London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
—————————————
A very good evening to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Sunday, July 13th, 2025.
This one’s dedicated to Heidi. Heidi who listens to London Calling while she’s mowing the lawn.
Heidi’s coming to London in September. And she tells us that in preparation for her trip one of the tuning forks she’s attending to is the London Calling podcast.
Ok, that’s released the mooring lines and pushed us out into the stream. What’s in these July 13th waters?
Well, to get us started, a word. The word privilege. Crack that word open and you get priv – which of course is the root of the word private. And lege, which is the root of the word legal or law.
So, to cut to the chase, privilege means private law.
Every time I think about that in the next breath I think about executive privilege. And it bothers me no end. I’m thinking, for example, of the occupant of the White House. And I don’t care in the least which occupant it is – doesn’t matter to me whether it’s Eisenhower or Clinton or Reagan or Bush or Obama or Trump – executive privilege bothers me no end. Why should the holder of that office – someone, let us not forget, who put his hand on the good book and swore a solemn oath to uphold the law of the land, why should that person, why should any person, be fitted up with his own private law? AKA executive privilege.
Ok, moving on.
I’m very partial to that old Russian proverb that the past is a lighthouse, not a port.
In which connection, I’m thinking about something that happened three score and ten years ago today. Three score and ten years. The biblical lifespan.
Three score and ten years ago today – July 13th, 1955 – a young life was ended.
28-year-old Ruth Ellis was executed at Holloway Prison in North London. She was the last woman to be hanged in this country.
Hers was a crime passionel. In consequence her execution hastened the abolition of the death penalty in this country.
Who was Ruth Ellis? She was Welsh. Born Ruth Neilson in north Wales, she was the fourth of six children. Her father was a musician, her mother a seamstress. She was born into poverty. As a child she vowed that when she grew up she would not live a life like her parents’. She said to her Mum, “Mum, I’m going to make something of my life.”
When she grew up, marriage seemed one way out. She fell in love with a Canadian serviceman. This was 1944. She fell pregnant. Turned out that the father of the child already had a wife and two children. Back in Canada.
Ruth was 18 years – the mother of a baby boy – and her and her baby’s existence was hard scrabble. She worked as a factory hand, a waitress and a shop worker.
Trying to find a way up and out she turned to a faster crowd and more lucrative pursuits. She did modelling and then hostessing at a string of clubs and brothels.
And then there was another man. A man named George Ellis. She married him. And so became Ruth Ellis. Platinum blonde Ruth Ellis. They had a baby girl. Her husband was an alcoholic. The marriage broke up. She was on her own again. Well, on her own with two toddlers. She worked as a hostess and a call girl. In 1953 she met and fell for a reckless and feckless racing car enthusiast named David Blakely. The relationship was a disaster. There were drunken fights and fits of jealous rage. He decided to leave her. She was drinking heavily. And taking tranquilisers. She got her hands on a revolver. Went to the Magdala Pub in Hampstead. Rightly assuming that David Blakely would be there. He was leaving the pub just as she arrived. She shot him four times.
A policeman was on the scene very quickly. She said, “Arrest me – I have just shot this man – and fetch an ambulance.”
She was arrested. Tried. She refused to plead insanity. The jury would not accept her defence of provocation. She was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. As I said, today is the 70th anniversary of her execution. She was 28. Had she not been hanged it would be just about possible for Ruth Ellis to be alive today. A very old lady. 98 years old.
We started with that Russian proverb, the past is a lighthouse not a port. Everyone knows Ruth Ellis was the last woman in this country to be executed. Everyone thinks of her as the platinum blonde call girl who shot her boyfriend dead. End of story.
Except the story – that bit of Ruth Ellis’s and London’s past – isn’t a port. It’s a lighthouse. It’s time finally to remember that, yes, 70 years ago a young woman was hanged. And into the bargain – though it’s an obscenity to call it a bargain – into the bargain a little boy and a little girl lost their mum. And as long as we’re at, let’s see what else shows up in the searchlight of that lighthouse.
I’m thinking of the statement put out by the teachers at a local school. A school in the neighbourhood of the prison where Ruth Ellis was hanged.
In part, the statement said, “Today Ruth Ellis was hanged. Not only myself but many of my colleagues were faced with the effect of this upon the boys and girls we teach. The school was in a ferment. There were some children who had waited outside the prison gates; some claimed to have seen the execution from their windows; others spoke with a fascinated horror about the technique of the hanging of a female. Not only was Ruth Ellis hanged today, hundreds of children were a little corrupted.”
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com –
home of London Walks,
London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do
to attract and keep the best guides in London –
you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating:
the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative –
is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor
(and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)…
well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar
and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…
come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.