My friend Robert Milsom, who has died aged 80 after a decade of Parkinson’s disease, was a legal aid solicitor who often defended the poor and outcast – and sometimes the seriously criminal. He was well known in Cambridge, where grateful former clients would approach him in the street and hug him. Robert had a deep-seated belief that everyone has the right to put forward the best defence possible.
Born in Crimplesham, Norfolk, he inherited nonconformist values from his mother, Betty (nee Hunt), a teacher, and his father, Charles, a tenant farmer.
He attended Culford school near Bury St Edmunds and gained an award to Queens’ College, Cambridge, to study history. We met at Cambridge, first through CND, then in the Labour club, and both joined an early equality protest in November 1960 when we helped some female students to sneak into the then male-only Cambridge Union Society debate.
Robert was a gentle, non-sectarian but principled and passionate idealist. We both went on anti-war demonstrations with the Committee of 100, a breakaway group from CND committed to non-violent direct action. On one occasion, at RAF Wethersfield in 1961, Robert insisted on the principle of being arrested and was charged with obstruction. I visited him on remand in Norwich jail. He was given a conditional discharge.
After graduating in 1963, he trained as a teacher, also at Cambridge, but went to work in the education department of the TUC.
In 1973, he moved to Birmingham to teach history at Fircroft College, a grant-aided, adult residential college with a Quaker tradition and connected to the trade union movement. Two years later its students, backed by staff, decided to rewrite their curriculum, which they saw as patronising and geared to “improving the working classes”. They wanted a more participatory style of teaching and discussion of philosophy, politics and history, and to hold debates. Initially they were supported by the principal. But this soured, and after an inquiry the trustees sacked all the staff except the principal.
Although this seemed like a miserable outcome, Robert was impossible to extinguish. He moved to Cambridge and retrained as a solicitor by correspondence. Qualifying rapidly, he found his metier, and worked for various firms in the city. He retired from Shelley and Co in 2013.
Robert had a lifelong interest in the radical politics of the 17th century and after retirement he taught a course on Oliver Cromwell at the University of the Third Age.
On 1964 Robert married Penny Kaldor. She survives him, along with their sons Tom and Ben. A third son, Paul, died in December 2021.
