The last woman to be executed in the UK has been granted a conditional posthumous pardon more than 70 years after her death. Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy announced in the House of Commons that King Charles had accepted his advice to grant Ruth Ellis a pardon, replacing the death penalty with a sentence of life imprisonment “to recognise a profound injustice in this exceptional case”.
Ellis, a nightclub hostess from Rhyl, Denbighshire, was hanged at London’s Holloway Prison on 13 July 1955, aged 28, after being convicted of murdering her lover, David Blakely. She had shot him five times outside The Magdala pub in Hampstead, following a tumultuous relationship marked by infidelity on both sides. At her trial, the judge told the jury to disregard the fact that she had been “badly treated by her lover”.
“Ruth Ellis, last woman hanged in UK, granted conditional pardon 71 years after execution for killing abusive partner.”
Evidence that has since emerged paints a picture of sustained abuse. Blakely, a racing driver, punched Ellis in the stomach during an argument, causing her to miscarry. According to accounts from friends, doctors and witnesses, he also pushed her down stairs, struck her so hard on the ear she was briefly deafened, and threatened to kill her. Ellis herself told the jury: “He only hit me with his fist or hands.”
Three months before the killing, she had an illegal abortion. At the time of her execution, she was a mother of two: a three-year-old daughter, Georgina, and a ten-year-old son, Andy. The jury deliberated for just 15 minutes before convicting her.
The application for a pardon was brought by four of Ellis’s grandchildren, who argued that her responsibility was profoundly shaped by domestic abuse and trauma that were never properly recognised at trial. Her granddaughter Laura Enston said: “The shadow of Ruth’s execution has fallen across two generations. We have carried shame that was never ours to bear.” Another grandson, former Hollyoaks actor Stephen Beard, added: “We can lay the burden down.”
Lammy told MPs that the pardon does not claim Ellis was innocent, but reflects that, had the case been heard today, partial defences such as loss of control or diminished responsibility might have reduced the conviction to manslaughter. The conditional pardon substitutes the original sentence with life imprisonment.
Ellis’s story was turned into the 1985 film Dance with a Stranger, starring Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett. Her son Andy took his own life in 1982; her daughter Georgina died of cancer in 2001. The day before her execution, Ellis wrote to Labour MP George Rogers, who had campaigned for clemency. In the letter, she said she was “quite well” and that Rogers would “know the truth” after her death. The pardon, while not undoing the past, formally acknowledges what her family has long argued: that the justice system failed her.