LONDON – Distinguished broadcaster, author and campaigner Sir Ludovic Kennedy has died, his spokeswoman confirmed yesterday.
Sir Ludovic (89) is thought to have been in a frail condition for some time, after developing pneumonia following a fall last year.
He was a BBC presenter and published his own investigations into well-known crimes. His work is credited with contributing to the abolition of the death penalty in Britain.
Sir Ludovic's family told the Timeswebsite that he had passed away yesterday at a nursing home in Salisbury.
Educated at Eton, Kennedy followed his sea captain father into the navy, serving aboard destroyers in the Arctic and North Atlantic during the second World War. He was involved in the pursuit of the Bismarck, an incident he chronicled in his book Pursuit.
He later went to Oxford's Christ Church and began a career in journalism, moving from print publications such as Newsweekto TV work. He was an ITN newsreader and later became an anchorman for the BBC's Panorama.
His celebrated book 10 Rillington Place,later turned into a film starring Richard Attenborough, demonstrated that Timothy Evans had been wrongly convicted of a murder committed by the serial killer John Christie. Evans was later pardoned and the case was a component in the abolition of the death penalty.
Sir Ludovic was also a candidate at the first byelection to be given live TV coverage, when he stood as a Liberal for the Rochdale seat in 1958. He lost to Labour but managed a huge boost for Liberal fortunes.
He was married to ballet dancer Moira Shearer, who starred in the classic ballet film The Red Shoes. The couple, who had a son and three daughters, were married for 56 years until her death in 2006.
Kennedy’s career championing the wrongly convicted stretched over four decades.
The cases he took up ranged from that of Evans to the Luton post office murder, in which a police officer conspired with a supergrass to help convict men he knew were innocent.
Kennedy’s strong sense of injustice frequently brought him into conflict with authority and, in particular, with the legal profession. He was refused membership of Muirfield Golf Club, much used by Scottish advocates and judges, because of his campaigns.
“Ludo” Kennedy’s career championing the wrongly convicted began after 18-year-old Derek Bentley was hanged for his part in the murder of a policeman on a south London rooftop, though his friend Christopher Craig (16), who had admitted firing the shot but was too young to hang, was jailed.
He wrote a play, The Murder Story, based on the events. This was not a commercial success but it associated the author in the public mind with "lost causes".
Several of his books question the convictions of notable cases in Britain, including 36 murders and Two Immoral Earnings, which details his work on the Birmingham Six case.
He helped win the freedom of those men in 1991 after they had spent 16 years in jail, falsely accused of two IRA pub bombings.
Scottish on both sides of his family, he was born on November 2nd, 1919, in Edinburgh where his grandfather was the university’s professor of international law.
While at Eton, he played in a jazz band with Humphrey Lyttleton.
His father, Capt Edward Kennedy, commanded a merchant cruiser sunk in single-handed action against a German battleship off Iceland in 1939.– (PA, Reuters)