Ruth Ellis’s Suit

Abstract

On 10 April 1955 Ruth Ellis shot and killed her lover outside a north London pub. She was arrested on the spot and tried for murder in the Number One Court at the Old Bailey; her highly publicised trial was short, and the jury took just over twenty minutes to reach a guilty verdict. She was executed on 12 July 1955 and was the last woman to be hanged in England. This is an article about the suit that Ellis wore to her trial. It was a smart, fur-trimmed, tailored suit, which she wore with a white silk shirt and high-heeled black shoes. Her hair was freshly dyed, and her make-up was perfect; she intended to look her best for the Old Bailey. And yet, her biographies record that someone in the courtroom was heard to announce that she looked like “a typical West End tart”. What can be learned from the disjuncture between Ellis’s self-perception and the perception of the public? What can a suit tell us about gender, sex, and class in post-war Britain? Clothes weave in and out of Ellis’s life story and the story of Britain after the war; they were necessary and desirable, part of a personal and national self-fashioning. There are no photographs of Ellis in her suit, so this article is also an exercise in historical imagination. By examining the written reports of her dress and appearance in newspaper articles and biographies, it is possible to access broader historical and cultural meanings concerning gender and class in post-war Britain and the significance of material things in the individual aspiration for social mobility.