changed his opinion upon seeing
Leo Eitinger Leo Eitinger Leo Eitinger (12 December 1912 – 15 October 1996) was a Norwegian psychiatrist, author and educator. He was a Holocaust survivor who studied the late-onset psychological trauma experienced by people who went through separation and psychological pain early in life only to show traumatic experience decades later. He devoted a long period studying posttraumatic stress disorder among Holocaust survivors, which had led Holocaust survivors including Paul Celan (1920– 1970), Primo Levi (1919–1987) and many others to commit suicide several decades after the experience. Leo Eitinger was born in Lomnice, Moravia, at that time a town in the Austrian-Hungarian