Hangmen prefer blondes
Peter Cotes
The Trial of Ruth Ellis Jonathan Goodman and Patrick Pringle (David and Charles £3.50) Poor Ruth Ellis. Nobody was to call her Mrs Ellis. Not for her the posthumous fame or _notoriety of a Mrs Thompson, a Mrs Rattenbury (why are most of the women who have stood in the dock on the capital charge "Mrs-this and Mrs-that," I wonder? Maybrick, Cornock, Hearn, Merrifield, Barney; the list is extensive). Like Charlotte Corday and Madeleine Smith before her, Ruth Ellis was !Flown at the time, and is known today, as Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Great Britain." The date was 1955. The furore the trial and execution caused did, perhaps, more to influence Parliament when introducing a Bill to abolish the death penalty than any other single factor. It was passed through all its stages seven months after Ruth was hanged.
Aged twenty eight she was a platinum blonde. Her husband was a dentist, later to take his own life. Daughter of a Mancunian father and a Belgian refugee mother, Ruth had come to London from North Wales at an early age and after a succession of unremunerative chores as a machine minder, Photographer's assistant and singer in a dance band, she had been made pregnant by a French Canadian soldier who, upon the birth Of his son, sent the mother a bunch of flowers, sailed for Canada and was never heard of again. To support her child Ruth next secured a job as a photographer's model and tasted her first serious money when she was paid one pound per hour for posing in the nude. The permissive society had not arrived and hard porn was just around the corner when, at the age of nineteen, Ruth got herself a job as 'hostess' at a Mayfair night-club. Henceforth she was to inhabit a netherworld of shadowy figures. 'Odd' people they were called by leading counsel at her trial. And 1953 found her at the Little Club, a drinking resort in Knightsbridge, where she was manageress and where she met Blakely, three Years her junior, with whom she was to live on and off until the events at Easter two-years later when she shot him dead outside a Hampstead pub, the Magdala.
Shortly after suffering a miscarriage, she had been driven by a mysterious male comPanion to the Hampstead home of some friends of Blakely's where he was spending the weekend. A party was in progress judging from the sounds of revelry within, but Ruth Was refused access, became obstreperous and finally police were Called to lead her away. She returned later, saw Blakely leaving the house and followed him to a nearby pub, and later, as he was getting into his car, shot him down. Those are the bare facts and on the face of them this would seem to be another Squalid murder case that would qualify for inclusion in the lists down the years of the minor crime passionels.
But not a bit of it. The Ruth Ellis case insPired films, novels and plays, presented crime Writers, criminologists and sexologists with an abundance of material from which to draw Upon for the next score of years, and has Made history. There were many queries about conduct of leading witnesses, the then Home Secretary's stubborn refusal to grant a reprieve despite the unsparing efforts of the legal advisers for the defence, and the immense controversy caused throughout the country by the sentence itself. Then there was the twenty-eight-year-old key figure; possibly the most luckless of all those women who have gone to the gallows in the past. Mrs Thompson was after all an incurable romantic who wrote the evidence that hanged her in the passionate love letters she wrote.
It is doubtful whether even her stoutest defenders would refer to Ruth as a romantic. And in their lengthy introduction to their account of the trial Jonathan Goodman and Patrick Pringle, who have also ediCed the present volume in the absence of a complete transcript of the trial itself, go some way in showing why she was, if not the unhappiest, certainly — with the exception of Edith Thompson — the unluckiest. "She was unlucky all the way along the line" recalls one of her legal advisers. But Ruth's view was that she deserved to be hanged. And it is said that her first solicitor, John Bickford, was sacked by her because of his strenuous efforts to fight for her life.
Nevertheless, there are many unresolved features that have puzzled students of such cases down the years? Not because Ruth (like D. H. Lawrence's-The Woman Beautiful, "yet she had no luck") was a femme fatale who destroyed herself as well as her lover, for it is doubtful, from the reports of those who knew her intimately, whether she was much more than a 'sex object' in the eyes of the men who came and went in a series of hasty affairs. Whatever her feelings towards them there were only two men who featured in her life with a degree of permanence: Blakely and the witness, Cussen. Messrs Goodman and Pringle here provide details now given for the first time of the police investigations before and after the trial, examine the effect of the case on the abolition of capital punishment and discuss evidence which, had it been known at the time of the trial, would have saved a life.
Some of it was known then, but the machinery of the law proved too cumbersome to make use of such assets as Ruth's confes sion of an accessory to her lawyers on the eve of execution; and her brother's discovery of the whereabouts of the mysterious Mr X, (who drove her to shoot Blakely down and thoughtfully provided the gun for the deed after filling her up with pernod) who had he chosen to save his mistress's life at the expense of his reputation, could have easily done so. As it was, when he was tracked down, X was spending Ruth's last night on earth in bed with another woman.
Peter Cotes, the film and stage director, has for long taken a keen interest in criminology.
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