Ruth Ellis

I have heard many mentions of the 'last woman hanged in Britain' but never actually read anything about her... until today.
I was casually reading dailymail.co.uk when I saw a picture of a striking woman in the 1950s. My interest piqued I clicked on the link and found this...
  

On a warm July morning in 1955, deep within the walls of Holloway prison, a tiny, slim young woman was getting dressed.

Until that day she had worn the regulation prison blue smock, but today she was allowed to choose her own clothing.

She selected a skirt and blouse, then cleaned her face, brushed out her hair and applied a minimum of make-up, clicking open the powder compact that played a faint, tinkling tune: La Vie En Rose. The door opened, admitting a warder with her breakfast.

She ate the scrambled egg delicately, using the plastic knife and fork that accompanied it. Then the prison wardress who had been rostered to supervise her that morning, Evelyn Galilee, helped her light a final cigarette.

At a quarter to nine, the deputy Governor entered with the prison chaplain, Reverend John Williams and they took a seat at either end of the table.

The door opened again. A nursing sister walked in, poured some liquid into a phial and passed it to the condemned woman, who refused it. The sister hesitated, then said, ‘It will calm you.’ But again it was politely refused.

The sister tried one more time before giving up and leaving the cell. For a moment no-one spoke.

Then Ruth Ellis slowly removed her glasses and handed them to the deputy Governor. ‘I won’t need these any more,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’ A little before nine, the door to the cell opened once more and the executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, walked in with his assistant.

Ruth sprang to her feet, knocking over a chair.

‘It’s all right, lass. It’s all right,’ Pierrepoint reassured her. He told her to sit down again and, keeping behind her, bound her wrists with a soft leather strap.

A warder pushed away the green, 6ft-high screen that ran along one wall of the condemned cell. Ruth had kept asking Officer Galilee what lay behind it.

In her heart, she almost certainly knew; now there was no doubt. The door to the execution chamber — always so near, yet hidden — suddenly slid into view.  Ruth stood and followed the executioner into the chamber, a warder at each elbow, holding her firmly.

She turned swiftly to glance at Evelyn Galilee and mouthed ‘thank you.’ The wardress would always remember Ruth’s dignity in her final hours: ‘Not once did she break down, scream or cry.’

Through the door and straight ahead, suspended at chest height above the trap, was the noose.

The escorting officers guided Ruth to the ‘T’ mark that Pierrepoint had chalked beneath the great beam at daybreak.

She stepped in her black court shoes onto the fissure in the trapdoors. Pierrepoint’s assistant stooped behind Ruth, fastening her legs together with the ankle strap. Then Pierrepoint extracted the white hood from his breast pocket.

When his fingers reached for her long, loosely combed hair, she looked at him and lifted the corners of her mouth in a faint smile.

He drew the hood down until it covered her face and reached for the rope.

In a seamless movement he lowered the noose over Ruth’s head, tightened it to one side of her chin and pulled a rubber washer along the rope to secure it.

Crouching down, with one hand he pulled out the cotter pin (the safety catch) and with the other he pushed the lever, hard.

The trapdoors banged open and Ruth’s body plummeted through the cavity into eternal  darkness...

Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Her execution provoked a wave of revulsion and a national debate on capital punishment that culminated in the permanent abolition of the death penalty for murder in 1969.

At her trial she was portrayed as a brassy, cold-hearted nightclub hostess who’d killed her privately educated lover David Blakely because he wouldn’t marry her.

Yet Ruth Ellis’s story was far more complex and tragic than that. No mention was made by the public school-educated barristers of the childhood physical and sexual abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her father, nor of the appalling violence inflicted on her first by her husband and then by Blakely himself.

Nor was there ever any mention of the fact that the gun she’d used to shoot him with had been supplied by another man, Desmond Cussen, who was deeply jealous of David Blakely.

Not only that, but he’d also taught her how to use it, and drove her to the North London street where she would kill Blakely.

None of this came to light at Ruth Ellis’s trial, because when she stood in the dock to answer for her crime, the many prejudices of the period were as discernible as the peroxide in her hair.

Born in Rhyl, North Wales, in 1926, Ruth was the fourth of five children, and was always her mother Bertha’s favourite. In a 1955 letter to the Home Office, Bertha described her as ‘a sweet and lovely child. She never gave me any trouble of any kind.’

Her sister Muriel told an interviewer years later that their father Arthur, a musician, frequently attacked his children and began sexually abusing her when she entered her teens, making her pregnant.

When Ruth reached puberty, their father turned his attention towards her. Muriel heard her young sister screaming as he attempted to rape her. But Ruth fought back, telling Muriel: ‘I’m not letting him do to me what he’s done to you.’

She was fiercely determined to escape her background. By the time war broke out the family had moved to London.

Ruth found a job at Lyons Corner house near Trafalgar Square and told her mother, to whom she gave most of her earnings: ‘Mum, I’m going to make something of my life.’

One night in 1943, in a bar, Ruth met a French Canadian serviceman named Clare Andrea McCallum. They shared a flat together where they enjoyed ‘weeks of rapture...  he loved me devotedly.’

When she discovered she was pregnant in early 1944, McCallum asked her to marry him. He was then posted to France, leaving Ruth excitedly preparing for the birth and wedding. In September 1944, aged 17, she had a healthy baby boy, whom she named Clare Andrea after his father.

But her soldier fiance didn’t return — and Ruth then made the shocking discovery that he was already married, with a wife and three children back home in Quebec.

Recalling the heartbreak ten years later, she said the betrayal changed her view of men for ever. ‘I no longer felt any emotion about men. Outwardly I was cheerful and gay. Inwardly I was cold and spent.’

Leaving her mother and sister Muriel, now married, to look after the baby, who she now called Andre, Ruth worked as many hours as possible to keep them all afloat.

Though not conventionally beautiful, she took great pride in her appearance and would not set foot outside unless fully made up with heavy foundation, rouge and lipstick. She used tongs to style her long auburn hair and bought the best clothes she could afford.

One evening she was taken for a drink to the Court Club, one of the rash of new nightclubs opening in post-war London.

It was owned by Morris Conley, a ruthless but genial pimp and convicted fraudster who had shrewdly spotted a gap in the market.

He believed ex-servicemen, regarded as heroes during their time in the forces but finding it difficult to adjust to mundane post-war occupations, would dig deep in their pockets for a chance to brag about their exploits – real or exaggerated – in an environment that offered a little ersatz luxury, alcohol — and desirable young women.

Conley immediately offered Ruth a job as a hostess, assuring her that she would earn twice as much as in a factory or shop.
Ruth soon learned she was expected to offer more than just drinks to customers, and came to view sex as part of business, giving customer satisfaction while shutting off her emotions.
It was at the club that she met George Ellis, a dentist who had also briefly been a director of Crystal Palace Football Club. He had turned to drink and lost his business after his wife had left him, taking their two children.
Ruth knew she didn’t love him and she was worried about his drinking. But he was 17 years older than her and generous with money, gifts and time.
‘He took me out shopping, bought me lots of expensive things,’ she recalled. When he proposed she accepted, on one condition: that he seek professional help for his drinking and depression.
He agreed, and in November 1950 Ruth Neilson became Ruth Ellis

But it was not long before George was not only drinking again, but beating up his new young wife. Her mother Bertha described one beating in a statement years later: ‘He pulled her hair and banged her head against the wall six or seven times . . . she started bleeding from the nose, losing pints of blood . . . both her eyes were swollen. She had a bald patch on the left side of her head. Her legs were bruised. She was a very sick girl.’

By the winter of 1951 she had given birth to a daughter, Georgina, but the marriage was over. Once again, Ruth had learned a hard lesson — that men could not be trusted.

With no means of providing for herself and her children, Ruth went to Morris Conley to ask for her job back.

Delighted, he asked her to manage his new club in Knightsbridge, the Little Club. He provided a flat near Harrods to go with it and a salary sufficient for her to pay her mother generously for looking after Andre and Georgina.

She dyed her hair peroxide blonde in imitation of Marilyn Monroe and Diana Dors, and luxuriated in the thought that life was finally getting better.

She was wrong. On the opening night the first customer was David Blakely. ‘He had dark brown eyes and curly eyelashes,’ Ruth recalled later. ‘When he left at closing time, I wondered if he would ever return.’

He did, the next night and the next, until one night after closing time Ruth invited him up to her flat. They ended up in bed, and within a fortnight Blakely was living with her. It was the beginning of an affair that would prove deadly for them both.

Although Blakely was from a much wealthier background, his upbringing had been almost as troubled as Ruth’s. His doctor father had regularly beaten his mother, and was later acquitted of murdering his mistress after an abortion went wrong.

His parents divorced and his mother married a wealthy businessman who paid for him to attend Shrewsbury public school. But he was supercilious and unpopular — a fellow pupil described him as ‘taking a positive delight in hurting others’.

By the time he met Ruth, Blakeley had developed a passion for motor racing. All his time, energy and limited funds went into his MG racing car, often at the expense of his relationship with Ruth.

But even when Blakely got engaged to someone else — and then broke it off — she could not stop loving him.

She said: ‘I thought the world of him; I put him on the highest of pedestals. He could do nothing wrong and I trusted him implicitly.’

Meanwhile, Ruth had an admirer of her own, in Desmond Cussen, a shy but likeable ex-RAF officer with a clipped moustache and Brylcreemed hair, who was a regular at the Little Club. When she found herself increasingly loaning Blakely money, Cussen offered to pay for her son Andre to go to boarding school. She accepted gratefully.

And she also agreed to a request from her ex-husband — claiming she was an unfit mother — that he give their little girl, Georgina, to a wealthy childless couple he knew.

Ruth later told a prison doctor: ‘It was a measure of my love for David Blakely that I was prepared to give up my child.’ Her love over-rode all other emotional attachments.

Despite these sacrifices, her relationship with Blakely rapidly became toxic.

They had enormous rows that ended with Blakely beating her viciously and it wasn’t long before their relationship was causing tension at the Little Club.

All the customers were aware she was ‘nuts’ about Blakely, and Cussen was nuts about her.

Morris Conley warned Ruth that she must be seen to treat all customers equally — and that included ‘loverboy’ and Cussen.

But when he saw takings had fallen from £200 a week to an average of £80, he fired her. With nowhere to live, she moved in with the devoted Cussen.

Shortly afterwards Blakely asked her to marry him, and for a few weeks Ruth allowed herself to believe that he would.

By the end of March, she was pregnant with his baby — but, seemingly inevitably, her dreams were dashed. 

She then spent the day with Cussen and her son Andre. According to Cussen, he took her home at 7.30pm. She put ten-year-old Andre to bed and he watched her repair her make-up, change her shoes and skirt, and put on a black coat.

Andre remembered her leaning over his camp bed to kiss him goodnight. ‘I won’t be long,’ she said softly, then she went out. He never saw her again.

Asked in court about her mood and feelings towards Blakely that night, she replied, ‘I was very upset.’ Then she paused and said, ‘I had a peculiar feeling I wanted to kill him.’

Once again the Findlaters were having a party to which Ruth had not been invited. Carole ran out of cigarettes at 9pm and Blakely drive to the nearby Magdala pub to get some, taking a friend, Clive Gunnell.

They parked and went in for a drink. At 9.20pm Blakely and Gunnell emerged, holding bottles. Neither noticed Ruth standing with her back to the wall of the pub.

When he saw her, Blakely started to run. Ruth fired twice, the gun emitting small white flashes. At first she thought Blakely had not been hit, as he was still running.

She followed him around the car. From the junction opposite, a middle-aged couple, Donald and Gladys Yule, watched in horror.

Ruth recalled. ‘When I got to the front of the bonnet of the car I think I fired again — David was still running and I must have followed . . . he looked round as I shot again and he fell forward flat on his face.’

She lost the baby after yet another beating and became very ill. ‘You’ll always come crawling back,’ Blakely goaded her. ‘You can’t walk on me for ever,’ she warned him quietly. ‘I’m only human: I can’t stand it.’

On Good Friday 1955, Blakely failed to turn up to meet Ruth as promised.  She suspected he was at the house of his friends Ant and Carole Findlater in Tanza Road, Hampstead. She asked Cussen to drive her there, and saw Blakely’s car parked outside. It was an ominous situation.

Ant Findlater was one of Blakely’s fellow motor-racing enthusiasts, whose wife Carole disliked Ruth intensely. The feeling was mutual, as Blakely and Carole had once had an affair and Ruth was jealous.

When Ruth rang the doorbell, no one answered. Then she ran to a nearby phone box and called their number. The phone was picked up and immediately put down. The same thing happened the following night, only this time a party was in full swing.

Humiliated, Ruth returned home. The next morning, Easter Sunday, she telephoned the Findlaters, again but Ant put the phone down on her. 

Directly across the road, Mrs Yule saw the figure lying on the pavement raise himself up on one elbow. ‘I shall never forget the look of appeal in his eyes,’ she recalled years later. ‘She put two more bullets into him, deliberately. I was petrified.’

Then Ruth very deliberately brought the gun up to her temple, pressing it under a lock of blonde hair. Her fingers closed on the trigger. But nothing happened.

She brought the gun down and as she did so, it did fire, the bullet going clean through Gladys Yule’s hand.

As Blakely lay in a growing pool of blood, Ruth turned slowly to look at Gunnell through her horn-rimmed spectacles, the revolver in her hand. She was totally calm.

On the road outside the Magdala, beer from the broken bottles that Blakely had been clutching to his chest mingled with the blood, and the deep red froth seeped into the drain at the foot of the hill. There was no doubting who had gunned him down: it seemed Ruth had signed her own death warrant.

Yet, as we will see on Monday, if only the jury had been told the full story, she might have escaped the gallows.

Adapted from A Fine Day For A Hanging: The Ruth Ellis Story by Carol Ann Lee, published by Mainstream on September 6 at £11.99. © Carol Ann Lee 2012. To order a copy at £10.99 (p&p free), call 0843 382 0000.

I think I shall most definately be purchasing this book!

Till next time,

Laura Lou x