Nemone Lethbridge, lawyer and writer

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

Nemone Lethbridge is a barrister who was called to the bar in 1956. One of very few female barristers working at the time, she encountered misogyny and was one of the trailblazers for women working in the legal profession who followed behind her. At her first Chambers, she wasn’t allowed to share a toilet with her male colleagues and had to use the facilities in a nearby café. It was hard for her to find work and for some time she represented the Kray twins. After her marriage to a writer, and former convicted criminal was revealed, she was forced to leave the legal profession and they moved to Greece for a number of years where both of them had careers as writers having their work filmed for the BBC. Nemone returned to the Bar in 1981 and continues to do pro bono work at 92 years old. She lives in London.

DISC ONE: Go Down, Moses - Paul Robeson DISC TWO: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel - The Choir of King’s College Cambridge DISC THREE: Scarborough Fair – Simon & Garfunkel DISC FOUR: I Wanna Go Back to Dixie - Tom Lehrer DISC FIVE: Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492 / Act 3: "Sull’aria ... Che soave zeffiretto" Performed by Edith Mathis (soprano), Gundula Janowitz (soprano), Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin and conducted by Karl Böhm DISC SIX: Strose to Stroma sou – Mikis Theodorakis DISC SEVEN: September Song - Gracie Fields DISC EIGHT: Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147: Chorale. Jesus bleibet meine Freude (Arr. for Piano) (Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring) Composed by Johann Sebastian Bach and performed by Lang Lang BOOK CHOICE: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam LUXURY ITEM: A doll CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492 / Act 3: "Sull’aria ... Che soave zeffiretto". Performed by Edith Mathis (soprano), Gundula Janowitz (soprano), Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin and conducted by Karl Böhm

Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Sarah Taylor

Transcript

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0:00.0	On Radio 4, the more you listen, the more you see.
0:04.7	Hello, I'm Brian Cox.
0:05.7	And I'm Robin Ince, and this is The Infinite Monkey Cage.
0:08.4	In this series, we're going to have a planet off.
0:10.9	I feel like Jupiter wins.
0:12.9	And after all of that, we're just going to chill out a bit.
0:16.0	We're talking about your bog standard.
0:17.9	Ice, not the fancy one.
0:20.2	Science with funny bits.
0:22.0	The new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage.
0:24.2	Listen on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
0:29.3	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:33.1	Hello, I'm Lauren Levern, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast.
0:36.8	Every week, I ask my guest to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
0:44.6	And, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
0:49.4	I hope you enjoy listening.
1:17.1	Music My guest listening. My castaway this week is the barrister and writer Nemone Lethbridge. She was called to the bar in the mid-1950s when she was one of very few female barristers in London. At her chambers, she was
1:23.3	locked out, literally and metaphorically, by her colleagues. She was banned from using
1:27.8	the toilets and told that she'd better find her own cases, since they wouldn't be passing
1:32.1	any briefs her way. Undeterred, she found herself in London's East End, representing two
1:37.6	brothers, who, as she puts it, got nicked every Friday night. They were the cray twins,
1:43.0	and defending them helped make her name. Her legal
	...

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