Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK, continues to inspire a morbid fascination in the public imagination.
This week, ITV will premiere a new dramatisation of Ellis’s life, crime, and eventual execution. Lucy Boynton will play the central role in A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story. The four-part drama also stars Toby Jones, Toby Stephens, Juliet Stevenson, and Laurie Davidson as Ellis’s partner, David Blakely.
For those unfamiliar with the case, Ellis was a Welsh waitress and nude model-turned-Knightsbridge nightclub hostess. On 10 April 1955, she fatally shot Blakely, 25, outside of a Hampstead pub after suspecting him of being unfaithful.
Ellis was arrested and found guilty of murder at the Old Bailey before being jailed at HM Prison Holloway. By 13 July, she had been hanged to death.
Despite her shocking demise, Ellis had already lived a tragic life. Her sexually abusive father, Arthur, had impregnated his eldest daughter, Muriel, when she was only 14. Arthur began targeting Ruth when she turned 11, but she was protected by her older sister.
After dropping out of school, Ellis fell into a string of abusive relationships with unreliable men, two of whom got her pregnant. She was only 17 when she gave birth to her first child, a boy she named Andy.
As a single mother living in post-war London and struggling to make a living, Ellis began nude modelling, which led her to become a nightclub hostess at The Court Club in Hampstead.
By 1953, she was the manager of The Little Club in Knightsbridge, where she had become a well-known figure, and had a number of celebrity friends. Around this time, she became infatuated with the abusive Blakely, whom she met through Formula One driver Mike Hawthorn.
Blakey was a louche public schoolboy and keen amateur racing driver, who was prone to bouts of drinking and depression. Within weeks of meeting each other, Blakely had moved into Ellis’s flat above the nightclub, despite being engaged to another woman.
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That being said, their relationship wasn’t exclusive and they still saw other people, including Desmond Cussen, a former RAF pilot who Ellis had moved in with. Blakely’s actions towards Ellis, perhaps out of jealousy, became increasingly violent during this period, culminating in a miscarriage after he punched her in the stomach in January 1955.
On 10 April 1955, outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead, Ellis shot Blakely five times with a revolver. Ellis tried to fire a sixth shot, but the bullet ricocheted off the ground and hit a bystander, Gladys Yule, who lost the use of her right thumb because of the wound. She would later reveal that Cussen gave her the gun and taught her how to use it.
Ellis was said to have made no attempt to flee the crime scene and was promptly arrested. Ellis reportedly asked Blakely’s friend Clive Gunnell, who was with Blakely at the time, to call the police, saying: “I am guilty, I’m rather confused.”
Upon arrest, Ellis was taken to Hampstead police station but showed no signs of being under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Upon further medical examination, Ellis showed no signs of any mental illnesses.
Ellis was trialled at the Number One Court at the Old Bailey on 20 June 1955. Prosecutor Christmas Humphreys asked her just one question: “When you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?”
She replied: “It’s obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.” This confession was enough for the jury, who only spent 20 minutes deliberating, to find Ellis guilty and sentenced her to execution, which was the mandatory punishment for murder at the time.
Ellis was executed at 9:01am on 13 July 1955 by the famed hangman Albert Pierrepoint. As was customary with British executions, Ellis was buried in an unmarked grave in Holloway Prison. She was 28.
Her execution caused public outrage and contributed to growing support for the abolition of the death penalty, which was eventually suspended in 1965. A petition signed by 50,000 people called for Ellis’s pardon on the grounds she could have been tried for manslaughter, and was submitted to the Home Office. It was ultimately rejected. Further calls for her pardon, taking into account the abuse she had suffered, were brought forward in 2003 and 2007, but both failed to pass.
Although it took a decade, the Ellis case did much to advance the abolition of the death penalty in Britain, which finally came to pass in 1965.
Ellis’s legacy has been cemented in the world of film, television and theatre. Most famously, Miranda Richardson portrayed Ruth Ellis in Mike Newell’s moving Dance with a Stranger (1985). Richardson brilliantly captured Ellis’s brassy vitality and almost masochistic devotion to Blakely (Rupert Everett), a playboy who took everything for granted while she fought for every scrap.
Whether the new dramatisation, based on Carol Ann Lee’s 2012 book A Fine Day for a Hanging, will shed any new light on Ellis’s life or her case remains to be seen. Regardless, the cruelty and sad conclusion to her life leave Ellis with an inauspicious place in British history.
A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story begins on ITV1 and ITVX on 5 March.
