Kenelm Hubert Digby

Kenelm Hubert Digby MBE (10 March 1912, in London – 5 August 2001)[1] was the proposer of the controversial 1933 "King and Country" debate in the Oxford Union who later became the Attorney General and a judge in Sarawak.

Digby's paternal grandfather was Sir Kenelm Edward Digby, a lawyer who was Permanent Under-Secretary in the British Home Office from 1895 to 1903; his father was also a lawyer, who had commanded a warship in the Great War and had stood unsuccessfully for parliament as both a Liberal and a Labour candidate.

[2] In 1933, at a debate in the Oxford Union, Digby proposed the motion "That this House would in no circumstances fight for its King and country".

A nationwide furore followed, and Digby and his fellow undergraduates were accused of sending the dangerous message to Europe's dictators that the British were soft and would not fight.

Isis, a student magazine of the University of Oxford, reported that Digby had a "tub-thumping style of oratory which would be more appreciated in Hyde Park than in the Union".

He returned to England at the end of his contract in 1939 and went into chambers as a pupil of Neil Lawson, who subsequently became a High Court Judge.

On the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the National Council for Civil Liberties as an unpaid volunteer while he was awaiting his call-up, having no intention of registering as a conscientious objector.

A lifelong socialist but never a communist, Digby's suspected communism made him unpopular with the authorities in Sarawak and brought his career there to a premature end, and he was rarely briefed by solicitors when he worked as a barrister in England.