The Murder That Changed Britain

Ruth Ellis made history in 1955 when she was the last woman hanged in Britain. She shot and killed her abusive lover, the racing driver David Blakely, at point blank range on a spring evening outside a pub. What events led up to this seemingly cold-blooded moment? And is it right that Ellis was recently granted a pardon for this murder? Trigger warning: this episode contains themes of abuse which some may find upsetting. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  A glamorous nightclub hostess, a doomed love affair, multiple shots outside a London pub that led to the hangman's noose. Ruth Ellis's story has all the ingredients of a tabloid sensation. But behind the headlines lies something far darker. A life shaped by violence, abuse and impossible choices. Her execution in 1955 made her the last woman hanged in Britain and forced a nation to confront uncomfortable questions about justice, mercy, gender and the true cost of capital punishment. Welcome to After Dark.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  And I'm Antony.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Now, today's episode, we're going to be covering a story that has hit the headlines again. It's the story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. We're going to delve into the dark story behind her crime and ask if the death penalty should have been avoided. Now, a content warning before we begin. This story contains themes of murder, sexual assault, sexual abuse and alcohol abuse. It's a story that feels very much of its time. And as we'll find out, it's set amongst the grime and glamour of post-war Soho in London. Antony, we have spent a little bit of time researching this. It's been in the headlines again recently. Let's start the beginning of the story with Ruth Ellis's early life. What can you tell me about that?

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Well, she's not Ruth Ellis at this point. She's Ruth Nielsen. She's born on the 9th of October 1926 in Wales, as it might be. It is a very disturbing family environment that she is born into. She has a sister, Muriel, and her mother is Bertha, her father is Arthur. And Arthur is significantly abusive towards both girls, mostly throughout their childhood and teen years, to such an extent that Muriel conceives a child by Arthur. And Bertha presents that child as her own.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  So this is a very tragic, tragic beginning. Now, the police even get involved in this. This is something that's known to the authorities or something. I'm not sure how that gets to them, but certainly there is something. But Bertha says, no, this is, this is my child. And once Ruth turns 11, she becomes the target of her father's abuse as well. So this is something that is very much sitting within the history of this family, within the dynamics of this family. And it's something that neither sister really discuss openly. So, you know, that is, that, these are the foundations on which the Ruth Ellis history starts to unfold. So already we're off to a very, very tragic start.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so often in stories, in sort of, well, in true crime cases, there is a tendency, I suppose, to look at the childhood of a killer and to draw from that certain conclusions. But I think in this case, you know, it's, you cannot have this story without that information. And it is really harrowing. Ruth doesn't stay in Wales there, does she? She makes her way to London.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, the whole family, the whole family come to London. So we are talking, you know, World War II London now as well. And Ruth leaves school at 14. She becomes an usherette in the cinema, which I kind of love this idea because of how her life unfolds and that nightlife that she becomes such a part of as the, as the war continues in them, but more so when it ends.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  And it's sort of interesting that she finds a place for herself in that kind of, the darkness of nighttime and evening entertainment and, and all of that, given the sort of, you know, the, the home life that she is trying to escape.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  But also bear in mind, yes, the, the chaos and the tragedy and the hardship that she's experiencing because of the war, but also the opportunity that is, that's presenting for women, especially in London. So she is seeing examples of women occupying spaces that if it were not wartime, they probably wouldn't be occupying. And of course, those women are then expected to, you know, return back in the 50s to what they were doing prior to the war. And that's a very difficult transition. But she's seeing some form of agency here, which is making its way through the, the air raids, the blackouts and all of that wartime staple that we know about so well today. But she's also seeing this other opportunity that's happening there.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  And she sees that in nightlife. That's how she's really honing in on it.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  So she's, she's come from Wales into this very different world, as you say. And it's a city in the early 20th century that is changing enormously, particularly for women. When she's in London, she, she becomes friends with a, a young girl called Edna Turvey, doesn't she? What's that relationship like? And I'm particularly interested in that, thinking about, you know, the claustrophobia of her domestic setting and, and finding a relationship outside of that.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Edna is in a relationship with Ruth's brother Julian.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Yes, okay.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, the, the ties start to get very difficult to keep up with sometimes.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Well, because in this family, the, the usual boundaries are broken.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. And exactly that, when I was looking into this earlier part of the life, I actually found it really difficult to keep the, the, the things in line because that's such a good, I hadn't really understood why I was finding it difficult. Yeah. And I was like, her brother and then a son and then all of this. And I'm like, oh gosh, I'm really kind of confused about what the dynamics are. Yeah, that's, that's why. And Ruth moves in with Edna, but equally, Arthur, the father, is still very present and the abuse continues because remember Ruth is only 14 at this time. So this is something that, again, that the, the boundaries of, of proper conduct are porous in this family dynamic.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  So we have sister-in-laws, unofficial sister-in-laws, living together, but an abusive father is still pushing through those boundaries somehow. She does go back to the family home, the, the London family home sometimes. So it's really peripatetic emotionally, if not necessarily geographically. And that we do, we do know that by 1944, Ruth has become pregnant by a married Canadian soldier. So she's 18. So, you know, she has lived a lot of a life by the time she reaches 18 in 1944. And of course, the war is raging.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  And it's interesting, you know, obviously within the Second War, there was a certain sort of liberalness, I suppose, in terms of relationships between men and women, because, you know, war was going on and you might die in an air raid or be asked to go and fight tomorrow. So, you know, it's not unusual for a woman to become pregnant by a married soldier, particularly a soldier who's come from Canada or the US or whatever, you know, in this moment. But, but thinking about Ruth specifically, how she is kind of involved in, like you say, the nightlife of London and the kind of, the kind of life she's maybe seeking for herself and the opportunities that are open to her and also the limitations that, that come with just her life experience so far.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  And the pregnancy obviously is, is one of those potentially.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Then on the 15th of September, she gives birth to a son named Claire Andrea or Andy Nielsen. And the, the name might sound unusual. And again, it's one of those things that I was having trouble linking up because she also goes on to have a daughter later, but we will talk about that, about when everything, all the, getting all these ducks in a row, because that sounds like a girl's name, but actually he's called after his Canadian father. So they really wanted to have, she really wanted to have that linked to the, to who the father was. So, yeah, she's had, by, what is she now? Yeah, 18. She's, she's a mother.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  And obviously the Canadian father, Canadian Claire, is married, as we know. He initially sends money for the child, but that's not going to last as an arrangement.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  I think it lasts for about a year. And then after that, she's on her own.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  So she's 18, she has a son, she has no support from the father after a certain amount of time. Her living arrangements are dangerous, oppressive. Then she's really slipping further into the nightlife of Soho, isn't she? This is where she finds opportunity, reprieve, some world beyond really the horror of her own situation.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. It's also where she starts to invent what we will come to know as Ruth Ellis. And I think that's really interesting in this history and sometimes a little bit too easily overlooked. So in post-World War II, she's entering into the nightclub scene initially. This is exposing her to some of London's well-heeled, who are now, you know, thinking it's time to throw off the shackles of wartime, although there was plenty of partying happening in wartime too. But it is a new phase that London makes itself into, or at least Soho, Soho nightlife does. And what Ruth does at this point, she becomes very conscious of her class background.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  And one of the things that others will later describe is how she she invents this cut glass English accent, upper class English accent.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Oh, that's so interesting.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Isn't it? By which to ingratiate herself into that part of society so that when they're coming into those nightclubs and she's hosting them, because she's often a hostess in in those places, she is a little bit more on par with them, but they never really see her as being, and they often comment, and we'll see this later on, that when she loses her temper, the accent slips.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Her relaxing comes up. That's so interesting. And I suppose, you know, you think about the way that the Second World War turned the world on its head, quite literally, and, you know, all of the kind of social norms, the rules, you know, disintegrated to a certain extent in Britain, certainly in terms of its nightlife in London, and that there was opportunity to rise above your own circumstances or maybe reinvent yourself within the chaos of what was going on. And it's interesting that this continues for Ruth after the war, but that, I don't know, there's a sort of uneasiness about it in this moment already, the sort of the fakery is, is something uncanny about it.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And the foundations are weak, right?

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  So it feels like even she must have felt quite panicky at times, despite the fact, I will point out, so not only is she doing this hostessing work in Soho, she's she's also working as a nude model, and she's also working as, we think, occasionally an escort. Well, we're pretty sure occasionally an escort. Maybe at times there's been insinuations, but again, we have to take that with a pinch of salt because we know how these sources go after the fact. And most of what we know about Ruth comes out after the fact. People that did know her talked about the fact that she may have worked in sex work at times, depending on where she was in her life and what was going on. She worked at the Court Club, but even within that, she's finding that her her managers

• 12:58Speaker 01

  are blackmailing her to sleep with him, so it's exploitative.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  This is a dangerous world for women.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  It's a dangerous world for women. And but and yet, I suppose one of the things to bear in mind, right, is within the context of the world itself, she does carve a path, and I kind of want to give her that. It's not necessarily always on her terms, but in terms of the availability that that is there for her, the boundaries that are available for her to to cope through.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  She survives.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  She's surviving, and at times she's even thriving because, you know, in the, you get accounts of her that in those nightclubs atmospheres, she's kind of the queen of the the place, you know what I mean? She's she is ruined. People know her, she's starting to get a bit of a profile within this nightclub scene. But again, at around this time, we know that she becomes pregnant by a client and and she has an abortion. And so it's, again, this word, peripatetic, keeps coming back. It's like, oh, damn, we're over here, we're doing this, we're trying to survive, we're eking out a living. And and it's, there's a lot going on for Ruth.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  And I suppose it says so much about the position of of women post Second World War, right, that we're, you know, we're not into the 1960s and the contraceptive pill and women's liberation in this moment. However, there has been some empowerment through the Second World War and women doing the jobs that men away fighting would ordinarily have done, which was, of course, the same in in the First World War. But now there's a there's a sort of strange interim period in a way where there is some opportunity, you can make something of yourself, albeit in a slightly seedy underworld here in Soho, but there are not the protections in place. Your manager, your boss can still abuse you, put pressure on you, behave in ways that are inappropriate or criminal.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  You do not have access to women's healthcare, so things like pregnancy that's unwanted and access to abortion, you know, these are all issues that are going to come up in this world that she's living in specifically, but for women more generally in this society.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this is, I think this is the key point, women in this society. And Ruth Ellis has recently, we're recording this in July 2026, and just this month, Ruth Ellis's case has been back in the in the headlines again, because this, well, we'll we'll leave that just for a second in case you're a less familiar one, but we'll come back to it at the end, but she's she's basically been back in the headlines. And what I want us to remember as we go through this, that our job as historians is to very much place her in her time. And even within her time, the abuse and the neglect and the the the world that she's having to traverse.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  It's enormous.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Is difficult, to say the least. But I think Ruth is most tragic, most valuable and most accomplished in her own time and less so in ours. So when we try to drag her into 2026, I think something odd happens where, you know, I always say this, and I know it's boring and I'm sorry, but where we start to make her work for us.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Rather than us working for her, and I think it should always be that way around.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Like you always, you say, you know, she doesn't owe us anything, and we we owe it to anyone in the past to to put them into the context and to understand that. So we we know that she becomes pregnant and that she has an abortion. We know that potentially she is sometimes engaged in sex work, possibly.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  She's modeling, she's working as a hostess, sometimes as an escort, very much a peripatetic life in in so many ways. The next big moment for her, I suppose, comes in November 1950, when she marries George Ellis. Tell me about how they meet, what's that relationship look like? Has she finally found some happiness and stability?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's a turning point, it's a potential turning point, isn't it? Because, and this is, of course, where Ruth Ellis comes into the picture, this is the surname that will come to define her, even though it's not.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Which is interesting because she's been kind of defining herself.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  So far and inventing these different versions of herself.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Which which is interesting, right? Because you know that thing about respectability, that, you know, she invents this accent. Well, she marries George, and I think, what is he, 41 or something? Yeah, he's he's older than she is, and this is in 1950. And so he's a middle class dentist, dental surgeon.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Is she having to do that fake accent the entire time?

• 17:21Speaker 01

  She's not having to in that other people expect her to, but she is doing it. She, by this point, she is doing it.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  I mean, in terms of meeting George and then, oh, you've married him, like, that's like telling a lie on a first date and then.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I will say, she's not lying about her background in that her parents are still her parents, she's, that's, that's who it is. But at the same time, if you were to meet her and just interact with her.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  She might not present as being from that background.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so George was married and divorced, he already has two sons, so he's had this kind of other life. And so there's a world here where you might think, right, she can leave the nightclub scene, which she does initially, she can have this respectable, upper middle class life with this dental surgeon in London, but as so often happens in Ruth's history, George proves violent, destructive, and he's an alcoholic. So she is put into this situation where there is, it's another terrible meeting of things that come together and then another bad luck turn, to say the very least, I mean, that's underplaying it.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  She does become pregnant, she has a child, Georgina, and it is at this point that the marriage, a year later, within 18 months, goes sour because George doesn't believe that the child is his.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, Ruth's life in this moment is really interesting, that he he thinks that she's having multiple affairs, but also in 1951, when she's four months pregnant, she's in a film.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, Lady Godiva rides again or something, isn't it?

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Now, listen, I have never heard of it, but yeah.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  But what a, you know, again, speaking to this kind of opportunity, this world of opportunity for women, and, you know, she's on the edge of quite glamorous existence, but on the seedier side of it.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And again, I wonder if, in terms of those upper middle class sensibilities of a dental surgeon, whether, you know, I don't know what her role was in that film necessarily, but she's uncredited, I know that, so it's not a huge role.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  She's not Lady Godiva.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  No, no, no. But it might not quite meet the standards of what that upper middle class life expects.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Well, I wonder, you know, 1951, if you would want your wife to be in a film, you know.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  At all, even as Lady Godiva.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I don't think there's anything particularly respectable about that for this, as you say, kind of middle class dentist wife. And I wonder if there's a sort of, you know, presumably her and George met through the Soho night scene, I assume.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  So, but, you know, presumably there is an expectation from George that she will step back from that world and be his wife and and, you know, that's, and and also, I suppose, you know, for a lot of women in this period, there was a a feeling that once you were married, that was, especially if you'd come from a difficult background or, you know, in Ruth's case, a really abusive, diabolical situation, that marriage would be a sanctuary for you, there would be, you know, oh, thank God, okay, I've made it. And obviously, that that isn't the case with George. But I wonder if for both of them, there was a sense of a fresh start, expectations on both sides, that neither of them actually met, and that's not to place blame on Ruth, but but to say in terms of what they were hoping from this relationship doesn't materialise

• 20:30Speaker 00

  for either of them, and therefore it is just doomed from the beginning.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  I think it is doomed from the beginning. I don't know, it's it's over very quickly because they do get divorced after the birth of of Georgina. And remind me to come back to the children at the end because their lives are equally tragic.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  I've lost track slightly, so she's got Claire.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  She's got the boy.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Who is the Canadian soldier's son.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  And now she's got Georgina with George.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  So she's got two children.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Two children, okay.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  By 1951.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  So divorce from George, not that he's offering her much in the way of comfort or protection, but now she is on her own again, she has two children to support, presumably she can't go back to her parents' house.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  She does.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, she, you know, this is one of those things where we we fail to understand the dynamics, I think.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  From a modern perspective, this feels completely unfathomable.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, she goes back to her, initially, she goes back to her parents' house with the children, and she, she doesn't always hold on to the children, it's probably worth saying, for later on in this this story, but for now, and she's there. But then she she's also now potentially returning to sex work to get herself back on her feet, and then she returns to London nightlife, and she she finds herself in the little club, and this is, I think, we're 1953 now, and this is where this history starts to coalesce around what we we know a little bit more about her.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Okay, we're going to take a little break now, and we're going to go back into Soho and that underworld at night.

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• 23:55Speaker 00

  Okay, so you mentioned the little club in Knightsbridge that Ruth is involved in. She becomes the manager there, doesn't she?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  She does, and she's very proud of being the manager there.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, that's a step up from, you know, potentially the sex work that she's, that she's doing, the modeling, even all of that stuff that she's done before, which is very peripatetic, as you say, very kind of temporary. It's a means to an end, all of that, you know, it's not necessarily offering stability. How much she enjoys any of it, you know, is, it's, we can't possibly define that. But I think this, on paper at least, offers her something in terms of more permanence.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's, again, there are times when opportunity presents itself with Ruth and you kind of go, oh, and then it's like, oh, no, not again. But anyway, so she has this job, she is the manager, and this is where she meets, prepare yourself for this name, David Moffat Drummond Blakely.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  He's posh.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  He's posh, and he's a racing car driver, he's privately educated, and he is an absolute, listen, there's no, he's a dickhead. Like, he's a dickhead and he's horrible to her and he, but they are, I was going to say, but they are in love, interesting.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  They're hot and heavy.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  They're hot and heavy, big, big time. She continuously expresses her, her love for him, like, she's absolutely besotted by him.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  And again, you know, it's this kind of breaking down the boundaries between the social classes in this part of London, in this nightlife scene, that she, you know, she wouldn't have met him any other way. That this is, you know, this is the way that you would come into contact with people like this of this social class. So he's not, he's not a good person?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I suppose when we look for black and white, if we want to do context, and if Ruth's context is important in what she later does, David's father had a murder trial of his own, where he had had an affair with this woman. She got pregnant, he helped her get an abortion, and she died because of the state of female healthcare. And he had, and he was, but he got off and then the family split up. So, you know, it's not exactly the most stable background there either, despite the class difference.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, interesting. And we have history repeating itself here because Ruth becomes pregnant with his child and has an abortion again.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yes, and, you know, he's, he's a heavy drinker. He is also physically abusive. It's very, very intense from her perspective. He flits in and out, he can be intense, but he can also flit in and out. And we also have, she does.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  And he has the privilege to do that, whereas she doesn't necessarily.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  He may not have the money to back it up, mind, but he still has that social privilege. And a lot of his, you know, we're talking about, again, even a notch above upper middle class with this, where his social circle is well-educated, Erudite. He's had relationships with some of them already, so when he's introducing them to Ruth, which he does, by the way, they don't accept her. They know she's, she's acting up and putting on this voice. And it's through, through their descriptions that we see that that accent drops at times. And so, yeah, it's not.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  It's very uncomfortable history, isn't it?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  It is, yeah, the whole thing.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  So presumably that relationship doesn't last.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  No, it does, but it's interrupted, shall we say. So David, keep David there, David's, David's going to keep going, and he's going to become absolutely pivotal in this.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  He's still in the driving seat.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Very good. But then we have Desmond, Desmond's cousin, and Desmond is one of the people that she meets at the little club. And he is a former RAF pilot, he has flown for the Lancaster bombers. He is somebody who was a very dynamic, you know, person in the war, and now his, his life has changed a little bit.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  This is so fascinating because, you know, it's kind of inevitable, I suppose, but the men in her life, I'm thinking about George, the husband, who's no more the husband. And then we've got what's called David, and now Desmond. They're sort of snapshots of different kinds of male experience in this moment as well, right? Like the racing car driver, the, the posh boy who's doing something a bit thrilling, you know, it's, it's very kind of fashionable in that moment. We've got a man, Desmond, who's served as a pilot in the Second World War and is now kind of on the way down after that, you know, kind of the, the excitement and glamour, I suppose, of a, of a job like that. So we have these kind of, yeah, like snapshots into the male experience in mid 20th century.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Desmond becomes a little obsessed with Ruth. You'll find two very different counter, not counter, but like tension-filled accounts of their relationship. One, which is very steady in the idea that he paid for her time and that she was an escort for him. And another in that he was absolutely in love with her. She wasn't in love with him, but was very loyal to him, didn't think he was a bad person, some say would have used him for, for certain things that she needed. He's certainly there in the background the entire time that the more volatile stuff with David Blakely is going on. And she's still, as I say, very much in that relationship with him as well.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  And it does turn really violent, doesn't it?

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Again, as I've, as I've said, like, as soon as he is drinking, as Blakely is drinking, he gets quite violent. It happens more than once, but there is one occasion on which we find out later.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  This is awful.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  That, yeah, that during an argument, he causes her to miscarry through physical violence. So she has become pregnant again with David, we think, and, and yeah, he causes miscarriage. So, you know, it is, it's, two things are happening. She is managing to get a foothold, although precarious. People know her, she's popular.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  There is opportunity, but also no protection for women.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  No, no, especially not this woman of this class.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly, and despite her efforts to reinvent herself again and again, there is, her circumstances trap her. And there's, there's just some kind of grim, it almost feels like inevitability. And I say that completely not placing blame at her door. But there is this kind of repetition, this cycle of circumstances that finds her again and again. And it's, you know, partly because of where she is in the world, in terms of her social class, in terms of the experiences that she's had, in terms of her role in Soho. The taking up of certain opportunities there in order to survive, in order to try and experience some glamour, to try and find some joy as well, you know, all of these

• 30:57Speaker 00

  things. It's, I mean, it's just sort of relentlessly bleak. Does, i- is it overwhelming for Ruth in this moment, the chaos of her life?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, she's very devoted to David. So he proposes to her and she says that she will marry him and she, that's what she wants. And we're going to see this devotion to David really linger. But there's also this thing in the back of her mind that's infuriating her in that she has suspicions and well-founded suspicions. Well, David was engaged to somebody else, somebody far more suitable class-wise to his family. And that breaks off, or, or, or does it, he says it does, but anyway. And she, he proposes to her very kind of unofficially and she says yes. But there is always this doubt in her mind that he's with other women and the likelihood is that he's, and she becomes very suspicious of, of Ant and Carol

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Findletter, because Carol has had a relationship with David in the past.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  So these are friends.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  These are friends. Yeah, sorry, I'm introducing new people. But we'll, and we'll come to them in a minute. But they're posh and they're stuck up. They make her feel uncomfortable. And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, yes, it's tumultuous, but David is the North Star despite the abuse. He's guiding her through it.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's perhaps kind of difficult to square that as a modern audience, looking at that now, you know, it's, it's kind of hard to understand. From a modern standpoint, the, our initial reaction is to be like, just walk away. But of course, that's not, that's not how she feels. That's not an option for her. There is a context to this that we need to bear in mind. With that in mind, let's move to the night of the murder that is going to shape her life and her fate. The 10th of April, 1955, it's Easter Sunday. Talk us through the events.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  So this is what we have pieced together, because even when she was arrested, and she's arrested immediately after the murder, the information is very piecemeal. She purposely withholds things, but this is what we've cobbled together over the decades. She takes a taxi from 20 Goodwood Court, Devonshire Street, where she is living with Desmond. So Desmond's, Desmond Cousins.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  So she's living with Desmond despite the potential engagement to Blakely?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the living arrangement with Desmond, remember, is often paid for. So it's not her home necessarily, because she also has a place where, above work, where she lives with David. Home for Ruth is a movable feast.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  Well, domesticity for her has been inconsistent and dangerous. And yes, okay.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, she doesn't have that language really, does she?

• 33:40Speaker 00

  She's leaving 20 Goodwood Place.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Which is the, the apartment or building that she, in which she sees Desmond. She stays there sometimes.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Is Desmond with her?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  We don't know. Some people say yes, some people say no. We'll come back to that once we kind of get to the end of this story.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Okay. Cause there's a suggestion that he owns a taxi cab.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  He definitely does.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  And she's getting a taxi. He doesn't drive it as a professional taxi driver. He just owns, a bit like Phoebe in Friends, he just has a taxi.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh my God, what a weird comparison, but yes.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Yes, sorry.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  He doesn't use it as a taxi, he's not a taxi driver, but he does have a taxi. So there is a world, and, and the, the link will become even more clear now in a minute, but.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  Okay, so there's a question mark.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't know if he's with her or how involved he becomes in the next steps, but certainly Blakely has gone, because they've had a bus stop, and Blakely has gone to stay with Ant and Carol. And remember, Ruth is suspicious of Carol anyway, and, and his involvement with her.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  So he's gone to their house?

• 34:37Speaker 01

  They're staying in Hampstead, they live in Hampstead.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  Of course they do.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  And yes, so that's where he goes. Ruth arrives.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  In Hampstead.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  In Hampstead, sees him, sees David, because she, she knows where the Findletters live, by the way, she's been to that house before. So she knows where it lives. He sees her, but he, he does a runner, he's like, I'm not dealing with this tonight. I'm, you know, I'm going out. So he goes to the Magdala pub, which is local to Hampstead. And he, he.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Is that still there?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yes, that is still there. But they go to, they, he goes there in his car, by the way, this is a different time, the, the, the driving rules are not the same.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  That's the least shocking thing of this entire history.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  She walks and she follows the car there, but she's already been dropped off, remember?

• 35:23Speaker 00

  And Hampstead is not a big place as well that you can walk in.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  It's a village of century. She sees Blake's, Blakely's car outside. We are now at about 9:30 PM, and she sees Blakely and his friend Clive Gunnell are leaving the pub. Ellis tries to get their attention. Well, she tries to get Blakely's attention. Again, they kind of ignore her. Now he's looking for his car keys. As he's fumbling for those, Ruth takes a pistol and she shoots him. She uses a 38 caliber Smith and Wesson Victory model revolver. She pulls it from her handbag. There is dispute. If you look this up online, you'll see all kinds of different numbers of shots that she, she sent. We're going with somewhere between four and six. You'll hear three.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  There are several shots.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  There are several shots. She fires, six in total, but the first missed, so other people say five shots. Anyway, look, there are a lot of shots. It is the second shot that catches David, that knocks him to the ground. And after that, then she, she probably would have been enough to kill him. She walks up to David, stands over him and fires three more bullets into him. And she is so close to him at this point that there are gunpowder burns on his skin. So that's how close.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  So the gun has been fired very close to his body.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then the, the, the next shot, so the sixth one, ricochets off, I think there's still, yeah, that, the, the pub is still there, because I think the bullet mark that ricochets off the wall is in one of the tiles, you know, those pub tiles that are outside?

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Is it still?

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Not the actual bullet, but the mark, and then hits somebody else.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  The bullet hits a woman standing, just a bystander, right?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Gladys Yule, who loses the, the use of her right thumb, which is such a random little side note to this story.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  Such a weird anecdote to be able to tell for the rest of your life, that you were here in this scenario and.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Ruth Ellis shot me and I survived.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  You know?

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Very weird.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Very weird.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  So David is multiple injuries, dead at the scene?

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yes, and an off-duty policeman arrests her, so.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  There's always an off-duty policeman in stories.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Isn't there in Hampstead, I guess, maybe, I don't know, but like, yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  It's a really shocking scene. And it's, it's funny as well, the sort of, the contrast for, for anyone, you know, who, Soho is, you know, an area in London that is known for its nightlife and its glamour, particularly in that moment. And then Hampstead is, as Anthony says, it's, it's like a village on the edge of the city in North London. And it's sleepy, expensive, it's all 18th century cottages, really. It's on Hampstead Heath, the open bit of land. It's, it's very sort of beautiful, upper-middle-class place, really. So you have that interesting contrast between that kind of the riotous nightlife and the sort of the grime and, you know, the mixing of the classes. And then Hampstead Heath is not that. So you have that. But the, the obvious thing to ask, I suppose, is where

• 38:15Speaker 00

  did she get the gun? You know, we are, we are in 19, what year is this? 1955. This is Britain, not America. What's going on? Is it presumably unusual for a woman to have a pistol in her handbag?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I suppose one of the things that occurred to me during this is, I wonder how unusual it was to have a pistol during World War Two, which I know we're not in right now.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  So I know that there's a lot of service pistols from the First and the Second World War that are brought back by servicemen that then are either kept by them when they should be handed back in.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Recalled, yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  But also that then end up circulating in the criminal underworld. And there's a lot of crimes, particularly armed robberies, in the following decades that involve service rifles, a service pistol, sorry, from the Second World War in particular. So you do see them crop up in crimes. So I wonder if, you know, that's, is this the kind of gun? Do we know? Is this?

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Well, we don't know that it's a service gun specifically, but we think, well, initially when she's arrested, she says, I was given this gun in my nightlife role as a form of security. But when they looked into that, it just didn't add up. The facts weren't there to back that up. So what they, what they now know is that it was most likely that Desmond Cousins gave her that gun, so the former RAF pilot man who.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  That makes sense.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Right. So bear in mind the question you asked earlier about, is he with her? In terms of, of did he come in the taxi? If he did drive her in the taxi, and people say he did, absolutely. If he did give her the gun, so there's a, that's a picture that's forming there. But we think it was his gun, but we're not necessarily sure if he gave it to her. But then there's another anecdotal thing that they had stopped in a forest on the way there, and he had helped her to learn how to shoot.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  So she tried to protect Desmond, but, you know, i- it is a complex relationship triangle anyway. And so there's lots that get, get involved there. But people are pretty confident that Desmond was more involved than the trial was able to prove he was.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  So there are questions about this. And I suppose the other question is about whether or not this was a premeditated situation, whether, you know, it's a crime of passion in the moment that she draws the gun out. But the fact that she has the gun in her purse in the first place, you know, is, is significant here. We're going to take a break. And then when we come back, we're going to talk about her arrest and the trial.

• 40:52Speaker 03

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• 42:01Speaker 00

  Okay, so you mentioned there's an off-duty policeman on the scene pretty quickly. Ruth is arrested. How is she in this moment? Is she denying that she's done it? Is she in shock? Is she, standing over the body, triumphant? What's the situation?

• 42:20Speaker 01

  She's bizarrely stoic. That would lend itself to traumatised, in shock, but also could read as quite cold and withdrawn as well. And there are times when people say all of those things about her in the coming weeks and months, because obviously this is going to turn into a big media trial. But certainly, shock is involved. She asked Clive.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  Clive's the friend that David was with in the pub.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  She said, I'm paraphrasing here, but it was like, "Are you going to call the police?" And some people...

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Some people have been like, "That was a prompt to him." And other people have said that she was in such shock that she was like, "Oh, what happens now?" You know what I mean? Like, she couldn't quite understand what was happening next. So it all depends on your interpretation of what her mind frame might have been at that time. But certainly, there is an off-duty police officer who's there, as I said. He arrests her, and she is then detained. And she appears at the magistrate court on the 16th of April. And it's determined that she's of sound mind. So that's one way in which she could escape. By the way, death penalty is the ultimate price that we might pay here. But I think there are four iterations for murder where you can not get the death penalty and just be in prison for life.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Lunacy is one of them, as they would have termed it. Provocation is another. There are other factors that can come in.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Okay. So there are options here for her defence.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know she killed him. That's not up for question. When she is questioned initially, she's like, "I am guilty. I'm a little confused."

• 43:57Speaker 00

  That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, obviously, again, we're not psychologists, but I just wonder, thinking about the confusion that she faces and this slightly cold reaction that some people accuse her of having, or describe her as having, that this is someone who has, in her life experiences, it's really hard to add it all up in your mind and to contemplate it. But this is someone who, from an early age, has faced abuse of all kinds. And I just wonder if the apparent coolness is a survival mechanism, if it's part of her usual response that she's learned from childhood, really.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  And I wonder if that's what we're seeing in this moment, the self-removal from the situation, almost?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  I'm always reminded, just on that point, of the conversation that we had with Professor David Wilson, the criminologist, who a lot of you might know from television appearances in the UK, when he said, "We need to stop trying to rationalise killings sometimes, because the whole point is that we can't, we should never be able to reach a point of understanding of such an extreme action." And that often, the people who commit those crimes themselves, it either happens in a moment of passion, and this is suggested in this case, too, that this is a crime of passion. We always want to understand, don't we, and find that definitive thing? Why did this happen?

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Yes. And that isn't necessarily an option for us here. So she's arrested. She says that she's guilty, but that she's confused. It's going to go to trial. And as you say, this is a newspaper frenzy. This story has so many elements that would be delicious to the press in this moment. The seedy Soho nightlife, the femme fatale-type figure, the pistol being drawn out of a handbag, the various lovers, all of this is going to just feed the media. What is the initial portrayal of her to the public?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  You can imagine what the initial portrayal is. So Ruth is very glamorous, very well-dressed, white blonde hair. We all know what Ruth Ellis still looks like to this very day. Really arch eyebrows, black eyebrows, beautiful white skin, red lip. And she lends herself so easily to this narrative in the press of a femme fatale.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  And then, of course, when we start putting together this, "Oh, it's a racing driver. Oh, there's London nightlife attached to this."

• 46:30Speaker 00

  There's so much glamour, yeah.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  There's story after story after story. And of course, the class element, the working-class mannequin. They refer to a model often as an ash blonde.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we have some headlines here. The Bradford Observer shouts with an exclamation mark, "Model charged with murder." Nice bit of alliteration there, but there's, again, the sort of putting her into these different boxes. The Daily Mirror, classy as always, goes with, "She was a leading mannequin. He was a crack car racing driver. Ash blonde Ruth, a former West End club manageress." Like, it's so salacious. So we have the media narrative that's building up. We've got the glamorous Ruth. We've got the dashing racecar driver David, who's been murdered. And then, of course, in reality, we have poor Desmond. Well, poor Desmond, is he involved?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Is he?

• 47:23Speaker 00

  He is interviewed as part of the trial. He has to give his statement. What's the version of events that he gives? Because presumably, if he was involved, he doesn't want to go down for this.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  I love the way you just phrased that. And actually, it really helps tell the story. What is the version of events? And the version of events that comes to us from Desmond via Ruth's solicitor.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  So this is how we know this, or this is how we have this information, or, as you said, this is a version of events, is that Desmond gave her the gun.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Okay, so hold on. So Ruth's defence lawyer, of course, he's going to go after Desmond to try and lessen the blow to Ruth.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. This would mean that she didn't...

• 48:11Speaker 00

  And this isn't to say that Desmond didn't do what we're about to say, but...

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Okay, that's the context. Go on.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Yep, that he gave her the gun. He gave her the ammunition. He drove her there, and on the way, with her son in the car, by the way. And on the way there, they stopped in this forest that I mentioned and did target practice before she was to go to actually shoot Blakely. And then, they dropped Ruth's son back to her flat. So think about all those different houses we're talking about there. There's Ruth's flat, Desmond's flat. Blakely usually comes to Ruth's flat, because that's just the arrangement.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  And once again, in Ruth's story, there's a poor child at the centre of all this horror.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Yep. But that doesn't make it to the trial. Desmond is more protected than that. And she goes to trial on the 20th of June 1955, and it's at the Number One Court in the Old Bailey.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  There's a really great book, I think we've probably mentioned this before, which I think is just called Number One Court, The Old Bailey, maybe? And it's about the biggest trials in British history that have happened in that room. And I'm pretty sure Ruth Ellis's trial is one of the last chapters in that.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Right, okay.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  I think. But I read it a long time ago, but it's great. I'd really recommend that.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll look that up. That sounds good.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  It's very good. And every chapter is a different trial and how it's changed Britain, changed the law. And yeah, it's great. Anyway, so she goes to trial. I need to just, for a second, remark on the fact that Desmond is not called as a witness and mentioned in the trial. Like, he is a lover of Ruth. The nature of that relationship is somewhat unclear. There's a question over, I mean, Ruth is saying, or at least her solicitor's saying, he provided her with the weapon, the ammunition, taught her how to fire the gun, and drove her to the crime scene.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  There are times when Ruth herself is not saying that, just to say, just to point it. But there's also a world where she's protecting him.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  Yes, but also, her solicitor is putting that on the record, and he's still not.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  He doesn't put it on the record.

• 50:10Speaker 00

  The version of events that the solicitor gathers is that Desmond is involved, and that he doesn't put it on the record.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  He releases it afterwards, and there's a world in which he allows Ruth to perjure herself. He comes in for a lot of flak because he betrays her client confidentiality. He betrays that and tries to leak this information. The barrister is kind of outraged, because he doesn't stand up in court, by the way, this particular solicitor. It's a barrister that does that. And so, yeah, it's messy.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Ruth doesn't want that. She's saying, potentially, that Desmond was involved. She doesn't want that out there. She wants to protect him. It's probably the likely...

• 50:45Speaker 01

  I think that's...

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Version of events, maybe?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, in terms of putting all the different things together. But here's the other thing. It turns out that Ruth's defence is probably being paid for by a newspaper. And so this guy appears, this solicitor that comes to her, is probably getting some of that money.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  In the pay.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's all a bit messy.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  It's a mess. Let's imagine the space of Number One, The Old Bailey. It's intimidating, it's iconic, it's the home to, as I've said, the huge trials that have changed Britain already and will continue to do that throughout the 20th century. It's oppressive, important.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Space, the actual architecture of it and what it would feel like to stand in that room. Ruth entering that space on trial, we think about the sort of media storm, the betrayals that were in the media. How does she appear? How does she present herself? Because she, you know, she's been the mistress really of self-presentation and self-invention all this time. And, you know, the murder trial is another stage for her and she's fighting for her life potentially here. How does she appear?

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Ruth, from most of the time since she's arrested, is very resigned. And there are two different theories about this. A, she's again, so traumatised from her entire life that she has no

• 52:12Speaker 00

  She's just given up.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  She's just like, well, this is gonna go bad. Everything goes bad. The other way of thinking about it is that she killed David, knowing that she'd be arrested. Are you not gonna call the police, as she says, she'd be arrested, go to trial, and she'd be hanged. Her and David would be together in the next life.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Now, look, this is all pop psychology interpretations on both sides of that argument that come out during and after the trial.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  But there is that kind of intensity to their relationship potentially.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  She never denies anything. She's like, as we're about to see, like, there's a one point at which the prosecutor, Christmas Humphries, by the way, what a name, yeah. He says, "You fired the revolver close range into the body of David Blakely. What did you intend to do? It is obvious that when I shot him, I intended to kill him."

• 53:03Speaker 00

  Wow, to the point, you know, wow, okay.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  And she remains like that quite a lot. There's a few times during her incarceration before the trial that she starts to mention Desmond and like, oh, there might have been something else going on. And I think the family dynamic might present itself. And I mean, that in terms of all her different iterations of family and that the solicitor is trying to get that to come to the fore. But she's very like focused on

• 53:27Speaker 00

  She's like, I killed him.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  I killed him. What are you talking to me about? And I'm perfectly sane. Like, I knew what was going on here. But again, nowadays, we talk about that in terms of her trauma and what else. But in the context of the time, people were definitely. I think the only time she gets a little bit upset is when she starts talking about David on the stand. And I think, so in, there's a TV show called A Cruel Love about this. It's recent and it's really good. And the guy who plays the judge in the case is Nigel Havers. And Nigel Havers' grandfather was the actual judge in the actual trial.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  No way. Oh, my God.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Anyway, they say, like, you know, he can take a seat. And she's like, no, no, you sit down. I've got my shit together again now. I got upset there for a second, but I'm back on it. So she's utterly traumatised, very, very stoic and looking down the barrel of a gun knowingly, or a combination of all of those things, maybe, who knows?

• 54:25Speaker 00

  So she's presenting a very simple narrative to the jury and to the court, which is, I did it. I'm guilty. That's it. The jury really do lean into that. They accept this version, don't they? I mean, 20 minutes?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  20 minutes. In the 1950s, that's 18th century deliberation time.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's presumably unusual in this moment.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, they were shocked at how quickly this came back. And by the way, this is a big trial by now. Like, media's, as we said, all over this. So everyone's waiting for this verdict. But the jury just didn't think there was anything to. And the judge advised them, the only thing to do is find her guilty. And they did. And she was sentenced to death.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  So she's taken from the Old Bailey and she's incarcerated in Holloway Prison. And almost immediately, there is a campaign for her reprieve, right?

• 55:20Speaker 01

  She doesn't want it.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  She has no part in it. She's

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Or no interest in it.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  But the public are like

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's part of a much larger. In research for this, I watched a Pathé newsreel of this, the day before she was hanged, I think. And it's so interesting to see. There are people out in the street with placards. There's a lot of conversation around the death penalty now anyway. So we're coming to what will be a pinnacle of this either way. And they're gonna take governmental steps on this to eradicate the death penalty. But it's still here right now and it's still a legitimate form of punishment. But she doesn't want this. And so this then goes the whole way up to the Home Secretary. So the very, essentially, the very top of government.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a question now?

• 56:06Speaker 00

  You can.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Who is the Home Secretary at this time?

• 56:09Speaker 00

  It is Lloyd George. But I only know that because it's in my notes.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Well, do you want to know?

• 56:15Speaker 00

  That's surprising.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Well, hold on now. He says no. He says that she has to be killed. This is the law and she has to be killed. Who is Lloyd George's, we know it's said about Nigel Havers, who is Lloyd George's great-great-grandson?

• 56:29Speaker 00

  Oh, I know this. It's the big boss man. It's Dan Snow.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  What an ugly Dan Snow. We're making all the connections on this podcast today.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Wow, that's, yeah, wow.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  So, you know, we have, he declines the request. But he declines the request within the parameters of what is law at that time. You know, this is, again, what I said at the start of this thing. We are in a specific time period here. So we have to remember that.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, also, what's the argument for the reprieve? Because, I mean, I know, obviously, her life is awful and dark and horrible. But is it not a clean-cut situation that she takes the gun and shoots him?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  I tend to agree with you. Listen, I'm not saying I agree with the death penalty. I don't, actually.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  No, no, no.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  But in the context of the time.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  Guilt in law in this moment.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  This is what I

• 57:24Speaker 00

  Like genuinely, what are the grounds for the reprieve?

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Well, they're arguing that, the team around her tried to argue that it was, so the barrister wants to argue that it's a crime of passion.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  The solicitor wants to argue that there is co-conspiracy between her and Cousins. So even the team are not convinced as to exactly what they're trying to argue.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  There's no united front.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  No. She, at the same time, is going, "Kill me. I want to die. I want to be with you. I want to die. I knew what I was doing. This is the punishment." And that's, I think, where maybe this theory comes from of going, she had this kind of death wish. That's not historically accurate to say that. And it's not, and I don't mean to be flippant.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, she supposedly tells her sister she wants to die to be with David, right? So like, there is anecdotal evidence that that is her reasoning. The reprieve doesn't work.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Doesn't work. And friend of the pod, Albert Pierpoint, is where, so he's the

• 58:17Speaker 00

  That's not a friend that you want.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  No. He's the executioner, of course, at this time, famed executioner. Yep. He hangs her. And there is a hoax call, I thought of you when I was looking at this. There's a hoax call at the last minute that she has received reprieve. And so it has to be stopped for a few moments. Yeah.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  I was about to say, 9:01 AM is a really weird time.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  London time. But they figure out that it is a hoax. And yeah, so she dies.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Okay, that's, that needs to be the opening. I'm sure there's lots of films about this, but there needs to be an opening that is that.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, is it gonna happen? Is it not gonna happen? Yeah, yeah. But she does die.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. I mean, that's fascinating. And that says so much about, you know, the impact that this media storm has had on the public and this kind of parasocial buying into the story. And also the fact that people feel they can have some fun with it, or, you know, whatever the motivation for the hoax call is. There's a kind of, there's a kind of attempt to, you know, is it a hoax call because someone wants to be cruel and delay things or complicate things? Or is it a hoax call because someone is genuinely trying to fake the reprieve in order to stop her from being killed?

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. The weird thing about it is, for me, is that at this, which, as I say, she is hanged, she does die. There are lots of stories about how she interacts with Pierpoint. And you can go on YouTube and watch an interview with Pierpoint about this execution.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, look, we've done an episode on Pierpoint. He loved to self-mythologise. He loves to tell a good story.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  He does. But this is an interesting one. He takes away that story. So there is this story that she comes out and is a bit flirtatious with him and it's whatever else. He goes, "No, that didn't happen. She didn't say a word to me. She didn't say anything. She just stood on the tea and that was it." So it's weird. You would expect him to be a bit self-mythologising and he doesn't with that. Well, in this particular interview.

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, but is that because he's probably someone who doesn't like to feel that someone's got the better of him and a woman flirting with him in that circumstance might

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  Anyway, but that, okay, that's very interesting. So, you know, she's, okay, so she is hanged and she's only, I mean, she's 28 years old. This is a life.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  I would like, when I got to the end of this, I was like, what is she, 40-something now at this point?

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  28.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  28. It's unbelievable.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  And a mother of two.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, has had a lot of pregnancies and child loss in that time as well. And she writes a letter to David Blakely's parents and as she's waiting for her execution, she says, "I've always loved your son and I shall die still loving him." So it's, again, she's hard and fast in the reasoning that she has done this and the fact that she loves him and that maybe there is something in this idea that now they can be together in whatever. I have also seen in my research on this, this is terrible. Don't bother watching it, but just anecdotally. A psychic medium on YouTube, this came up as I was doing the research for this,

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  saying that he's talking to Ruth Ellis and she's going, oh, me and David made it up. We're great now on the other side. We have this lovely life together, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  That's gross.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  But it just goes to show about that kind of level of exploitation. This is 21st century.

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is still, you know, big business for some people. Okay, so what I think is interesting is, I think, you know, on paper, it's, I mean, it's obviously a very hard, hard history to, to go through. It's just full of all this human tragedy and sadness and bleakness. And also passion and aspiration and glamour and, you know, sort of a yearning for a better life, all of that for freedom. And then you have this seemingly clean cut murder at the heart of it, that, you know, actually, once you consider the sort of the context around it and the possible

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  involvement of Desmond, you've got these kind of, these question marks. But thinking about how passionate people were about the campaign for the reprieve, once Ruth is hanged, there is sort of an outcry of public outrage, really, immediately.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feeds into a kind of an ongoing conversation because, you know, Ruth Ellis is the last woman hanged in Britain. So this is one of the way, well, there's so many reasons she's famous, but, but this is also one of the last because she is the very last. But it's almost a decade before the death penalty is, is taken out. So it's like, you know, public hangings have stopped from the, you know, 1868.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, this happens within the privacy of the prison. This isn't on show.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  But the actual hangings don't stop until 1964. So, you know, like, it's still almost a decade afterwards. I think one of the reasons why Ruth's case initially causes that much uproar is that 90% of women's cases are reprieved, even when the death penalty is still there.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Yes, the proportion of men who are sentenced to death and then hanged is much higher than that of women, right?

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, and even then, they're not all hanged, even if they're sentenced, that they get that reprieve. So there's that, you know, it's, it's, here we have a quote from the Daily Mirror, talking about that execution. This is on the day of the execution. And again, go and watch that Pate news reel, because it's short, but it's really interesting. It says, "The one thing that brings stature and dignity to mankind and raises us above the beasts will have been denied her pity and the hope of ultimate redemption." So there is, you know, contemporary idea that this is wrong now. So we've gotten to that point in, in the supposed progress narrative of, of the death penalty.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  We've looked a lot on this show at women who have committed murder across the centuries, murder of different types of people in different relationships to them, who've, you know, servants who've murdered their masters and mistresses, women who've killed children, women who've killed lovers, who've killed friends. And I wonder, in Ruth Ellis's case, if there would have been such public outcry had she not been part of a glamorous part of society. And, you know, there's even the anecdote about her being flirty with Pierpoint

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  at the end of her life. There's a projection onto her of this kind of glamorous slight availability. You know, in her, in the press, her lifestyle is reported extensively. And I don't know, I don't know if there's, had she, God forbid, committed a different type of crime or killed a person to whom she had a different relationship, would it have garnered such attention and would it have garnered such sympathy?

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  Isn't it interesting? I mean, I think about if this was even 100 years before, even 50 years before. I think there's something about, it's a perfect meeting of streams, right? Where media is doing a certain thing, it's post-war, she belongs to that nightlife, they're talking about getting rid of the death penalty anyway. She becomes this kind of figurehead, especially where women are concerned with this is not how we should do this.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  I think as well, she's not, she's not necessarily punished for her social class in the way that she would have been 50 years earlier or 100 years earlier. You know, the thought of someone from the working classes who lived and worked as she did, then killing a man of a higher social class would have been considered worse in some ways, or more shocking, if it were in the Victorian period compared to this moment. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's a really complicated case. And I think it actually leaves a lot of questions.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  I do.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Just tell me a little bit about the sort of the afterlife of this case then, because the, the calls for reprieve and to kind of reassess this don't stop.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is almost, for us, this should be the most, I don't mean me and me, I mean, but for contemporary audience, this is almost the most interesting part because this is where I ask for that caveat to come back in of us working for her, her working for us, what are we trying to do here? Before I do that, I just want to point out that her children have very tragic lives and are not very complimentary about their experiences with their mother. So although, you know, that's also shaped by media perception and all those kind of things. Her son dies by suicide and her daughter dies through complications through

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  extreme alcohol. I think she dies at 50. Her son, I think, is 37. And they don't, they don't take pity on Ruth. They don't think, oh, you know, whatever else. So they have, I'm just interested in that viewpoint and how that to shape their lives. But it's not just Ruth shaping that, it's the media and it's people around her.

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, you know, I think as well, like something to, to hold in our minds as well, is we have to remember the, the context in which Ruth lived and the way that she, you know, was subjected to various abuses, coercive control by Blakely and probably other men as well in her life. And we've, you know, we've reviewed that.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we get the first attempt to reprieve is 2003. The Criminal Cases Review Commission refers Ruth's case to the Court of Appeal. And the CRC then rejects that because they say, when she was punished under the law as it stood in 1955, it added up. It made sense that that's what the punishment would be.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  It has a historical context. We're not going beyond that.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Within the historical context, the, the ruling is sound, essentially. Then 2007, it is presented to the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, asking him to grant a pardon. It wasn't, that was just kind of skipped it left. It wasn't, it wasn't used. But now we come to this month, July 2026. So this history is still unfolding this month.

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  It's still going, yeah.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  And it was announced that King Charles III had granted, and I want to talk a little bit about this, a conditional pardon, reducing her sentence from execution to life imprisonment. And funnily enough, I heard her very articulate granddaughter talk about, A, her relationship to Ruth, who obviously she didn't know, but the, the legacy of Ruth.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  Well, yes. I mean, as a family legacy, presumably that's a shadow that has loomed large.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then this kind of judgment, and it was fascinating. Again, it's available online, go and listen. And this is just from this month. So, you know, it's there. But I was reminded throughout of Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde's grandson, who has been on this podcast and who has been offered a reprieve for Oscar. And he won't take it because he says, no, you did what you did. Who's that reprieve for? And I was just like, oh, that's so interesting. I never thought about it like that before. Of course, before it would have been like, of course, reprieve them. Of course, hand them, but sure, the reprieve's no use to them. They're dead. And, and they, they suffered and struggled through the social stigma, the

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  legal implications of what that was then. And I just, Merlin's mindset, a very smart man, you know, being a Wilde, of course he is. But it was like, I, I just thought it was really interesting going, no, I'm not letting you off, actually. You don't get to give that reprieve.

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

  You're doing it to wipe that slate.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, and kind of dust off your hands. But on the, on the flip side, it's really useful. I know, I know Ruth Ellis's granddaughter is glad of it. So I guess there's, I guess there's different ways of looking at it. But I just think, again, it feeds into what you're saying about how complex, the complex this is, how nuanced this is. You know, we're not talking about David Blakely's family, who have also lost a son. Granted, he was a very violent man. But again, once again, context, he had his own very troubled upbringing. So it's messy.

• 1:10:27Speaker 00

  It is messy. Well, Anthony, thank you very much for, for bringing this to our attention. I think it's relatively rare that a piece of history like this comes into our own moment. And, you know, occasionally we get flashes of things, especially with legal cases that are being overturned or revised in some way. But I think this, we've, we've done this a little bit in recent episodes, actually, thinking about 20th century histories, the legacy of which we can still feel very keenly. And I think this is one of them. And I think there is a wider conversation here about women's experiences in, in the 20th century. You know, there's often some conversations about domestic abuse, about protection for

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  women, about women's healthcare, opportunities for women that are so important. And actually, you know, this is, you talk about the fact that Ruth Ellis's granddaughter is now talking on television about this, that there, this is two generations away from us. We are living with the effects, our parents are living with the effects of what happened in the early and mid 20th century. It's still here in our world. It's still worth talking about.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  Is this one of our latest topics that we've ever done on After Dark? We tend to be very wary about going into the 20th century. I think we've done something in the 60s.

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  We've done something in the 60s. I think we did.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  UFO stuff.

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  A UFO thing. But this is, this is the first crime thing, I think.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  I know when I saw her granddaughter talking, I was like, oh, we've never had, I've never, and this is like, this month. And it just, it made me feel a little uncomfortable because it's like, oh, this is still somebody's life. And I'm like, we've never really been confronted with that.

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think, I think as well, it shows that history is an ongoing thing. It's not over. History's never over. And that it's this constantly rolling, rolling thing. And we, we have to constantly talk about it and reassess it. It's important. But also, it's a reminder that, that, you know, when we talk about people who hundreds of years removed from us, it's easy to forget their humanity and that they were people. And I think what this reminds us is these are complex, nuanced human beings who made mistakes, who made choices, who were passionate, who were angry, who felt aggrieved, who committed crimes, who loved all the rest of it. It's all in here. And when it's a bit more proximate to

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  us, that feels even more powerful.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Are we very lucky to get to do this podcast and have these little chats on a, what is a Thursday afternoon? It's just like, yeah, but it gets the brain thinking, doesn't it?

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  It does.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  What are the boundaries of the kind of morality of all of these conversations? And yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's, it's interesting. But yeah, say goodbye to the people now.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  Well, thank you very much for watching along. If you're watching on YouTube or listening, wherever you get your podcasts. If you would like us to cover more 20th century history, actually, that would be interesting. Anthony's not looking particularly invested.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  No, I'm Tokyo for it. No, I am, I am, I am, I am.

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  Well, if you, if you want that, you can write in to us at [email protected].

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  I went very Mrs. Doyle there. I am, I am, I am, I am.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  Good lord. Bye.