On the ropes
Sir: Mr Fenton Bresler taxes me with call- ing the late Lord Goddard repulsive and the late David Maxwell Fyfe a mediocrity. (Justice for the judge', 5 October). They were both.
I met Goddard once, at a dinner party given by Sir Arthur Bryant and where the only others present were Lady Bryant and my wife. I had been looking forward to being entertained by legal wit and wisdom, but instead had to listen to a succession of smoking-room stories which embarrassed us all. He also thought we would be amused to learn that soon after sentencing two men to death, he had heard someone singing `We'll all swing together', the words of the Eton Boating Song.
In court he said that he thought that a murderer judged to be insane was a very proper person to be hanged, and of two delinquent brothers that what they needed was a good larupping. Evidence was then led to show that one of the causes of their delinquency was that their father, a retired sergeant major, was in the habit of larup- ping them regularly.
Maxwell Fyfe is on record as having said that there was no practical possibility of an innocent man being hanged in this country and anyone who thought so was moving in the realms of fantasy. And it was not the media but the Bar that composed a ditty about him: The nearest thing to death in life Is David Patrick Maxwell Fyfe'.
Ludovic Kennedy
Ashdown, Avebury, Wiltshire
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