Mary Whitehouse was right after all!
Barrister who fought her over Romans In Britain rape scene says she has been vindicated
THE leading criminal barrister who defeated Mary Whitehouse in court later admitted the family values campaigner had been vindicated over her battle against gratuitous sex and violence, it has emerged.
Jeremy Hutchinson, QC, clashed with Mrs Whitehouse during her private prosecution of the National Theatre play The Romans In Britain in 1982.
Mrs Whitehouse objected to a scene in which the Romans were seen attempting to rape a naked druid on stage.
But she dropped her claim of ‘procuring gross indecency’ after the QC’s crossexamination of a witness reduced the courtroom to laughter.
Years later, however, Lord Hutchinson admitted Mrs Whitehouse had had a point following the rise in extreme forms of pornography that had become available.
The barrister’s biographer, Thomas Grant, QC, made the revelation at the Cheltenham Literary Festival yesterday where he told the audience ‘it was very easy to laugh at Mary Whitehouse because a lot of people did’.
But he added that Lord Hutchinson, who is now 101, respected Mrs Whitehouse and the ‘sincerity with which she went about her business’.
Mr Grant said: ‘A lot of the things that she was complaining about in the 70s and
‘Became rather too distasteful’
80s that were deemed to be ludicrous – I think she has been to some extent personally vindicated and I think Jeremy thinks she has been vindicated as well.
‘I mean, the cases that he was defending, the artwork he was defending – Fanny Hill, Lady Chatterley – they are relatively safe artwork in one sense.
‘But there came a time when Jeremy didn’t do any more pornography cases because the pornography became rather too distasteful for him.
‘There was a famous novel called Last Exit To Brooklyn which came out in 1968, where Jeremy was briefed to defend it on an obscenity charge.
‘He actually said to the publishers, “Look, I don’t think I’m the right man to defend this case, not because I don’t think this book should be published but because I find it so upsetting as a book, I don’t think I could give it the best defence it could get”.’
For more than 30 years Mrs Whitehouse sought to purge Britain of public indecency, saying she acting on the principles of ‘a dedicated school teacher and a committed Christian’.
She pushed for a TV watershed but was ridiculed by some as being out of touch after protesting against broadcasters and artists whose work she felt was obscene.
In 1965 she founded the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, using it as a platform to criticise the BBC for its perceived lack of accountability and excessive portrayals of sex, violence and bad language.
At the time she was loathed by liberals, but since her death aged 91 in 2001 a growing number of commentators have said her views on the dangers of broadcasting gratuitous sex and violence had been ahead of their time. In 2010 veteran broadcaster Dame Joan Bakewell, who fought for a new liberal age of freedom, admitted that she had come to agree with her one-time adversary.
Lord Hutchinson had a long and prolific career in which he defended everyone from Soviet defectors George Blake and John Vassall to the Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson. Acting for Christine Keeler, he was at the centre of the Profumo affair, the sex and spying scandal that brought about Harold Macmillan’s resignation in 1963.
He also represented Penguin Books in its defence of D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover on charges of obscenity.