From starlet to the gallows
QUESTION
Is it true that Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain, appeared in the 1951 British comedy Lady Godiva Rides Again? RUTH ELLIS was born Ruth Neilson in Rhyl in October 1926, spent her childhood in Basingstoke and moved to London at the height of the Blitz in 1941.
She became pregnant aged 17; the father was a married Canadian serviceman who didn’t stick around. She had a son, Andy.
Various factory and clerical jobs were soon replaced by work as a nude model and nightclub hostess, while she possibly also worked as a prostitute.
She worked at the Court Club in Mayfair where manager Morris Conley demanded sexual favours in return for the job. There she became friendly with actress Diana Dors.
early in 1950, pregnant again, she had an abortion. On November 8, 1950, aged 24, she married divorced dentist and Court Club regular George ellis, 41, a violent and jealous alcoholic.
In 1951, when Ruth was four months pregnant, Diana Dors got her a walk-on part in her film Lady Godiva Rides Again. The film was about a small-town english girl (played by Diana) who wins a beauty contest and heads for greater fame after appearing as Lady Godiva in a pageant.
Inspired by the 1950 Miss Kent contest, it was produced by competition judge Frank Launder.
Several uncredited starlets were in the film, many of whom had been ‘improved’ by society osteopath Dr Stephen Ward, who ‘had a singular talent for finding young ladies and shaping them for society’.
Ward later became a key character in the Profumo scandal and killed himself in 1963.
Ruth’s participation in the film wasn’t common knowledge. her sister Muriel, who was sent three stills by the British Film Institute, said: ‘Among them I saw Ruth alongside Diana Dors and the starlets Joan Collins, Pat Marlowe and Jane hart.
‘I was stunned. It was one of Ruth’s bestkept secrets. She looked different. her hair was short and dyed black. She’d put on weight [she was four months pregnant at the time], but it was Ruth. I knew she wanted to make a name for herself, but I couldn’t believe my sister moved in the same circles as Stephen Ward.’
Ruth never featured in any other film. When her daughter Georgina was born, George denied paternity, they separated and Ruth returned to the hostess circuit. By 1953, she was managing the Little Club, popular with racing drivers. There she met David Blakely, three years her junior.
Ruth also started an affair with businessman Desmond Cussens. Blakely was increasingly jealous and violent and another pregnancy ended with a miscarriage when he punched her in the stomach.
On easter Sunday 1955, ellis shot Blakely dead outside the Magdala pub in hampstead and immediately surrendered to police. At her trial, she took full responsibility and was hanged at holloway Prison on July 13, 1955, aged 28. She was indeed the last woman to be executed in Britain.
Caroline Jacks, Wheatley, Oxon.
QUESTION
Did the fiddle exist at the time of Nero (when Rome burned)? NERO was emperor of Rome from AD 54 to AD 68 and received a bad reputation from contemporary historians and commentators for many reasons.
he was a keen, but apparently amateur, musician, who insisted embarrassingly on solo singing on public and other occasions, accompanying himself on the cithara, a multi- stringed plucked lyre, ancestor of the guitar.
The fiddle or fidicula as a bowed (rather than plucked) stringed instrument first appeared in europe as the Byzantine lyre only in the 9th century AD. Suetonius alleges that Nero set fire to Rome in AD 64, the conflagration lasting a week, partly in order to loot the burned houses and partly for the fun of it.
‘he watched the fire from the Tower of Maecenas, delighted by the beauty of the flames; then he put on his tragic actor’s costume and sang The Destruction Of Troy from start to finish.’
Stephen Aiano, Painswick, Glos. NERO was noted for his public singing and the playing of the cithara by Roman historians, but his musical ability was forgotten for centuries.
Although he was a popular figure with Chaucer and other writers of the late Middle Ages, it’s only with Shakespeare that he appears again as a musician. In henry VI, henry proclaims: ‘Plantagenet, I will; and like thee, Nero, play on the lute, beholding the towns burn.’
In The Taming Of The Shrew, Shakespeare says that, in everyday parlance, a lutist was a fiddler. As Katherine’s exasperated music teacher moans to her father: ‘And there I stood amazed for a while, As on a pillory, looking through the Lute, While she did call me “rascal fiddler” And “Twanging Jack” with twenty such vile terms, As had she studied to misuse me so.’
The earliest direct reference to Nero as a fiddler appears in The Tragedy Of Nero, an anonymous play dating from 1624, where Seneca says of the emperor: ‘Nay, even end here, for I have heard enough; I have a fiddler heard him, let me not See him a player . . .’ By the 17th century, a fiddler referred to any stringed instrument: it was not until the 20th century that the fiddle became associated specifically with the violin.
Janet Rouse, Swansea.
QUESTION
Has a mistranslation by an interpreter ever caused an international incident? FURTHER to the earlier answer, a World War II veteran and fluent German speaker told me the destruction of Monte Cassino was the result of a mistranslation.
An intercepted German signal stating ‘Der abt ist noch da’ (the Abbot is still there) was taken to mean that a German unit was still in position within the monastery. The word abteilung (unit) is often shortened to abt. — note the full stop. In German this would have read ‘ Die abt. ist noch da’ (the unit is still there).
It is now thought German forces didn’t occupy the building until after it was destroyed by Allied bombing. The ruins then made an excellent defensive position that held up the Allied advance.
Trevor Deary, Norwich, Norfolk.
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