Sir Aubrey Melford Steed Stevenson was an English barrister and later a High Court judge. He served during the Second World War as a Deputy Judge Advocate General of the Armed Forces. In 1954 he represented the government of British Kenya during Jomo Kenyatta’s unsuccessful appeal against his conviction for membership of the rebel organisation Mau Mau. In 1955 he defended Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed for murder in the United Kingdom. He retired from the bench in 1979 aged 76, and died at St Leonards in East Sussex on 26 December 1987.
About Melford Stevenson in brief
Sir Aubrey Melford Steed Stevenson was an English barrister and later a High Court judge. His judicial career was marked by his controversial conduct and outspoken views. He served during the Second World War as a Deputy Judge Advocate General of the Armed Forces. In 1954 he represented the government of British Kenya during Jomo Kenyatta’s unsuccessful appeal against his conviction for membership of the rebel organisation Mau Mau. In 1955 he defended Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed for murder in the United Kingdom. Stevenson became a high Court judge in 1957, and acquired a reputation for severity in sentencing. He retired from the bench in 1979 aged 76, and died at St Leonards in East Sussex on 26 December 1987. He was the eldest child and only son of the Reverend John George Stevenson and his wife Olive, sister of Henry Wickham Steed, journalist and editor of The Times from 1919 until 1922. The Rev. J. G. Stevenson, a Congregational minister, died when his son was 14 years old, plunging the family into relative poverty. There was no money available to allow him to attend university, so Stevenson studied for an external London University LLB degree after becoming an articled clerk in his uncle’s legal practice. In 1925 he joined the chambers of Wintringham Stable at 2 Crown Office Row, now Fountain Court Chambers. He remained there for the rest of his legal career except for the war years, eventually becoming head of chambers.
Most of Stevenson’s early legal work was in the field of insolvencies, \”almost always with small fees\”, and he made steady progress until the outbreak of the Second WWII in 1939. In 1945 he served as Judge Advocate at the war crimes trial in Hamburg of former personnel of the German submarine U-852, the so-called Peleus affair. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Stevenson started to build his high reputation for commercial litigation, together with Leslie Scarrman and Alan Orr. In 1950 he was elected Recorder of Cambridge and appointed Recorder for Rye from 1944 to 1951. He is now considered unlikely to have been a moderate member of the Inner Temple, and is now a member of the Batchelor, a part-time barristers’ society. He had previously served as Recorder in Rye from 1952 to 1952; he had previously been a Recorder, in Rye in 1944 to 1952, and in Cambridge in 1950 and in 1951 to 1952. He died in 1987, and was survived by his wife, two children and a step-grandchild. He has been described as the ‘last of the grand eccentrics’ by Lord Devlin, who described him as ‘the worst judge since the war’. In 1970 Stevenson passed long sentences on eight Cambridge University students who took part in the Garden House riot, and the following year gave Jake Prescott of the Angry Brigade 15 years for conspiracy to cause explosions. He also represented the litigants in the Crichel Down affair, which led to changes in the law on compulsory purchase.
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