Jeremy Hutchinson was the doyen of the criminal bar in the 1960s and 1970s. No Old Bailey hack or parvenu Rumpole, he was the son of Jack, a distinguished practitioner in the same field, and Mary, a Bloomsbury Strachey. An Oxford undergraduate who acquired a criminal record along with a PPE degree (he accidentally shot a policeman with an air pistol), married first to Peggy Ashcroft, he moved throughout his life in the upper echelons of English liberal intellectual society, and was elevated, while still in practice, to the House of Lords. The brief biographical sketch at the outset of this book, littered with names of those whose paths he crossed, including T.S. Eliot, Winston Churchill, Isaiah Berlin and Roy Jenkins, sparks regret that Jeremy — as he has always insisted on being called — was too modest to write a memoir himself.
Happily Thomas Grant, also a barrister, found himself by chance the Sussex neighbour of the eminent advocate, now more than quarter of a century into his retirement, and spotted a reputation which deserved resurrection. In these case histories, stepping stones in his subject’s professional career, he has dwelt on trials involving sex scandals and espionage, sodomy actual and simulated (on stage and celluloid), and theft and fraud in the art world — all heady stuff for someone whose previous contributions to literature were textbooks on the worthy topics of lenders’ claims and solicitors’ negligence.
Many of Jeremy’s clients were as famous as his friends. They ranged from Stirling Moss (the charge inevitably one of dangerous driving) to Michael Oakeshott, the philosopher prosecuted for exposure when bathing naked off the Dorset coast, to Quintin Hogg, threatened with a charge of assault by a young liberal protestor. He successfully defended, as junior counsel to Gerald Gardiner, the publishers of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and, by then himself a senior silk, the distributors of Last Tango in Paris.
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