As the crowds gathered outside Holloway Prison in London on a warm summer’s morning in July 1955, the tinkling of the popular tune La Vie En Rose wafted out of the condemned cell, played by the musical powder compact held by 28-year-old Ruth Ellis as she prepared for her execution.
Until then she had worn the prison’s regulation blue smock, but for her hanging she was permitted to wear her own clothing, and picked out a skirt and blouse before applying light make-up and brushing out her hair.
After she’d eaten a breakfast of scrambled eggs, a warder helped her light a final cigarette before she removed her glasses and handed them to the deputy governor.
‘I won’t need these any more,’ she said.
Shortly before 9am, the executioner Albert Pierrepoint entered with his assistant, and Ellis, who stood only 5ft 2in, leapt up in terror, knocking over a chair.
‘It’s all right, lass,’ he assured her, securing her wrists behind her with a leather strap, before two warders took her by the elbows and led her through a door hitherto hidden behind a screen. It opened into the execution chamber.
In her black court shoes, Ellis stepped on to the trapdoors, while the hangman’s assistant fastened her legs with an ankle strap and Pierrepoint produced a white hood from his breast pocket, drawing it down over her face.
Next came the noose, tightened to one side of her chin and secured with a rubber washer. Seconds later, Pierrepoint pushed the lever opening the trapdoors and Ruth Ellis plunged to her death.
Ruth Ellis, 28, was the last woman to be hanged in Britain
The last woman to be hanged in Britain, she was depicted during her trial at the Old Bailey a few weeks earlier as a heartless femme fatale who had shot her public school-educated lover David Blakely in a fit of jealousy.
Yet the truth was far more complicated, as will be revealed in a new four-part ITV drama series A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, available on BritBox now and to be shown on ITV next month.
With the release of the series, Ruth Ellis’s grandson Stephen Beard has called for her to be pardoned. Though Ellis confessed to the killing, Beard says the judge who imposed the death penalty was responsible for ‘a severe miscarriage of justice’ in failing to consider the horrendous physical and sexual abuse to which Ellis had been subjected.
Had the court done its job, he told The Times, it would have recognised a clear instance ‘of both battered woman syndrome and diminished responsibility’ and spared his grandmother from the gallows.
A Cruel Love stars Lucy Boynton – who got her break playing Freddie Mercury’s one-time girlfriend in the 2018 movie Bohemian Rhapsody – as the lead, with Toby Jones playing Ellis’s solicitor John Bickford, in an echo of the role he played as the campaigning subpostmaster in the phenomenally successful ITV drama series Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
Just as Alan Bates campaigned tirelessly for himself and other victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal, so John Bickford would fight to save Ruth Ellis.
But she refused his help and went to the gallows protecting the man who all but pulled the trigger – one in a long line of disastrous relationships entered into by a woman who today would be recognised as a victim.
Ellis had suffered abuse from childhood. Born the fourth of five children in the seaside town of Rhyl, North Wales, in 1926, she was preyed upon by her musician father, Arthur, who had got her elder sister, Muriel, pregnant at the age of 14.
Ellis was depicted during her trial at the Old Bailey as a heartless femme fatale who had shot her public school-educated lover David Blakely in a fit of jealousy
According to hangman Albert Pierrepoint, she met her end courageously
Their mother was aware of what was happening but, terrified of her husband, did nothing. Ruth, however, always managed to fight her father off, telling Muriel: ‘I’m not letting him do to me what he’s done to you.’
During the Second World War, she met a Canadian serviceman in a bar and they shared a flat in London, where she remembered enjoying ‘weeks of rapture… he loved me devotedly’.
On discovering that she was expecting his child, he proposed, but by the time their son Andre was born in September 1944, when she was 17, he had been posted to France and he never came back. Ellis later discovered that her fiance had a wife and three children back home in Canada.
This betrayal forever tainted her view of the opposite sex. ‘I no longer felt any emotion about men,’ she later said. ‘Outwardly, I was cheerful and gay. Inwardly, I was cold and spent.’
Her family had also moved to London and, while Muriel and her mother looked after the baby, she began working at a nightclub where the hostesses were expected to have sex with the customers as part of their night out. There she met George Ellis, an alcoholic dentist.
Seventeen years her senior, he wooed her with money and gifts, and she agreed to marry him in November 1950 on condition that he gave up drinking. He never did and soon began beating her up.
Her mother, Bertha, recalled how, during one attack, he ‘pulled [Ruth’s] 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 time their daughter Georgina was born in October 1951, the marriage was over. Dying her auburn hair platinum blonde in imitation of Marilyn Monroe, Ellis moved back in with her parents and returned to prostitution before being hired as the manager of a new nightclub, the Little Club, in Knightsbridge, a job which came with a generous salary and a flat near Harrods.
There, in the autumn of 1953, she had her ill-starred first meeting with troubled David Blakely – three years her junior and a dashing but hard-drinking racing driver whom she admitted putting ‘on the highest of pedestals. He could do nothing wrong and I trusted him implicitly’.
Ellis was subjected to horrendous physical and sexual abuse in her marriage to David
Their relationship became toxic and developed into the familiar pattern of appalling domestic violence
In fact, there was every reason to distrust Blakely, remembered by one fellow pupil at Shrewsbury public school as an unpopular boy who took ‘a positive delight in hurting others’.
Often borrowing money from Ellis to fund his motor racing, he moved into her flat above the club despite being engaged to someone else at the time. But Ellis was prepared to put up with that, and even to sacrifice her relationship with her daughter for him.
When her former husband George decided that the life she was living with Blakely made her an unfit mother and insisted that she let a wealthy, childless couple he knew care for Georgina, she agreed to his request.
‘It was a measure of my love for David Blakely that I was prepared to give up my child,’ she told a prison doctor.
After her mother’s execution, Georgina would be adopted by a family in Warrington, Cheshire. She discovered her birth mother’s identity at the age of eight, and as an adult followed in her dead mother’s footsteps, working in the sex trade and becoming an alcoholic, according to Georgina’s son Stephen Beard.
There seemed no limit to what Ellis would put up with from Blakely, as their relationship became toxic and developed into the familiar pattern of appalling domestic violence.
A friend who described seeing him kick and beat her, and once squeezing her by the neck and lifting her up, feared that he would kill her one day. ‘I always would have thought it would be more him, than her,’ she said after Blakely’s death.
Her injuries were also seen by her clients. One wrote to the police in her defence saying that the sight of her injuries would ‘live in my memory for ever. Her body was covered with big ugly bruises and in some places the skin had broken’.
The tensions between them spilled over into the club at night. On one occasion Blakely smacked and punched Ellis in front of her customers and, with takings down as the manager realised that she only had eyes for her abusive lover, she was eventually fired.
She then moved in with former RAF officer Desmond Cussen, a regular at the club. He was besotted with her, but she remained obsessed with Blakely – even after she became pregnant by the racing driver and lost the baby after yet another beating.
That was in March 1955 and, by then, Ellis was reaching breaking point. ‘You can’t walk on me for ever,’ she warned him quietly. ‘I’m only human: I can’t stand it.’
But he knew his power over her. ‘You’ll always come crawling back,’ he replied. And he was found to be right.
When she discovered that he was cheating on her with other women, Blakely appeased her by proposing marriage and she accepted, finally allowing herself to believe things might work out between them. But her relief was to be short-lived.
Moving out of Cussen’s flat and into a rented room in Kensington, she’d hoped to spend that Easter with Blakely, but instead he partied throughout the weekend with his friends Ant and Carole Findlater at their home in Hampstead, north London.
She loathed this couple, because Carole had once had an affair with Blakely and she still saw her as a rival for his affections.
On the evening of Good Friday, she persuaded Cussen to drive her to the Findlaters’ flat but, although Blakely’s car was parked outside, they refused to answer the door, leaving her angry and humiliated outside.
Dangerously so, given that only a few hours previously, Cussen had supplied her with a loaded .38 Smith & Wesson revolver.
On the Saturday evening, Cussen drove Ellis back to the Findlaters but, once again, they wouldn’t let her in. Finally, on the morning of Easter Sunday, she telephoned the flat to speak to Blakely but Ant Findlater slammed the phone down on her.
Increasingly distraught, she spent the day with Cussen, then put ten-year-old Andre to bed before he took her back to Hampstead and dropped her off near the Findlaters.
At around 9pm, Blakely and his friend Clive Gunnell drove to the nearby Magdala pub to get cigarettes for Carole.
The two men parked and went into the pub for a drink. As they emerged carrying bottles, they saw Ellis, who was standing with her back to a wall. Firing two shots at Blakely, she then pursued him around his car where he fell face down on the pavement as she fired more shots point-blank into him, before bringing the gun up to her own temple.
When she pulled the trigger, nothing happened, but as she brought the weapon down it fired its remaining bullet into the hand of a passerby.
Throughout the shooting, Ellis appeared perfectly calm and remained so when, after being questioned by police, she was told she was to be formally charged with Blakely’s murder.
‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ she nodded. ‘I will hang.’
When her solicitor John Bickford tried to persuade her to plead insanity, she firmly refused.
‘I took David’s life and I don’t ask you to save mine,’ she told him. ‘I don’t want to live.’
She was reluctant even to plead not guilty – only doing so in the end because she blamed the Findlaters for driving her to do what she had done and she wanted their supposed part in it all to come out in court.
In the run-up to the trial, Cussen confessed to Bickford his role in supplying Ellis with the gun, teaching her how to use it, and chauffeuring her to the Findlaters’ Hampstead home three nights in succession.
But although the possibility that she had been manipulated by a green-eyed lover who clearly wanted Blakely out of the way might have helped her case, she refused to allow Bickford to use the information in her defence, saying that she had ‘over-persuaded’ him to give her the gun. ‘I don’t want Cussen involved in any circumstances whatsoever,’ she told her solicitor.
All the jury heard at the time of her trial was her version of events. She told the court she had been given the revolver three years previously by a customer at the club.
In A Fine Day For A Hanging, the book on which the new drama series is based, author Carol Ann Lee argued that all this suggests that Ellis was driven to the edge of madness by her ill-treatment at Blakely’s hands.
‘It seems clear that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress,’ she wrote. ‘But in 1955, the term did not exist. Nor did the defence of diminished responsibility, which would almost certainly have saved her from the gallows.’
The jury returned their guilty verdict after only half an hour of deliberation and her execution date was set for July 13. According to hangman Albert Pierrepoint, she met her end courageously.
‘I have seen some brave men die, but nobody braver than her,’ he would later say.
The public were far less sanguine about her fate and there was outrage that no account had been taken of the abuse inflicted on her by Blakely.
This all helped galvanise the anti-death penalty movement, eventually bringing about the abolition of capital punishment ten years after the hanging of one of the best-known – yet most misunderstood – figures in British criminal history.
