Ludovic Kennedy: British campaigner against injustice



He could, one of his friends said, smell injustice. Sir Ludovic Kennedy, who has died aged 89, was a broadcaster and author whose relentless pursuit of miscarriages of justice ensured that his legacy would reach far beyond the transient fame of television.

In a career championing the wrongly convicted that stretched over four decades he not only secured pardons and remissions of sentence but also played a significant role in the campaign to abolish the death penalty.

The cases he took up included that of Timothy Evans — hanged for a crime that was almost certainly committed by the serial killer John Christie — and the Luton post office murder, in which a police officer conspired with an informant to help to convict men he knew were innocent.

Sir Ludovic “came from a rather good background”, his friend Will Wyatt, the former head of BBC Television, said. “But he had a huge sense of mischief and distrust of authority. When he got on to something, he really enjoyed upsetting the applecart. He smelt injustice and felt passionately about it, and enjoyed the chase.”

The first case he took up was that of Derek Bentley, who, aged 18, was hanged for his part in the murder of a policeman on a South London rooftop. Then, convinced that Evans was wrongly hanged, he wrote 10 Rillington Place — filmed with Richard Attenborough and John Hurt — which led to a judicial inquiry and a posthumous pardon for Evans. The case is widely held to have been instrumental in the decision to abolish the death penalty.

As Richard Ingrams, the former Editor of Private Eye, said, it “exposed the fact that the British judicial system could get things hopelessly wrong and would then try to cover them up”.

Sir Ludovic also believed that the society osteopath Stephen Ward, who killed himself during the Profumo affair, was a victim of injustice and that the man hanged for the abduction and killing of the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby was framed.

Among his successes was the release from jail of Patrick Meehan, who had been convicted of the murder of Rachel Ross at her Ayrshire home.

He was also a passionate advocate of atheism, republicanism and foxhunting, and in his later years championed assisted dying. He stood for Parliament in the 2001 general election as an independent on a pro-euthanasia ticket.

Michael Mansfield, QC, who helped to overturn the conviction of the Birmingham Six, another cause championed by Sir Ludovic, said: “For me he was an inspiration. He is part of the reason I went to the Bar at all. After I read 10 Rillington Place I was horrified about that as a miscarriage of justice, and how it could happen. His style of investigative journalism was courageous at a time when the British system was hardly ever questioned.”

Mr Ingrams described Sir Ludovic as “a bit of an anarchist”. He told the BBC: “For somebody like that to be engaged in the exposure of miscarriages of justice — it gave him an advantage. He couldn’t be dismissed as a kind of left-wing lunatic or anything like that.”

Sir Ludovic believed that the main culprit in nearly all the cases he took up to have been the “extremely childish” British system of adversarial justice, which was “an invitation to the police to commit perjury, which they frequently do”. Such iconoclasm may have surprised television viewers for whom he was merely the urbane presenter of such current affairs programmes as This Week, Panorama and 24 Hours.

His charm, though, was legendary. As Mr Wyatt said: “People fell in love with him. They would fall over backwards for him, and so he was always able to get a lot out of people.”

At a fancy-dress ball in 1949 he met the young ballet dancer Moira Shearer, who had starred the previous year in the film The Red Shoes, and asked her to dance. She would be delighted, she told him, only “I don’t dance very well”.

They married the next year, and stayed together until her death in 2006.

Speaking for the family, Sir Ludovic’s daughter Rachel Hall said: “He leaves a great gap in all our lives. He was an immensely attentive and loving father, and though he was totally absorbed with his work, he was always ready to do things with his children. He taught us to be curious about the world, he shared with us his love of jazz, literature and poetry, and, of course, with that wonderful voice he was someone you always wanted to listen to.

“Both he and our mother had a delightful naivety about modern life — they were totally uninterested in the workings of anything mechanical, and although my father attempted to discover the boon of a word processor, it wasn’t long before it was discarded and he was back with his familiar Olivetti, and the two-finger typing.”

Original report here



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