Kenelm Hubert Digby

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

Digby was born in London, the son of Edward Aylmer Digby by his marriage to Winifred Digby Watson, his first cousin. 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. Kenelm Digby was educated at Lydgate House Preparatory School and then Gresham's School in Norfolk, before reading philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at St John's College, Oxford.

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." The debate was lively, and the motion was eventually carried by 275 votes to 153. A nationwide furore followed, and Digby and his fellow undergraduates were accused of sending a dangerous message to Europe's dictators – that the English 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", while sixty years after the event Digby mused "It was just a debate. I don't know what all the fuss was about. Frank Hardie had asked me to propose the motion and I agreed. That's all there was to it. But ever since the debate security intelligence organisations seem to have taken an interest in me." Digby kept the white feathers he was given after the debate.

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