Condemned Women

In 1955 Ruth Ellis became the last woman hanged in Britain. Everybody knows
her name.

Nobody knows the other hundred and fifty.

Between 1900 and 1958, more than a hundred and fifty women stood in
courtrooms in England and Wales and were told they would be hanged by the
neck until they were dead. Fifteen of them were. The rest - nine out of
every ten - waited three clear Sundays in a condemned cell, watched day and
night, until a letter arrived from the Home Office and the machinery was
quietly taken apart.

Not one of them was ever told why.

There was a rule. You can see it in the outcomes. Kill a newborn in the
hours after giving birth and you would live; kill somebody else's baby for
a fee and you would hang. Be pregnant and you were untouchable. Plan it,
profit by it, lie about it - and you were finished.

Nobody wrote it down. Written down, it could have been debated in
Parliament and argued in open court. Left unwritten, it was administered by
one man in an office who never had to say a word.

Drawing on the published trial proceedings of the Old Bailey, the debates
of Parliament and the catalogue of The National Archives, CONDEMNED WOMEN
reconstructs the cases of the women the state condemned and the machinery
that decided which of them died - from the Edwardian baby farmers hanged at
Newgate and Holloway, through the factory girl at Leicester whose case
changed the criminal law of England, to the morning of 13 July 1955.

It ends with the last woman ever sentenced to death in England and Wales,
and with the one occasion in fifty-eight years when the state wrote down
its reason. That file is closed until 2041. Its description is open, and
you can read it this afternoon.

Book One of THREE CLEAR SUNDAYS.