Ludovic Kennedy

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.

Early life Kennedy was born in 1919 in Edinburgh,

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. After leaving Oxford he began a career as an investigative journalist.

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 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!"

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 convicted of murdering 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. Kennedy died of pneumonia in a nursing home in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on 18 October 2009, aged 89.