The youngest of 12, Terence Hutt was born in north London on April 30 1935, the son of Arthur, a horse-and-cart driver, and his wife Ann, who went blind. Terry was evacuated to Wales for the rest of the war, and did not see his father for six years. “I felt I wasn’t wanted,” he recalled. “I didn’t recognise my father when I saw him again.”
This painful separation later spurred him to campaign for Fathers4Justice, one of a litany of causes which enjoyed his full-blooded support and extensive repertoire of sandwich boards, badges and comic outfits.
Another passion was the NHS, after Hutt, aged 48, had undergone emergency open-heart surgery, followed by three further bypasses. By then a veteran of the Royal Ordnance Corps, he was forced to take early retirement as a joiner, and used his spare time to demonstrate against the closures of hospitals, often dressed as a Tudor doctor, and on one occasion successfully aimed an egg at the Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley.
On another occasion, he dug a pit in Michael Heseltine’s Northamptonshire arboretum to protest against open-cast mining. His various campaigns found him crawling under moving buses, climbing trees on Whitehall, blocking the Newbury bypass, barricading himself in Manchester City’s boardroom and declaring himself the “number one fan” of Ken Livingstone.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.telegraph.co.uk ’
