Denis Pritt

Denis Nowell Pritt, QC (22 September 1887 – 23 May 1972) was a British barrister and left-wing Labour Party politician. Born in Harlesden, Middlesex, he was educated at Winchester College and the University of London.

A member of the Labour Party from 1918, he was a defender of the Soviet Union. In 1932, as part of G. D. H. Cole's New Fabian Research Bureau's expert commission of enquiry, he visited the Soviet Union, and, according to Margaret Cole, "the eminent KC swallowed it all". Pritt was expelled from the Labour Party in March 1940 following his support of the Soviet invasion of Finland.

Early life Pritt was born 22 September 1887 in London, the son of a metal merchant. He was educated at Winchester College, which he left after four years so as to relocate to Geneva in order to learn French, with a view to joining his father's company. He continued to study law in 1909, obtaining a law degree from the University of London in 1910.

In 1940, Pritt was expelled from the Labour Party for defending the Soviet invasion of Finland. His book Must the War Spread? sympathized with the Soviets and led him to be greatly disliked by the Labour Party elite during and after the war. After 1940, he sat as an Independent Labour member, and at the 1945 general election was re-elected in Hammersmith North under that label gaining a 63% share of the vote against official Labour and Conservative candidates. In 1949 he formed the Labour Independent Group with four other fellow travellers, including John Platts-Mills and Konni Zilliacus, who had also been expelled from the Labour Party for pro-Soviet sympathies. At the general election of 1950, all the members of the Labour Independent Group lost their seats. By this time, Pritt's opposition to the Cold War and NATO had made him an "unpopular figure" in Britain.

In 1931, Pritt represented three Indian revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru before the Privy Council, arguing that the ordinance which had been used to establish a special tribunal to try them for the crime of murdering a policeman was ultra vires. The appeal was rejected, and the three men were executed by hanging within a month of their trial on 23 March 1931. Pritt successfully defended Ho Chi Minh in 1931 against a French request for his extradition from Hong Kong. In 1933, Pritt was chairman of the "International Commission of Inquiry into the Clarification of the Reichstag Fire", the so-called "London Counter-Process" to the Leipzig Reichstag Fire Process. In 1942, he initially defended Gordon Cummins but, due to a technicality, the trial was abandoned and restarted with a new jury, and Pritt was replaced by another lawyer. Cummins, then a serving member of the Royal Air Force, was known in the press as the Blackout Ripper and was accused of murdering four women, mutilating their bodies and attempting to murder two others. The defence was unsuccessful, a subsequent appeal was dismissed and Cummins was hanged in June 1942.

Pritt's most high-profile case, which he lost, was defending the Kapenguria Six, a group of Kenyan political figures accused in 1952 of links with the Mau Mau: Jomo Kenyatta, Bildad Kaggia, Kung’u Karumba, Fred Kubai, Paul Ngei and Achieng Oneko. In this case, Pritt worked with a team of African, Indian and Afro-Caribbean lawyers including Achhroo Ram Kapila, H. O. Davies, Dudley Thompson, and Fitz Remedios Santana de Souza.

Pritt played a significant role in the Singaporean "Fajar trial" in May 1954. He was the lead counsel of the University Socialist Club with the assistance of Lee Kuan Yew as the junior counsel and helped the club to win the case eventually. From 1965 to 1966, he was Professor of Law at the University of Ghana. Strachan then went onto be elected the President of Inner London Justices' Clerks' Society, and became an expert in laws regarding adoption, marriage, and drink driving.

Death and legacy Pritt died in 1972 at his home in Pamber Heath, Hampshire.