Lord Hutchinson of Lullington
Criminal lawyer who saw off Mrs Mary Whitehouse and defended Christine Keeler and the spies George Blake and John Vassall
LORD HUTCHINSON OF LULLINGTON, who has died aged 102, was probably the finest criminal advocate of his day, best known to the general public for his spirited courtroom opposition to literary censorship and his eloquent advocacy in secrets cases; he was also, for 26 years, the third husband of Dame Peggy Ashcroft.
As a lawyer, Hutchinson first came to public notice in 1960 when he was junior counsel for Penguin Books in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial. For social historians, the case’s often racy evidence identified it as one of the events that launched the swinging Sixties.
Hutchinson, typically, tackled the case head on and began his cross-examination by familiarising the jury with some of the novel’s bluest passages. He was helped by witnesses such as Norman St John Stevas, who said that “every Catholic priest and every Catholic moralist” would profit by reading the book. Of equal assistance was the absurdly out of date turn of phrase of the prosecuting counsel, Mr Mervyn Griffith-jones QC, who at one point asked the jury: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”
Hutchinson’s urbane courtroom manner gave a deceptively lightweight impression of his powers – at the height of which he was capable of laughing a case out of court.
His reputation in censorship cases brought other high-profile briefs. In 1964 Hutchinson defended, albeit less successfully, John Cleland’s 18th-century novel Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure – described by one witness as a “gay little book” and a “useful corrective for young people”. In 1982 he defended Michael Bogdanov’s scene of explicit homosexual rape in the play Romans in Britain at the National Theatre, privately prosecuted by Mary Whitehouse. After the Attorney General entered a nolle prosequi, Hutchinson reportedly commented: “You get your knickers in a twist if you launch private prosecutions.”
In 1997, having spent much of his career reassuring clients whose private lives were being exposed in the press, he found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to rebut the claims of an unauthorised biography of his former wife Peggy Ashcroft, which asserted that the actress was promiscuous and unfaithful to all three of her husbands.
“What the modern generation does not understand is that you can love someone without going to bed with them,” countered Hutchinson. He attacked the biography as a “squalid, prurient book” and said that the “picture of me as a poor, long-suffering husband is not one I am going to allow”. He had not cooperated with the author Garry O’connor because he distrusted his “smarmy” approach. “I have not been a criminal barrister for nothing … After an hour I had sussed him out.”
Jeremy Nicolas Hutchinson was born on March 28 1915, the son of St John Hutchinson KC, himself a successful criminal barrister, and his wife Mary, a member of Bloomsbury’s “smart art set” who was best known for her long affair with Clive Bell and as the reputed inspiration for Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway.
Young Jeremy went to Stowe, then read PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford, sharing rooms with Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-west’s son, Ben, who later became an art historian. He was aware of Peggy Ashcroft throughout the 1930s, and they met quite often at weekend house parties.
Hutchinson was called to the Bar by Middle Temple in 1939, shortly before joining the RNVR at the shore training base at Hove. In 1940, after passing his selection board to become an officer, he visited Peggy backstage at Brighton. “That was when our romance developed,” he later recalled. They met again that summer when he was on leave, and after a fast romance decided to marry. She had been twice divorced and, at 33, was eight years his senior.
By 1941 Hutchinson was serving aboard Kelly, the flagship in Mountbatten’s destroyer flotilla at Malta, whose wartime career later featured in the film In Which We Serve. When the Germans invaded Crete the flotilla was sent to intercept them, and Kelly and her sister ship were sunk by German aircraft. Hutchinson spent four hours in the oil-covered water, under heavy machine gun fire. He was eventually picked up by a third vessel.
The next year, following a shore posting at Devonport, Hutchinson was back with Mountbatten and others who survived Kelly’s sinking aboard the aircraft carrier Illustrious. He was later stationed in the Indian Ocean and at Caserta in the Mediterranean, where he worked under General Alexander in the Anglo-american team.
Having ended the war as a lieutenant, Hutchinson contested the Abbey division of Westminster for Labour at the 1945 general election; his driver was Anthony Wedgwood Benn, then aged
19. He even canvassed No 10 Downing Street: “Literally went and knocked on the door with Peggy,” he recalled. “This grand figure opened the door and said: ‘Unfortunately the tenant is abroad at the moment.’”
Unsuccessful (it was a safe Tory seat), he entered chambers in the Temple to practise on the Western Circuit. He took silk in 1961, and was appointed Recorder of Bath in 1962, and of the Crown Court ten years later.
In 1953 Hutchinson prosecuted Laslo Szilvassy, the Hungarianborn artist who was conditionally discharged after pleading guilty to damaging a model of Reg Butler’s sculpture The Unknown Political Prisoner, then on show at the Tate. Seven years later he was unsuccessful in the defence of Stirling Moss on a dangerous driving charge. Moss was banned for a year.
One of his first briefs as a
QC – the first in a string of headline-catching secrets cases – was to defend George Blake, who was sentenced to 42 years imprisonment at the Old Bailey for spying for the Soviet Union.
In 1962 he represented John Vassall, the Admiralty clerk who pleaded guilty to spying for Russia after being blackmailed about his homosexuality. In mitigation, Hutchinson said Vassall’s “unfortunate sexual proclivity” brought in its train “inner turmoil and suffering”. “There is nothing in him of the master spy,” he argued. Vassall, however, was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment.
In 1963 Hutchinson successfully defended the Italian-born nuclear physicist Giuseppe Martelli, who had refused to yield to subtle and relentless pressure by the KGB.
The same year he defended Christine
Keeler, who was jailed for nine months after admitting to perjuring herself during the trial of her former boyfriend, the Jamaican jazz singer Aloysius “Lucky” Gordon. Hutchinson’s address to the jury was masterly.
Fifty years later he recalled the moment Christine Keeler first entered his chambers: “What sticks most forcefully in my mind is the disparity between her porcelain, mask-like looks, still undeniably beautiful, and her voice. It was a voice of a person who had lived many years longer than her 21 years and who seemed to have grown entirely weary of life. It was a voice which had lost any joy in life.”
Two years later, Hutchinson appeared in the Sunday Telegraph secrets trial which followed the leaking of General Henry Alexander’s report on the Biafran War by Jonathan Aitken (who was “seeing” General Alexander’s daughter at the time).
Gen Alexander described Aitken as a man “who told many lies and behaved in a dishonourable manner”. In his closing speech, Hutchinson said the Crown’s case was “wholly blanketed in official fog”. “You may think” he said to the jury “that these gentleman [Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials] acted like a lot of old hens, fluttering their feathers in their Whitehall coops, pecking away at their classification, and that when the truth begins to leak upon them, they ran to their traditional range, the deep litter house – the Official Secrets Act.” The jury returned not guilty verdicts on all the defendants.
In 1978 Hutchinson acted for the journalist Duncan Campbell in the ABC secrets trial, which resulted from a magazine article giving details of GCHQ at Cheltenham. In his closing speech Hutchinson argued that the Official Secrets Act was not designed to save governments from embarrassment or block Watergate-style newspaper investigations. The trial judge, Sir William Marsjones, agreed, and the next day the Attorney General Sam Silkin stopped the prosecution.
As chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, Hutchinson called on police to clean up their interview techniques in response to the allegations by Sir Robert Mark, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, that some defence counsel were guilty of concocting defences and of forensic trickery.
Hutchinson was elevated to the peerage by James Callaghan in 1978. The following year he spoke against the government’s Protection of Official Information Bill in the House of Lords, saying that it “suspends a sword above journalists’ heads”. On another occasion he lamented the “disgraceful” treatment of prisoners on remand.
In 1981 Hutchinson defended Howard Marks on a £20 million cannabis smuggling charge. (Handed a bag of cannabis, the judge inquired: “How is it ingested?”) Marks was cleared on the smuggling charge, but given a two-year sentence for making a false passport application.
Hutchinson became a member of the Arts Council in 1974 and chairman in 1977. Before standing down in 1979 he headed a thorough internal appraisal of the council’s structure at a time when some were seeking to bring it closer to the Civil Service.
Hutchinson was appointed a trustee of the Tate in 1977 and chairman three years later. His chairmanship coincided with the opening of the Clore Gallery extension, designed by James Stirling to house paintings that JMW Turner had left to the nation over 130 years previously. He strongly opposed the imposition of museum charges, on the grounds that the taxpayer pays for the acquisitions.
In 2014 Helena Kennedy QC interviewed a then 99-year-old Hutchinson for Radio 4. She asked him if criminal lawyers make a difference. “I think we make an enormous difference,” he replied. “Without being pompous, I think I have helped a large number of people assert their rights, resist oppression.”
In 2015, in collaboration with Thomas Grant, he published Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories, an account of selected trials. It was received warmly, Frances Wilson in the Telegraph writing: “The finest literary moments in this book are those in which Hutchinson himself speaks. Hearing him in court was apparently like being under the sway of a magician, and he has a similar impact on the page.”
Hutchinson and Dame Peggy Ashcroft had a son, who survives him, and a daughter, who died in 2016.
The marriage was dissolved in 1965 and in 1966 he married June Osborn, the widow of the concert pianist Franz Osborn, who in the early 1960s had been mentioned as a possible future wife for Edward Heath. She died in 2006.
Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, born March 28 1915, died November 13 2017