Great Advocates Series Part 3: Jeremy Huthchinson

By David Langwallner

My Previous contributions in this ongoing series were of two old school advocates Carson and Darrow both advocates with a defined political involvement which I think conditioned their knowledge of human affairs and in Darrow’s case as The Great Satan and the attorney for the damned due to the type of work he acquired.

Lord Hutchinson was a blue blood and very much part of the Bloomsbury set of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and indeed John Maynard Keynes and deeply politically engaged and on the board of The Tate but also  subject to the common accusation of being satanic for his criminal defence or obscenity work or being met in the street by erstwhile and putative respectable members of the profession and confronted with the clientele and how he could represent such people.

I know how he feels and I have never been a blue blood.

The world then and now is full of public avengers and he ultimately dealt with Mary Whitehouse as I have had to deal with her equivalent ilk among the academics and family lawyers of Dublin.

The nefarious catholic action groups and sexually repressed and deeply satanic men and women. Body of Christ.  Amen. The Holy Joes with their screaming hosannas. The despicable moral majority fully of fury and inverted smuttiness. The smut peddlers of conservatism. Small minds.

Invited me back to Trinity recently. I rejected.

The society in the UK when he was in his prime was in a period of transition and as an advocate he kind of bridged it and became emblematic which is why there has been a recent book Case Histories (Thomas Grant) 2016. Based on personal access about his career.  Some of which I have borrowed in the following but not all.

There are all sorts of interesting things in his career of note and often in his statements in the Lords and in a most interesting appendix to the book. For one, an issue dear to the Innocence Project, his gradual perception of cognitive bias and that its is dangerous to think everybody shares your views or your affinities.. His clear understanding of the can rank rule in a postscript to the book and the way you should take anyone for a fee even not a large fee. Such is your obligation often willfully misunderstood by commercial lawyers.

In that postscript he makes a very salient point in a remark that Pitt The Younger made about Charles Fox that advocacy is about magic and so it is.

Americans and many commercial lawyers do not understand this. Nor do bar Schools it cannot be thought. It is not a linear process. It is not a science. It bears the same relationship to science as alchemy or voodoo or magic. It is the art of illusion so I agree with him.

He also defends the criminal barrister against the charge of hackery rightly so. Commercial lawyering is about money not advocacy or rarely so. Most can do it. Very few can deal with the complex art of cross examination, a surprise question or a closing speech and in our programmed technocratic age even less can do so.

He was fortunate with his cases in an age of great cultural change and transition where obscenity and sex were centre stage. Noticeably Robertson QC was often there as a junior. Crusading times.

Much of the book concerns mitigation not trial. An advocate of reducing the damage often unsuccessfully  despite forceful advocacy when it involve state secrets such as Blake. Yet some of the mitigation produced in the book is cleverly orchestrated such as the way he sought to belittle the involvement of confidential secret disclosed by the client Vassel by defining him as a little man caught up in a web of intrigue. A marionette. The sentence was still 42 years. Advocates words do not have the same effect in a sentence before a judge.

He representation of Ms. Keeler during the Profumo Affair  when Stephan Ward was dead shows both the courage and the sinister element of advocacy at its highest. One cannot libel the dead and he got Mr. Keeler a most lenient sentence but was it truly inappropriate use of language to say of Ward that:

“He was a sort of perverted professor Higgins.”

Ward as Robertson in a Crie de Couer book was a victim of a miscarriage of justice by the then establishment. In fact the inappropriateness of the remark reminded me of the fact that several times in a glittering career he was opposed by Reginald Manningam Buller or Viscount Dilhorne. As the books adverts to Lord Devlin, also in appropriately, savaged Dilhorne posthumously for his conduct as prosecutor of the Bodkin Adams trial by constantly adverting to jis lack of intelligence, clubbability and How everyone referred to him as Reggie.

I dislike by the way when people refer to me as Dave for similar reasons.

The Great Irish Supreme Court Judge McCarthy in Ireland in reviewing the book indicated why was it necessary to be so hard on Reggie or indeed it might be said Stephan Ward.

But the advocate practises the dark art and has to represent his client and the ethics are complex.

At times this leads one to do and say things that are in conventional terms unforgiveable.

Hutchinson  of course did the Lady Chatterlys Trial, a huge victory but an open goal by the crown barrister when he said infamously and counter intuitively in the temper of the times is this a book you would like your servants to read.

Hutchinson had an acute non establishment bohemian sense of the temper of the times even though he was quite a quiet living man ostensibly though divorcing the brilliant but no doubt difficult Dame Peggy Ashcroft.

Obscenity dominates The Romans in Britain trial and The Last Tango in Paris in particular a private prosecution.

His cross examination in the later case is quite brilliant in that he very cleverly  gets the complainent to accept that he could not have witnesses the graphic rape penile masturbation scene from the back row of the theatre the stalls and the cheap seats and even how seriously did he take his private prosecution if he did that. In court he apparently and riskily demonstrates what the witness should have seen. Risqué then. Risque now. A bit like Darrow calling William Jennings Bryant to the stand to talk about the bible. Great advocates are magicians. I must say I had to do the same trcik with some of the lunatic avengers of Dublin such as the criminal Phelan and his associates in the family law community.

But in a moving codicil and only recently dead living over 90. On senses he could afford to think and act about the quality of justice. A pampered and privileged generation it must be said though he sagely warns about how funding cuts are diminishing the quality of justice and indeed the art of the advocate.

Perhaps with the Anglo Australian Robertson QC and another junior to him Solley he was the last of the thinking advocates. A kind of self aware privileged well educated noblesse oblige.

Though it is odd that as a member of the Bloomsbury set he indicates he did  not read many books.

But advocacy is after all illusion and that of course as I sure he would have accepted is dangerous.