The Second Last Woman in England

Extract from a novel published in Australia by Murdoch Books, April 2010

London: Summer, 1953

TOWARDS THE END of May 1953, Mr Cecil Condor Wallis made the decision to watch the Coronation on a newly purchased television set rather give in to his children’s wishes to join the hundreds of thousands lining the streets less than a mile from his South Kensington home. It was an odd decision for a man who had, on a number of occasions, expressed his loathing for the new medium - and it was one that probably cost him his life.

There were, of course, other factors, aside from the decision to purchase the television set, which contributed to Mr Wallis’ death.

On the day in question - that disappointingly wet Tuesday on the second day of June – the Wallis’, their two young children and a number of close family and friends gathered in the Wallis’ home at number 83 Athestan Gardens to watch the broadcast. And so had much of the country – those who could afford a television set or knew of someone who owned one.

A party had been organised at the Wallis’. Not just tea and lemonade either, but champagne! Ordered from Harrods and delivered the day before by a liveried man in a large green and gold van. The silver had been polished. A Scottish smoked salmon, plump Spanish olives and tiny wafers of French toast had been laid out on silver trays in the kitchen downstairs. A pale yellow crab soufflé steamed gently in the oven. How all this had been achieved on the extra 1lb of sugar and 4oz of margarine ration provided by the Government over the Coronation month remained a mystery.

And a television set had been purchased for the occasion from Peter Jones of Sloane Square and set up in the upstairs drawing room.

On that day Mr Wallis wore a navy blazer, beige flannel trousers, a white linen shirt, a tie with a school cricket club insignia, navy socks (wool) and black loafers (leather, Italian) . He had eaten two kippers and some buttered toast for his breakfast and at some point during the morning he drank one cup of tea and one of coffee, both with milk but not sugar - so noted the coroner’s report made the following day.

How long Mr Wallis took to consider his wardrobe that morning, deciding whether to wear this tie or that one, or his breakfast half an hour later debating whether or not to eat that second kipper, to butter his toast but perhaps not to spread marmalade on it, was probably less time that the coroner took to record all these facts and to present them, first at the inquest and later at the trial. And it was undoubtedly less time that the prosecuting counsel and the jury took to mull, at length, over each and every item.

On the morning of her Coronation the Queen, travelling in her gold state coach drawn by eight handsome Windsor greys and surrounded by sundry gloriously liveried and uniformed escorts, left Westminster Abbey after her crowning and returned along Whitehall and The Mall, arriving in triumph at Buckingham Palace at a little before one o’clock in the afternoon. At a few minutes past one, according those present, Mr Wallis left his drawing room to ask the housekeeper, Mrs Thompson, to bring another bottle of champagne up from the cellar. He re-entered the room at 1.20pm, having not (according to Mrs Thompson) spoken to her. He returned to his seat and picked up a glass of champagne at the moment that his wife, Mrs Harriet Wallis, entered the room and shot her husband six times in the chest, abdomen and left leg with a double action Webley Mk VI revolver. Two bullets - the second and third - entered his heart and he died instantly.

All of the witnesses later recalled that at the precise moment Mrs Wallis had entered the room, the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth had stepped out onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace with her family. The thousands waiting outside the Palace, their faces pressed against the railings, had burst into a spontaneous rendition of God Save the Queen. It represented not simply the culmination of a magnificent day, but the beginning of a glorious new era.

And perhaps it was the breath-takingly unpatriotic timing of Mrs Wallis’ crime that caused the jury to take a mere 45 minutes to find her guilty of murder.

By the time the new Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had departed on their tour of the Commonwealth in November, Harriet Wallis had been tried, convicted and hanged and lay in an unmarked grave in West London…Which was pretty bad luck for her.

Had Mrs Wallis waited to murder her husband some twelve years later – capital punishment having been abolished - she would merely have received a life sentence, may indeed still be alive today, paroled and living quietly under an assumed name in a provincial nursing home. But it was 1953 and on the morning of Monday 9th November Harriet Wallis became the second-last woman in England to be hanged…

This book was published in Australia and New Zealand in April 2010 by Murdoch Books.

More about the Second-last Woman in England