Ruth Ellis


Ruth Ellis was a British escort and nightclub hostess. She was the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom, after being convicted of the murder of her lover, David Blakely.
During her childhood, her family moved from Rhyl, to Basingstoke in Hampshire, and, in 1941, to Hampstead in London. In her teens Ellis entered the world of London nightclub hostessing, which led to a chaotic life that included various relationships with men. One of these was with David Blakely, a racing driver engaged to another woman.
On Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955, Ellis shot Blakely dead outside the Magdala public house in Hampstead and was immediately arrested by an off-duty policeman. At her trial in June 1955, she was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to death. On 13 July, she was hanged at HM Prison Holloway.

Early life

Ellis was born in Rhyl in North Wales, the fifth of six children. During her childhood her family moved to Basingstoke in Hampshire. Her mother, Elisaberta Goethals, was a Belgian refugee; her father, Arthur Hornby, was a cellist from Manchester. The Register of Marriages gives Arthur Hornby as marrying Elisa B. Goethals, at Chorlton, in 1920. Arthur changed his surname to Neilson after the birth of Ruth's older sister Muriel in 1925.
Ellis attended Fairfields Senior Girls' School in Basingstoke, leaving when she was 14 to work as a waitress. Shortly afterwards, in 1941, the Neilsons moved to London. In 1944, 17-year-old Ruth became pregnant by a married Canadian soldier named Clare and gave birth to a son, whom she named Clare Andria Neilson, known as "Andy". The father sent money for about a year, then stopped. The child eventually went to live with her mother.

Career

Ellis became a nightclub hostess through nude modelling work, which paid significantly more than the various factory and clerical jobs she had held since leaving school. Morris Conley, the manager of the Court Club in Duke Street, where she worked, blackmailed his hostess employees into sleeping with him. By early 1950 she was making money as a prostitute and became pregnant by one of her regular clients. She had this pregnancy terminated in the third month and returned to work as soon as she could.
On 8 November 1950, she married 41-year-old George Johnston Ellis, a divorced dentist with two sons, at the register office in Tonbridge, Kent. He had been a customer at the Court Club. He was a violent alcoholic, jealous and possessive, and the marriage deteriorated rapidly because he was convinced she was having an affair. Ruth left him several times but always returned.
In 1951, while four months pregnant, Ruth appeared, uncredited, as a beauty queen in the Rank film Lady Godiva Rides Again. She subsequently gave birth to a daughter Georgina, but George refused to acknowledge paternity and they separated shortly afterwards and were later divorced. Ruth and her son moved in with her parents and she went back to prostitution to make ends meet.

Murder

In 1953, Ruth Ellis became the manager of the Little Club, a nightclub in Knightsbridge. At this time, she was lavished with expensive gifts by admirers, and had a number of celebrity friends. She met David Blakely, three years her junior, through racing driver Mike Hawthorn.
Blakely was a well-mannered former public school boy who was educated at Shrewsbury and Sandhurst, but also a hard-drinking racer. Within weeks he moved into her flat above the club, despite being engaged to another woman, Mary Dawson. Ellis became pregnant for the fourth time but had an abortion, feeling she could not reciprocate the level of commitment shown by Blakely towards their relationship.
She then began seeing Desmond Cussen. Born in 1922 in Surrey, he had been an RAF pilot, flying Lancaster bombers during the Second World War, leaving the RAF in 1946, when he took up accountancy. He was appointed a director of the family business Cussen & Co., a wholesale and retail tobacconists with outlets in London and South Wales. When Ruth was sacked as manager of the Little Club, she moved in with Cussen at 20 Goodward Court, Devonshire Street, north of Oxford Street.
The relationship with Blakely continued, however, and became increasingly violent and bitter as Ellis and Blakely continued to see other people. Blakely offered to marry Ellis, to which she consented, but in January 1955 she had another miscarriage after Blakely punched her in the stomach during an argument.
pub in 2008. Two "bullet holes" in the wall at lower left were drilled by the pub's landlady in the 1990s.
On Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955, Ellis took a taxi from Cussen's home to a second floor flat at 29 Tanza Road, Hampstead, the home of Anthony and Carole Findlater, where she suspected Blakely might be. As she arrived, Blakely's car drove off, so she paid off the taxi and walked the to the Magdala, a relatively large public house in South Hill Park where she found Blakely's car parked outside.
At around 9:30 pm David Blakely and his friend Clive Gunnell emerged. Blakely passed Ellis waiting on the pavement when she stepped out of Henshaws Doorway, a newsagent next to the Magdala. He ignored her when she said "Hello, David," then shouted "David!"
As Blakely searched for the keys to his car, Ellis took a.38 calibre Smith & Wesson Victory model revolver from her handbag and fired five shots at Blakely. The first shot missed and he started to run, pursued by Ellis round the car, where she fired a second, which caused him to collapse onto the pavement. She then stood over him and fired three more bullets into him. One bullet was fired less than half an inch from Blakely's back and left powder burns on his skin.
Ellis was seen to stand over Blakely as she repeatedly tried to fire the revolver's sixth shot, finally firing it into the ground. This bullet ricocheted off the road and slightly injured a bystander.

Trial

Ellis, in apparent shock, asked Gunnell, "Will you call the police, Clive?" She was arrested immediately by an off-duty policeman, who heard her say, "I am guilty, I'm a little confused." Blakely's body was taken to hospital with multiple bullet wounds to the intestines, liver, lung, aorta and trachea.
At Hampstead police station Ellis appeared to be calm and not obviously under the influence of drink or drugs. She made a detailed confession and was charged with murder.
She made her first appearance at the magistrates' court on 11 April 1955 and was ordered to be held on remand.
She was twice examined by principal Medical Officer, M. R. Penry Williams, who failed to find evidence of mental illness; an electroencephalograph examination on 3 May found no abnormality. While on remand she was examined by psychiatrist Dr D. Whittaker for the defence, and by Dr A. Dalzell on behalf of the Home Office. Neither found evidence of insanity.
On 20 June 1955, Ellis appeared in the Number One Court at the Old Bailey, London, before Mr Justice Havers. She was dressed in a black suit and white silk blouse with freshly bleached and coiffured blonde hair. Her defending counsel, Aubrey Melford Stevenson, supported by Sebag Shaw and Peter Rawlinson, expressed concern about her appearance, but she did not alter it to appear less striking.
The only question put to Ellis by prosecutor Christmas Humphreys was, "When you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?"; her answer was, "It's obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him." This reply guaranteed a guilty verdict and the mandatory death sentence. The jury took 20 minutes to convict her.

Reprieve decision

Ellis remained at Holloway Prison while awaiting execution. She told her mother that she did not want a petition to reprieve her from the death sentence, and took no part in the campaign. But at her relatives' urging her solicitor, John Bickford, wrote a seven-page letter to the Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd George, setting out the grounds for reprieve. George denied the request.
In a 2010 television interview, the grandson of the trial judge Sir Cecil Havers, actor Nigel Havers, said his grandfather had written to the Home Secretary recommending a reprieve as he regarded it as a crime passionnel, but received a curt refusal.
Ellis dismissed Bickford and asked to see Leon Simmons, the clerk to solicitor Victor Mishcon. Before going to see Ellis, Simmons and Mishcon visited Bickford, who urged them to ask Ellis where she had obtained the gun. On 12 July 1955, the day before her execution, Mishcon and Simmons saw Ellis, who wanted to make her will. When they pressed Ellis for the full story, she asked them to promise not to use what she said to try to secure a reprieve; Mishcon refused.
Ellis then said that she had been drinking with Cussen for most of the weekend and that Cussen had given her the gun and some shooting practice. Cussen had also driven her to the murder scene. Following the two-hour interview, Mishcon and Simmons went to the Home Office; the Permanent Secretary, Sir Frank Newsam, was summoned back to London and ordered the head of CID to check the story.
Lloyd George later said that the police were able to make considerable enquiries but that it made no difference to his decision, and in fact made Ellis's guilt greater by showing the murder was premeditated. Lloyd George also said that the injury to the bystander was decisive in his decision: "We cannot have people shooting off firearms in the street!"
In a final letter to Blakely's parents from her prison cell, Ellis wrote "I have always loved your son, and I shall die still loving him."

Execution

The Bishop of Stepney, Joost de Blank, visited Ellis just before the execution. Just before 9 am on 13 July the hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, and his assistant entered Ellis's cell and took her to the adjacent execution room where she was hanged.
As was customary in executions, she was buried in an unmarked grave within the walls of the prison. In the early 1970s the remains of executed women were exhumed for reburial elsewhere, Ellis's in the churchyard of St Mary's Church in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. Her headstone was inscribed "Ruth Hornby 1926–1955". Her son, Andy, destroyed the headstone shortly before he committed suicide in 1982.

Public reaction and legacy

The case caused widespread controversy at the time, evoking exceptionally intense press and public interest to the point that it was discussed by the Cabinet.
On the day of her execution, the Daily Mirror columnist Cassandra wrote a 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. The British Pathé newsreel reporting Ellis's execution openly questioned whether capital punishment—of a female or of anyone—had a place in the 20th century.
The novelist Raymond Chandler, then living in Britain, wrote a scathing letter to the Evening Standard, referring to what he described as "the medieval savagery of the law".
Though the execution was on the whole supported by the British public, it helped strengthen 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; according to one statistical account, between 1926 and 1954, 677 men and 60 women had been sentenced to death in England and Wales, but only 375 men and seven women had been executed.
In the early 1970s, Bickford told Scotland Yard that Cussen had told him, in 1955, that Ellis lied at the trial. A police investigation followed but no further action regarding Cussen was taken.
Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister at the time, made no reference to the Ellis case in his memoirs, nor is there anything in his papers. He accepted that the decision was the responsibility of the Home Secretary, but there are indications that he was troubled by it.
Foreign newspapers observed that the concept of the crime passionnel seemed alien to the British.

Family aftermath

Ellis's husband, George Ellis, descended into alcoholism and committed suicide by hanging, at a Jersey hotel on 2 August 1958. In 1969 Ellis's mother, Berta Neilson, was found unconscious in a gas-filled room in her flat in Hemel Hempstead. She never fully recovered and did not speak coherently again.
Her son, Andy, who was ten at the time of his mother's hanging, took his own life in a bedsit in 1982, shortly after desecrating his mother's grave. The trial judge, Sir Cecil Havers, had sent money every year for Andy's upkeep, and Christmas Humphreys, the prosecution counsel at Ellis's trial, paid for his funeral. Ellis's daughter, Georgina, who was three when her mother was executed, was fostered when her father killed himself three years later. She died of cancer aged 50.

Pardon campaign

The case continues to have a strong grip on the British imagination and in 2003 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 could rule only on the conviction based on the law as it stood in 1955, and not on whether she should have been executed.
The court was critical of the fact that it had been obliged to consider the appeal:
In July 2007 a petition was published on the 10 Downing Street website asking Prime Minister Gordon Brown to reconsider the Ruth Ellis case and grant her a pardon in the light of new evidence that the Old Bailey jury in 1955 was not asked to consider. It expired on 4 July 2008.

Film, TV and theatrical adaptations

In 1980, the third episode of the first series of the ITV drama series Lady Killers recreated the court case, with Ellis played by Georgina Hale.
The first cinema portrayal of Ellis came with the release of the 1985 film Dance with a Stranger, directed by Mike Newell and featuring Miranda Richardson as Ellis.
Both Ellis's story and the story of Albert Pierrepoint are retold in the stage play Follow Me, written by Ross Gurney-Randall and Dave Mounfield and directed by Guy Masterson. It premiered at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh as part of the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
In the film Pierrepoint, Ellis was portrayed by Mary Stockley.
Diana Dors, who had starred in Lady Godiva Rides Again, in which Ellis had had a minor, uncredited role, played a character resembling Ellis in the 1956 British film Yield to the Night, directed by J. Lee Thompson.
The case was the basis for Amanda Whittington's play The Thrill of Love. It premiered at the New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, in February 2013 and subsequently played at St James Theatre London with Faye Castelow in the main role. Maxine Peake played Ellis in an adaptation of Whittington's play, broadcast on 5 November 2016 by BBC Radio 4.
The life of Ellis was the inspiration behind a musical play by Lucy Rivers, Sinners Club. A co-production with Theatr Clwyd, it premiered at The Other Room Theatre in Cardiff, in February 2017.
The Ruth Ellis story was dramatised in the Murder Maps series of documentaries on the Yesterday Channel on 2 November 2017. It featured Monica Weller, ghost writer of Ruth Ellis My Sister's Secret Life.
The story was also the inspiration for the 2015 opera Entanglement by the composer Charlotte Bray.
The case was re-examined by film-maker Gillian Pachter in the 2018 BBC Four documentary series The Ruth Ellis Files: A Very British Crime Story.