Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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Radio 4. My castaway this week is the former barrister and member of the House of Lords

Jeremy Hutchinson. His life spans 11 decades of British history and he spent much of it at the very center of the action.

Born during the First World War, he was brought up in the company of some of the greatest artists and writers of the day.

In World War II, he escaped his bombed

out ship clinging to a life raft with Lord Mount Baton. At the bar, he played a

central role in many of the culturally seismic trials of the day, among them defending the novel Lady

Chatterley's lover against obscenity charges and Christine Keeler in the Profumo Fair trial.

His brilliance in cross-examination inspired John Mortimer's creation of the character of Rumpole of the Bailey.

He enjoyed two long marriages, his first to the great actress Peggy Ashcroft, his second of 40 years to June Osborne, and he spent most of his time in the Lords

an active and passionate defender of liberty. He says, I had the luck to live when the world of the establishment was being dismantled.

The whole of one's career was to do with what was going on in society.

And that's the key thing, is it Jeremy, to be be an effective advocate it's essential to be in touch

with what's going on for the people in the jury you understand their life and therefore

can communicate with them. Absolutely.

That's the whole point.

You have to have a deep interest, I think, in people.

You happen to know what's going on in life,

and you have to have a passionate belief in what you're doing which is about justice.

You retired in 1984 having spent 44 years at the bar and it's probably a good idea to just remind people that in the span of that time we saw things like the abolition of corporal and capital punishment, the abolition of censorship, the legalization of homosexuality,

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