 |
||||||||||||
| Cressida's Transformations - art and photography |
||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
On July 13th 1955, Ruth Ellis was hanged for the murder of her lover David Blakely.
She was the last woman to be executed in Britain.
Ruth had a tempestuous relationship with David Blakely, a hard drinking
womaniser. Because she believed he was having an affair with another woman,
Ruth went to the pub where he had been drinking and outside shot him dead.
Ruth’s trial was the source of tittle-tattle. Each day many couldn't wait to
read the lurid details in the daily newspapers. There were even jokes
about the woman who was crossed by a man who, as one commentator put
it, "didn't deserve her love".
It is a case that remains on the conscience of the British Judiciary.
After her execution, there was debate about evidence not presented to the
jury that might have reduced her sentence to one of manslaughter.
Her execution fuelled the already huge lobby for the abolition of the death
penalty in Great Britain. The barbaric practice was against the teachings of
Christianity and society was deemed as culpable as the murderer, the pathetic
figure, Ruth Ellis.
I remind the reader that as with all the portraits in my collection, “20th
Century Woman” I absorbed the character I was playing. For Ruth
Ellis’s portrait it would have been too simple to paint the hangman's
noose around the neck of the woman who went to the gallows unrepentant for
murdering the man she loved.
Yet creating her portrait didn't require a great deal of thought. It
flowed smoothly from me. Prison bars in the foreground, Ruth's head
is held high. The portrait exudes emotions of defiance and lack of
repentance, and her neck stretched long and thin is wound in a band of
silk - silk that symbolises the hangman's noose, the controversy and
criticism of the British Judiciary.
Kathleen Notman
