The last woman to be hanged in Britain was far from being the hysterical, brassy blonde she’s sometimes been portrayed as. STEPHEN LEWIS spoke to Wilberfoss author Carol Ann Lee about her new book on Ruth Ellis.

AT just before 9am on Wednesday July 13th, 1955, Albert Pierrepoint, the official hangman, entered the condemned cell at Holloway Prison where Ruth Ellis was waiting for him.

The 29-year-old nightclub hostess, who had admitted the murder of her lover David Blakely in court and had been condemned to death, sprang to her feet, knocking over her chair. It was the only time she showed any lack of composure, according to Wilberfoss true crime writer Carol Ann Lee.

There is a powerful, moving account of what happened next in Carol Ann’s latest book, A Fine Day For A Hanging.

Pierrepoint was “very reassuring, if you can say that of a hangman,” according to a female prison warder who was present, Carol Ann writes.

“He said to her ‘it’s all right, lass, it’s all right.’ He kept to the back of her so she wouldn’t see his face, picked up the chair and told her to sit down again.”

He then bound her hands behind her, and led her through to the execution room next door. Ruth never flinched, Carol Ann writes – not even when the executioner came to place a hood over her head. “When his fingers reached for Ruth’s long, loosely-combed hair, she looked at him and lifted the corners of her mouth in a faint smile.”

Afterwards, Carol Ann says, Pierrepoint was to describe her as the “bravest women he ever hanged.”

She was also, famously, the last women to be executed in the UK. Her hanging changed society for good, helping to strengthen public opinion for the abolition of the death penalty, which came ten years later.

As a 16 year old, Carol Ann watched Dance With A Stranger, the film starring Miranda Richardson as Ellis.

She has been fascinated by her ever since. Richardson’s performance was wonderful, she says – but she doesn’t think the film was entirely fair to its subject. “It portrayed her as this complete hysteric. She wasn’t like that.”

Nor was she the ‘scarlet woman’, the brassy blonde portrayed in so many newspaper accounts of the time. Instead, she was a calm, thoughtful person, driven to what she did by the intolerable nature of her relationship with Blakely.

Not that Carol Ann condones the murder. Blakely may have treated her dreadfully – but he was only a young man when she shot him to death outside the Magdala public house in Hampstead on Easter Sunday 1955.

“I feel real sympathy for him and for his family,” she says, speaking from her Wilberfoss home. “But I really liked Ruth, too.”

Having researched Ellis extensively, through court documents, letters and other material held in the National Archives, Carol Ann believes she felt driven to murder Blakely because she could see no other way out of the relationship.

She also believes Ellis honestly meant to kill herself that day, too. In the book, she describes how, having killed Blakely, Ellis put the gun to her own head.

But for some reason, she didn’t die. One eye-witness said she could not bring herself to pull the trigger. Carol Ann believes the gun may even have malfunctioned.

What really fascinates her, however – and what she focuses on in her book – is what happened after the killing.

Carol Ann, a 43-year-old mother of one, says that in her behaviour during the trial and subsequently in prison while awaiting execution, Ellis behaved with extraordinary dignity.

Ellis’s main concern was for her two children – her ten-year-old son Andy and three-year-old daughter Georgina. But the many letters she wrote from her prison cell, some of which Carol Ann quotes, reveal a woman who had come to accept what would be.

Often, they show a dry sense of humour. In one letter to a friend, she wrote: “Sorry about my notepaper. They couldn’t get my crest printed in here.” In another, she joked to a friend that her signature at the bottom might be worth a bit of money if it was sold to a newspaper.

In her career as a true-crime writer Carol Ann, who is in a relationship with Alan Bennett, younger brother of Keith Bennett, the victim of moors murders Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, has written about some appalling murders and murderers – not least Brady and Hindley themselves.

Ellis was an entirely different kind of person, she says. “She was a very likeable person. You could have had an interesting evening with Ruth Ellis – a lovely evening.”

A Fine Day For A Hanging by Carol Ann Lee is out now as a Mainstream paperback, priced £8.99.