by Stephen Wade
The document is the post-mortem report on her from HM Prison, Holloway, in July 1955. That report states that she was ‘well nourished, with evidence of proper care and attention’, and that she was 5ft 2ins, with a weight of 103 lbs. The summary of the corpse after hanging was simple, technical and direct:
Deep impressions around neck from noose with front of the angle of the lower jaw. Vital changes locally and in the tissues beneath as a consequence. No ecchymoses [discoloration from ruptured blood vessels] in the face, or indeed elsewhere. No marks of restraint.
She had been dead for an hour when the pathology was done. Her spine was dislocated, and there were fractures in the oesophagus. The pathologist, the celebrated Keith Simpson, added ‘Deceased was a healthy subject at the time of death. Mark of suspension normally situated …’ One little detail indicates much about her life: ‘Lower abdominal operation scar for ectopic pregnancy.’
Her life and the murder she committed are well known, but we need to summarise that here before looking at her prison life and last days. She was born Ruth Neilson in 1906, the child of a professional musician, Arthur Neilson, in Rhyl. Her father had worked on the liners which left from nearby Liverpool, but when that industry declined the family moved to Basingstoke, and then, in the War, to Southwark. Ruth was just fifteen when she started work in a factory but was too ill to continue so in her enforced period of unemployment she learned to dance. She was, from the start, gregarious, lively and always longing for some glamour in her life.
The first step on the road to being a club hostess was when she worked as a photographer’s assistant. That work entailed some work at the dance halls. In the great age of the jazzy dance bands, she was dropped into the heart of the club culture and she loved it. Ruth’s first failed relationship was with a Canadian called Clare; she became pregnant and he went back home: a pattern reproduced across the land when the soldiers were, as the saying has it, ‘Over sexed and over here’. The child was born: Andria Clare, in September, 1944.
One clear way out of her mess was to try modelling and she found some work: at just nineteen she met Morris Conley. Known generally and in the media as ‘Britain’s biggest vice boss.’ Working at Conley’s business, the Court Club, she met the alcoholic George Ellis and he was very much infatuated with her. He persisted in his attentions, and he offered her some stability and financial security, and so they married and settled in Southampton. Then again, the relationship failed. Ruth was back in London after a few years, working for Conley. She was promoted in 1953, becoming the manager of The Little Club in Knightsbridge. The job had perks and a good salary. But a regular customer, David Blakely, met her and soon they were living together.
She always had plenty of admirers, and arguably the one who really loved her was Desmond Cussen, who was rich and generous. But Ruth’s wild side longed for what Blakely could offer: excitement, fast cars, drink, parties and life on the edge. When she became pregnant, Blakely’s dark side came out: he beat her up and hurt her so much that a miscarriage was caused. A few days later he brought her flowers and they were friends again. That familiar pattern, so often observed in domestic violence, was the bedrock of what would later be the spur to murder.
After saying that he would meet Ruth for drinks with their friends, the Findlaters, Blakely did not appear: he had left with the Findlaters to join them in a party somewhere else.
Blakely was drinking in The Magdala club, Hampstead, with his friend Clive Gunnell. They came out, laughing and joking, to Blakely’s car, a Vanguard, parked outside. Ruth was waiting for him. Blakely had ignored her, stood her up, and of course she had welling up in her the hatred and resentment of a long period of abuse. She had in her hand a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver. Ruth called his name and Blakely just went on shaking his car keys; she called again and as he turned she shot him twice and he staggered around the car. Three more bullets were fired into his body at close range. Then one more shot was aimed down at the pavement. Ruth’s spree of death and damage was still not done though: a passer-by was shot in the thumb from the ricochet of the shot.
At her trial, Melford Stevenson really only had one gambit for the defence: the fact that she was so upset that there was a case of diminished responsibility. If he could show that she was out of control, and indeed ‘demented’ then he might save her neck. But she was doomed. She was sentenced to death and had an appointment with Albert Pierrepoint, the publican executioner.
Off she went to Holloway to await the outcome of an appeal. She had not wanted to launch an appeal but her lawyers did so nevertheless. A letter was sent to the Home Secretary, but as the appeal went on, Ruth merely wanted to die. She tried to persuade her brother to smuggle a drug into gaol so she could take her own life. He refused. She had time to spend in prison, and she read the Bible, quoting to visitors the Old Testament law of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’.
Her thoughts were naturally on Blakely, and she asked her friend, Mrs Dyer, to go and see Blakely’s corpse, so she could report back. Apparently he was lying in a satin-lined coffin and Ruth was satisfied he was well cared for in death. She also wrote to Blakely’s mother, saying, ‘I implore you to try to forgive David for living with me, but we were very much in love with one another. Unfortunately David was not satisfied with one woman in his life.’
In prison, she was generally composed and self-controlled. Her biographer, Robert Hancock, writes that she was managing the days before her death by doing what she was good at, ‘playing a part’. He says, ‘When she appeared at the Old Bailey, she knew she would be a national figure. The fame that had unfairly passed her by so far was hers now. Ruth Ellis was not going to let Ruth Ellis down by any sign of weakness.’
In Holloway she read thrillers, as well as the Bible. That says a lot about her and her dual nature. She had been brought up a Roman Catholic (though there was Jewish ancestry) and that was still in her character. She and the men she cared for had certainly gone through ordeals and hellish suffering. Her husband, George Ellis, had taken his own life in a Jersey hotel. He was on record as saying about his wife, ‘I was frightened to death of her. She was ruled by a passionate, uncontrolled, insane jealousy.’ Those words needed to have been spoken in court, but Ruth never wanted an insanity plea. A doctor who examined her at that time reported, ‘She indignantly denies that her behaviour of the weekend was hysterical … her whole history is that of an emotionally immature person.’
There is a whole library of books on the hanging of Ruth Ellis. Attacks were made on the verdict, and it was all about the legal procedure around the trial, with the basic condemning question left out of the picture. That question had been:
Mr Christmas Humphreys: Mrs Ellis, when you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?
Ruth Ellis: It is obvious … when I shot him I intended to kill him.
It took the jury only fourteen minutes to decide on a guilty verdict.
Ruth spent twenty-three days in the condemned cell at Wandsworth. That was a long wait, giving the press and public plenty of time to agitate and express themselves. There was an appeal for clemency. When Pierrepoint and his assistant, Royston Rickard, arrived the night before the execution, to observe the client, and to assess weights and drop measures, the crowd outside was very noisy. Hundreds of people were at the prison gates, singing hymns. Some rushed and battered at the prison gates. Extra police had to be called in.
Pierrepoint worked out the necessary drop as being 8ft 4ins. Then, early in the morning, they chalked the spot where Ruth would stand and placed the noose. As they were doing this, she was writing some letters, and finally wrote an apology to Blakely’s mother. She would have been sitting there wearing canvas underclothes, compulsorily directed for women, but otherwise she was not in prison clothes in her last hours. The last hour was somewhat extended when a phone call was received, supposedly a reprieve from the Home Office, but when this was checked out it was proved to be a
hoax.
When the time came, Pierrepoint only had to take Ruth a few yards to the gallows: the process was very sharp and professional, both hangmen working to pinion her and tie her legs, then Pierrepoint shoved the lever for the trap.
Ruth Ellis in her prison life is still something of a mystery. At one point, some papers on her were stolen from a store inside the prison. Her biographer wrote, in 2000, that ‘In December 1967 a prisoner at Pentonville prison told the authorities that the missing papers might be in the hands of a man who ran a club in Hammersmith, who planned to sell them in the USA. They are still missing.’
CHAPTER 11
Harry Roberts: 1966 And All That
The list of those prisoners whose prison term stretches across several decades are very few. Britain’s longest serving prisoner, John Straffen, died in 2007 after being inside the big house since 1951. Not far behind him in the dire statistics of isolation is Harry Roberts, the killer, along with two other men, of three police officers in 1966.
A lifer in jail has to accustom himself to more than a routine: that word comes nowhere near the sheer depressing experience of years of confinement within a circumscribed space. The pad becomes the central personal space, and that area of eight by twelve feet becomes a microcosm of flat, oppressive selfhood. The gym or the chapel become welcome respites from the company of yourself. Memories have to be erased by sheer force of will. Dreams and nightmares will be your own business and mostly will never be related to anyone else. What staves off the will to end the isolation is the creation of rituals. Small rewards and even smaller anticipations become dominant. Sharing a coffee with someone who might listen to a fragment of your experience is a major event.
For a lifer, the sense of self implodes; many develop habits of cranky, obsessive thinking and write interminable letters to the national prison newspaper, Inside Time. A recent newspaper called Context encourages a reading culture of complaint and querulous argumentation on minutiae. Lifers relish that outlet. Harry Roberts has had this for decades and he is surely now as familiar to prison officers as their morning mug of tea and the roll call when there are movements across the establishments.
Who has thought of Harry Roberts in that great gap of time? The point of such a punishment for such a heinous crime is obliteration of the self. He has become a non-person. His life, in a massive sequence of huge moments, chained into his small, diminished daily events, has moulded into one great stretch of time, one seemingly endless moment.
Yet he has not been forgotten. In fact his name and story have reached into popular culture. One reason for this has been Jake Arnott’s novel, He Kills Coppers (2001) in which the writer fictionalises Roberts’ life in some aspects. Roberts has entered the popular narratives of football, because the chant: ‘Harry Roberts is our friend, is our friend/ Harry Roberts is our friend/ he kills coppers/ Let him out to kill some more, kill some more/ Let him out to kill some more, Harry Roberts.’ This was first spoken after Roberts’ arrest, by people outside Shepherd’s Bush police station. He is something of a hero in anarchist circles, and that chant will provoke the authorities wherever it is sung.
For years now, Roberts has been a familiar face in all kinds of contexts: the craggy, dented face looks out at the world without emotion: it is so much the face of a villain and a tough that it sends up its own image, just as has happened in the case of Myra Hindley’s mug shot. Harry Roberts’ mug shot is a definitive one – it defines the whole genre of ‘hunted man’ images.
The facts of his crime are very simple: he and two other men were driving in Braybrook Street, East Acton, when they were stopped by three officers in an unmarked ‘Q’-car. The policemen, PC Geoffrey Fox, Sgt Christopher Head and DC David Wombwell were shot dead. Roberts killed two of the officers. The patrol car, Foxtrot Eleven, had stopped near to Wormwood Scrubs prison, so there was some suspicion about the three men loitering there. When the blue Vanguard car of Roberts, Witney and Duddy reversed towards the ‘Q’ car, a check was made on the plate. The killings sorted out that problem for the gang, but after they ran and panicked, Witney was soon traced after the car was seen in Lambeth. John Duddy had dashed up to Scotland, and he was picked up in Glasgow.
At the trial, Witney’s evidence was on the grounds that Roberts had frightened and bullied him. But all three were given the life sentence and the thirty-year minimum term.
The Roberts story became a saga after he ran into hiding. He was an ex-soldier and was skilful in survival skills, so he went under cover in the country. For three months he was in hiding, until he was caught in a barn at Blunt’s Farm near Bishop’s Stortford. He had taken risks, such as travelling on public transport and going shopping at times; but he had never been identified by the public and in the end was found quite by chance.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum period of thirty years. He was twenty-five at the time, having been born in 1936 in Kennington. As I write this, he is still inside. His prison life has been eventful to say the least. In 1973, while in Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight, he made two attempts to tunnel his way out. After the discovery of the first tunnel he was taken to another cell and there he dug a second tunnel. All this came out during the trial of his mother, Mrs Dorothy Roberts, after she had allegedly smuggled bolt-cutters into the prison. At that trial, a security officer, Bernard Wilson, revealed the tunnels story.
This trial was at Winchester, and the defence counsel was the famous novelist and playwright, John Mortimer, who described the escape features and methods: ‘The hole in the wall had been disguised by a thin board painted to match the cell wall in each case.’ The mystery is that spins (cell searches) were done every two weeks, and Mortimer guessed that the tunnels would have taken several months to dig. The officers must have been fooled by the trompe l’oeil of the wall feature. The barrister suspected that there would have to have been some kind of collaboration or ‘turning a blind eye’ by someone on the staff, and Bernard Wilson agreed with that possibility. In fact, Mortimer asked, ‘Was there an absolute breakdown in prison security?’ The officer did not deny that.
Roberts had been a busy man and had been working on a major project – one which could easily have given him the use of tools and materials. He was, said Mr Victor Easen, making a two and a half foot power boat and that had kept him busy for eighteen months. It is common practice to use shadow boards for tools in prison, and there are also strict controls over the kinds of tools and artefacts used in pads; it is obvious that Roberts found ways around these measures, and his boat building was just what he needed as a ruse, a distraction, and as a source of tools for the real work in hand. Unbelievably, as The Times reported:
Mr Roberts had a full set of carpentry tools at his disposal. He said it was unlikely there would be a pair of bolt-cutters in the tool chest. Twenty people might have been in a position to use the washroom key.
As to the bolt-cutters, Easen told Mortimer that these could have been brought by another visitor. One possibility was the wife of Jack McVitie, the man killed by Ron Kray, she used to visit the maximum security block. Easen said, ‘A blind eye was turned at the end of her visits when she used to kiss and embrace. She was visiting a man called Green and was his common law wife. The jury were asked to believe that the bolt cutters could have been passed across on one of those occasions. It seems unlikely.
Mrs Robert pleaded not guilty to aiding her son to escape from the prison; Victor Watts, prosecuting, said that Harry’s mum had worn a fur coat and trousers when she visited on 30 November. It was commented by one officer that staff had never seen her wearing trousers. We have to ask what kind of searches were done on visitors at the time. Bolt-cutters down the leg of a pair of jeans would have been spotted in the most cursory search.
Regarding the planned tunnel, a piece of plywood was found over the hole, and the list of other items found is beyond belief: a pair of sun-glasses, a compass, a pair of wire-cutters, a dinner knife, a wooden brace and some drill bits, news
paper cuttings with maps of the Isle of Wight, screwdrivers, a file and some bank notes. The bolt-cutters would have been used to cut through the security fencing at the jail. When Mortimer examined an officer, Mr Duffield, on the matter of the smuggling, the man said that searching at that time was not thorough. He said they were short of staff and that ‘Mrs Roberts was not searched properly on 30 November … We try to be humane over visitors and give people as long together as possible.’ He had no knowledge of anyone searching Mrs Roberts’ bag.
That was not the only surprise for the court. Mortimer said that the cutters could have been left in a washroom and then found by anyone – staff or prisoner. An officer responded by saying that a control console would have shown when a washroom door was opened. He said ‘It would have been an unusual occurrence and the control room would have reported it.’ That fact had never been mentioned before at the trial, apparently for security reasons.
On 29 March 1974, Mrs Roberts was found not guilty. The jury at Winchester Crown Court was out for over five hours.
For her book, Killers (2003), Kate Kray visited Harry Roberts in Gartree High Security prison. She had met him before, back in the late eighties. She therefore was clearly surprised at how well he still seemed now, in his seventies: ‘Harry was waiting for me, fit and well and dressed in the usual prison ‘uniform’ of sweatshirt, jeans and trainers.’ He set about controlling the interview and restricted his talk to the main events of the crime, rather than any kind of personal exploration of his life.’
Roberts the prisoner had done what many do: cultivated the brain. He had become a Mensa member and had been obviously devouring what interested him in the prison library. Kate Kray took from him a rich, detailed account of his prison escape, including one story of him making a crossbow but needing some elastic. He told her that a woman knitted tanktop jumpers for prisoners, with a length of strong elastic in them which could be taken out.
