Mrs Violet Van der Elst (1882-1966)

The Richest Woman in Brighton: Best Remembered

for her Activities Against the Death Penalty

by Marion Bance

Today we live in a country that has rejected state sponsored murder, but this was not always the case. Until relatively recently the death penalty was still a legally defined punishment for certain crimes. The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act was introduced in 1965 but only as a trial measure; in 1969 the list of capital crimes was scaled back, but it was not until 1998 that the last two crimes on the statue books - treason and piracy with violence – ceased to be capital offences. Only then could we say, “No person shall suffer death for any offence” in Britain. The climate of change had begun to shift away from judicial executions in the 1950s, but capital punishment continued to be a hotly debated topic with Parliamentary votes on reintroduction continuing well into the 1990s.

Among the most persistent voices calling for abolition in post-war Britain were organisations such as the National Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty (NCADP), but there were also lone campaigners. One of the most dedicated was Mrs Violet Van der Elst – otherwise known as “the richest woman in Brighton” and one of the city’s most colourful 20th century eccentrics.

She was born Violet Anne Dodge on the 4th January 1882 in Feltham, Middlesex; the daughter of a labourer and a laundress, the second youngest in a family of nine children. Her first job was as a scullery maid, but working-class origins were never going to hold this formidable woman back.

Violet found her way out of poverty in 1903 when she married Henry (Harry) Arthur Nathan, a civil engineer 13 years her senior. Henry died on the 15th November 1927 and four months later Violet married Jean (Jack) Van der Elst, a Belgian artist who had been a Captain in the First World War, worked for Henry Nathan and lived with them at 30 Belsize Park, London.

Marriage gave Violet all the freedom she needed to blossom and, as it turned out, she was a shrewd businesswoman. She began making and selling her own cosmetics and eventually founded a company that developed a hugely successful product called Shavex; the first brush-less shaving cream for men.

With her newfound wealth, Violet bought property, including Woodingdean House, a large Georgian mansion situated in what is now Ovingdean Close. We do not know why she chose Brighton, perhaps, the inclusive spirit of the town, with its history of tolerance and acceptance of the less conventional, appealed to her. She owned the house for nearly ten years and during that time was reputed to have had an “eccentric lifestyle” with fifteen servants, three Rolls Royce motors cars and a fascination with spiritualism. In 1937, she moved to a far grander residence, a stately home in fact – Harlaxton Manor in Lincolnshire, which she renamed Grantham Castle. Here Violet carried out lavish renovations and filled the house with an eclectic mix of art and furniture. Her ambition seems to have known no bounds: she developed a great love of culture, became a music composer and an occultist book collector.

But there was also great sadness, Jean Van der Elst had died in 1934 and Violet mourned his passing deeply. She became obsessed with both the occult, often attempting to contact Jean during séances held in Harlaxton Manor, and with the abolition of capital punishment, a cause that had been close to his heart.

Violet committed to putting all her money and efforts into the anti-hanging campaign in her husband’s memory. She entered politics, hoping to exert more influence over the capital punishment debate. She stood three times as an independent candidate to be a Member of Parliament but was unsuccessful - dismissed, no doubt, as an eccentric outsider. She found more success as an activist. The world of business had taught her the value of publicity and how to generate media interest and, as a woman who had lived through the years of suffragette militancy, she knew the importance of direct-action tactics.
Always dressed in black, often sporting a Russian sable fur stole, she was an imposing and highly visible figure outside courtrooms and prisons. She frequently provoked confrontations with the police, breaking through their cordons and causing a nuisance and, as a result, was arrested on multiple occasions.

On the morning of executions, she would deliberately create a spectacle; as soon as she stepped out of her chauffeur-driven Rolls she would start chanting, “Abolish capital punishment” into a microphone. She hired planes to fly overhead pulling black banners which read, “Stop the Death Sentence” and on the ground she employed sandwich-board men to walk through the crowds carry similar slogans. All of this was accompanied by brass bands playing Handel’s funeral anthem, “Dead March for Saul”. Violet’s voice could also be heard through her writing. She set up her own newspaper called Humanity and used it as a platform to present some of her personal (rather outlandish) theories about murderers. In 1937, she published On the Gallows a political manifesto about capital punishment. That same year she also released a selection of 13 ghost stories, entitled The Torture Chamber and Other Stories.

Violet’s wealth not only gave her the luxury of self-publishing, but it also enabled her to be constantly campaigning and protesting, travelling around the country to be present at every execution. Violet was outside Wandsworth Prison on the morning of 16th April 1935 trying, with all the means available to her, to stop the execution of Percy Charles Anderson and she was still present for the infamous hanging of Ruth Ellis on the 13th July 1955.

Happily, Violet lived to see the House of Commons approve the Abolition of the Death Penalty Act in 1965. She died on the 30th April 1966, aged 84, living in obscurity in a nursing home in Ticehurst, Sussex. Her money was nearly all gone, spent, as she had intended, on the things she felt most passionately about.