Ruth Ellis
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Ruth Ellis (October 9, 1926 – July 13, 1955) was a British murderess who was the last woman to be executed in the UK. She was convicted of the murder of her lover, David Blakely, and hanged at London's Holloway Prison.
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[edit] Biography
Ruth Neilson was born in the Welsh seaside town of Rhyl; her mother, Bertha, was a Jewish Belgian refugee, and her father Arthur Hornby a cellist from Manchester who spent much of his time playing on Atlantic cruise liners. Arthur Neilson had changed his surname from Hornby after the birth of Muriel, Ruth's elder sister - he had long since given up playing the cello on ocean liners when Ruth was born. Ruth was one of five children. She left school at fourteen to work as a waitress. In 1941, at the height of the Blitz, the Neilsons moved to London.
At 17, Ruth became pregnant by a married Canadian soldier, and gave birth to a son, Clare Andrea ("Andy"), in 1944. The father visited and paid support for the child until he returned to Canada. Via low-level modelling work, she became a nightclub hostess, which paid significantly more than the various factory and clerical jobs she had had since leaving school.
In 1950 she married 41-year-old George Ellis, a divorced dentist with two sons, who had been a customer at the Court Club in Duke St, London. Unfortunately, George was an alcoholic who became violent when drunk, and Ruth was jealous and possessive, convinced he was having an affair. The marriage deteriorated rapidly. When Ruth gave birth to Georgina in 1951, George refused to acknowledge paternity, and they separated shortly afterwards. She moved in with her parents, and went back to hostessing to make ends meet.
[edit] David Blakely
In 1953, she became manager of a nightclub, and met David Blakely, three years her junior. He was a well-mannered former public school boy, but also a hard-drinking racing driver with expensive tastes. Within weeks he moved into her flat above the club, despite already being engaged to another girl. According to documents stored at the National Archives, Blakely was actually a known homosexual: what is more, Ruth knew this. She eventually accepted Blakely's proposal of marriage, although she was still married to George Ellis. Blakely became progressively more jealous of her attentions to male customers, and spent more and more time in the club to keep his eye on her. Her earnings fell as a result, and his inheritance was blown on a playboy lifestyle and the development of a racing car called The Emperor. Rows about money, fuelled by alcohol, became violent - on both sides. He also maintained another mistress, and each was extremely jealous of the other's affairs and activities. Ruth also had another older lover, Desmond Cussen, who had a strong dislike for Blakely.
On the night of Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955, Ruth Ellis took a .38 calibre revolver from her handbag and fired six shots at David Blakely outside The Magdala, (a public house) in Hampstead. Blakely was taken to hospital with multiple wounds and was subsequently pronounced dead. Gladys Kensington Yule, a passer-by, also sustained a slight wound when a bullet fired by Ellis ricocheted off the pavement and hit her in the hand. Ellis made no attempt to leave the scene, asking a witness to call the police. She was arrested and charged with Blakely's murder. The jury at the trial took just fourteen minutes to convict her, and she received a mandatory death sentence. The circumstances of her obtaining the gun and learning how to use it were never fully explored at the trial. Reluctantly, the day before her death Ellis made a statement that the gun had been provided by Cussen, and he had actually driven her to the murder scene. The authorites made no effort to follow this up and there was no reprieve.
The last woman to be hanged in England went to the gallows at Holloway Prison on July 13, 1955, aged 28. She was executed by Albert Pierrepoint and his assistant, Royston Rickard.
The Reverend John Williams was the Church of England chaplain at Holloway prison between 1951 and 1957. He was responsible for the pastoral care of Ruth Ellis.
The Bishop of Stepney (in the diocese of London) at that time was Dr Joost de Blank. He visited Ruth Ellis just prior to her death. The visit is mentioned in both published biographies of de Blank. After the visit he said that he "was horrified and aghast beyond words" when he learned "that prisoners could hear the hammering as the scaffold was being erected." Also, he could not forget Ruth Ellis's words to him: "It is quite clear to me that I was not the person who shot him. When I saw myself with the revolver I knew I was another person." These comments were made in the old London evening paper The Star.
The case caused widespread controversy at the time: on the day of her execution the Daily Mirror columnist Cassandra wrote a famous column attacking the sentence, writing "The one thing that brings stature and dignity to mankind and raises us above the beasts will have been denied her - pity and the hope of ultimate redemption." A petition to the Home Office asking for clemency was signed by 50,000 people, but the Conservative Home Secretary Major Gwilym Lloyd George rejected it.
A published question in the House of Commons regarding the hanging was asked by Mr Hyde MP on 8th December 1955. He asked the Home Secretary if he was aware that prisoners and staff were disturbed by the noise of scaffolding being erected for Ruth Ellis's hanging. Major Lloyd George stated: "No scaffold was erected in Holloway prison before the execution of Mrs Ellis." Mr Hyde replied that what the Home Secretary had said would reassure those members of the public who were alarmed at the statement to the contrary sense made by the Bishop of Stepney, who visited Mrs Ellis shortly before her execution.
[edit] Legacy of The Ellis Case
The hanging of Ruth Ellis strengthened public support for the abolition of the death penalty, which was halted in practice for murder in Britain ten years later. Reprieve was by then commonplace. It was becoming clear to many that capital punishment was arbitrary: political, rather than judicial considerations determined which of the condemned would pay the supreme penalty.
Of the 145 women in Britain convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the 20th century, only 14 were hanged, a reprieve rate of over 90 per cent. Factors that counted against Ruth Ellis included her appearance, her lifestyle, her supposed lack of remorse, the fact that a passer-by was slightly wounded and the sensational aspects of the case. Unfortunately, the murder and Ruth's arraignment also occurred during the 1955 General Election campaign, which was won by the Conservatives on a strongly pro-death-penalty platform. It may be that the publicity and furore surrounding the case was counter-productive to Ruth Ellis's cause, and the newly elected Home Secretary could not be seen to bow to a section of public opinion in exercising the Royal Prerogative of mercy.
In his book Anthony Eden, published in 1986, Robert Rhodes James states that Eden, who was the British prime minister at the time, makes no reference whatever to this matter in his memoirs and there is nothing in his papers about the case. Eden accepted that the decision was the responsibility of the Home Secretary, but there are indications that he was troubled about it.
The execution brought worldwide condemnation. Foreign newspapers observed that the concept of the crime passionnel seemed foreign to the British. One French reporter wrote: "Passion in England, except for cricket and betting, is always regarded as a shameful disease."
The tragedy of David Blakely and Ruth Ellis was not confined to them. Within weeks of her execution, Ruth's 18-year-old sister died suddenly, allegedly of a broken heart. Ruth's husband, George Ellis, descended into alcoholism and hanged himself in 1958.
Her son, Andy, suffered irreparable psychological damage and committed suicide in a squalid bedsit in 1982. It is said that the trial judge, Sir Cecil Havers, had sent money every year for Andy's upkeep. Christmas Humphreys, the prosecution counsel at Ruth's trial, paid for his funeral.
The case continues to have a strong grip on the British imagination and was referred back to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The Court firmly rejected the appeal, although it made clear that it ruled only on the conviction based on the law as it stood in 1955, not on whether she should have been executed.
On May 21st 2005, The Mirror newspaper published an exclusive story, No Pardon for Ellis: "Fifty years on, government turns down reprieve for hanged Ruth Ellis. - Hanged killer Ruth Ellis has been secretly denied a pardon by the government, documents reveal. The decision has been kept under wraps for fear of unleashing protests which could embarrass ministers.".
[edit] Burial And Reburial
The body of Ruth Ellis was buried in an unmarked grave within the walls of Holloway Prison, as was customary. In the early 1970s the prison underwent an extensive programme of rebuilding, during which the bodies of all the executed women were exhumed. All were reburied in Brookwood Cemetery with the exception of Ruth Ellis, who was reburied in Saint Mary Churchyard in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. The headstone in the churchyard was inscribed Ruth Hornby 1926 - 1955. In 1982 Ruth's son Andy (Andrea) destroyed the headstone shortly before he committed suicide. The grave is now overgrown with yew trees.
[edit] Recently released information
Ruth Ellis was 5' 2" tall, and at the time of the murder of David Blakely weighed 7 stone. She had small hands, and her left hand was gnarled as a result of contracting rheumatic fever as a teenager.
It is clear from a Holloway hospital case paper, opened since 2005 at The National Archive, fifty years after Ruth's death by hanging, that her condition was known.
On May 27th 1955, Mr W. Mackenzie, medical registrar at St Giles hospital in London, prepared a report for Ruth's solicitor Mr Bickford. Referring to the rheumatic fever for which Ruth had been admitted to the hospital as a teenager, he said bones in her left hand ring finger had been destroyed by septic arthritis. In a postscript he added, "I should be interested to know, from a medical point of view, the present state of her joints."
Mackenzie wrote the report six weeks after Ruth shot her lover, aiming and firing six times with a heavy Smith and Wesson revolver.
On 11th April 1955 the prison medical officer at Holloway prison noted that, as a teenager, she had "contracted rheumatic fever, which was followed with arthritis in the fingers of the left hand and of the ankles."
In a recently opened file at The National Archive, the statement that Lewis Charles Nickolls, Director of the Metropolitan Police Laboratory in 1955, can be studied. He stated in a police statement and again at the magistrates court hearing prior to the Old Bailey trial: "On receipt the Smith and Wesson revolver was in working order, and during the course of firing in the Laboratory, the cylinder catch broke as the result of a long standing crack in the shank...The trigger pull is 9.5 to 10lbs uncocked...These are normal figures for this type of weapon...In order to fire these 6 cartridges, it is necessary to cock the trigger six times, as in the case of a revolver pulling the trigger only fires one shot. To pull a trigger of 10lbs requires a definite and deliberate muscular effort."
Two months later, none of this evidence about the gun was presented to the jurors at the Old Bailey. When questioned, Nickolls merely stated, "To fire each shot, the trigger has to be pulled as a separate operation."
[edit] In Film
Her story was told in the 1985 film Dance with a Stranger (director Mike Newell), featuring Miranda Richardson as Ellis.
In the film Pierrepoint (2006), Ellis was portrayed by Mary Stockley.
The 1956 film Yield to the Night, starring Diana Dors as a doomed murderess bears a close resemblance to the Ellis case; however, the work is in fact based on a 1954 book of that name by Joan Henry.
Unknown to most people until 2005, Diana Dors was a close friend of Ruth Ellis. They socialised in the London clubs in which Ruth Ellis was employed.
[edit] Quotation
- It is obvious that when I shot him, I intended to kill him. – Ruth Ellis, on the stand at the Old Bailey, 20 June 1955 (this was in answer to the only question put to her by Christmas Humphreys for the Prosecution 'When you fired the gun, did you mean to kill?')
