Cruel myth in the dock
THE last British woman sentenced to the gallows was not Ruth Ellis. That honour belongs to Mary Wilson, convicted three years after Ellis of poisoning four husbands. It was thanks in part to the Ellis trial that Wilson had her sentence commuted to life. Her age (65) was given as the reason but the Home Secretary was reacting to protests that had grown ever angrier since Ellis’ execution.
THE RUTH ELLIS FILES: A VERY BRITISH CRIME STORY (BBC4) began with the background to this landmark case and it was more background than ever got aired in the courtroom.
If you found yourself facing the noose, you’d want presenter/ filmmaker Gillian Pachter on your side, sifting through court transcripts and witness statements, endlessly following leads on what might to some seem like a cold, dead trail.
Pachter’s mission is not to prove that Ruth Ellis didn’t pull the trigger on her sometime boyfriend. Indeed, many saw her, on Easter Sunday, 1955, shooting racing driver David Blakely outside a pub in Hampstead. Pachter’s angle is that Ellis didn’t get a fair trial, or a fair sentence. Film clips from the era underscored the argument, full of “hysterical” women getting a slap from the leading man.
NCPA, No Call For Police Action, was standard coppers’ notebook code for a woman getting battered by a man and hence, Ellis’ bruises and the witnesses to her boyfriend’s violence were ignored.
An associate of Blakely’s, still alive today, recalled meeting Ruth one time, and spoke of her heavy make-up and her chilly manner.
He seemed to overlook the idea that thick make-up might disguise marks and a cold manner might be fear of angering a volatile partner.
Pachter picked up on this and found traces of it everywhere. From the interviewing police officers to the prison doctor (all male), Ellis’ bleached blonde hair, make-up, nail varnish and polished manner were seen as signs of inner steel. Like crime reporters of the era, they seemed in thrall to the hard-faced dames of Raymond Chandler novels and determined to make this real woman fit the myth.
Ellis was low-born, the casual summing-up of the senior officer proclaimed, and had hitched her wagon to the wealthier Blakely, then taken revenge when he no longer wanted her. Regardless of who’d given her the gun, driven her there or driven her to do it (revealed over the next two nights, we trust), that might have been part of the truth. In court, though, we’re meant to tell the whole truth.
Foolishly, I’d thought WHAT WOULD YOUR KID DO? (ITV) could never work. There was one big flaw, I thought, with a game show transplanting the Mr & Mrs format to parents and kids.
You’d be surprised if a bloke guessed correctly about his wife, or if she didn’t greatly underestimate him in some theoretical situation. Therein lies the fun. What parent would willingly misjudge their baby though? Who’d say to the nation, “Nah, I don’t think my little Orestes would tell the truth...”? Quite a few parents would as it happens.
I felt a twinge of sympathy for Blake, a cheeky wean from Glasgow, described by his mum as a “fabricator” and not predicted to pass the lateral thinking challenge. He was more of a creative problem solver, finding loopholes in at least two of the challenges so he could say he’d done them even if he hadn’t. Whatever Blake’s ma says, a bright future awaits him in politics.