Real-life Rumpole who put the SEX into the 60s
BOOK OF THE WEEK JEREMY HUTCHINSON’S CASE HISTORIES by Thomas Grant (John Murray £25)
JEREMY HUTCHINSON was the greatest advocate of his generation, a pivotal figure in some of the most celebrated trials of the 20th century, whose clients included Christine Keeler, the spy George Blake and Penguin Books in the Lady Chatterley case.
But even if he had not been a truly great criminal lawyer (he’s said to have partly inspired John Mortimer’s rumpole), and even if he had not robustly reached his 100th birthday in March this year, his would still be a life worth chronicling.
he was umbilically connected to the Bloomsbury set — his mother, on whom Virginia Woolf supposedly modelled her fictional socialite Mrs Dalloway, was Lytton Strachey’s cousin.
Indeed, he and his sister grew up so well acquainted with the literary lions of the time, regular house guests, that they had their own private nicknames for them: T. S. eliot was ‘The eagle’ and Aldous huxley was ‘The Quangle-Wangle’.
Moreover, his theatrical connections would become similarly impressive; his first wife, whom he married after a whirlwind romance at the height of the Battle of Britain, was the actress Peggy Ashcroft.
he left her 25 years later for June Osborn, whose father ‘Boy’ Capel had been the lover of Coco Chanel. Talk about six degrees of separation; hutchinson, now Baron hutchinson of Lullington, needs only one, or two at most, to link him to some of the most famous people of the last century.
HIS treasure trove of memories even includes clinging with Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten to the wreckage of their destroyer, HMS Kelly, when it was sunk off Crete in 1941. But it is his remarkable legal career on which Thomas Grant’s fascinating book focuses, and understandably so, for Grant is himself a barrister.
Not that his own training stops him being as beguiled by his subject as we are. Sometimes a trifle too beguiled, perhaps.
But it does enable him to explain how hutchinson exploited some of the more peculiar quirks of Britain’s legal system to help usher in a new age of permissiveness.
For example, when in 1960 Penguin Books was prosecuted for publishing D. h. Lawrence’s racy novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the defendants were entitled to an all-male jury, on account of it being an obscenity trial. hutchinson and the defence team waived that right, reckoning that in matters of decency women were ‘more relaxed and sensible’.
Yet the prosecution counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC, with enduringly notorious pomposity, still asked them whether this was a book ‘you would even wish your wife or your servants to read’. At which hutchinson recalls throwing the Old Bailey jury a conspiratorial smile.
They were emphatically not drawn from the servant-owning classes and three of them were women. They weren’t likely ever to have been classical scholars, either, in fact five of them struggled even to read their oaths.
hence further smirks across the courtroom, when Griffith-Jones said: ‘Members of the jury, for those of you who have forgotten your Greek, “phallus” means the image of the man’s penis.’
The prosecution, which had been widely expected to win the case, by now seemed to represent an out- of- touch establishment, underlined by hutchinson’s astute examina- tion of key witnesses, including the Penguin Books founder Sir Allen Lane. The verdict duly went Penguin’s way, and hutchinson still has his letters of congratulation, including one from the writer Laurie Lee, thanking him for having protected ‘the short sharp vigour of the Anglo-Saxon monosyllable’.
The Anglo-Saxon monosyllable — the F-word to you and me, which cropped up 30 times in Lady Chatterley’s Lover — might not seem today like a cause much in need of a champion.
But through i ts detailed
lawyer’s-eye view of Hutchinson’s trials, this book evokes a different age, one in which another client, Christine Keeler, the leading lady of the Profumo scandal, was widely and angrily cast as a woman of extreme moral turpitude.
In December 1963, defending her against a cast-iron charge of perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, Hutchinson depicted her instead as the victim she undoubtedly was.
Delivering a plea in mitigation, said at the time to be one of the longest and most brilliant speeches ever heard at the Old Bailey, he called on the judge to ‘resist the temptation for what I might call society’s pound of flesh’. and the judge did resist, sentencing Keeler to an unexpectedly light prison term of nine months.
Throughout his long career, Hutchinson was drawn inexorably to the underdog. another was Kempton Bunton, a retired Newcastle bus driver who i n 1961 masterminded a theft so outrageous, one which so captured popular imagination that it was alluded to in the following year’s inaugural James Bond film, Dr No.
Walking through the villain’s lair, Sean Connery’s 007 spots Francisco Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington propped up on an easel, and casually remarks: ‘So there it is.’
Bunton had pinched the real one from the National Gallery because he was so outraged by the state-funded purchase of a mere painting, for the then exorbitant sum of £140,000, at a time when pensioners were being forced to pay the BBC licence fee.
FOUR years later, after sending several ransom notes asking for an equivalent sum to be paid to charity, Bunton owned up.
He was plainly guilty, but of what? Ingeniously, Hutchinson exploited a loophole in the law, contending that his client could not be guilty of theft because he had not intended to deprive the owner permanently of the painting.
It was another towering performance at the Old Bailey, infuriating both prosecution and judge, but winning over the jury. The loophole was duly closed by section 1 of the Theft act 1968.
aptly enough, Grant does proper justice to these trials and more, including those of George Blake, the art forger Tom Keating and the drugs smuggler Howard Marks.
among others only fleetingly mentioned, is his successful defence of the actor Trevor Howard, who was prosecuted for drinkdriving. Howard, like Hutchinson a devout cricket lover, had on the night of his arrest conducted a long chat with a police officer about the distinction between a googly and a leg-break.
How could such complexities possibly be debated, asked Hutchinson, by a man incapable of controlling a car?
If there are any questions left by the end, they do not concern Hutchinson’s oratorical brilliance, his mastery of the law or his keen awareness of human nature — but why it is he remains so comparatively little-known.