Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in Britain on July 13 1955. Her execution was a national event. A crowd, reported to be 1,000-strong, gathered outside Holloway Prison in London that morning. Anti-death penalty protesters held signs, some people prayed and some wept. Ellis’s story had deeply moved the public.
Over 70 years later, the deputy prime minister, David Lammy, has announced that Ellis has been granted a conditional pardon due to the “exceptional circumstances” of the case – one in which he said there was a “profound injustice”. The pardon replaces Ellis’s death sentence with life imprisonment. It also recognised that the outcome of the case may have been different under modern law.
As part of my research on the death penalty in Britain, I have written about the public reactions to Ellis’s case and how it was portrayed in the press. I have argued her case was culturally significant in helping to shift views on the death penalty.
Ruth Ellis was a 28-year-old woman who worked as a nightclub manager in London. She had two young children. She was convicted of the murder of David Blakely, a man with whom she had been in a relationship, in June 1955. The events surrounding the murder were dramatic. On April 10 1955, she took a taxi to Hampstead, and shot Blakely several times in the back, including as he lay on the ground outside the Magdala Tavern pub. She was arrested by an off-duty police officer who had been in the pub, and taken to a police station.
The high-profile case was widely reported in the newspapers from the start. The story’s ingredients – a cross-class romance that turned deadly – were ideal fodder for sensationalised articles. Blakely was the son of a doctor. Ellis had what would be regarded disdainfully as a “past”. She was a divorced, working-class woman, who gave birth to a child outside of marriage. She did nude modelling and worked in nightclubs.
With her peroxide blonde hair, Ellis looked like a 1950s film star. She was not respectable according to the era’s standards of womanhood. Her relationship with Blakely unsettled boundaries of social class, while also having the allure of fast living and bright lights – “the champagne and chandeliers of London” as the Woman’s Sunday Mirror put it.
At Ellis’s trial, the judge did not allow the jury to consider her lawyer’s attempt to argue provocation, on the grounds there was insufficient evidence to support this defence. Provocation was a partial defence to murder – if argued successfully, it would reduce the conviction to manslaughter, which did not carry the death penalty. Ellis was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, the mandatory penalty for murder at the time. There was no appeal.
There was more to the story than a romance gone wrong. Blakely physically and emotionally abused Ellis, something which came to public attention through the press as the case went on.
An article in the Daily Mirror by Ellis’s brother described her “hobbling on two sticks” after a “stand up fight” with Blakely. Ellis’s life story was serialised in the Woman’s Sunday Mirror, and detailed how one night Blakely “grabbed me by the throat and squeezed. Everything went black. I thought I was going to die”. In one particularly brutal attack, it was reported, he punched Ellis in the stomach repeatedly while she was pregnant. She subsequently miscarried.
Justice delayed
Writing about the case to then home secretary Gwilym Lloyd George in the days leading up to the execution, members of the public expressed concern that Ellis faced hanging when Blakely had “used physical violence” and “led her a Cat and Dog existence”. Women articulated their own experiences of abuse. One stated: “Only a woman understands that has been in the same position like myself and millions of others beaten by our husbands”.
What the public response showed is that many people personally identified with Ellis and her experiences of abuse. There was also understanding that these experiences would have affected her behaviour. One man referred to the miscarriage Ellis had after being punched in the stomach and commented angrily, “all this counts for nothing and contributes nothing to a womans [sic] mind”.
Efforts to secure a reprieve from Lloyd George were unsuccessful. A reprieve would have meant being sentenced to prison rather than death. For her part, Ellis said she was “quite happy to die”, although was reported to have changed her mind the night before her execution.
In the intervening decades, Ellis has remained in the public imagination. Her compelling story has been adapted for film, dramas and documentaries. The conditional pardon has rewritten its ending by acknowledging that she should not have hanged.
The law has changed since Ellis’s trial in 1955. Legal partial defences to murder are better able to incorporate evidence related to experiences of gender-based violence and coercive control – although they have limitations.
Gender-based violence remains a serious problem that is widely experienced by women and girls in Britain and across the world. Ellis’s posthumous pardon is a long overdue recognition of the terrible impact of abuse, and relieves some of the burden carried by her descendants.
Lizzie Seal received funding from the British Academy.