I have never supported the death penalty. Maybe I was influenced when I was six or seven years old by the fact that our next-door neighbour in Campden Hill Square, west London, was a woman who devoted her life to campaigning for its abolition. She was born Violet Dodge in Surrey in 1882, the daughter of a washerwoman and of a ‘coal porter’ (a person whose job is to carry sacks of coal). She herself had worked for a while as a scullery maid, but eventually became immensely rich for inventing and manufacturing Shavex, the first brushless shaving-cream. She also married a Belgian painter called Jean Van der Elst, who died suddenly in 1934 and in whose memory she dedicated herself to the campaign against capital punishment.
Whenever there was an execution pending, she would set off from Campden Hill Square in her chauffeur-driven yellow Rolls-Royce to protest outside the prison where the hanging was to take place. There, weighing 15 stone and dressed in black, she would harangue the waiting crowd with shouts of ‘murder’ while planes flew overhead trailing black streamers, and a brass band below played the Dead March from Handel’s Saul. Such displays were very expensive, as were her three unsuccessful efforts to get herself elected to parliament, and she eventually dissipated her fortune by buying, restoring and lavishly furnishing a colossal and magnificent neo-Jacobean house of 1837 called Harlaxton Manor near Grantham in Lincolnshire, which had become derelict and was threatened with demolition.
Mrs Van der Elst had already sold Harlaxton Manor when, after the war, she was living next door to us in London, still in considerable style. But she soon sold that, too, and she was to die penniless and forgotten in a London flat in 1966, one year after capital punishment was abolished in Britain.
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