Ludovic Henry Coverley Kennedy: born November 3rd, 1919; died October 18th, 2009:THE WRITER and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy, who has died aged 89, was a British establishment figure who was gloriously anti-establishment. He campaigned vigorously and over many decades on behalf of people he believed were victims of miscarriages of justice.
Those who caught his attention included the Birmingham Six.
Kennedy was born with, if not a silver spoon, then at least a silver-plated spoon in his mouth, being a scion on his father's side of the Kennedy earldom which used to own Culzean Castle in Scotland, and on his mother's side of a Scottish baronetcy. His greatgrandfather was principal of Edinburgh University, with an elegant Adam house in the New Town where Ludo, as he was known to his friends, was born.
He was sent to Eton college, where he played in a jazz band with Humphrey Lyttelton, and one of his first escapades against authority was to take a small group of friends by aircraft to the French resort of Le Touquet and back before the six o'clock roll call.
In the holidays he travelled to Edinburgh to stay with his grandparents. He never got on with his overbearing mother, Rosalind, but idealised his father, Edward, who, as captain of the former passenger steamer Rawalpindi,had gone down with his ship and 263 men after the attack by the German battle cruiser Scharnhorstin November 1939. Ludo had just turned 20, and had enlisted as a midshipman. His widowed mother was awarded a lifetime grace-and-favour apartment at Hampton Court palace, southwest London.
Kennedy's active war service, coupled with his father's record, left him with an abiding interest in naval history. He was on HMS Tartar,one of the ships that hunted the Bismarckin the Atlantic, and wrote four naval books, including Pursuit: The Chase and Sinking of the Bismarck(1974) and Menace: The Life and Death of the Tirpitz(1979), which was also the subject of the BBC documentary that he wrote in 1973.
At the end of the war he served as assistant to the governor of Newfoundland, after which he returned to Christ Church, Oxford, to read English and to edit the magazine Isis.
In 1950 he met and married the ballerina star of the film The Red Shoes,Moira Shearer, and accompanied her on a ballet tour of the US while beginning his career as a freelance journalist.
In 1953 he wrote a successful play, Murder Story,about the Craig-Bentley case. Derek Bentley, aged 18, was hanged for a murder committed in 1952 by his 16-year-old accomplice, Christopher Craig. This was followed in 1961 by his most successful book, 10 Rillington Place,about the erroneous hanging of Timothy Evans for the murder of his infant daughter, committed in 1949 by an older ex-policeman lodger, John Christie, at the same address. This led to a posthumous free pardon by the home secretary in 1966; in the film based on his book five years later, Evans was played by John Hurt and Christie, who acted as a prosecution witness, by Richard Attenborough.
It was Kennedy's first and most celebrated campaign success. He was indefatigable. The case helped to convince many doubters that capital punishment should not play a part in a civilised society. Kennedy himself was a passionate opponent of the death penalty and the Evans case gave him fresh ammunition in the campaign that succeeded in abolishing it in 1965.
Kennedy lent his name to many other campaigns, as he recalled in his book, 36 Murders and 2 Immoral Earnings(2003), in which he examined the Birmingham Six case.
He was always supportive of younger journalists working in the miscarriages of justice field and he frequently challenged the establishment notion that reopening such cases undermined faith in the judicial system. Almost 20 years ago, he called for the setting up of a body to re-examine such cases and welcomed the eventual birth of the UK Criminal Cases Review Commission.
He had a long association with the Liberal Party and twice stood for election, almost winning on both occasions. He had at various times been half-promised a peerage by two leaders of the party and was offered one firmly by David Steele when he was leader. He turned it down, partly on the grounds of advancing years, and partly because he had just left Scotland to live in the south. He was offered a knighthood in 1994.
His broadcasting career began seriously as a newsreader with Robin Day when ITN started in 1955. From there he went on to work on both ITV and the BBC, on such programmes as This Week(1958-1959), Panorama(1960-1963), 24 Hours(1969-1972), Tonight(1976-1978) and Did You See?(1980-1988).
He pursued his criminal justice campaigns and others, including for Scottish home rule and the legalisation of euthanasia, with passion.
His television interviews with Harold Macmillan, Enoch Powell, Lord Mountbatten, and John F Kennedy remain classics.
Kennedy enjoyed travelling and writing until his later years and especially appreciated being given a writer-in-residence post at Edinburgh University. His later works included an idiosyncratic book on Scotland, In Bed With an Elephant. Much more successful was his engaging autobiography published in 1990, On My Way to the Club.
Kennedy added much to the stock of public life, education and gaiety, and leaves an army of friends. He was immensely proud of Moira, who died in 2006, and their four children, Ailsa, Rachel, Fiona and Alistair, who survive him.