Forgive my resurrection of this thread. You may have gathered that JHQC is rather a hero of mine.
Sadly, he died earlier today and very promptly, The Times has run his obituary (which has no doubt sat in a filing cabinet and seen out many an obit. ed. ..)
Since it behind a paywall I can only attempt to invoke the great man's inclination to trample on privilege by reproducing it in full. I do hope you find it interesting.
OBITUARY
Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, QC
Leading criminal barrister whose extraordinary career included the defence of Christine Keeler, George Blake and Howard Marks
“Call EM Forster!”
Few barristers have had the joy of summoning a name so redolent as a witness. Fewer have taken part in cases such as the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that define an era, and arguably many an advocate would not have struck just the right note of restraint in the still more august presence of Justice (“I believe you have written some novels?”).
However, Jeremy Hutchinson was not an ordinary barrister. In the 1960s and 1970s he was the leading criminal lawyer of his generation, acting usually for the defence at a time when the bulwarks of the establishment were being first assailed and then toppled. Appearing for clients such as the model Christine Keeler, the spy George Blake and drug dealer Howard “Mr Nice” Marks, Hutchinson found himself helping to alter definitively society’s attitudes to sex, secrecy and punishment.
Censorship too, because his career took off after the Lady Chatterley case, which in 1960 set the tone for the decade. Its publication had long been banned on the grounds that the novel used obscene language, but Penguin challenged this by stating it meant to bring out a mass edition.
Hutchinson was its junior rather than leading counsel, but it was he who pushed for as many female jurors as possible, on the basis that women get less steamed up about sex. And it was largely he who mustered and then examined star witnesses such as Forster and Richard Hoggart, who testified to the book being a work of literature and not pornography.
Thirty years earlier, Hutchinson’s father, St John, who was also an outstanding criminal barrister, had appeared for a gallery prosecuted for showing DH Lawrence’s nudes. That the wind had changed was epitomised in the celebrated question posed to the Chatterley jury by prosecutor Mervyn Griffiths-Jones: “Is it a book that you would wish your wives or servants to read?”
Hutchinson was often to make profitable use of that gulf between the lives and sentiments of ordinary people and their supposed betters. He could also achieve much with a glance.
As was sometimes the case in those days, the judge, Laurence Byrne, had brought along his wife, Lady Byrne, to sit by him. Hutchinson recalled her glaring down at him, arms firmly crossed: her feelings about Lawrence’s book were clear. When Griffith-Jones posed his infamous question, grins flickered across the faces of the jury. Hutchinson gave them a conspiratorial look and threw a sideways glance at Lady Byrne. His meaning was clear: the trial was between “them and us”, the establishment versus the people.
After being appointed QC in 1961, he featured in another emblematic episode when engaged to represent Keeler. She had admitted perjuring herself during the trial for assault of her former boyfriend Aloysius “Lucky” Gordon, whose obsession with her had led ultimately to the exposure of the Profumo affair.
In his plea in mitigation, Hutchinson was at pains to play down Keeler’s press-created image as a “sex goddess”, emphasising her immaturity. In truth, however, he thought that she had already seen too much in life, its effects visible in the discrepancy between her ravishing looks and her hard voice.
Hutchinson recalled his first meeting with Keeler: “Christine in the flesh was far removed from Christine astride the famous chair. She was a victim of circumstances and of a kind of unquenchable male desire.” As she came to his room he noticed that all of his colleagues had left their doors open to get a glimpse of her.
In court he painted a portrait of a vulnerable young woman from a broken home who had been manipulated by many men, one of whom, her mentor, the society osteopath Stephen Ward, he described as “a sort of perverted Professor Higgins”. (Although he later expressed great sympathy for Ward’s plight.) He told the judge: “I know Your Lordship will resist the temptation for what I might call society’s pound of flesh.” The judge handed out the relatively light sentence of nine months.
Hutchinson had less success when making the same plea for Blake, the Soviet spy who had confessed to five charges under the Official Secrets Act. Unmoved by Hutchinson’s plea in mitigation, the lord chief justice, Lord Parker, imposed a 14-year prison sentence for each charge, three to be served consecutively. Hutchinson told the Court of Appeal that such sentencing would lead either to madness or escape — and faced with a sentence of 42 years, at the time the longest in legal history, Blake broke out of Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 and made his way to Moscow.
It was not until much later that Hutchinson was able to confirm his suspicion that the judge, Lord Parker, had been secretly briefed on the damage that Blake had done. This included giving away names of agents, but Hutchinson was kept in the dark and unable to challenge the detail. He was not displeased when Blake escaped from prison and the two exchanged Christmas cards.
Delivered with panache, Hutchinson’s advocacy could fizz like champagne, although it was not above theatricality. He was said to have influenced John Mortimer’s creation of Rumpole of the Bailey, especially in his calling of judges “old darlings”.
There was mischievous wit too. When, in a buggery case, the judge referred to the prosecution’s argument as being a shot across the bows, Hutchinson riposted: “More a shot across the stern, I would have thought.”
In another obscenity case, Margaret Drabble appeared as a witness about the value of a psychological treatise, The Mouth and Oral Sex. The judge asked her why anyone needed to read about oral sex, given that (as far as he knew) society had managed to do without it for 1,000 years. “Poor, poor His Lordship,” remarked Hutchinson wistfully, “gone without oral sex for a thousand years.”
He revelled in the absurdity that sometimes accompanies legal proceedings. Marks, the drug smuggler, did not deny having imported huge quantities of cannabis — enough, he said, for every person in Britain to get high at the same time — but claimed to have been working undercover for MI6. Hutchinson got Marks off by convincing the jury that this was the case. At one point he questioned a customs officer, who insisted that he had observed Marks meeting two Americans crucial to the case through the keyhole of a room at the Dorchester Hotel. “Ah,” Hutchinson countered, “so you recognised him by his knees.”
The crucial testimony, improbably, was provided by a man in a sombrero said to be a member of the Mexican secret service, although he admitted it would be impossible to establish that — or to disprove it. Although the judge sentenced Marks to two years’ imprisonment for making false passport applications, Hutchinson ensured that the sentence was quashed before joining Marks for a celebratory dinner at the Dorchester — “a grand idea,” Hutchinson joked to Marks, “given that you have never set foot in the place.”
Other clients included the Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson, Stirling Moss (for speeding) and the journalist Duncan Campbell in the ABC trial over GCHQ’s work. Hutchinson secured the acquittal on corruption charges of T Dan Smith, the infamous leader of Newcastle council at his first trial, but he never received his fee. Another high-profile client was Trevor Howard, whose acquittal he secured by claiming that the actor’s long conversation with his arresting officer about the differences between googlies and leg breaks meant he could not have been drunk at the wheel of his car.
Hutchinson also recommended not prosecuting Lord Montagu of Beaulieu for homosexuality offences, but his advice was not followed. On appeal he cleared the name of Christopher Swabey, a naval commander who for almost 20 years had sought to overturn a conviction for putting his hand on the knee of a junior officer.
In 1962 Hutchinson served as counsel in the “Committee of 100” trial, representing five of six nuclear disarmament campaigners who had been charged with conspiring to break into Wethersfield air base in Essex during a demonstration. The trial was a cause célèbre, the witnesses for the defence including the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the actress Vanessa Redgrave, both of whom confessed their complicity in planning the demonstration. The defendants received sentences ranging from 12 to 18 months; two of them, Pat Pottle and Michael Randle, would later help Blake to escape, having met him in prison.
Later that year Hutchinson acted for John Vassall, an admiralty clerk who had confessed to spying for Russia. When making his plea in mitigation, Hutchinson presented his client — who had been blackmailed by the Soviets after participating in a gay orgy in Moscow — as a pawn in the Cold War. Vassall received a relatively light sentence of 18 years.
Hutchinson’s admirers painted him as a radical, and certainly he had family roots in Bloomsbury. In reality he was perhaps more of a paternalistic Liberal, although bound as a barrister to appear for clients whatever his view of their case. In 1982 he was briefed by Michael Bogdanov when Mary Whitehouse brought a private prosecution for indecency against the director of Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain on the basis that an erect penis could be seen during a pivotal scene of homosexual rape.
Bogdanov could have been sentenced to two years in jail, but in a bravura performance Hutchinson destroyed the credibility of the prosecution’s sole witness, Whitehouse’s solicitor, Graham Ross-Cornes, a member of her National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association.
Hutchinson demonstrated what it could have been with a gesture unlikely to have been witnessed at the Old Bailey before or since. “Fist balled, thumb protruding, jammed into his crutch, Hutchinson thrust away, to the barely concealed amusement of the members of the jury,” Bogdanov recalled.
Hutchinson turned to the hapless witness: “Are you sure you did not see the tip of the actor’s thumb, Mr Ross-Cornes, as he held his fist over his groin like this?” The court fell about laughing as Ross-Cornes conceded: “Well, I might have been mistaken.” When the prosecuting counsel declared that he was withdrawing the case, the judge insisted that the trial continue, obliging the defence to apply to the attorney-general’s office to terminate the proceedings.
Jeremy Nicolas Hutchinson was born in Chelsea in 1915. His earliest memory was of taking shelter in a cellar from a Zeppelin raid, his second of a farm boy coming to his parents’ country home to tell them that the First World War was over.
He was introduced to the art of performance by his father on trips to music halls to see George Robey. His mother, Mary, was close to many in the Bloomsbury set. She was said to have inspired the character of Mrs Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s novel and had a long affair with the writer’s brother-in-law, the critic Clive Bell. Her cousin Lytton Strachey taught Jeremy how to do up a bow tie.
Jeremy and his sister, Barbara (whose first husband would be Victor, later Lord Rothschild), were brought up overlooking the Thames in Hammersmith. “Here comes the Queen of Sheba!” the well-read local urchins would shout at their mother, in her dresses hand-painted by Roger Fry. Later they lived near Regent’s Park and during summers at Chichester, where their friend TS Eliot was a neighbour.
Jeremy was educated at Stowe and at Magdalen College, Oxford. There he read modern greats (politics, philosophy and economics) and shared rooms with the future philosopher Stuart Hampshire. He was prompted to join the Labour Party after seeing the Jarrow marchers in 1936. Subsequently he trained for the Bar, celebrating the end of his studies by visiting Los Angeles, where he stayed with Aldous Huxley and met Charlie Chaplin.
Having joined the RNVR before the outbreak of the Second World War, he was aboard HMS Kelly, Lord Mountbatten’s ship, when it was sunk off Crete in 1941. It was, he recalled on Desert Island Discs in 2013, “a most beautiful day in May, and I remember the smell of herbs on the shore . . . I was one of the lucky ones because I was on deck and I was swept off by the sea. Going down and down and down in the water is not as bad as you imagine, except for the feeling your ears are going to burst.”
He came up and swam through the surface oil to some wreckage. While he and his comrades, including Mountbatten, waited to be rescued, they maintained spirits by singing songs such as Roll out the Barrel. The episode was immortalised the next year in the film In Which We Serve, written and co-directed by Mountbatten’s friend Noël Coward.
The previous year Hutchinson had married the actress Peggy Ashcroft after a whirlwind romance — they were married at Marylebone register office at the height of the Battle of Britain, but the wedding breakfast was cut short by an air raid. Seven years older than him, and already twice divorced, she was a family friend, but Hutchinson ascribed her falling for him to his having turned up in her dressing room in tight sailor’s trousers — “the one time in my life when I’ve looked really attractive!”
Their daughter, Eliza, became a painter based in Paris and died in 2016, while their son, Nicholas, is an actor and director. Ashcroft’s frequent absences, and their subsequent involvement with others, led to the end of the couple’s marriage in the mid-1960s, although they remained on good terms. In 1966 Hutchinson married June Osborn, once courted by Cecil Beaton and Ted Heath, and who was the daughter of Coco Chanel’s lover “Boy” Capel. She died in 2006.
Hutchinson was given his first legal brief in 1944 when serving as a signals officer at the Allies naval HQ in Naples. It involved an English sailor called Bill Croft, who was the leader of a gang of deserters; he had killed a soldier near Rome. Hutchinson thought it the only time that a barrister had begun his career with a case of murder, and his prosecution resulted in Croft becoming the last sailor to be executed.
The next year Hutchinson stood for parliament as the Labour candidate for the Abbey division of Westminster. He canvassed 10 Downing Street (Winston Churchill was away at Potsdam) and the teenage Tony Benn drove his loudspeaker van.
Hutchinson sat for ten years from 1961 as the last recorder of Bath and helped to found the Criminal Bar Association. Yet he took care to tend his hinterland (after the Chatterley case he had been offered, but turned down, the chairmanship of Penguin). He loved cricket — he assisted in the motion to the MCC in 1968 to stop touring South Africa — and walking, as well as art. When a young man, he had been left a small Monet, which he admired for ten minutes before selling it to buy a house in Hampstead.
His parliamentary debut had to wait until 1978, however, when he was created a life peer, eventually voting with the Liberal Democrats.
He later served as deputy chairman of the Arts Council and, from 1981-84, as chairman of the trustees of the Tate. It was Hutchinson who paved the way for the building of the Clore Gallery to house Turner’s work, as well as for the creation of Tate Liverpool.
He retired from the Lords in 2011, although he continued to speak out against the spectre of political interference with the judiciary. In 2015 he turned 100. Saluting him on his centenary, his fellow lawyer Sir Alan Moses called Jeremy Hutchinson “a hero for us all. He is the living symbol of all that independent criminal advocacy means for justice and the survival of the rule of law.”
That same year an account of his life, Case Histories, by the barrister and author Thomas Grant, was published and became a bestseller. Hutchinson contributed a postscript. In it he recalled his days as pupil to James Burge, who had taught him, he said, the wisdom of the barristers’ adage: “Never ask a question to which you do not know the answer.” He later added his own rule: “When you get the wrong reply, look as though it was precisely the one you were expecting.”
Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, QC, was born on March 28, 1915. He died on November 13, 2017, aged 102
