BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts Hello,
I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks,
book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is the barrister and writer Nemany Lethbridge.
She was called to the bar in the mid-1950s,
when she was one of very few female barristers in London.
At her chambers, she was locked out, literally and metaphorically, by her colleagues.
She was banned from using the toilets and told that she'd better find her own cases,
since they wouldn't be passing any briefs her way.
Undeterred, she found herself in London's East End representing two brothers who,
as she puts it, got nicked every Friday night.
They were the Cray twins and defending them helped make her name.
Her legal career was just taking off when her marriage derailed it.
Her husband was a talented playwright, but he had a criminal history.
They married in secret, but when news of their union hit the press, she was sacked.
It was nearly two decades before she would practice law again.
She used her creativity to make ends meet, writing, living abroad and raising two sons.