Profumo lawyer and real-life Rumpole
Jeremy Hutchinson Barrister and judge BORN MARCH 28, 1915 - DIED NOVEMBER 13, 2017, AGED 102
JEREMY Hutchinson, said to be the model for TV barrister Rumpole Of The Bailey, was involved in many of the leading cases of his day.
He appeared for Christine Keeler, – the model at the heart of the Profumo affair – as well as Soviet spy George Blake and the drug dealer Howard “Mr Nice” Marks.
Hutchinson even had a minor role in the Lady Chatterley case of 1960, in which he appeared as a junior defence counsel for Penguin, the publisher of D H Lawrence’s tale of love across the class divide. Many concluded that the prosecution was out of touch after its lead barrister Mervyn Griffith-Jones asked: “Is it a book that you would wish your wives or servants to read?”
In 1982 Mary Whitehouse brought a private prosecution for indecency against the director of Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain. The case revolved around whether Whitehouse’s solicitor, Graham Ross-Cornes, a member of her National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, had seen the tip of an actor’s penis on stage.
When Hutchinson asked where in the theatre he had been sitting, Ross-Cornes replied that he had been in the gods. “The back row. You sat in the back row!” thundered Hutchinson. “You go to the theatre, knowing your task is to collect evidence for a very serious prosecution of my client, a man who has never committed a single offence in his life, on a very nasty charge and you sit in the back row?”
After some more theatrics the jury was convinced and costs were awarded against Mrs Whitehouse who left the court saying: “God will have to provide.”
Jeremy Nicolas Hutchinson was born in Chelsea in 1915, where he remembered taking shelter from a Zeppelin raid. His mother, Mary, was said to have inspired the title character in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. TS Eliot was later a neighbour. Hutchinson attended Stowe School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read modern greats (politics, philosophy and economics) and joined the Labour Party after seeing the Jarrow marchers in 1936. After he trained for the Bar, he visited Los Angeles, staying with Aldous Huxley and meeting Charlie Chaplin.
In 1940 he married the actress Peggy Ashcroft with whom he had two children. They divorced in the mid-1960s and in 1966 Hutchinson, who lived in London and East Sussex, married June Osborn, the daughter of Coco Chanel’s lover “Boy” Capel. She died in 2006.