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Sir Ludovic Henry Coverley Kennedy, (3 November 191918 October 2009) was a Scottish journalist, broadcaster, humanist and author. As well as his wartime service in the Royal Navy, he is known for presenting many current affairs programmes and for reexamining cases such as the Lindbergh kidnapping and the murder convictions of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley. He also campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty in the United Kingdom.
Kennedy's father, by then a retired captain, returned to the navy and was given command of , a hastily militarised P&O ocean liner, known as an armed merchant cruiser, that was used on the Northern Patrol. On 23 November 1939, while on patrol southeast of Iceland, Rawalpindi encountered two of the most powerful German warships, the small battleships (or battlecruisers) and , trying to break out GIUK gap into the Atlantic. Rawalpindi was able to signal the German ships' location back to base. Despite being hopelessly outgunned, Kennedy decided to fight, rather than surrender as demanded by the Germans. Scharnhorst sank Rawalpindi; of her 312 crew, 275 (including her captain) were killed. Kennedy was posthumously mentioned in dispatches and his decision to fight against overwhelming odds entered the folklore of the Royal Navy.
Kennedy was interested in naval warfare. He wrote and presented a substantial number of television documentaries for the BBC on maritime history in the Second World War, beginning with Scapa Flow, followed by the dramatic narrative of the sinking of the Bismarck in which he was involved. Other subjects included the U-boat war, the story of , and the Dieppe Raid and St Nazaire Raid. The Life and Death of the Scharnhorst (1971) brought him into contact with survivors of the battlecruiser that had sunk his father's ship Rawalpindi. The series included Target Tirpitz (1973), a history of the extraordinary attempts to sink the feared German battleship Tirpitz; two of the films led to books.
In 1980 he presented an episode of the BBC television series Great Railway Journeys of the World, in which he crossed the United States.
From 1980 to 1988 he presented the television review programme Did You See...? He interviewed Peter Cook's character Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling in A Life in Pieces in 1990. He appeared as himself in several episodes on the political comedy series Yes Minister, often being called "Ludo" by Jim Hacker and Humphrey Appleby. Kennedy was the subject of an episode of That Reminds Me (2002: series 4, episode 1).
Kennedy also expressed to another journalist that there were "too many Blacks" on television.
Private Eye magazine sometimes referred to him as "Ludicrous Kennedy". In the long-running BBC sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, Alf Garnett, while attacking BBC personalities, described Kennedy as a "Russian Mick" ("Mick" being a derogatory term for an Irish person), meaning "that Ludovich Kennedy!"
In 1985, Kennedy published The Airman and the Carpenter (), in which he argued that Richard Hauptmann did not kidnap and murder Charles Lindbergh's baby, a crime for which he was executed in 1936. The book was made into a 1996 HBO film Crime of the Century, starring Stephen Rea and Isabella Rossellini. In 1990, Kennedy became the advisory committee chairman of David Jessel, a television production company dedicated to exposing miscarriages of justice. In 2003, he wrote 36 Murders and 2 Immoral Earnings (), in which he analysed a number of noted cases, including the Evans case and those of Derek Bentley and the Birmingham Six, a number of which were affected by claims of police failure, police misconduct or perjury. In it he concluded that the adversarial system of justice in the UK and the United States "is an invitation to the police to commit perjury, which they frequently do", and said that he preferred the inquisitorial system.
Kennedy also wrote,
In addition to his writing and campaigning on miscarriages of justice, Kennedy campaigned on a number of other issues. A lifelong atheist, he published All in the Mind: A Farewell to God in 1999, in which he discussed his philosophical objections to religion, and the ills he felt had come from Christianity. He was a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association, he contributed to New Humanist magazine, he was an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Distinguished Supporter of the Humanist Society Scotland.
He was also an advocate of the legalisation of assisted suicide, and was a co-founder and former chair of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. His book, Euthanasia: The Case for the Good Death, was published in 1990. Kennedy resigned from the Liberal Democrats in 2001, citing the incompatibility of his pro-voluntary euthanasia views with those of the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy (not a close relation), who was a Roman Catholic. He then stood as an independent on a platform of legalising voluntary euthanasia in the 2001 general election for the Wiltshire constituency of Devizes. He won 2 per cent of the vote and subsequently rejoined the Liberal Democrats.
David Steel Obituary: Sir Ludovic Kennedy, The Guardian, 19 October 2009
Naval officer
Ludovic Kennedy followed his father into the Royal Navy; he served as an officer on , mostly in the same northern seas. His ship, , was one of those that pursued the battleship following the Battle of the Denmark Strait. He witnessed the final battle, until Bismarck was ablaze and its crew began to abandon ship, but shortage of fuel forced Tartar to depart for home before Bismarck sank. Kennedy later wrote about this in his 1974 book Pursuit, his chronicle of the chase and sinking of Bismarck.
Return to university
Kennedy returned to Christ Church, Oxford, at the end of the war to complete his English degree. He also edited the student newspaper The Isis Magazine. At Oxford he co-founded the Writers' Club and wrote a book on Nelson's captains. After leaving Oxford he began a career as an investigative journalist.
Journalism and broadcasting
Kennedy wrote for a number of publications, including Newsweek. From 1953, he edited and introduced the First Reading radio series on the BBC Third Programme, presenting young writers such as Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. Later he became a television journalist and a news presenter on ITV's Independent Television News alongside Robin Day and Chris Chataway. He presented the BBC's flagship current affairs programme Panorama for several years. Kennedy was interested in miscarriages of justice, and he wrote and broadcast on numerous cases. In 1957 Kennedy made a guest appearance as a newsreader in the Scotland Yard supporting feature series episode The Lonely House.
Writing
Kennedy's book Pursuit: The Chase and Sinking of the "Bismarck" () detailed the career of the Bismarck, her sinking of British battlecruiser Hood, and her destruction by the Royal Navy.
Miscarriages of justice
He wrote several books that questioned convictions in a number of notable cases in British judicial history. One of the first miscarriages of justice he investigated was the conviction and hanging of Timothy Evans in his 1961 book Ten Rillington Place (). Evans was found to have murdered his baby daughter in 1950, but Kennedy contended that he was innocent, and that the murders of his wife and baby had been committed by the serial killer John Christie. Christie was hanged three years after the hanging of Evans, following the discovery of six more bodies at 10 Rillington Place, none of which could be ascribed to Evans. Indeed, two of the skeletons found at the house dated back to the war – long before Evans and his family had moved in. After a long campaign, Evans was in 1966. The scandal helped in the abolition of the death penalty in the UK. In 1970 Kennedy's book was turned into a film entitled 10 Rillington Place; the British crime film starred Richard Attenborough as Christie, John Hurt as Timothy Evans, Judy Geeson as Beryl Evans and Pat Heywood as Ethel Christie.
Politics and campaigns
In 1958, Kennedy stood for election to Parliament as the Liberal candidate in the Rochdale by-election called after the death of the sitting Conservative MP, Wentworth Schofield, in December 1957. He lost to the Labour candidate, Jack McCann, but achieved an increase in the Liberal vote, pushing the Conservatives into third place. The Rochdale contest was covered by Granada Television, the first British by-election to receive live television coverage. He stood for Rochdale at the 1959 general election, with a vote share increased from the by-election, but again came second to Labour.
Personal life
In February 1950 he married the dancer and actress Moira Shearer in the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace. He later remembered their meeting in 1949, when he was reluctantly persuaded by a friend to accept a complimentary ticket to a fancy dress ball held at the Lyceum ballroom in London. Shearer, who had recently become famous for her role in The Red Shoes, was presenting the prizes at the occasion. Kennedy later recalled that "I felt a tremor run through me when I caught sight of her. She looked even lovelier than in the film". Summoning up his courage, he approached the 23-year-old dancer and asked her to dance. She would be delighted, she told him, only "I don't dance very well." She was not, Kennedy revealed, a competent ballroom dancer. The couple had one son and three daughters from their marriage that ended with her death on 31 January 2006 at the age of 80. Obituary in The New York Times, 2 February 2006. Retrieved 11 October 2014. Kennedy died of pneumonia in a nursing home in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on 18 October 2009, aged 89.
Honours
He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Strathclyde in 1985. He was Knight Bachelor in the 1994 Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to journalism, on the recommendation of John Major's government. Major's predecessor Margaret Thatcher had vetoed Kennedy's knighthood.
External links
Categories: 1919 Births, 2009 Deaths, 20th-century British Non-fiction Writers, 20th-century Scottish Male Writers, 20th-century Scottish Journalists, 21st-century British Non-fiction Writers, 21st-century Scottish Male Writers, Alumni Of Christ Church, Oxford, British Anti–death Penalty Activists, Scottish Male Journalists, Bullingdon Club Members, Deaths From Pneumonia In England, Euthanasia Activists, Fellows Of The Royal Society Of Literature, Itn Newsreaders And Journalists, Journalists From Edinburgh, Knights Bachelor, Liberal Party Parliamentary Candidates, People Educated At Eton College, Royal Navy Officers Of World War Ii, Scottish Atheists, Scottish Humanists, Scottish Non-fiction Writers, Scottish Television Presenters, Liberal Democrats People, 20th-century British Male Journalists
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