Celebrated barrister who was a model for Rumpole

Jeremy Hutchinson, who has Jeremy

died aged 102, was one of Hutchinson

the most prominent criminal 1915-2017

lawyers of his generation, said The Times. Usually acting for the defence, he fought a series of era-defining cases (and, owing to his delight in pricking the pomposity of judges, became a model for John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey). One of his early triumphs was in defending the publisher Penguin against an obscenity charge, brought in relation to its publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a mass paperback. “Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read,” Mervyn Griffith-jones, the prosecutor, famously asked the jury. Hutchinson noted the jurors’ amused reaction and threw them a conspiratorial glance. His message was clear: it was a case of us vs. them. Penguin was acquitted and sales of the book soared.

“I had the luck to live when the world of the establishment was being dismantled,” Hutchinson once observed. Yet he was part of that establishment. Born in 1915, he was the son of a barrister, St John Hutchinson, and Mary (née Barnes), who was said to be the model for Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Educated at Stowe and Magdalen College, Oxford, he was called to the Bar in 1939. In 1940 he married another great performer – the actress Peggy Ashcroft. (They had two children before divorcing amicably in 1965. He then married June Osborn.) A member of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, he was serving on Lord Mountbatten’s ship, HMS Kelly, when it was sunk off Crete in 1941. Hutchinson, Mountbatten and several others survived by clinging to a liferaft, and sang music hall staples such as Roll out the Barrel to keep their spirits up – an episode that Noël Coward immortalised in his film In Which We Serve. He got his first legal brief in 1944, prosecuting a sailor who had led a gang of deserters, and killed a soldier. The man was executed.

“Call E.M. Forster,” was a line he had the pleasure of uttering at the Chatterley trial in 1960. Forster was there to testify to the book being a work of literature and not of pornography. Hutchinson introduced him with the words: “I believe you have written some novels?” He was only junior counsel, yet he played a key role – including pushing for more women on the jury, because women get less “worked up” about sex. Defending Christine Keeler against a perjury charge in 1963 – two years after he took silk – he stressed that she was not the siren described in the press, but a vulnerable young woman, who had been ill-used by powerful men. “Christine in the flesh was far removed from Christine astride the famous chair,” he said later. She was given a relatively light nine-month term. His defence of the KGB spy George Blake, in 1961, was less successful: he got 42 years. Hutchinson thought it “monstrous”, and was rather pleased when Blake later broke out of Wormwood Scrubs and was spirited to Moscow (where he still lives).

In 1982, he defended Michael Bogdanov in a private prosecution brought by Mary Whitehouse over his production of Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain. In court, her witness insisted that one of the actors had appeared on stage with an erect penis. Under cross-examination, the man admitted that he had been sitting way up in the upper circle, and – following Hutchinson’s vivid demonstration – was forced to agree that what he’d taken to be the tip of a penis could have been the actor’s thumb. In 1980, Hutchinson secured an acquittal for the cannabis smuggler Howard Marks, by persuading the jury that Marks had only been posing as a smuggler as part of his undercover work for both MI6 and Mexico’s secret services. In one moment of high theatre, he called for a mysterious figure wearing dark glasses and a sombrero to be allowed to testify in camera. Whether this man really was a Mexican agent remains unclear.

Although known for his high-profile clients, Hutchinson – a longtime Labour Party member, who was made a peer in 1978 – stressed that he’d enjoyed representing all kinds of people. “It is your privilege to enter their lives for a short period – perhaps the most important part of their whole life.”