IN MEMORIAM: Ruth Ellis,
Born 1926, Rhyl, Denbighshire
Died 1955, Holloway Prison.
The last woman to be executed in the United Kingdom.


She lived her whole life under someone’s heel
then one day snapped under the final straw.
She took a gun and shot her faithless lover:
hard-drinking racing driver David Blakely,
surrendering to an off-duty copper.

The prosecutor’s name was Christmas Humphreys,
later famed as England’s leading Buddhist.
Counsel for the Defence: Melford Stevenson
went on to become the most outspoken
controversial high court judge.

The trial was a Shakespearian travesty –
as if Portia (really a man) was damned if
Antonio didn’t yield his pound of flesh;
and Shylock begged the court on bended knee
for mercy on the out-of-luck defendant.

The Last Woman prevailed upon her counsel
(who uttered not a word in her defence)
to paint her as a wanton good-time gal –
a fleur-du-mal upon the Soho cesspit –
a hardened bitch deserving no one’s pity.

Obediently the jury took the bait, and
finding the alleged murderess guilty,
the black-capped judge played out his lethal hand,
consigning the Last Woman to the hangman.
…Then she sabotaged her own reprieve.

No one, then or now, can comprehend
why she went so wilfully to slaughter.
She, neither suicidal nor demented,
acting rationally, and firm of purpose,
snatched death from the jaws of mercy.