[1] Prejudicial press coverage of the case prior to the trial suggested Adams was guilty and that the verdict would be a foregone conclusion, but Lawrence successfully secured an acquittal.

The son of a master butcher and a singing teacher, Lawrence was educated at the City of London School before going up to New College, Oxford.

After graduation he acted as tutor to two sons of Jan Masaryk, travelling with the family to the United States of America, and Prague.

Having decided to enter the law, Lawrence was awarded a Harmsworth scholarship and became a pupil to Eric Neve, being called to the Bar in 1930 from Middle Temple.

[3][4] Time magazine described Lawrence as a "puckish, mousy little man with a mind as orderly as a calculating machine".

[4] Cullen describes him similarly as "used to digesting boring technicalities",[1] though Robert Hounsome highlights his "magnetic oratory style.

'Certainly no-one, other than his brothers (both in the legal profession) can make such polysyllables as "cerebral" and "respiratory" sound like something out of Keats'"[5] He first achieved judicial office in 1948 with his appointment as Recorder (a part-time judge) of Tenterden.

He was tried for the murder of the latter in 1957 with the prosecution, led by Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, alleging that he had killed her with excessive doses of heroin and morphine for mercenary motives.

"[1] To the surprise of all but the defence team, he then produced eight notebooks which had been written by the nurses, detailing their and Adams' treatment of Morrell.

Testimony from expert witnesses for the prosecution, Dr Arthur Douthwaite and Dr Michael Ashby, was rendered ineffective as they had prepared their hypothesis of murder by opiate poisoning based on the police evidence of the amounts of opiates prescribed and the assumption that everything prescribed had been administered, without having had access to the detailed evidence of amounts administered in the notebooks.

He had been expecting Adams giving evidence, and being able both to provoke him onto making the sort of damaging admissions that the police had recorded and discrediting his explanation of events.

In his spare time Lawrence was an accomplished violinist, having played first violin for the orchestra of the Oxford Bach Choir under Sir Hugh Allen.