Ruth Ellis

Ruth Ellis (; 9 October 1926 – 13 July 1955) was a Welsh-born nightclub hostess and convicted murderer who became the last woman to be executed in the United Kingdom following the fatal shooting of her lover, David Blakely.

In her teens, Ellis had entered the world of nightclub hostessing, which led to a chaotic life that included various relationships with men. One of these men was 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, London. She was immediately arrested by an off-duty policeman. At her trial in June 1955, Ellis was found guilty of premeditated murder and was sentenced to death; on 13 July she was hanged at Holloway Prison.

Early life

Ruth Ellis was born Ruth Neilson in Rhyl, Denbighshire, Wales, on 9 October 1926, the fifth of six children. She moved to Basingstoke, Hampshire, England, with her family during her childhood. Her mother, Elisaberta (Bertha) Goethals, was a Belgian war refugee; her father, Arthur Hornby, was a cellist from Manchester who played on Atlantic liners. The Register of Marriages gives Arthur Hornby as marrying Elisa B. Goethals at Chorlton-cum-Hardy in 1920. Arthur later changed his surname to Neilson.

Arthur's twin brother Charles was killed in 1928, when Ellis was two years old. Arthur began to be physically and sexually abusive to his elder daughter Muriel. Bertha, despite being aware of the abuse, took no action. Muriel stated this was due to how badly Arthur treated her mother; it made Bertha afraid to say anything. As a result of the sexual abuse, 14-year-old Muriel conceived a child by her father. Although Arthur was subsequently questioned by the police, he was released. Bertha then passed as the child's mother. Arthur began targeting Ruth when she turned 11. Muriel often tried to prevent it, kicking Ruth out of the house when Muriel sensed trouble. The sisters never openly discussed their father's sexual abuse.

Ellis briefly attended Fairfields Senior Girls' School in Basingstoke until 1940, after which she attended Worting village school before leaving school when she was 14 years old.Dunn, Jane (2010). "Ruth Ellis," ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography''. Her first employment was as an usherette at a cinema in Reading. Arthur moved to London on his own shortly after, accepting a job offer for the live-in position of caretaker-chauffeur for Porn & Dunwoody Ltd., a lift manufacturer. In 1941, Ellis befriended Edna Turvey, the girlfriend of her older brother Julian, who was on leave from service in the Royal Navy. Edna introduced Ellis to what Muriel later called "the fast life." Eventually, Ruth and Edna moved to London and lived with Arthur. His abuse against Ellis continued while he simultaneously engaged in an affair with Edna, although the affair ended when Bertha caught the pair in bed after making an unannounced visit. Bertha moved to London following the discovery of her husband's affair.

In 1944, when Ellis was 17 years old, she became pregnant by Clare Andrea McCallum, a married Canadian soldier. As a result, she was forced to move to a nursing hospital in Gilsland, Cumberland. On 15 September, she gave birth to her son, Clare Andrea (Andy) Neilson. McCallum stopped sending money around a year after the delivery. Andy, who eventually went to live with Bertha, was supported by Ellis through her employment in several factory and clerical jobs.

Career

By the end of the 1940s, Ellis had become a nightclub hostess in Soho through nude-modelling work, which paid significantly more than her previous jobs. Morris Conley, her manager at the Court Club in Duke Street, blackmailed his hostess employees into sleeping with him. By early 1950, Ellis was making money as a full-service escort and became pregnant by one of her regular clients.

On 8 November 1950, Ellis married 41-year-old George Johnston Ellis, a divorced dentist with two sons, at the register office in Tonbridge, Kent. A regular customer at the Court Club, George was a violent and possessive alcoholic who became convinced that his new wife was having an affair. Ellis left him several times but always returned. When she gave birth to a daughter, Georgina, in 1951, George refused to acknowledge paternity; they separated shortly afterwards and later divorced.

In 1951, while she had been four months pregnant, Ellis appeared, uncredited, as a beauty queen in the Rank film '' Lady Godiva Rides Again''. She returned to prostitution following her divorce from George, having moved into her parents' residence with her daughter.

Murder

In 1953, Ellis became the manager of the Little Club, a nightclub in Knightsbridge. At this time, she was lavished with expensive gifts by admirers. Ellis met David Blakely, three years her junior, through racing driver Mike Hawthorn. Blakely was a former public school boy who was educated at Shrewsbury School and Sandhurst but was also a hard-drinking racer. Within weeks, he moved into Ellis's flat above the club despite being engaged to another woman, Mary Dawson. Ellis became pregnant for a fourth time but had her second abortion, feeling she could not reciprocate the level of commitment Blakely showed towards their relationship.

Ellis then began seeing Desmond Cussen, a former Royal Air Force pilot who had flown Lancaster bombers during the Second World War, and who had taken up accountancy after leaving the service. He was appointed a director of the family business Cussen & Co., a wholesale and retail tobacconist with outlets in London and South Wales. Ellis eventually moved in with Cussen at 20 Goodwood Court, Devonshire Street, north of Oxford Street. The relationship with Blakely continued, however, and became increasingly violent as he and Ellis continued to see other people. Blakely offered to marry Ellis; she consented, but in January 1955, she had a miscarriage after he punched her in the stomach during an argument.

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 public house in South Hill Park where she found Blakely's car parked outside.

At around 9:30pm, Blakely and his friend Clive Gunnell emerged. Blakely passed Ellis waiting on the pavement when she stepped out of the doorway of Henshaw's, a newsagent next to The Magdala. 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. Ruth pursued Blakely as he started to run around the car, firing a second shot which caused him to collapse onto the pavement. She then stood over him and fired three more bullets, with one fired less than half an inch from his back, leaving 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 injured Gladys Yule, a bystander, who lost the use of her right thumb.

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 fatal wounds to the intestines, liver, lung, aorta and trachea. Originally taken in as evidence, the revolver is now in the Metropolitan Police's Crime Museum.

At Hampstead police station, Ellis appeared to be calm and not obviously under the influence of drink or drugs. She made her first appearance at a magistrates' court the next day, 11 April, and was ordered to be held on remand. Ellis 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, Ruth was examined by psychiatrist Duncan Whittaker for the defence and by Alexander 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 (and dyed blonde hair) 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 twenty 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. However, at her relatives' urging, her solicitor, John Bickford, wrote a seven-page letter to Home Secretary Gwilym Lloyd George setting out the grounds for reprieve. Lloyd George denied the request. Ellis dismissed Bickford (who had been chosen by Cussen) and asked to see Leon Simmons, the clerk to solicitor Victor Mishcon (whose law firm had previously represented her in her divorce proceedings). Before going to see her, Simmons and Mishcon visited Bickford, who urged them to ask her 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 her for the full story, Ellis asked them to promise not to use what she said to try to secure a reprieve; Mishcon refused. Ellis divulged that Cussen had given her the gun and taught her how to use it on the weekend prior to the murder. She also revealed that Cussen had driven her to the murder scene. Following a 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 Criminal Investigation Department (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 showing the murder was premeditated. He also said that the injury to the bystander was decisive in his decision: "We cannot have people shooting off firearms in the street! As long as I was Home Secretary I was determined to ensure that people could use the streets without fear of a bullet."

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 prior to her execution. Just before 9:00am on 13 July, the hangman Albert Pierrepoint and his assistant entered her cell and took her to the adjacent execution room where she was hanged. There was a momentary delay, due to a hoax call being made to the prison. The hoaxer claimed to be the private secretary to Lloyd George, and that there had been a stay of execution. Prison governor Charity Taylor spent six minutes calling the Home Office, to confirm it as a hoax. As a result Ellis was executed at 9:01am instead of planned 9am. Like the murder weapon, the noose is now in the Metropolitan Police Crime Museum. As was customary in British executions, Ellis was buried in an unmarked grave within the walls of Holloway Prison.

In the early 1970s, the remains of executed women at Holloway were exhumed for reburial elsewhere; in Ellis's case, directed by her son and next of kin, Andy, her remains were reburied in the churchyard of St Mary's Church in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, some from where Blakely was buried. Her headstone was inscribed, "Ruth Hornby 1926–1955."

Public reaction and legacy

Ellis's case caused widespread controversy at the time, evoking exceptionally intense press and public interest to the point that it was discussed by the Cabinet. She was the last woman ever to be executed in Britain. Then-Prime Minister Anthony Eden made no reference to the case in his memoirs, nor is there any mention 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. A petition to the Home Office asking for clemency was signed by 50,000 people but was rejected.

On the day of Ellis's execution, columnist Cassandra of the ''Daily Mirror'' attacked her 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". The British Pathé newsreel reporting the execution openly questioned whether capital punishment—of a woman 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".

The execution helped strengthen support for the abolition of the death penalty, which was halted in practice for murder in Britain ten years later ( the last execution in the UK occurred in 1964). 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 the Metropolitan Police that Cussen had told him, in 1955, that Ellis lied at the trial when she denied that Cussen had given her the murder weapon. A police investigation followed but no further action regarding Cussen was taken.

Family aftermath

Ellis's former husband, George Ellis, died by suicide by hanging at a Jersey hotel on 2 August 1958. In 1969, Ellis's mother, Bertha 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.

Ellis's son Andy, who was aged 10 at the time of his mother's execution, took his own life, in a bedsit in 1982, shortly after desecrating her 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. Her daughter Georgina, who was aged 3 when her mother was executed, was fostered when her father killed himself three years later. She appeared on the television discussion programme '' After Dark'' and died of cancer in 2001 at age 50.

Pardon campaign

The Ellis 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 (CCRC). 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 Ellis case and grant her a pardon in the light of new evidence that the jury at her trial was not asked to consider. It expired on 4 July 2008.

In popular culture

Television

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. In the series 1 conclusion of '' Deadly Women'' Ellis was portrayed by Carissa Singleton, with Blakely played by Jimmy Aschner.

In June 2023, ITV announced it would produce a standalone adaptation of Ellis' story which would be based on true crime author Carol Ann Lee's book ''A Fine Day for Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story'', with Ellis being portrayed by Lucy Boynton. The adaptation was originally titled simply as ''Ruth'', but was later retitled ''A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story''. The four-part series was aired from March 2025, also starring Toby Jones as John Bickford, Laurie Davidson as David Blakely, Mark Stanley as Desmond Cussen and Nigel Havers as Sir Cecil Havers (his own grandfather).

In the non-fictional sphere, the case was dramatised in the ''Murder Maps'' series of documentaries on the Yesterday Channel on 2 November 2017. It was re-examined the following year by film-maker Gillian Pachter in the BBC Four documentary series ''The Ruth Ellis Files: A Very British Crime Story''. The documentary suggested that Ellis may have suffered domestic abuse by Blakely, and that the gun used may have been supplied by Cussen, who may also have driven the taxi that took Ellis to the Magdala pub.

Books

The hanging of Ruth Ellis is part of a conversation between characters in ''Broken Country'' by Claire Leslie Hall.

Film

Diana Dors, who had starred in '' Lady Godiva Rides Again'', in which Ellis had a minor, uncredited role, played a character resembling (though not based on) Ellis in the 1956 British film '' Yield to the Night'', directed by J. Lee Thompson. To date the only direct cinematic portrayal of Ellis has been the 1985 film '' Dance with a Stranger'', directed by Mike Newell, and featuring Miranda Richardson as Ellis. The scriptwriter was Shelagh Delaney.

The film '' Pierrepoint'' (2006) includes Ellis as a supporting role, portrayed by Mary Stockley. It was broadcast on ITV on 25 August 2008, when it attracted an estimated audience of 3.6 million. The film was renamed ''Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman'' for its North American release.

Stage

Both Ellis's and Pierrepoint's stories 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. The case was also 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 story was also the inspiration for the 2015 opera '' Entanglement'' by the composer Charlotte Bray and ''Sinners Club'', a 2017 musical play by Lucy Rivers. A co-production with Theatr Clwyd, the latter premiered at The Other Room Theatre in Cardiff, in February 2017.

In 2023, actor Carly Halse wrote and performed ''Now You See Me'', a solo performance based on Ruth Ellis' story. ''Now You See Me'' toured as part of the Hidden Stories double-bill presented by The Plays The Thing theatre company.

References

Citations

Bibliography

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Further reading

*Hancock, Robert (1963). ''Ruth Ellis: The Last Woman to Be Hanged''. Orion; 3rd edition 2000.
*Mark, Laurence and Van Den Bergh, Tony (1990). ''Ruth Ellis: a Case of Diminished Responsibility?''. Penguin.

External links

The Execution of Ruth Ellis (''The Spectator'' on 15 July 1955)
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Scotsman report

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ellis, Ruth
1926 births
1955 deaths
20th-century executions by England and Wales
Executed Welsh women
Executed Welsh people
History of mental health in the United Kingdom
London crime history
People convicted of murder by England and Wales
British people executed for murder
People from Rhyl
British female murderers
Welsh female prostitutes
Welsh people convicted of murder
Welsh people of Belgian descent
Welsh people of English descent
20th-century Welsh women
20th-century British murderers
20th-century English sportsmen