The Magnificent O'Connors: 4. The Rise and Fall of Jimmy O'Connor

Summary

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The History Podcast – The Magnificent O'Connors

Episode 4: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy O'Connor
Host: BBC Radio 4
Date: October 10, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode charts the remarkable personal and professional journey of Jimmy O'Connor: from small-time London criminal wrongly convicted of murder and facing the hangman's noose, to celebrated TV scriptwriter mixing with celebrities on Mykonos. It explores the devastating consequences of Jimmy's conviction on his wife Nemone Lethbridge, one of the UK’s first female barristers, and their family. The episode also follows the O’Connors' determined efforts—decades later—by son Ragnar, brother Milo, and their now 93-year-old mother, to finally unearth the truth and clear Jimmy’s name. The search for lost trial transcripts and key statements drives both the narrative and the family’s passionate quest for justice.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Hidden Burden: Family and Professional Fallout

• Nemone’s Career Destroyed: After marrying Jimmy in secret in 1959, Nemone had her promising barrister career cut short when the marriage was revealed due to Jimmy's reputation as a convicted murderer. (01:08)
  • “Mum was thrown out of the profession she loved because the man she married was, in the eyes of the rest of the world, a murderer.” – Ragnar (01:22)
• Enduring Stigma: The family reflects on the lifelong impact of this injustice, both personally and professionally.
  • Nemone comments on modern recourse: "You know, nowadays I'd go to the industrial tribunal or something." (01:45)

2. The Long Hunt for Lost Evidence

• Decades Searching for the Trial Transcript: The O’Connor family details their exhaustive, often dispiriting pursuit of the full transcript from Jimmy's 1942 trial—a record seen as crucial to contesting the conviction.
  • “My dad was looking for it his entire life, my mum’s been looking for it all our lives… There comes a point where you just despair.” – Milo (04:06)
• Breakthrough at the Archives: In a moment of near-mythical luck, Milo finally finds the full transcript at Kew.
  • “It literally was the last thing we were looking at … and there it is. The whole transcript of summing up. And we've always known that was the important thing to see.” – Milo (05:48)

3. From Notoriety to Cultural Influence: Jimmy’s Writing Career

• Rise as a Writer: Jimmy transforms adversity into creativity, becoming a key voice in the "Angry Young Men" cultural movement. Prisons’ dismissal of his writing as "too extreme and violent" becomes a badge of honour.
  • “1960s was a great time to be a working-class man with a story to tell.” – Ragnar (08:45)
• Collaboration with Ken Loach: Jimmy’s work, in partnership with influential figures like Ken Loach, brings new realism to British TV, notably through plays like Three Clear Sundays (1965), dramatizing the death penalty with raw immediacy.
  • "What energy and comedy and zest for life he had. And his writing matched that." – Ken Loach (10:47)
  • Three Clear Sundays is recognised as pivotal in the national debate about capital punishment. (11:19–12:34)

4. Art as Retribution: Layers of Meaning in Jimmy’s Work

• Personal Parallels: Ragnar speculates that casting George Sewell Jr. in Three Clear Sundays was Jimmy’s coded message to George Sewell Sr.—a key (possibly coerced) witness at Jimmy's trial.
  • “I can't believe that getting George Sewell Jr. to play that part of Johnny is a coincidence.” – Ragnar (14:51)

5. Downturns, Divorce, and Enduring Hardship

• Career Decline, Drinking, and Paranoia: As TV fashions change, Jimmy’s work dries up, leading to bitterness and increased isolation.
  • “He got angrier and angrier after.” – Nemone (17:42)
  • Recording phone calls to protect his ideas exemplifies growing distrust. (18:02)
• Failed Legal Appeals: Despite the engagement of high-powered solicitor David Napley and a fleeting recantation by key witness Sewell, their appeal is rejected by the Home Office as lacking sufficient grounds. (19:01–22:11)
  • “There is no… it’s just—” “There's no desire for just justice.” – Ragnar & Nemone (22:17)
• Family Breakdown and Survival: The combination of professional setbacks and personal struggles leads Nemone and Jimmy to finally divorce in 1973.
  • “He had some very good years. We also had some very difficult ones.” – Nemone (23:54)
  • Post-divorce, the family lives in poverty, “off lentils and the generosity of family and friends.” – Ragnar (25:27)

6. Redemption and Return

• Nemone’s Return to the Bar: In 1981, after decades of professional exile, Nemone is finally welcomed back into legal chambers, reflecting slow changes in the profession.
  • “He was extremely eccentric… He accepted black men and women. Horror, shock, horror, shock, horror. And he gave me a tendency.” – Nemone (25:46)

7. Final Revelations and Cliffhanger

• Still Haunted by Injustice: Even as his public platform fades, Jimmy fights to clear his name, culminating in a poignant 1991 radio interview asserting continued hope.
  • “Hope deferred maketh the heart grow sick. There's always hope.” – Jimmy (27:22)
• A Critical New Discovery: The episode ends on a dramatic note with the family uncovering a major statement from John Andrews, potentially unlocking new truths about the murder for which Jimmy was convicted.
  • “We got a strange phone call… from a guy who said, I've got a terrible weight of conscience on me. We've got it all, Mum. It’s open now.” – Milo (29:09)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “What happened to her was plain wrong. And that's a big part of why we're trying again to get Dad's conviction overturned.” – Ragnar (01:57)

• “It's like finding the mythical dorky bird or something.” – Milo, on discovering the transcript (04:22)

• “They've been called everything from messiahs of the milk bars to the new intellectuals.” – Nemone, on the Angry Young Men movement (08:45)

• “Well, as it says in the Scriptures, hope deferred maketh the heart grow sick. There's always hope.” – Jimmy (27:22)

• “There’s no desire for just justice.” – Nemone (22:17)

• “We got it all, Mum. It’s open now.” – Milo, after finding the crucial statement (29:09)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:08 – Nemone’s forced exit from the legal profession
• 04:06 – Decades of searching for the trial transcript
• 05:48 – Milo’s discovery of the lost transcript
• 08:45–09:45 – Emergence of Jimmy as part of the Angry Young Men
• 10:25 – Ken Loach describes meeting and collaborating with Jimmy
• 11:19–12:34 – Broadcast and impact of Three Clear Sundays
• 14:36–15:18 – George Sewell connection and possible subtext
• 17:23 – Onset of career downturn and personal decline
• 19:39–20:51 – Solicitor’s findings on witness coercion
• 22:17 – Reflection on legal stonewalling
• 25:46 – Nemone’s return to the bar
• 27:22 – Jimmy’s hope for exoneration, 1991 radio interview
• 28:08–29:19 – Discovery of crucial new statement, setup for next episode

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Tone and Style

The episode maintains an intimate, often raw tone: blending historical investigation, poignant family testimony, and moments of dry wit, especially in Nemone’s reflections. There’s a persistent sense of injustice, determination, and the messy complications of public and private life after an infamous conviction.

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Next on The Magnificent O'Connors:
A startling confession and the appearance of a lost statement threaten to upend the whole campaign for Jimmy’s exoneration.

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Transcript

[Ragnar O'Connor]

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[Nemeni O'Connor]

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[Ragnar O'Connor]

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[Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman]

America is changing and so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, dc. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

I'm Ragnar O'. Connor. You're about to listen to the history podcast the Magnificent Oconnors, and this episode contains strong language. When my parents, Ne and Jimmy married in secret in 1959, they'd hoped to keep their relationship out of the press to protect Mum's career as a barrister. But once their marriage was out in the open, the consequences were devastating. Mum was thrown out of the profession she loved because the man she married was, in the eyes of the rest of the world, a murderer.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

You know, nowadays I'd go to the industrial tribunal or something.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

Yeah.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

And you didn't think maybe to try and challenge it or.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Yeah.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

What happened to her was plain wrong. And that's a big part of why we're trying again to get Dad's conviction overturned. For the last few weeks, we've been going back through everything, every old document or photo we can find related to Dad's case to see what we can turn up. And then there are things like spooling through Dad's old recordings.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

Hello, is Roger there, please?

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Hey there, Jimmy.

[Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman]

Yes, hello.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Yes, he is.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

Oh, thanks.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Doing that has actually hit me a bit. Before we started making this podcast, I don't think I'd heard his voice in 20 years. But listening to him again and wading through so much detail about his life, it's brought me up short. It's been the same for all of us.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

I do miss Dad. I miss him.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Oh, we all do. Yes, I miss him. So all of this, it takes a toll. But our family won't be deterred from its mission. And thankfully we've got some good people in our corner, like Louise Shorter, after she came to visit us. Louise, who's the expert in miscarriages of justice you heard in the last episode. Kept thinking about the fact we'd never been able to get hold of a full transcript at Dad's trial.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

We probably won't be able to get it from the transcription service now because it can be legally destroyed by now.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

We can't pick apart the trial if we don't know what was actually said. We'd previously looked all over at the National Archives at Kew. Nothing. So Louise had a think and suggested a few other places we could try, one of which was the Law Society of England and Wales. So we went there, but sadly, no luck. However, a member of their staff did come up with a possible lead. They gave us some reference numbers they said we could look up back at the National Archives. It looked like it might take us into a collection we'd never been to before. Surely it had to be worth a try. So Milo headed to Kew, ordered up the documents and got searching.

[Milo O'Connor]

My dad was looking for it his entire life. My mum's been looking for it for all our lives. I've been looking for it. We've all been looking. And there comes a point where you just despair.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Could it be any different this time?

[Milo O'Connor]

But now I just feel so giddy. It's like finding the mythical dorky bird or something. It's. I honestly really thought this was never gonna.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

I'm Ragnar O' Connor and from the History Podcast and BBC Radio 4, this is the magnificent O'. Connors. Episode four, the Rise and Fall of Jimmy O'. Connor. In this episode, I'm going to tell you about how my parents created an unbelievably successful new life, for a while at least. And how Mum came to join dad in his long standing battle to get his murder conviction overturned. One of the things that definitely hindered them back then was the lack of access to key documents. Dad believed he would find his justice somewhere within them. All of which makes me wonder what he would have said when Milo found what he found that day at the National Archives. The box of documents that Milo was handed looked almost pristine. There was a seal that had never been broken. Most of what was inside was of limited interest, but Milo kept rifling through. It was a long process and time was ticking. People were drifting out of queue as closing time beckoned.

[Milo O'Connor]

I mean, it literally was the last thing we were looking at. And I'd given up hope Today. And there it is.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

It's right there.

[Milo O'Connor]

The whole transcript of summing up. And we've always known that that was the important thing to see.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

At the very last moment, Milo found the full transcript of dad's trial from 1942.

[Milo O'Connor]

We've not been able to read it because we've just been kicked out the building because they're closed, so we haven't had a chance to even see. I haven't read two words. I was in such a hurry to copy it before we got kicked out.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

But that was fine. Reading could wait until later. Milo had photographed everything. The main thing was, after all these years, we finally had it. After his trip to Kew, Milo went home to share the news with Mum.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Hello, Milo. How are you?

[Milo O'Connor]

I'm fine, thanks, Mum. How are you?

[Nemeni O'Connor]

I'm good. What did you find out?

[Milo O'Connor]

We've got the whole shebang, Mum. We've got a full transcript of the entire trial and in particular, we've got the full summing up. Wow.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Well done. And how does it strike you?

[Milo O'Connor]

I haven't read it yet. Only had time to copy it and get it back to here. And so I need to print it off and then give it to you as well.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Yes, brilliant.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

She plays her cards close to her chest, but Mum was beyond thrilled by this. She told Milo she hadn't been able to sleep the night before because she was so excited about what he might find. She spent the next few days reading through it all. Here she is with Milo, checking in again.

[Milo O'Connor]

So, Mum, how was your day?

[Nemeni O'Connor]

I was reading most of the day. Yeah, I found it very interesting.

[Milo O'Connor]

What was your first impressions?

[Nemeni O'Connor]

That the barristers were disappointed. Particular hacked to use.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

That would be Dad's defense counsel, the one he only met on the morning of his trial.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Yes. Was a complete threat.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

It was one thing for us to have our opinions while reading through the transcripts, but the real test would come when Louise Shorter and her legal friends went through them. And we knew wading through all of this paperwork would take considerable time. But we also knew this was our chance to tackle Dad's conviction right at the root cause, the trial itself back in 1962. Mum and dad would have killed to have had this kind of information. But without any of this, they needed to concentrate instead on trying to rebuild their lives. For Jimmy, that meant taking everything he'd learned, everything he'd been through, and making what he could out of it to further his aims. And luckily for him, the early 1960s was a great time to be a working class man. With a story to tell.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

They've been called everything from messiahs of.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

The milk bars to the new intellectuals. Who are these angry young men bubbling up all around? Jimmy was a new cultural movement.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Up to then, the writers who had successful were people like Terence Ratigan. It was French windows and jolly hockey sticks.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

In 1956, John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger changed everything. It featured a kind of unblinking realism that felt shockingly new. Osborne and his contemporaries were the ones dubbed the angry young men. They captured the world in all its ugliness and inequality. And their kitchen sink dramas made the careers of working class actors, directors and writers. Jimmy's writing, which in prison he'd been told was too extreme and violent, had finally come of age.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Luckily, you know, the Wednesday play came along. There was nothing like it before.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

The intention of the Wednesday play was to better reflect modern Britain in all its confrontational glory.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

It was an attempt to be authentic, to make contemporary television fiction at peak hours on a Wednesday. It was unique, really.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

So this is one of Dad's old muckers, Ken Loach, director of Things Like Kathy Come Home, Kez and loads of other brilliant stuff. In 1964, he was contacted by a guy called Roger Smith.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

Roger was the story editor on the Wednesday play and I was one of the lucky five or six who were asked to be the team of directors.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Each director was assigned a script and Roger Smith had one sitting in his in tray. A speculative submission from a new writer called Jimmy o'. Connor.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

Roger introduced me to Jimmy and immediately, what a man, what a man, what a story he told, what energy and comedy and zest for life he had. And his writing matched that.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

So Ken the director was paired up with Jimmy the writer. What was he like to work with?

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

He knew what he wanted and he knew the reality. And obviously I. I was in awe of that. I respected it.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

A key play in the Jimmy ken catalog was Three Clear Sundays, which was first broadcast in 1965. It's about a young man called Danny who commits a murder after being set up by a group of gangsters. We follow him through every stage of the justice system, culminating in the moment he faces his punishment, death by hanging. Danny, I want you to be very brave this morning. I want you to die like goot Catholic.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

I shan't leave you.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

I shall be with you all the time.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

You saw him being prepared for execution. The last words of the priest. He's offered a drink and then in the middle of that, he's taken by surprise. Hooded noose, put around his neck and he's carted off and he's there and you're expecting the rope to go and he just cuts to black.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

The play clearly reflected Jimmy's own close shave with the death penalty. And never before had British television laid so bare this entire process.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

I think we knew this was the big one. I think it was seen as, you know, a significant contribution to the whole capital punishment debate.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

It's said there were reservations about broadcasting it back in April 65 for fear it would affect the passage of the abolition of the Death Penalty Act. In two and a half hours from now, we shall know whether or not hanging for murder is likely to be abolished in Great Britain. Yet the act came into force at the end of the year. Those prison cells for the condemned which Jimmy had once occupied were consigned to history. Millions watched Dad's play go out on BBC1. His message was heard in households across the land. It's clear this was another way for him to criticise what had very nearly happened to him. But I've come to think there's another message hidden in three clear Sundays. A message designed for a very particular audience. In fact, an audience of one. Danny, I want to talk to you now. You know all about me. You know I'm a man of midwife, right? You've heard all about honor amongst thieves, haven't you, sir? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's all cobblers. There's no honor amongst thieves. There's a lot of dodgy characters in the underworld I ain't all that proud to be king of, I tell you. But no one can't say nothing against me because I'm rich. That character you've just heard is called Johnny. May I bring him up? Because there's something really interesting about the actor who was chosen to play him, George Sewell.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

He was a nice guy, George. The George I knew.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Yeah. George Sewell was a character actor, frequently guest starring on British TV from the mid-1960s until his final role on medical drama Casualty in 2006. His dad was also called George. George Sewell Senior. Georgie Sewell's one of the people that's actually in Jimmy's case when Jimmy got sentenced to death and Sewell was one of the. One of the witnesses that apparently the police lent on quite heavily to get a statement out of him and was used to convict. Jimmy Sewell Senior was the bloke who said the. That not only did Jimmy tell him about Don Cambridge's murder, he gave him a gold watch that probably came from the crime scene.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

Wow.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Yeah. Did you know about George Seal's father and his background and where he was from?

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

And I didn't know that precise thing. No, I didn't. Yeah, I never knew that till you said it now.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Ah. Okay. In three clear Sundays, Danny is sentenced to death thanks to the lies of Johnny May. I can't believe that getting George Sewell Jr. To play that part of Johnny is a coincidence. So I'm left wondering whether dad was using prime time BBC one to send a message to his old mate. Maybe he was letting George Sewell Sr. Know that everything that had happened back in the 1940s wasn't over yet.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

How do you do it?

[Ragnar O'Connor]

You see, son, the whole secret of crime is straightening people. Straightening before, while and after action.

[Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman]

America is changing and so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, dc. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Jimmy had found his voice and maybe his calling. A playwright with something to say and money in his pocket. But he was clear from his writing that he hadn't fully moved on from his conviction. And as for Mum, she tried to find some other chambers that would take her on, but every door in the legal profession was closed to her. So instead, she followed Jimmy into his line of work.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

I sort of got my foot in the door with the BBC partly because of Jimmy, but also because I'd made friends with Ken Loach and all the Wednesday play people.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

That foot in the door led to three scripts, each one poking fun at her old profession and making the point that law and justice weren't always the same thing. With TV success, Mum and dad were on the up. They even bought a house on the Greek island of Mykonos. To all outward appearances, it was going great, but nothing lasts forever. At what point did you start noticing that things were going downhill and dad was starting to get a bit more.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Troubled soon as he stopped working, I think.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

In total, Jimmy wrote four scripts for the Wednesday play, and he would write a couple more for TV in the following years. But as the single play fell out of fashion, so did Jimmy. And with that, he lost his public platform from which to talk about justice, or indeed, injustice.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

And he got angrier and angrier after.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

The TV work dried up, Jimmy drank more and he developed a distrust of others. In time, he'd start doing things like recording phone conversations with people, making a record of what was said and what was promised to him because he didn't.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

Think it was strong enough at the time or something like that. Well, as we said, he rang me yesterday. Oh, yes. Or the day before or whatever. And told me he'd rung you. Yeah. What do you have to say? He had rung you. Well, that's right, yeah. I told you what he had to say.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

This is Jimmy talking to Roger Smith from the Wednesday play. I think he thought someone was trying to steal one of his ideas, but to be honest, it's hard to know.

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

Which is based on my ship. Well, mine's called the Sandra May. That make no difference. This is the same plot. See this out.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

He wasn't just paranoid about his ideas. Dad was restless, agitated and, of course, in his head. All roads kept leading back to Don Ambridge's murder. By the late 1960s, Jimmy was back again, leaning in hard to try and prove his innocence, this time with Nemeni's help.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

The solicitor who acted for us when we made our first attempt, David Napoli, was actually a very good solicitor.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Napoli was a big deal and he didn't come cheap. Mum and dad instructed him to bring in old witnesses and get new statements. Of course, there was one witness Jimmy was particularly keen to get hold of. George Sewell Sr. Maybe that message in three clear Sundays, had hit home because Sewell did come forward. Here's Milo reading from solicitors notes taken at the time Sewell attended at these.

[Milo O'Connor]

Offices on Monday 25th September 1967. He is an evasive person, but the general tenet of these discussions was that he had been forced under threats by the police to implicate O'. Connor.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

What Sewell was saying was that back in 1941, Chief Inspector Thorpe, the copper who had interviewed him about Jimmy, had leaned on him. All of that stuff about the gold watch and Jimmy confessing, Thorpe had led him by the nose through that. Sitting in the solicitor's office on that September day in 1967, Sewell seemed to want to unburden himself. He even said he would come back for another meeting to clarify this new version of events.

[Milo O'Connor]

In the interim, he approached o' Connor and told him that if he was to go on and help him, he, Sewell, would require £1,000.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

When it became apparent there would be no payment forthcoming, Sewell retracted the whole lot, reverting back to what he said at trial, wow, wow, wow, wow. I mean, it makes it even worse. So you've got a grass who says one thing to the police and another thing to dad.

[Milo O'Connor]

It's ludicrous.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Yeah.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

This was obviously a blow. And the other witnesses Napoli tracked down didn't offer up anything substantially new. After all, this case was now almost 30 years old. However, what Napoli was able to focus on were the deficiencies of the counsel Jimmy had been given at trial.

[Milo O'Connor]

The degree of preparation which was undertaken by those instructors to conduct the defence would appear to have been minimal and was certainly regarded by our clients as quite inadequate.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

On New Year's Day, 1969, a document was submitted to the Home Office criticising Dad's conviction and requesting it be looked at again. The money that Mum and Dad had spent on Napoli was considerable, but it was all for the cause.

[Milo O'Connor]

This is a letter in 1970, the 29th of September. Dear Mr. Napley. Okay, now this is from the Home Office. I think this is from the Home Secretary.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

In his reply to Napley's submission, the Home Secretary conceded there were a number of troubling elements surrounding Jimmy's conviction, but concluded there wasn't sufficient grounds to justify taking the exceptional course of reconsidering the case. It's so dismissive.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Yeah.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

The way they shoot down the. The challenges. There is no. It's just.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

There's no desire for just justice.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

None. None.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Jimmy was deeply disappointed we failed to.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Get his pardon, but I can imagine that he would have been very angry and frustrated.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

He was.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

And obviously that manifests itself in more drinking, right? Yes, but it wasn't just drinking. I think it also had an impact on the way dad viewed his relationship with Mum.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

There's one occasion on Mykonos which really was the last straw as far as I was concerned. He was going somewhere with other chaps and one of them said, what about your wife? You're going to bring her? And he said, oh, no. Call fucker.

[Milo O'Connor]

Wow.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

But he told me that and hurt.

[Milo O'Connor]

Gotcha.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

It hurt. Now, here comes a little boy called Milo o'.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Connor.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

What do you think of them?

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

Horror.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

A little farting horror.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

In that case.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

That's the end of our interview for today.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

That's a lovely bit of family audio of me, dad and Milo, probably from the 70s. And that's the decade Milo and I arrive into this story. I was born in 1970 and Milo came along two years later. But we never quite got to be the happy family you'd think of in the conventional sense by then. There'd just been too much water under the bridge between Mum and Dad.

[Milo O'Connor]

He really did absolutely adore you.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

I know. I feel so sad about it now.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

But you always said you loved him, but you just couldn't live with him.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

I did love him. He had some very good years. We also had some very difficult ones.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Mum and Dad's marriage came to an end in July of 1973 at a divorce court in London. When all the legal stuff was done, Mum and Dad shared a kiss and.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

A handshake and that's how we parted.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

So when did you buy this house? Was it April 74? Why do I have April in my. It is April 74, our home in Lystrier Park, North London. Today, it's a lovely place, very desirable. But when Mum first bought it and the three of us moved in, there were no carpets, no heating and it was infested with rats. To begin with, we all lived in one room. Those years of freelance working, not to mention spending fortunes on Dad's case, had left Mum completely broke. This is one of my or me and Milo's most difficult memories, is how much you struggled. And one of the things that I remember very clearly is Andrew the bailiff.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Yes. He used to come around all the time and I didn't like him. I was determined never to give him anything. It was very frightening. It was scary. You know, we nearly lost the house.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

These were the times where we lived off lentils and the generosity of family and friends. Although now divorced from Jimmy, any approach his mum made to return to the bar was still being blackballed. But then in 1981, things changed. She was introduced to a barrister called Louis Depina.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

He was extremely eccentric and very untypical of his generation of a bar, and he had his own small chambers in Chancery Lane and he accepted black men and women. Horror, shock, horror, shock, horror. And he gave me a tendency.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

It had taken almost 20 years for the legal profession to catch up, but finally Nemeni was back at the bar. During those years where Mum was thriving, back doing what she loved best, dad was having a tougher time. His particular view of the world seemed to have fallen completely out of fashion. So he got into other things, like property. And all the while he kept on drinking.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Obviously, I kept in touch with dad and he used to come to Sunday lunch every week.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

He'd come in, he'd say hello and then he'd go straight to the pub and then he'd come back for about 3 o' clock and he'd be half pissed. We'd eat our lunch and then he'd go back to the pub and then he'd come back about closing time and he'd sleep on the living room floor. And then we'd do that again the following week. Of course, his conviction still hung over all of us. It was something we all kept pursuing with dad trying to get publicity for his cause, reminding the world that he didn't murder Donk, that he wasn't even there. This is him doing a radio interview in 1991.

[Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman]

It's 50 years now since you were found guilty. There has been no pardon. Do you think it's going to turn around now?

[Ken Loach / Roger Smith]

Well, as it says in the Scriptures, hope deferred maketh the heart grow sick. There's always hope.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

And I think he was right to be hopeful because not so long after that radio interview, something properly mind blowing happened. We always wanted to get into it in this podcast, but to tell the story properly, we needed to find a few documents that we knew were lurking somewhere in our archive. As we continued sifting through the stuff in the cellar, working out what information will be useful to share with Louise and the rest of our podcast team, Milo found the very thing we were looking for. Some paperwork we hadn't seen in years. This is John. This is the.

[Milo O'Connor]

Oh, my God.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

This is the statement. John Andrews.

[Milo O'Connor]

Yeah.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

Oh, my God. John Andrews was the son of Freddie Andrews. You might remember that originally there had been three men in the frame for the murder of Don Cambridge. My dad, William Redhead and Freddie Andrews. Freddie was a local villain, well known to the police with a frightening reputation for violence. Back in 1941, he'd escaped getting charged by keeping his mouth shut. But his son, his son was a different kettle of fish. It turns out John Andrews really wanted to talk to us. On the next episode of the Magnificent oconnors, there's a jaw dropping confession and we uncover a previously unseen statement which threatens to derail our campaign to clear Dad's name.

[Milo O'Connor]

We got a strange phone call in the house one day from a guy who said, I've got a terrible weight of conscience on me. We've got it all, Mum. It's open now.

[Nemeni O'Connor]

Whoa.

[Milo O'Connor]

We've got it. Finally.

[Ragnar O'Connor]

The Magnificent O' Connors is a BBC Audio Scotland production for BBC Radio 4 and the History podcast. It was produced by Emily essen and Victoria MacArthur. Listen to the whole series right now, first on BBC. Sounds.

[Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman]

America is changing and so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.