He was an English barrister known for his calm and charming manner – a manner that was somewhat at odds with his bulldog relentlessness when it came to defending those accused of the most serious crimes. His attitude could be very much of his time, however, and his comments about some of the women he came into contact with are, to modern eyes, both unpleasant and misogynistic. His role, though, was important, and it led to his involvement with such high-profile cases as one involving the Titanic’s owners in 1913, aiming to award relatives of the deceased £100 each in compensation.

Joshua David Casswell was born in Wimbledon on 3 February 1886, the son of Joshua Joyce Casswell and his wife, Sarah. As befitted a middle-class young man, he went to Cambridge – gaining a degree in jurisprudence from Pembroke College in 1909, a year before he was called to the Bar. Just three years later, in 1913, he was involved in the case against the White Star Line’s owners, the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company. The White Star Line, of course, operated the ill-fated Titanic, which had sunk after striking an iceberg the year before. At the end of the case, the jury found Captain Smith negligent and, as a result, several relatives of those drowned when the Titanic went down received compensation.

His law career was disrupted, as many were, by the First World War, but Casswell took on a military role with alacrity, serving as a major in the Army Service Corps. He was sent to France in November 1915, but in 1917 he was injured and sent home. In 1919, his father died, leaving an estate of over £35,000 (over £1 million in today’s money); the same year, he married Irene Fitzroy Hutton, and they would go on to have four children together.

By the 1930s, JD Casswell was a pre-eminent defence barrister, his status sealed in 1935 when he acted on behalf of George Percy Stoner, a young man accused of murdering his older, married lover’s husband. His lover, Alma Rattenbury, had infamously killed herself shortly after her architect husband’s murder, and the case was hugely newsworthy. George Stoner was found guilty of murder and convicted to death – but he was later reprieved. Casswell defended 40 murder cases and this was one of only five that he lost.

In 1944, Casswell acted on behalf of Elizabeth Marina Jones, who was accused, together with her boyfriend Karl Hulten, of killing a taxi driver – the last in a line of criminal exploits. Hulten was convicted and later executed for murder, but Jones, represented by Casswell, kept her life. Two years later, Casswell defended a notorious Bournemouth murder. Neville Heath, a smooth-talking conman, had murdered two women, Margery Gardner and Doreen Marshall. There was a strong feeling that Heath was guilty, and a desire to ensure that he was convicted. However, Doreen’s murder had been so horrific that the prosecution was concerned that the defence would be able to successfully argue that Heath was insane, and so it was Margery’s murder that he was instead prosecuted for. Heath himself told Casswell he wanted to plead guilty to murder, which Casswell advised him not to do. Heath responded, ‘All right, put me down as not guilty, old boy.’ In a rare mistake, Casswell called criminal psychiatrist William Hubert as an expert witness. Unknown to him, Hubert was a drug addict and was high on morphine when he gave evidence – the prosecution was able to destroy his arguments. Heath was duly found guilty of murder and executed in October 1946.

Given the famous cases that Casswell had been involved in, it is not surprising that he was asked on several occasions to write his memoirs. For a long time he refused, stating that he was ‘not and never have been a prominent public character or a VIP in any sense of the word’. Even when he did agree, he veered away from writing about his family or personal life, stating that he did not regard them as of the ‘slightest interest to the general public’. He did include some mention of them, though – perhaps at the behest of his publisher. In his memoirs, entitled Only Five Were Hanged, he offered the following advice to future lawyers: not to give lengthy speeches, and to avoid rhetoric and extravagant language (‘Perhaps it will look well in newspaper headlines, but I doubt whether it will further the interests of your clients’).

The book, though, was not just a dry collection of legal opinions. John Connell, in his summary of the memoir – included in print on the back page of the first edition – noted that one of Casswell’s cases had been that of ‘Charlotte Bryant, a gipsy slut who was accused of poisoning her husband’ in 1935. Her case came to trial in 1936, with Casswell as her defence barrister. Charlotte was actually an ordinary wife and mother, but she was also working class, poor and illiterate. She was also dissatisfied with her marriage. Her decision to have an affair with her lodger not only led to murder, but also negative coverage about her status as a poor woman of Irish origin, and as a woman who had an affair. Even recent coverage of her case has described her as ‘highly sexed’ and ‘indulging in a little prostitution’, and it’s not hard to see where this comes from in terms of the description of her on Casswell’s memoirs as a ‘slut’.

Casswell himself described her as an ‘ugly Irish gipsy woman’ and although he noted that it would be ‘too harsh’ to call her a prostitute, she was known locally to ‘hang around local public houses, accept drinks from strange men, and disappear outside with them afterwards’. Yet he was clearly conflicted about her, stressing her poverty, and recognising that to possibly engage in sex acts with locals for money was the only way that she could afford the good food she bought to feed her children – she was trying to do what she could to give her family a decent life. He also felt that she was a ‘surprisingly good’ witness despite her lack of education, and was sad that he was unable to save Charlotte from the hangman’s noose – he didn’t think her guilt had been adequately proved, and that, therefore, an innocent woman may have died.

Casswell was a formidable man and opponent. He frequently appeared in the pages of the provincial and national press, his arguments and questioning in court eagerly reported, and his appointment as the defence barrister in cases must have caused concern amongst many, who knew of his high success rate. He was not, however, infallible, as the five murder cases he lost attest to. But he also dealt with the worst of cases, such as in 1949, when 31-year-old lorry driver Sidney Chamberlain of Exeter was charged with strangling 15-year-old Doreen Messenger and leaving her on a Devon moor. Casswell defended Chamberlain – a difficult job – but argued that he was insane. Despite Casswell’s efforts, Chamberlain was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. A subsequent appeal failed, and Sidney Chamberlain was hanged on 28 July 1949 at Winchester.

Casswell’s memoirs, and his frank speaking, resulted in controversy. In February 1963, the publishers of The People were accused of libel, following the publication of an article based on Casswell’s memoirs, and published under his byline. The article referred to a man acquitted of murder 20 years previously – one Harold Loughans. Loughans had twice been tried for the murder of Rose Robinson, the 63-year-old landlady of a Portsmouth pub, in 1943. At his first trial, at Winchester Assizes, the jury failed to agree, and at the second, at the Old Bailey, he was acquitted. At both trials, Casswell was, unusually, the prosecuting counsel. The 1963 article was headed ‘This is perfect murder – says judge’, making an assumption that Loughans had committed the murder, and got away with it. The defence was simply that the words used were ‘true in substance and in fact’. It was trial by newspaper, and trial by memoir; and, in this third ‘trial’, Loughans, by now terminally ill with cancer and serving a ten-year sentence for theft and breaking and entering, was finally found guilty, for judgement was given in favour of the newspaper, when the jury decided Casswell’s words were indeed ‘true in fact’: ‘the plaintiff committed murder’. Three months after Loughans lost the libel case, he sold his story to The People, finally confessing to the murder of Rose Robinson. It seems that Casswell had been successful in his last case.

Despite Loughans’ perilous state of health, he would outlive his accuser. The learned Queen’s Counsel, JD Casswell, died in Wimbledon, his lifelong home, on 15 December 1963; Harold Loughans, however, would live on for another two years.