Lord Hutchinson of Lullington QC

Lord Hutchinson was regarded as the greatest criminal barrister of his generation. He was junior defence counsel in the Lady Chatterley trial; defended the spy George Blake; model Christine Keeler and the drug dealer Howard Marks.

R v Penguin Books Ltd saw the prosecution of Penguin Books at the Old Bailey, under obscenity laws, over its publication of the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence. The jury delivered a verdict of “not guilty”, paving the way for freedom to publish explicit material in the UK.

Lord Hutchinson told Helena Kennedy QC in an interview on BBC Radio 4, at the age of 99, that the most thrilling moment of the trial had been calling for “Mr E M Forster … and then through the door came this little man in a dirty mackintosh. And I was able to say after asking him his name and address, ‘I think you have written some novels.’”

On the occasion of his centenary in 2015, Sir Alan Moses called him “a hero for us all. He is the living symbol of all that independent criminal advocacy means for justice and the survival of the rule of law.”