A link to Ruth Ellis

Clare Andrea (Andy) Neilson Hornby (1944-1982)

Andy was born on 15th September 1944 at the Maternity Hospital, Gilsland, Northumberland. He was the son of Ruth Neilson^*, later Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, then 17, and a married Canadian soldier. He sent money for about a year, and then stopped. Andy eventually went to live with Ellis's mother, Berta (Elisaberta Neilson, née Cothals, formerly Goodall, a Belgian refugee) who was, in 1969, found unconscious in a gas-filled room in her flat in Hemel Hempstead. She never fully recovered and did not speak coherently ever again. This was a most tragic and complex family. His step-father, George Johnston Ellis, descended into alcoholism and hanged himself in 1958. Andy, who was 10 at the time of his mother's execution, suffered irreparable psychological damage and took his own life in a Paddington bedsit on 17th June 1982.

The judge presiding at the trial of his mother, Sir Cecil Havers, had sent money every year for Andy's upkeep, and Christmas Humphreys, the prosecution counsel, paid for Andy's funeral. Ruth Ellis (1926-1955) was the last woman to be executed in Britain. Andy destroyed the marker on her grave at Amersham, St Mary's Cemetery in Buckinghamshire, and it has never been replaced (her remains were interred there following a re-building programme at the prison). Andy had a half-sister, Georgina, who was three when her mother was executed. She was adopted when her father hanged himself three years later. She died of cancer aged 50.

^* Ruth's father, Arthur Hornby, was a cellist from Manchester who spent much of his time playing on Atlantic cruise liners. Arthur changed his surname to Neilson after the birth of Ruth's elder sister Muriel (subsequently Jakubait). Ruth was born Neilson and it was as Neilson that she married George Ellis in Tonbridge, Kent in 1950 - hence Andy was given that surname.