Ruth Ellis is posthumously pardoned - but what happened to her children after she was executed?
When Ruth Ellis was hanged at the age of 28, she left behind two children - what happened to them after she died?
Ruth Ellis has been posthumously pardoned after a long campaign by her family to get the government to overturn her murder conviction.
Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy told MPs that a pardon had been granted by King Charles, meaning that her death penalty had been replaced with a sentence of life imprisonment.
'The shadow of Ruth's execution has fallen across two generations. We have carried shame that was never ours to bear,' her granddaughter Laura Enston said.
The true story of what happened to Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in the UK, played out in four-part ITV drama A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story last year. While Ruth maintains notoriety for shooting dead her boyfriend David Blakely, and the subsequent catalyst her execution played in the abolition of the death penalty, her story is tragic and nuanced.
Ruth's life had been plagued by abuse, with countless men in her life treating the nightclub hostess abysmally from a very early age. Her death sentence was also likely influenced by class and sex prejudices rampant at the time, something often contemplated by historians and those who believe Ruth should be pardoned. She was also a mother of two young children, whose lives would've been irreversibly altered by her death. We look at what happened to her children after Ruth's execution.
What happened to Ruth Ellis's children?
Ruth Ellis had two children - her son, Clare Andrea (Andy) Neilson, was 10-years-old when she was executed. Her daughter, Georgina, was aged just three.
Andy was named after his father, a married Canadian serviceman who returned to his home country before Ruth gave birth and was not heard from again.
Georgina's father was a divorced dentist named George Johnston Ellis. The pair were married when Georgina was born but upon her arrival he refused to acknowledge paternity and the couple divorced shortly afterwards.
Following his mother's death, 10-year-old Andy was enrolled as a boarder at St Michael’s College in Hitchin. He joined at a time the school was known for a particularly strict regime and was said to struggle with the level of discipline imposed.
Andy struggled to settle at the school and left before taking any exams to live with his grandparents in Hemel Hempstead. He is said to have struggled with depression, and would've suffered more tragedy when his grandmother tried to take her own life in 1969.
She was found unconscious in a gas-filled room in her flat in Hemel Hempstead, but never fully recovered and was left unable to speak coherently for the rest of her life.
In 1982 at the age of 37, Andy desecrated his mother's grave a St Mary’s Cemetery in Amersham, before sadly taking his own life at his bedsit.
Ruth's daughter, Georgina, was sent to live with an adoptive family upon her mother's death when she was three-years-old. Her father, George Ellis, had issues with alcohol abuse and took his own life three years after Ruth’s execution.
Speaking to The Telegraph in February last year, Ruth's granddaughter and Georgina's daughter, Laura, spoke about her mother Georgina to say, "She led a chaotic life thanks to her childhood; she could not be the mother that my siblings and I needed, drank heavily later in life and died of cancer aged 50."
Laura described Georgina as a model and socialite, defined by being Ruth Ellis's daughter. She went on to have a number of high-profile relationships, notably with footballer George Best and the actor Richard Harris.
She also had six children and several marriages. When she divorced Laura's father, Georgina lost custody of the children she had with him, who went to live with their father full time.
Speaking about her mother's death, Laura said, "I always knew Mum would never live a long life. In her later years, she drank heavily, which helped to mask the cancer until the point where treatment was futile."
Laura concludes, "Ruth lost her life in 1955 due to misogyny, discrimination and judgment, and this reality has shaped who I am.
Ruth’s legacy of strength will continue to live on through me and my daughters, which is the least we can do for my grandmother, whose death saved the lives of others by triggering the abolishment of the death penalty in Britain."
