Ruth Ellis UK 1955 - hanging is immoral

I will never forget the letters, petitions and public protests ag­ainst the last execution carried out in Australia. Ronald Ryan (1925–1967) was found guilty of killing a warder during a pris­­on outbreak in 1965. His 1967 hanging horrified Australian citizens and led to permanent legislative change across the nation.

David Blakely and Ruth Ellis 
at the Little Club London, in 1955

Australia should have learned earlier. Ruth Ellis (1926–1955) was hanged for her lover's murder, the last woman to be executed in Britain. Welsh-born Ellis had been a beautiful nude and lin­g­erie model with a great figure, a nightclub hostess in a plush London club. The blond 29 year old mother of 2 young children, she said she'd been in a relation­ship with a 25-year-old upper-class racing driver David Blakely.

There was a ton of evidence that Blakely had been violent towards her including 3 miscarriages from beatings on the stomach, hospital records of bruised and broken body parts. Today the medical evid­ence would have cancelled the mur­der charge in favour of a man­slaughter charge, or actual bodily harm in self defence.

Hampstead, where he'd been hiding out in friends’ homes, was not far from the Magdala pub where the shoot­ing was. Ellis was definitely the person who fired the shots at Blakely but had she been driven there and given the loaded gun by her other lover, Desmond Cussen? In any case, the trial las­t­­ed just a day. A unanimous, swift (23 mins) guilty ver­dict saw the trial judge immediately don his black cap to pass the death sentence.

Ellis was portrayed as calm and expressionless between the mur­der, in mid April 1955, and the very speedy execution in Hol­lo­way Prison 3 months later. But the main question remains: how much did class and sexist prejudices play in the decision not to bar or can­cel Ruth Ellis’ hanging?

                                    

Crowds gather at Holloway Prison London

before the execution of Ruth Ellis, 1955

Flicker

There has long been a fascination in Britain with young women acc­used of murder eg
1. Edith Thompson & Fred­erick Bywaters were a British couple executed for the murder of Thompson's husband Percy in 1923.

2. Young songwriter Alma Rattenbury was accused along with her younger lover of killing her husband, in 1935. The trial judge told the jury NOT to convict her just because she was an adulteress. Only her lover was hanged, so Rabbenbury stabbed herself to death.
3. Margaret Allen, hanged in Man­chester in 1949, was a gay woman who killed her elderly, brut­alising neighbour.
4. In 1953 Louisa Merrifield was hanged for pois­oning her employer, in response to the boss’s newly changed will.

Murders by women were sensationalised in the English press. While male villainy was dismissed as an unfortunate regres­sion, the same sort of behaviour in females, particularly when it was direct­ed at males, was condemned as a hideous perversion. Men were punished; women were punished and villified. The Victorians were originally fasc­inated by the transgressive woman, but so were 1950s newspapers! Ruth Ellis could not have breached more sexual stand­ards of 1955, had she tried – nude modelling, adultery with Blakely, working in a night club, drinking alcohol herself and receiving money from Cussen.

Front page, Daily Mirror, July 1955 Two Royal Commissions have protested against these horrible events. Now it is time for ordinary citizens to add their voices.

BBC Four gave 3 hours to a re-examination by the American film-maker Gillian Pachter in March 2018. The tv series The Ruth Ellis Files looked at new evid­ence of Cussen’s role and also the part that a journalist played posthum­ously. The chief crime reporter for The People took up Ellis’ case and inter­viewed her young son, Andy – something the police had never done. In early 1956, the report­er noted: “Ruth Ellis would not have hanged … but for a tragic er­ror of judgment by the home secretary.” The home secretary had not given Scotland Yard enough time to investigate how Cussen had prim­ed and encouraged her to kill.

Months later, the Home Office conceded that there might be some­thing in Webb’s claims. Director of Public Prosecutions concluded that: “Since Ellis is no longer available as a witness, there is no ev­id­ence to prove that Cussen supplied her with the gun.” Good grief!! Cussen secretly emigrated to Aust­ral­ia and died 1991.

In 2003, Ellis’ sister Muriel Jakubait requested a post­hum­ous appeal. Muriel revealed that their father had raped her at 14, producing a son who was brought up as her brother, and had also abused Ellis. The abuse and the beatings by Ruth’s husband, George Ellis, and boyfriend David Blakely, formed the other part of her case for the appeal court. However the appeal court concluded that Ruth Ellis had been rightly convicted of murder under the law back then.

Her execution played an important role in eliminating capital pun­ishment across the UK. So Gillian Pachter had to ask if that 1955 case still had any particular relevance today. Yes! Firstly, Pachter said, there hasn’t been a case that changed the conscience of the USA in quite the same way as Ellis’ did. Secondly the way that Ellis’ own violence and male sexual violence against her was framed by the auth­or­ities …still resonates today.

Endless protest marches against capital punishment in Melbourne,
Herald Sun, 1967

Ruth's ex-husband, George Ellis, committed suicide in 1958. Her son Andy suicided in 1982, aged 38. Her daughter Georgie died in 2017 of cancer, aged only 50, still hoping that her mother would be cleared. Capital punishment was always immoral, and not just for the executed person.