Grave matters

On this day in 1863 the Metropolitan Railway - the world's oldest underground railway - opened between Paddington and Farringdon, marking the beginning of the London Underground. I cannot begin to imagine what it was like travelling through those dark smoky tunnels and breathing in the fumes from the steam engine pulling the train.

Nor can I imagine ever wanting to witness a public execution. However, many did. And one of my favourite facts is that you could have gone by Tube to watch a person being hanged. 

The last public execution in the UK was on the 26th May 1868 - five years after the Tube opened - when Fenian Michael Barrett was executed at Newgate Prison (on the site where the Old Bailey now stands) for killing 12 people with a bomb in Clerkenwell. A month previously you could have watched the death of Frances Kidder, the last woman to be publicly hanged. 

It's a curious thought that people used to voluntarily go along to watch these events - especially as the so-called 'long drop' that cleanly broke a person's neck wasn't introduced until 1872. Therefore, the person may have died more slowly by strangulation. It's not my idea of entertainment.

The last men to be hanged in the UK (behind closed doors) were Peter Anthony Allen, at Walton Prison in Liverpool, and Gwynne Owen Evans, at Strangeways Prison in Manchester, both on 13th August 1964.  By then, public attitudes towards the death penalty had changed dramatically and it was abolished soon after. I suspect that people were sick of death after two world wars and, besides, it's never worked as a deterrent, which is why murder continues to be committed in countries that still have a death penalty. Another factor was the execution in 1955 of Ruth Ellis - the last woman to be hanged in Britain - for the murder of her lover David Blakely. While she was no angel, she'd also had a terrible life and severe provocation and many people saw the offence as a crime of passion. Thousands of people signed petitions protesting her sentence and her case was the subject of acres of newsprint in the lead up to her execution.

Interestingly, there's a connection between the story of Ellis and Blakely and the area where I live because both are buried nearby. 

Here's their story ...

David Blakely was something of a playboy with a passion for fast cars. Born to a well-off family, he was educated at Shrewsbury and then did his National Service in the Highland Light Infantry (whose insignia appears on his tombstone). He tried for a career in hotel management but was fired, so he concentrated on his beloved car - the 'Emperor' - and a career as a race driver. In 1953, he met Ruth Ellis, a former model and escort and the manager of the Little Club in Knightsbridge, and entered into an intimate relationship with her. It wasn't a healthy relationship - not only was he openly unfaithful to her as she was to him, he was physically abusive, too. 

Things escalated until Easter Sunday 1955 when Ellis appeared with a .38 Smith and Wesson pistol as Blakely was leaving the Magdala pub in Hampstead.  Her first shot missed him, the second caused him to fall to the ground, and she fired three more while standing over him. At this point, she held the gun to her head and pulled the trigger but it jammed. She dropped the gun and it fired. The sixth shot ricocheted off the pavement wounding a lady bystander in the hand. 

At her trial, Ellis pleaded Not Guilty. She testified of Blakely, 'He only used to hit me with his fists and hands, but I bruise very easily, and I was full of bruises on many occasions.' However, she admitted that, 'It was obvious that when I shot him I intended to kill him.' She was found guilty, and became the last woman to be executed in the UK (to read a more detailed account of the story see here).

Now, here's my local connection:

Blakely's family lived in the village of Penn, around a mile from where I live, and Ellis would regularly travel out from London to see him. Blakely never took her to the family house - possibly because he believed they would disapprove of his choice of partner - so they would meet at The Crown pub (now one of my favourite local pub restaurants) or somewhere close by. 

Blakely, appropriately, is buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Penn, opposite the pub. Flowers are still left on his grave to this day.

Ellis, meanwhile, was hanged at Holloway in London and buried in the prison grounds. However, in 1971, while the prison was being remodelled, her body - and the bodies of four other executed women - were exhumed. Amelia Sach, Annie Walters, Edith Thompson, and Styllou Christofi were all re-interred at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. But Ellis was buried at St Mary the Virgin Churchyard in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, at the request of her son, Andy, who lived locally. Her plain white headstone was inscribed 'Ruth Hornby 1926-1955' (although she was born Ruth Neilson and was formerly married to a dentist called George Ellis, the name 'Hornby' relates to her father Arthur Hornby. He'd changed his name, for reasons I've yet to discover, to Neilson before Ruth's birth and the use of the name on the stone provided some anonymity). Sadly, however, the stone was destroyed in 1982 by Andy - who was schizophrenic - prior to his suicide and, from that point on, her grave was left unmarked.

However, photos do exist of where the plot was and so, just before lockdown, I went in search of it with my friend - writer and musician Sarah K Marr. Amersham is only five miles away and it's a lovely little town with many old buildings (and some great pubs). Consequently it's featured in lots of films and TV shows like Midsomer Murders, which is filmed all around this area.

Using historical photos, we soon located the spot and found that someone had left a strange totem there - something like a cross with what looked like a head and a heart indicated by stones. Or maybe it was a 'poppet' of some kind (see here). It's actually a double grave as Ruth's son Andy's ashes were also buried at this spot.

Incidentally, this particular churchyard has around 40 curiously-shaped tombs known as 'body stones', all dating from about 1770-1860. The reasons for using this design are not known, nor why they were particularly fashionable in this part of Buckinghamshire.  

Sadly, the tragedy surrounding Ruth Ellis's life carried on long after her death. In 1958, her former husband George committed suicide by hanging at a Jersey hotel. Then, in 1969, her mother Bertha Neilson was found unconscious in a gas-filled room in her flat in Hemel Hempstead. She never fully recovered and did not speak coherently again. Ruth's son Andy, who was aged 10 at the time of his mother's execution, took his own life in a bedsit in 1982 shortly after desecrating her grave. The trial judge, Sir Cecil Havers, had sent money every year for Andy's upkeep, and the excellently-named Christmas Humphreys, the prosecution counsel at Ruth's trial, paid for his funeral. Ruth's daughter Georgina, who was aged 3 when her mother was executed, was fostered when her father killed himself three years later. 

It's been said of Ruth Ellis that the real tragedy of her life was that she died for the love of a man who did not deserve it.

And it says something about my brain that we got to Ruth Ellis's grave from an initial discussion about the 160th anniversary of the London Underground. But that's how my mind works - constantly finding connections. In fact, my first two published books - Joined-Up Thinking and Connectoscope - consisted of self-contained chapters in which the reader is taken on a series of short circular journeys of connected facts.

I could have carried on ...

Mention of Brookwood Cemetery and trains could have led to a discussion about the London Necropolis Railway where you could buy first, second, and third class tickets for dead people (see here). Or, from the jumping off point of Ruth Ellis, I could have mentioned the 1951 British comedy film Lady Godiva Rides Again (Bikini Baby in the US) in which she played a beauty pageant contestant alongside Diana Dors and the first screen appearances of Joan Collins and Anne Heywood. From there I could have jumped to the extraordinary story of Diana Dors' use of mysterious cryptic codes to hide her money after her death (see here), or I could have mentioned the Leas Cliff Hotel in Folkestone, where Lady Godiva was filmed and which I've visited a number of times as it was the location of the annual Nudgestock behavioural science conference. It means that I've walked down the same stairs as Ruth Ellis and given keynote speeches on the same stage she stood on. From there I could have talked about Folkestone and the fact that it has one the UK's largest outdoor art trails and ...

See what I mean? 

Call it a train of thought.