Nigel Havers: 'My judge grandfather didn't want Ruth Ellis to die'

Nigel Havers has revealed that his high court judge grandfather Sir Cecil begged for Ruth Ellis’ life to be spared.

The actor is playing his grandfather, who passed sentence on the last woman to be hanged in Britain, in ITV’s major new drama series A Cruel Truth: The Ruth Ellis story. In a new documentary which sits alongside the drama, Havers says Sir Cecil was horrified after the jury took just two days to find her guilty of murder, which came with a mandatory sentence of the death penalty.

Nigel, 73, says his relative was hugely affected by the case, even writing to home secretary Gwilym Lloyd George to beg for her life to be spared. “I know it upset my grandfather enormously,” Nigel says in the documentary. “He wrote a letter to the home secretary expressing she did not deserve to be hanged. Simple as that.” In response, Sir Cecil Havers is said to have received a “blunt refusal”. The actor adds: “I have very fond memories of my grandfather. I adored him really. He was a kind-hearted man and I do know he had great sympathy for Ruth.”

He said the 28-year-old mother had sealed her own fate by refusing to reveal that Desmond Cussen had given her the gun used as the murder weapon, instead taking all the blame for the killing herself. “She said on every occasion ‘no, no I intended to kill him’. And the more you say that, I’m afraid, the more at the jury will convict you of murder.”

Of the tactics used by her defence lawyer Melford Stevenson, he added: “He tried desperately hard to get her to say, in front of the jury, that she didn’t intend to kill the man. That she was driven to shoot him because of provocation. Sadly, she refused.”

Mother-of-two Ellis, 28, was hanged in HMP Holloway on July 13, 1955. In an interview in 2010, Havers said that his grandfather had always believed that it had been a crime of passion which could have resulted in a sentence for manslaughter rather than the mandatory death penalty for murder. It was later revealed that Cecil Havers sent money to Ellis's son every year from her death until his own in 1977.

Ellis, a nightclub hostess, killed her lover, the racing driver David Blakely, in April 1955 outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead after he tried to end their relationship just days after telling her he loved her.

A Cruel Truth: The Ruth Ellis Story begins on Wednesday on ITV with documentary, The Real Ruth Ellis, available on ITVX.