Helped inspire ‘Rumpole’ character

Lawyer

LAWYER Jeremy Hutchinson, a towering legal figure who helped liberalise British laws around sex and freedom of expression, has died. He was 102.

Lord Hutchinson’s former law firm, Three Raymond Buildings, said on Tuesday he had died a day earlier. No cause of death was given.

In 1960, he was part of the team that successfully defended Penguin Books against obscenity charges for publishing D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The book was first published in Italy in 1928 but was banned in its full uncensored form in Britain until Penguin published it in 1960.

The novel scandalised some; a prosecution lawyer infamously asked in court whether it was ‘‘a book that you would . . . wish your wife or your servants to read?’’

Lord Hutchinson felt that attitude was out of touch with an increasingly liberal and egalitarian society, and the jury proved him right.

Lord Hutchinson had fought to have as many female jurors as possible because, he later said, ‘‘Women are so much more sensible about sex.’’

He went on to fight in court on behalf of the erotic novel Fanny Hill, the explicit movie Last Tango in Paris and the academic book The Mouth and Oral Sex.

In 1982 he defended the director of the play The Romans In Britain in a prosecution for gross indecency. Lord Hutchinson demonstrated that an audience member who claimed to have seen an erect penis could have been looking at an actor’s thumb.

Other clients included model Christine Keeler, a key figure in the 1963 Profumo Affair sexandespionage scandal; Soviet spy George Blake; and drug smuggler Howard Marks.

Born in 1915 to parents who were part of London’s literary Bloomsbury group, Lord Hutchinson attended Oxford University and served in the Royal Navy during World War 2, surviving the torpedoing of his ship HMS Kelly during the Battle of Crete.

After the war he became a criminal lawyer and was made a member of the House of Lords in 1978 as Baron Hutchinson of Lullington.

The writer John Mortimer said Lord Hutchinson was one of the inspirations for his character Rumpole of the Bailey, a loquacious, wineloving defence barrister.

Lord Hutchinson was married to the actress Peggy Ashcroft from 1940 until their divorce in 1966; she died in 1991. In 1966, he married June Osborn, who died in 2006. He is survived by a son and a daughter. — AP