Ludovic Kennedy RIP

[Chilperich]

Broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy dies
Last Updated: Monday, 19 October 2009, 21:07 GMT- Search: Ludovic Kennedy death

Writer, campaigner and broadcaster Sir Ludovic Kennedy has died aged 89Distinguished broadcaster, author and campaigner Sir Ludovic Kennedy has died at a nursing home in Salisbury.
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 and his work is credited with contributing to the abolition of the death penalty.
"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.


Afterwards, the cases he took up ranged from Timothy Evans, executed for a crime almost certainly committed by serial-killer John Christie, to the Luton post office murder, in which a police officer conspired with a supergrass to help convict men he knew were innocent.
He also believed society osteopath Stephen Ward was a victim of injustice in the Profumo Affair in the 1960s and that the man hanged for the kidnapping and killing of aviator Charles Lindbergh's baby was framed.
To most people however Kennedy was the urbane presenter of Did You See on BBC2 or the anchorman on current affairs programmes such as This Week, Panorama, Midweek and 24 Hours.
Scottish on both sides of his family, he was born on November 2, 1919 in Edinburgh where his grandfather was the university's professor of international law. He was educated at Eton, where he played in a jazz band with Humphrey Lyttleton, and Christ Church, Oxford.
He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and twice contested Rochdale as a Liberal in parliamentary elections.
In 1950 he married ballet dancer Moira Shearer who starred in the classic ballet film The Red Shoes. The couple had a son and three daughters. Their 56-year marriage ended with her death in 2006. He was knighted in 1994 for services to journalism.

[Chilperich]

I should point out that the above was copied and pasted from the AOL web site.

Ludovic Kennedy was (and remains) one of my great heroes - a true upholder of liberal values in an age where many pretend to support them, but few actually do.

I could not agree with his support for euthanasia, although I respected his sincerity and good intentions, but his rigorous, sustained critique of capital punishment should remain an inspiration to all genuine opponents of this vile institution. Two books of his in particular, The Airman and the Carpenter and Thirty-Six Murders and Two Immoral Earnings remain indispensable classics, and both have utterly transformed my view of the world (not merely about capital punishment, which I have always wholeheartedly opposed).

Kennedy was a true liberal and a great man. RIP.

[Chilperich]

(It is a detail, I know, but Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the man accused and convicted of kidnapping and murdering Charles Lindbergh's baby son, was electrocuted, not hanged (as the AOL obituary wrongly states).)

[Philidor]

Originally Posted by Chilperich

Ludovic Kennedy was (and remains) one of my great heroes - a true upholder of liberal values in an age where many pretend to support them, but few actually do.

Me too. It saddens me they're all going: Ludovic Kennedy, Robert Kee, John Mortimer, Paul Foot, EP Thompson. Tony Benn, Eric Hobsbawm and George Steiner are terrifically old. Fearless, non-politically correct, high liberal values drawing on Methodism, Marxism, and good old fashioned Anglo-Saxon bloody-mindedness. Who are we left with? Polly Toynbee? Trevor Philips? Pilger?

RIP Ludo