Ambrose Appelbe

Appelbe's clients ranged from the actress Ingrid Bergman to the mass murderer John Christie whom he came to like. Before going to the gallows in 1953, Christie bequeathed his reading glasses to the poor sighted lawyer. Thereafter, Appelbe was often to be found with the killer's half-moons on the end of his nose.

The numerous campaign groups Appelbe helped to found included the National Marriage Guidance Council (now know as Relate), Help the Aged, War on Want, and the Anti-Noise Society.

His campaign against noise was sparked by the din of a pneumatic drilling one day outside the window of the practice he founded in Lincoln's Inn in 1935. With characteristic tenacity, Appelbe took the matter to court and succeeded in forcing the council to muffle its bad drills.

With his bow ties and floral buttonholes plucked from the garden of his large house in Highgate, Appelbe conformed neither to the cautious legal Establishment nor to the north London socialist set. His acquaintances, who included Gandhi, Edith Summerskill and the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII), were as diverse as his political views. Although he once stood for Parliament as a Labour candidate (at Harwich in 1935), he believed that parents who paid for their children to attend private school should receive a tax rebate.

Ambrose Erle Fuller Appelbe (the stress is on the middle syllable) was born on a trek ox wagon in Bechuanaland - now Botswana - on February 23 1903. His father, the Reverend Dr Robert Fuller Appelbe, was a Methodist medical missionary whose application to the cause of African development could not be faulted.

Dr Appelbe's first wife had been murdered by tribesmen, and he himself had been tarred and feathered when he returned to find his wife's body being picked over by vultures. Undeterred, the missionary returned to England, acquired a new wife (a county girl from Yorkshire) and returned to the Dark Continent. She bore him a son.

The young Ambrose started his schooling on his father's knees, learning Greek and reading the Bible. By the age of six he had three African servants - Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego - and spent his days cantering over the veldt on a pony. At 12 he moved to England, and went to Kingswood school, Bath. At 15 he joined the Army in time to serve in the last few weeks of the Great War. This experience, albeit limited, made him a pacifist. He did not fight in the Second World War, and would leave the room if a war film was on television. In the Forties, he represented numerous conscientious objectors, including Bertrand Russell.

After the First World War Appelbe tramped around England earning money as a concertina player, before landing a scholarship to read law at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. On the rugger field he proved an effective scrum half and was nicknamed 'The Bullet', a sobriquet that displeased him only for its martial connotations. In the late Twenties and early Thirties, Appelbe resided at Toynbee Hall, the east London hostel which gave professional men a flavour of life in the slums. During the Depression the then Prince of Wales sat at Appelbe's side during a three-week incognito visit. The future king wanted to acquaint himself with the condition of the poor, and Appelbe was struck by the prince's sensitivity - and also by his elegant dress sense, which he rather envied. Another visitor to Toynbee Hall was Gandhi, who had known Appelbe's father in Africa and had followed the old man's advice to seek a political career in India. Appelbe was struck by Gandhi's philosophy of the 'simple life' which, to an extent, he followed in his own life. He rarely took holidays, ate frugally, and slept on a hard bed in a room without curtains. While the tweed suits he wore were of Saville Row quality, he made them last for decades.

During the Jarrow to London march in 1935, Appelbe, working with Clement Attlee, offered free legal advice to the protesters. Thirty years later, in quite another field, he represented Florence Nagle, who challenged the Jockey Club's refusal to grant licences to female trainers. Another client in the Sixties was Mandy Rice-Davies, whom Appelbe guided through the Profumo case. Appelbe later formed a close friendship with John Profumo through their shared interest in Toynbee Hall. In 1958 he witnessed the discreet marriage of his client Ingrid Bergman to Lars Schmidt, a Swedish impresario. Appelbe's Vauxhall, imperfectly polished by his young children (they were too small to clean the entire bodywork) swept the couple off the their secret honeymoon.

Appelbe continued in practice until 1990, one of the last lawyers to write letters in longhand. When colleagues urged him to abandon this habit, Appelbe would briskly insist that he did 'not have the time to wait until those typists arrive at nine o'clock'. He himself arrived at seven. An adherent of concise prose, he believed that most legal letters could be written on one side of A4 paper. He disliked foreign derived words such as 'exit'. What, he asked, was wrong with 'out'?

Appelbe helped to build the Youth Hostels Association and the Housing Centre Trust. He was closely involved with the early days of the bereavement charity Cruse, and co-founded the Married Women's Association (which campaigned under the slogan ARE MARRIED WOMEN SLAVES?). He long advocated separate taxation for women, and campaigned for mothers, rather than fathers, to be paid child care support. From the Thirties to the Fifties he was closely associated with women's rights, a subject he frequently addressed in the press.

In 1935 he embarked upon perhaps his most ambitious project: the foundation (in concert with G B Shaw and H G Wells) of the Smell Society, which sought to eliminate foul odours. He hoped to refresh the nostrils of London commuters with sheets of paper impregnated with the smells of the seaside. The society also aimed to create new words to describe the smell of such things as roast turkey, mimosa and tar. The Smell Society held an aromatic dinner at the Grosvenor House Hotel, in a room squirted with lemon scent. But the venture did not prosper. A co-founder of the Anatomical Donors Association, Appelbe was frustrated in his attempts to leave his own body to medical research, scientists finding no use for his nonagenarian corpse.

Ambrose Appelbe married first, in 1927, Carrie Morrison, the first woman solicitor in London. The marriage ended in divorce. He married secondly, in 1937, Ann Wilde, who died in 1998; they had four children, three of whom survive.