Nemone Lethbridge on fighting for love, justice and the Kray twins

Nemone Lethbridge, barrister of the Kray twins, talks to the Slice on shattering the glass ceiling, defending the criminals of the East End, and pursuing justice at 93.

Underestimate Nemone Lethbridge at your peril. 

It was a trap I fell into when I interviewed her in her Stoke Newington home: now 93, and I painted an image of her in my head as a delicate older woman. 

While physically frail, Lethbridge was ferociously sharp. Surrounded by books and a copy of Private Eye on her lap, she shrewdly analysed the politics of the day. I nodded along as if I could keep up.

Born in 1932, Lethbridge was one of the first female barristers in the UK, shattering the glass ceiling and representing some of the East End’s most notorious criminals, including the Kray twins. 

Lethbridge’s life has been blotted by naysayers, but defined by her ability to rise above. Called to the bar in 1956, she faced the ramifications of breaking into a rigidly sexist profession.

In her first job in law, misogynistic superiors put a lock on the toilet and gave the key only to the men, telling her to use the cafe down the road instead. She was told not to expect any work; ‘Even humble things like traffic cases were denied to me.’ 

With no income, Lethbridge resorted to applying for a dock brief, whereby defendants choose a representative from an assembly of unemployed barristers, based almost entirely on looks.

Later in her career, she came across someone she represented on a dock brief and asked why he’d chosen her, a young, inexperienced barrister. 

‘He said, “I wanted the other geezers to see I got the dolly bird in my cell.”’

A dolly bird is a name for an attractive but unintelligent young woman. 

I asked her if her experiences ever made her doubt herself. ‘No, but I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry half the time, you know, it was so blatant.’

Her gateway into regular work was none other than Ronnie and Reggie Kray, East End gangsters known as the Kray twins.

It was a Saturday in 1958, and a case was being heard at a magistrates’ court beside Arbour Square Police Station in Stepney. Two of the junior staff who would have covered the case wanted to go to Twickenham for a football game instead. 

Lethbridge was sent off with no instructions, only a piece of paper reading ‘Queen against Mr. R. Kray and Mr. R. Kray’

There, she met solicitor Paddy Pakenham, who’d dealt with the Kray twins before; ‘[Paddy] introduced himself and said, come on my dear, we’ll go and meet the clowns and find out what it is they haven’t done.’

Almost immediately, she was met with Violet Kray, mother of the twins, curiously wheeling a basket full of laundry: ‘She came up to me said, “I’m their mum, they’re definitely innocent, it’s a fix up.”’ 

Then the twins’ brother, Charlie, turned up: ‘“I’m their brother, they’re definitely innocent, it’s set up.”’

It was in the cells that she finally met the twins, where she was taken aback by how put together they were after a night in the cells: ‘They were absolutely perfect, with clean shirts, Brylcreemed [a hair product] – their mum had been on laundry duty – and a very strong smell of aftershave.

The twins, then aged 25 and reinventing themselves after their short-lived boxing career, had been accused of loitering with intent to commit a crime, under the Vagrancy Act, which no longer exists. Lethbridge defended them, with particular focus on their charitable pursuits in the community, and they were found innocent of the charges. 

She quickly became a favourite of theirs: ‘After that, they kept on asking for me, and we really formed a very good relation.’

Mysteriously, they seemed to always be found innocent. 

‘I thought I was the cat’s whiskers,’ she said, before chuckling, ‘It had nothing to do with the big chaps with scarred faces in the back…’

After one hearing, the twins offered her a lift back home in their chauffeur-driven white Jaguar: ‘Ronnie came up to me and said, “would you like a lift back? Nobody don’t like to be south of the river, do they?” with tremendous geographical snobbery.’

During the lift back, Ronnie said his mother would be honoured if she took tea with them, which was how Lethbridge found herself in the twins’ house in Bethnal Green: ‘Everything was immaculate – lace curtains and bows on the curtains and velvet red wallpaper and knickknacks.’

Lethbridge remains loyal to the Kray memory to this day, and is the godmother of Nancy Kray, who claims to be the long-lost niece of the twins’ elder brother, Charlie.

Through the Krays’ recommendations to their friends, Lethbridge began building up her practice. One of her clients was Shoreditch-born Ronnie Knight, convicted criminal and Barbara Windsor’s ex-husband. 

When she failed to gain bail for Knight at the Old Bailey, she took it to the High Court instead, the possible press coverage of which angered Windsor: ‘She came up to me and she said, “you fucking little cow. After this, they won’t sell me in this business with a pound of sugar.”’

In the end, Knight was acquitted of the charges: ‘I was even more popular and got even more work.’

Lethbridge stayed in touch with the Krays – even visiting Ronnie in Broadmoor for tea at one point. She was invited to Ronnie’s funeral in 1995 with her sons, and remembers, ‘We were in limo number four of something like 30 limos, which of course we never paid for. 

‘The streets in the East End were absolutely packed. It was really strange.’

Lethbridge’s own upbringing was very different from the working-class criminals of the East End she represented. A child of the Raj, Lethbridge grew up in what is now Pakistan while it was under British rule as part of pre-partition India. 

Daughter of war commander Major-General John Lethbridge, she was educated at a boarding school from the age of eight, and went on to be one of the few women to study law at Oxford University at the time.

She said her ‘upper-class’ upbringing helped her connect across class lines: ‘I think you’ll find there’s much more in common between the upper and working classes than with the middle classes – the dual ends of the spectrum.

‘They like horses and dogs and racing and gambling and all the things that are respectable middle class people don’t, and they don’t feel that they’re superior in the way the middle class does.’

The divide between classes was not only present in her career, but in her marriage too, and it played a role in her 18-year hiatus from law.

Lethbridge first met her husband, Jimmy O’Connor, at the Star of Belgavia pub in 1958 when a friend of hers said she’d like her to meet the most interesting man in London. 

Almost 20 years before, O’Connor had been sentenced to death in 1941 for murder, but two days before he was set to hang, he was reprieved by the then Home Secretary, on advice that O’Connor may be innocent. Still, the conviction stood. He spent over a decade in prison and was released in 1952. 

I asked if sparks flew immediately when they met, and she said, smiling, ‘Like Othello and Desdemona.’

The reference to a tragic, Shakespearian love affair between two spirited people split apart by societal expectations was a fitting metaphor. 

A week after their first meeting, she found Jimmy at her doorstep: ‘He just said, “I wish you was my wife”, and I said, in your dreams! 

‘But over course of about a year he wore me down.’

They married secretly in 1959 and had two sons. However, news of their marriage in 1962 broke in the press after she had attended her sister’s wedding with O’Connor. The marriage was frowned upon and, as a result, she was asked to leave her career as a barrister. 

For Lethbridge, it wasn’t just his criminal background, but his class that was an issue at the time: ‘I think it’s one of the nastiest aspects of English society, is snobbery. I hate it. You can imagine what happened when I married Jimmy.

‘A bog Irishman from County Kilburn. [They’d say] “Oh, I hear that the Nemone’s married an Irish laborer [..] That lowly criminal”. 

The couple divorced in 1973 due to O’Connor’s alcohol problem, fueled in part by his unsuccessful fight to clear his name. ‘When things started to go downhill, he took to the bottle in the big way […] By that time I had two small children. I thought, I don’t want to subject them to this rubbish.’

Despite this, they ended on good terms, and after he had a stroke, she had O’Connor moved down the road from her, so she and her sons could visit easily. 

‘When he died, I was with him, I held his hand, and the boys were there too.’

Lethbridge managed to return to law in 1981, finding it a much more tolerant place than when she left. As of late, she’s become somewhat of a celebrity, starring on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in February this year, prompting a flurry of articles in other publications. 

After such an impressive life, I asked if she’d do anything differently. ‘No, I still stick to my guns.’ I told her that’s what I’d hope she’d say, prompting a chuckle.

Still, there seems to be one thing left over. Lethbridge’s strength of personality, which won over many a jury in her time, is starkly apparent when she talks about fighting for O’Connor’s pardon. Even now, over 20 years after his death, she’s dedicated to getting justice.

‘I’m absolutely determined to get Jimmy’s conviction overturned. And I think we’ll do it. I think we’ll do it. Because suddenly everything started to come together. 

‘I want to do it before I die, and I’m 93, so time is running out. It would mean so much to the children and the grandchildren and I think to the public.’

If you like this story, read An anti-hero of gay liberation: Ronnie Kray’s violent life outside the closet