A Day In July

A very memorable time from my boyhood

A Day in July

It was a memorable day. A special time time in the playground of the boys’ school I attended. Myself, and a group of friends were talking quietly. This was somewhat unusual for us but, as usual a teacher and a couple of prefects were pacing about. They watched us as if we were convicts in a prison exercise yard. They were menacing as they strode about occasionally glaring at us causing one to sense their own delusions of self importance.

These were the days when they were strict in schools, corporal punishment was very much the norm. I never thrived in any academic sense until I left school and felt at a very early age that brutality only teaches people to be brutal.

Passers by paused and looked in. This often happened and I for one never welcomed it and, even as an eight year old boy I found being stared at disconcerting. Perhaps they joined with the teacher in thinking we were up to something. For some reason people often think a group of boys together were up to something but no, that day was very different. There was a girls school next door and perhaps this day was different for someone there too, I was never able to find out.

It was July 13^th 1955. We were held together not by any sense of joyful mischief plotting or of sharing each others needs and concerns. I was eight years old and the same age as my friends. We knew and were brought together by a strange sense of horror, curiosity and fear. We could not understand even then and, I have had problems for different reasons since but, how could they do it? This was the day Ruth Ellis died in London's Holloway Prison, Ruth was the last woman in England to be hanged. The execution was carried out by Albert Pierpoint (March 3^rd 1905 �" 10 July 1992) who came from a long family line of executioners, he was extremely skilled and proficient and, with him the job would be done in an average of seven seconds.

We had heard grown ups talking and seen many pictures of the large crowds,among them women with young children, holding vigil outside Holloway Prison. Ruth's hanging attracted widespread concern. A petition to the home office in her favours igned by fifty thousand people was rejected. The novelist Raymond Chandler then living in London wrote a scathing letter to the London Evening Standard in which he referred to “...the medieval savagery of the law.”

We had noticed the forthcoming execution in the newspapers and youngsters do notice and feel things. Their feelings are important. Now, all these years later I recall wondering what Ruth was feeling. Was she afraid? Perhaps listening for footsteps on the landing outside the condemned cell.

Ruth Ellis, who had been found guilty of the murder by shooting of her abusive boyfriend David Blakely who had repeatedly physically abused her. Ruth's injuries included punching in the stomach which occasioned a miscarriage.

Ruth Ellis died the victim of a bullying man and a cruel system that could only see with narrow and blinkered vision. Two years after Ruth’s death the possible defence of diminished responsibility became law and even now where it should be established it is often infact difficult to make this defence plain.

In a BBC radio interview the public executioner Albert Pierpoint once said he thought the legal system in England was the fairest in the world; yet then as now prison and all its worse manifestations was and still is a predominantly working class experience and this is somewhat of an inevitably as our laws are framed and administered around the laws of private property.

I digress slightly. We return to those boys together and quiet in the noisy playground. Wondering what it’s like when the time comes, the cell door opens and your wrists are pinioned behind you. There is the command “Follow me” and you walk through to the execution room. When your face is covered the rope is carefully and precisely fixed around your neck and then there comes the drop.

I remember this so well and it was in no way a kind of morbid curiosity. What held us together was a fear not of the unknown or of anything grown �" ups in all their short sighted stupidity might not expect us to understand; it was a sense of how could they do this terrible thing to her; it was all so horrible.

As an eight year old I tried to express myself in words. I well remember writing a poem about Ruth that sadly has got lost among the passing of the years. But what is left in memory is what I felt at the time and also a sense that Ruth's murder by the state may well have been one of the significant formative events in my life.

Now, many years later I am a prisoner support activist; I write, paint and also work as a tutor, a role I am due to retire from at the end of this year, 2012, when I have reached sixty five . My support work extends to a number of prisoners in this country and in America some of whom are on death row.

My compatriots of that day so many years ago have long since moved along their own pathways in life yet; I have a notion that from time to time, wherever they are and whatever life may have thrown at them they too will think back to that day all those years ago, a day though engulfed in the mists of time is still a beacon to the memory and, perhaps a teacher.

We need to learn that we do not really have a clear notion of what justice is. We need to look for decisions reached with impartiality and with concern for the unifying and betterment of society and mankind at large and to be aware of justice in Ruth’s condemned cell, in courts and prisons being an anguished wanderer who cries “Not in my name”

George Coombs (1028 words)