LADY GODIVA RIDES AGAIN
“As a barrister for fifty years I was just putting the facts of the actual murder. I knew nothing of the background and I didn’t care.”
This was the opinion that Christmas Humphreys, the prosecuting counsel at Ruth Ellis’s murder trial, was still vehemently defending twenty-seven years later when he spoke to Ruth’s son Andre McCallum. Andre secretly taped their three-hour conversation at the Buddhist Society in London.
Just weeks later Andre, aged 38 committed suicide.
Humphreys was blinkered; for it was exactly what was going on in the background, amongst the shady characters in Ruth’s circle, that led to the shooting of her ex public schoolboy lover David Blakely outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead in 1955 and to Ruth’s execution three months later.
Ruth’s friends, some were prosecution witnesses at her trial, were more complicated than you would imagine from simple statements they made at the Old Bailey.
As I read the transcript of the trial and police statements it was clear that nobody was interested in witnesses’ backgrounds. In what appeared to be an open-and-shut case of cold-blooded murder, where a prostitute murdered one of her lovers, it didn’t matter about anyone else.
But those characters should have been investigated.
David Blakely had a darker side. During one of many visits to the Public Record Office (PRO) I was surprised to find buried in a Home Office document, that Ruth’s lover was actually homosexual. It was well known apparently in Blakely’s social circle. What is more, Ruth knew. It didn’t come out in the trial. Mr Bickford, Ruth’s solicitor, had evidence but “felt it unwise to call it.”
And that is where the truth of what really happened remained – hidden in the background for nearly fifty years.
It will shock most people to learn that Ruth Ellis fell under the spell of Dr Stephen Ward in the 1940’s. He groomed her; a fact previously unknown to the public. This sensational finding was pivotal in uncovering the real Ruth Ellis story.
Most people associate Ward’s name with the 1960’s Profumo scandal. He was the pimp and smooth, society osteopath whose patients included Winston Churchill, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret.
He introduced Christine Keeler to John Profumo, the Conservative Secretary of State for War. The scandal that Keeler was having a simultaneous affair with a Soviet spy led to Profumo’s resignation.
Years later it was revealed Ward had been a double agent, working for MI5 and for the KGB.
Those who think his spying activities began and ended in 1963 should think again.
Stephen Ward’s involvement with pretty, young girls who became the eyes and ears for his spying activities did not just start suddenly in 1963. He was recruiting girls from the late 1940’s.
Ward and his post-war close friend, society and stars’ photographer Antony Beauchamp, who was married to Winston Churchill’s daughter Sarah, were working together in their sordid profession, making something of young girls from the right background.
Ward’s skill was “finding uneducated girls from a poor background.” He groomed and transformed them into ‘somebodies’. In return they did the dirty work, becoming a listening service for intelligence organisations, gathering information from high-powered men, generally in their beds, during the Cold War.
Both Ward and Antony Beauchamp, about whom little was known, were members of the Little Club in Knightsbridge, also shrouded in mystery, the club where Ruth Ellis would become manageress in 1953. The Press tried to portray it as some sort of low-class dive for losers.
Its membership actually included King Hussein of Jordan, film stars Douglas Fairbanks Jnr and Burt Lancaster, society photographer ‘Baron’ a close friend of Prince Philip, racing driver Stirling Moss and Anthony Armstrong-Jones who became Princess Margaret’s husband.
Ruth fitted the bill for Ward and Beauchamp’s game. She was a gift; she was trying to escape from poverty and abuse; she was uneducated; she had a child to support; she had parents who took every penny she earned; and she had a family secret. Her sister Muriel gave birth to a child through incest with her father, a bully who started sexually abusing Muriel when she was six. He turned his attentions to Ruth when she was 11. Ruth made Muriel promise never to tell anyone about his obscene behaviour.
Ward, the “vice peddler” created Ruth Ellis. She was undoubtedly indebted to him. After all, he transformed her, gave her nice clothes, made her feel special.
Vickie Martin, Ruth’s best friend, was another of Ward’s proteges. She became the lover of the Maharaja of Cooch Behar before being killed in a mysterious car crash in January 1955.
By chance I discovered Ward won Ruth a walk-on part in the 1951 film ‘Lady Godiva Rides Again’ a comedy about beauty contests. A publicity still showed a beauty queen line-up. There alongside her friend Diana Dors and young Joan Collins, was Ruth with short dark hair.
Four years later on 9th February 1955, when her services were no longer required, Ruth was thrown to the wolves by Desmond Cussen, her so-called alternative lover, to fend for herself during her last sixty days of freedom.
At 11.30 p.m. on 10th April, the night Blakely was murdered, on her arrest Ruth immediately admitted to murdering him. She said, after being cautioned, “I am guilty. I am rather confused.”
In effect she signed her own death warrant.
Muriel never could understand why her sister didn’t put up a fight, if only for the sake of her children.
But it’s the circumstances of Ruth’s police statement, in a previously unpublished Home Office file, which were odd.
It sounded as if she had previously rehearsed her statement. It was word perfect. At the beginning of her performance, which she began without being asked saying, “It all started about two years ago when I met David Blakely at the Little Club, Knightsbridge,” Superintendent Crawford had to stop her and ask “Would you like this to be written down?”
Ruth had clearly been brainwashed.
To the police it was an open and shut case of cold-blooded murder. But Ruth lied. The events of 10th April did not happen as she had described them in her police statement. She was protecting someone.
The two-day murder trial was a travesty. As I leafed through the trial transcript during a visit to the PRO at Kew, the inadequate questioning of witnesses is obvious now for all to see. Ruth’s defence counsel Melford Stevenson did nothing for her. Later when I found this statement that Stevenson made on the first morning of the trial, I asked myself what was going on. He’d already decided to “Subject the witnesses of the prosecution to a minimum of cross-examination.”
Someone was being protected. And someone was determined to send Ruth to the gallows.
Official files relating to the trial, including the transcript, have been locked away for much longer than the statutory 30 years. The authorities still keep some files to do with Ruth’s trial closed until 2031. What else was there to hide?
In our book we set out evidence that the court in 1955 never got to hear. Evidence showing that Ruth was innocent of the crime she was hanged for.
We also identify the group of people in Ruth’s circle who conspired against her, planned the murder of Blakely with military precision and left Ruth holding a smoking gun.
The day before Ruth was hanged, having dismissed her solicitor Mr Bickford who represented her at her trial, she was visited in the condemned cell at Holloway prison by Mr Mishcon, now Lord Mishcon, and Mr Simmons, solicitors whom she consulted on domestic matters prior to the murder.
Simmons asked her what really happened on the day of the shooting. Ruth said she hadn’t told the truth because to do so “seemed traitorous – absolutely traitorous.” A loaded phrase, bearing in mind the details that have come to light about Ruth’s double life.
Like Christine Keeler in 1963, Ruth was in a position to bring down the government with what she knew. She was the innocent pawn in a game of espionage planned by intelligence officers whose job was to lie and who wanted to get rid of her. Ruth stood no chance against them.
The story about spying and the shadowy characters in Ruth’s circle continued to unravel by an extraordinary twist of fate. It followed my discovery of Desmond Cussen’s signature on a business document in 1964 while he was lying low at a London hotel. This was Cussen’s one and only trail left anywhere since 1955.
After Ruth’s death, Cussen and Ward moved from their Devonshire Street flats where they were close neighbours, to Bayswater addresses in London; Cussen to Lanterns Hotel in Craven Road, Ward to Orme Square. Cussen seemed to be following Ward around. When the names Ward, Keeler and Profumo cropped up later in the Atlantic hotel, I realised that Cussen who’d been staying there for two years was not there by accident. He was perfectly placed when the Profumo fiasco broke in 1963.
This discovery opened up a new line of investigation, which in turn led to the infamous spying activities of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.
The convincing story, spun and repeated for fifty years, disguised the real Ruth Ellis. The message reaching the public in 1955 was of the common, peroxide blonde, nightclub manageress who was a part-time prostitute.
The message not reaching the public was about the poorly educated, gullible young woman, desperate for money and who probably unwittingly became involved with spying and died in a dramatic way for her country, in the process.
Five years before her death, Ruth, looking very different with natural auburn hair, frequented the White Hart Hotel in Brasted, Kent, which was more like a private club. She blended in with the special people who congregated there, including nuclear weapons bigwigs from nearby Fort Halstead, top ranking RAF and spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.
I have tracked down witnesses in London, Northumberland, Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Buckinghamshire and Australia who have memories of the characters involved in the story. All have spoken out for the first time.
One gentleman from Penn in Buckinghamshire casually mentioned to me that the family of Donald Maclean had lived in the village for thirty years. This led to a discovery of a secret service stronghold there in the early 1950’s.
Commentators of the Ruth Ellis story focused on Blakely’s mother Anne and stepfather Humphrey Cook when they lived at the Old Park in Penn in 1955. It would seem coincidental that in 1949 the Blakely family moved into a rented house in the village, immediately changing its name. The only documented evidence being two entries on the voters’ list for 1950 and 1951.
The defection of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess was being planned at that time.
By 1949 Maclean was under suspicion for passing secrets to the Russians. In May 1950 he returned to England and was kept under surveillance by MI5. In 1949 David Blakely began his National Service but within weeks was released and on his way to Penn. There was no official explanation.
The Donald Maclean connection with Penn illustrates just one of the complicated trails typical of my findings. Coincidentally, Maclean’s body was brought back from Russia and buried in a secret midnight service in Penn graveyard
Of real significance is the link between Westerham, Brasted, Tatsfield, Tonbridge, Warlingham and Sanderstead on the Surrey-Kent border, more than 20 miles from London; and just three miles from Fort Halstead, with its secret complex of bunkers where Britain’s Nuclear Weapons programme began.
Ruth had connections with all these supposedly unconnected areas. Nobody has ever put two-and-two together before.
The trumped up murder charge that Ruth admitted to and for which she was hanged obscured the truth about Britain “in the grips of a spying scandal.”
