ESSENTIALLY a communicator” was the way Sir Ludovic Kennedy described himself. A Scottish “lad o’ pairts” might have been a better term. Not only did he have prodigious talents as a writer and broadcaster, but he used them to the full. If his manner was relaxed, his questioning courteous and his bearing almost patrician, he was no dilettante. The amiability and easy charm merely helped to disguise both his professionalism and the zeal that burned within him.
In nothing was that zeal more apparent than in his lifelong concern with miscarriages of justice. This, he thought, was planted in his mind in early childhood by meeting a prison visitor who consorted with the wicked inmates of Bedford jail. It was surely strengthened when he later learnt of the career-breaking court-martial of his adored father, a naval captain, in 1921. By talking to his men, rather than using force against them, Captain Kennedy had averted a mutiny but was nonetheless censured and denied a new command.
The guilty men in this episode were gutless admirals. In the cases Sir Ludovic was to broadcast and write about, the villains were usually corrupt policemen, complacent judges and those who defended an adversarial system of justice that encouraged “the police to commit perjury”. Among the cases he examined were those of Timothy Evans, hanged for a murder he had not committed; Stephen Ward, prosecuted after the Profumo affair, who was probably framed; Bruno Hauptmann, accused of murdering Charles Lindbergh’s baby; and the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four convicted (unsafely, it turned out) for IRA bombings. Sir Ludovic’s book about Evans, “10 Rillington Place”, is widely said to have played a part in ending capital punishment in Britain.
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Sir Ludovic was not, however, a single-issue man. Another cause was atheism. As a good child, he had said his prayers every night, but as a teenager gave up, since “no one was listening”. His father, he presumed, knelt as usual to pray the night before he and his ship were blown to pieces by German bombardment. Sir Ludovic’s scepticism about a deity was then clinched by Thomas Paine’s “The Age of Reason”.
The right to a good death
Voluntary euthanasia was a later concern, this one strengthened by watching his mother’s drawn-out death in 1977. His compassion then was in contrast to his feelings as a child, when he had feared and hated this burly, domineering figure who would come down the road with her three close women friends dressed in tweeds and brogues and looking “like a squadron of battleships in line abreast”. It was her icy inability to show affection, he believed, that was responsible for the black moods and psychosomatic ailments that plagued Sir Ludovic for decades, causing him to consult psychiatrists on hundreds of occasions over 25 years. He hoped to feel better after each visit, but rarely did, even after a session with a Jungian analyst who fell fast asleep during his patient’s “free association” on the couch.
If his dark interior moods were at odds with his self-assured exterior, so did his Liberal politics jar with his Conservative family background and his upper-class, Eton-and-Christ-Church education. Twice he stood for Parliament as a Liberal, and each time came close to winning. Latterly, the reluctance of his party first to make common cause with the Scottish Nationalists, then to put euthanasia in its manifesto, made him choose in 2001 to stand, not altogether gloriously, as an independent.
Although Sir Ludovic’s father was a Lowlander and his mother a Highlander, an English childhood and an English accent made him consider himself an Anglo-Scot. For all that, the country and its people were important to him. The seeds of his commitment, he wrote, were sown when, as a small child, he woke up on a night sleeper to Nairn and pulled back the blind to see “a great sea of purple sloping downwards from the track…and below it a long, thin oblong loch, flanked by purple hills and, to complete the picture, a stag trotting purposefully downhill.” Only later did he come to view Scotland through a less Landseerian lens, seeing the Scots as an overlooked nation and arguing the case for home rule in “In Bed With An Elephant”, an enjoyable blend of history, anecdote and advocacy about the land of his birth.
In this, as in all his work, he brought to an argument the cogency of the rationally convinced with the wisdom of one who could see the other side. That other side he often understood because it was in his genes and upbringing. Small-minded Edinburgh lawyers who disapproved of his campaigns might blackball him from their golf club, and did, but their slightly more sophisticated counterparts in London could hardly dismiss him as a wild leftie: they had known him in the Bullingdon Club and shared his views on hunting.
In truth, though his background and even friends were establishment and his causes unfashionable, he was not a man of contradictions. Rather, he held the convictions of a thoughtful, civilised man, who could as easily write plays as pamphlets or naval history, who liked the pipes as much as jazz and was as moral, for all his atheism, as any man of God. And, in all he did, he brought humour and humanity unusual among zealots. A lad o’ pairts indeed. :SugarwareZ-278::SugarwareZ-278::SugarwareZ-278:
In nothing was that zeal more apparent than in his lifelong concern with miscarriages of justice. This, he thought, was planted in his mind in early childhood by meeting a prison visitor who consorted with the wicked inmates of Bedford jail. It was surely strengthened when he later learnt of the career-breaking court-martial of his adored father, a naval captain, in 1921. By talking to his men, rather than using force against them, Captain Kennedy had averted a mutiny but was nonetheless censured and denied a new command.
The guilty men in this episode were gutless admirals. In the cases Sir Ludovic was to broadcast and write about, the villains were usually corrupt policemen, complacent judges and those who defended an adversarial system of justice that encouraged “the police to commit perjury”. Among the cases he examined were those of Timothy Evans, hanged for a murder he had not committed; Stephen Ward, prosecuted after the Profumo affair, who was probably framed; Bruno Hauptmann, accused of murdering Charles Lindbergh’s baby; and the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four convicted (unsafely, it turned out) for IRA bombings. Sir Ludovic’s book about Evans, “10 Rillington Place”, is widely said to have played a part in ending capital punishment in Britain.
Click here to find out more!
Sir Ludovic was not, however, a single-issue man. Another cause was atheism. As a good child, he had said his prayers every night, but as a teenager gave up, since “no one was listening”. His father, he presumed, knelt as usual to pray the night before he and his ship were blown to pieces by German bombardment. Sir Ludovic’s scepticism about a deity was then clinched by Thomas Paine’s “The Age of Reason”.
The right to a good death
Voluntary euthanasia was a later concern, this one strengthened by watching his mother’s drawn-out death in 1977. His compassion then was in contrast to his feelings as a child, when he had feared and hated this burly, domineering figure who would come down the road with her three close women friends dressed in tweeds and brogues and looking “like a squadron of battleships in line abreast”. It was her icy inability to show affection, he believed, that was responsible for the black moods and psychosomatic ailments that plagued Sir Ludovic for decades, causing him to consult psychiatrists on hundreds of occasions over 25 years. He hoped to feel better after each visit, but rarely did, even after a session with a Jungian analyst who fell fast asleep during his patient’s “free association” on the couch.
If his dark interior moods were at odds with his self-assured exterior, so did his Liberal politics jar with his Conservative family background and his upper-class, Eton-and-Christ-Church education. Twice he stood for Parliament as a Liberal, and each time came close to winning. Latterly, the reluctance of his party first to make common cause with the Scottish Nationalists, then to put euthanasia in its manifesto, made him choose in 2001 to stand, not altogether gloriously, as an independent.
Although Sir Ludovic’s father was a Lowlander and his mother a Highlander, an English childhood and an English accent made him consider himself an Anglo-Scot. For all that, the country and its people were important to him. The seeds of his commitment, he wrote, were sown when, as a small child, he woke up on a night sleeper to Nairn and pulled back the blind to see “a great sea of purple sloping downwards from the track…and below it a long, thin oblong loch, flanked by purple hills and, to complete the picture, a stag trotting purposefully downhill.” Only later did he come to view Scotland through a less Landseerian lens, seeing the Scots as an overlooked nation and arguing the case for home rule in “In Bed With An Elephant”, an enjoyable blend of history, anecdote and advocacy about the land of his birth.
In this, as in all his work, he brought to an argument the cogency of the rationally convinced with the wisdom of one who could see the other side. That other side he often understood because it was in his genes and upbringing. Small-minded Edinburgh lawyers who disapproved of his campaigns might blackball him from their golf club, and did, but their slightly more sophisticated counterparts in London could hardly dismiss him as a wild leftie: they had known him in the Bullingdon Club and shared his views on hunting.
In truth, though his background and even friends were establishment and his causes unfashionable, he was not a man of contradictions. Rather, he held the convictions of a thoughtful, civilised man, who could as easily write plays as pamphlets or naval history, who liked the pipes as much as jazz and was as moral, for all his atheism, as any man of God. And, in all he did, he brought humour and humanity unusual among zealots. A lad o’ pairts indeed. :SugarwareZ-278::SugarwareZ-278::SugarwareZ-278: