To those of us who take an interest in miscarriages of justice Ludovic Kennedy is something of a patron saint. His account of the terrible events at 10 Rillington Place, the house of horrors in 1950s Notting Hill, which led to the trial and execution of an innocent man, is a classic. It eventually resulted in a pardon for Timothy Evans and played an important part in the campaign to abolish capital punishment. In later years Kennedy took up the cudgels on behalf of many other miscarriage of justice victims.
Richard Ingrams has recounted just four of the many causes that Kennedy, espoused, using them to illustrate his argument that the pen is mightier than any other medium and to pay tribute to one of the great campaigning writers of his day.
Kennedy was one of the first television journalists. In the mid-1950s he was a pioneer of a non-deferential style of interviewing politicians and other holders of public office. A willingness to take on the political and legal establishment was a useful and unusual attribute in an age when there were few takers for the proposition that police officers sometimes lied and that judges might occasionally be incompetent or mistaken. It helped that Kennedy, educated at Eton and Oxford and married to a famous dancer (Moira Shearer), radiated upper-class self-confidence and was personally acquainted with just about everyone who mattered.
The discovery of the remains of five women at 10 Rillington Place in 1953 caused a sensation. Not least because the man who had so obviously murdered them, John Reginald Christie, had three years earlier been the principal prosecution witness at the trial of Timothy Evans, the remains of whose wife and baby daughter had been found four years earlier in Christie’s wash-house. Instead of owning up to a terrible mistake, the reaction of the Home Office and the legal establishment was to organise a cover-up.
There were two inquiries. The first, by a QC in 1953, asserted that Evans had murdered both his wife and daughter, despite Christie having confessed to the murder of Evans’s wife. The second, by a judge in 1965, followed Kennedy’s book and a campaign led by, among others, Observer editor David Astor. It concluded that, although Evans might not have murdered the baby (the crime for which he was hanged), he probably murdered his wife. Kennedy’s book destroyed the case against Evans and poured scorn on the intellectual gymnastics of the legal profession, many of whom never forgave him.
The other cases dealt with here are those of Patrick Meehan, a career criminal wrongly sent down for a notorious murder in Ayrshire that he had nothing to do with; David Cooper and Michael McMahon, framed for the murder of a postmaster in Luton; and Richard Hauptmann, a migrant carpenter sent to the electric chair in the US for the kidnapping and murder of the baby son of Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly the Atlantic. This last case was a sensation in 1930s America. The Lindbergh case is the only one that remains unresolved.
When it came to the judiciary, Kennedy did not mince words. He described Lord Robertson, one of the judges in the Meehan case, as “one of the stupidest men I have ever come across”. Lord Hunter, another Meehan judge, was “almost as big a dumbo as Robertson”. At the time the Scottish legal establishment was even smaller and smugger than its English counterpart and they did not take kindly to having their deficiencies pointed out.
“My generation,” writes Ingrams, a founder of Private Eye, “is often credited with the demolition of the old establishment … but Ludo played a much more influential role.” Although Ingrams doesn’t tell us a great deal that we didn’t already know (and despite the clunky title), he has written a lucid and affectionate portrait of one the great journalists of his day.
• Ludo and the Power of the Book by Richard Ingrams is published by Constable (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846
