The beau of Reading jail: was prisoner 1122 Oscar Wilde’s lover?

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/oct/16/reading-jail-oscar-wilde-lover-photograph

Version 0 of 1.

The hands are filthy, and the shirt collar a ragged disaster, only clinging on by a few grubby threads – but the eyes of prisoner number 1122, a fellow inmate of Reading jail’s most famous prisoner, are still sparkling with life and mischief.

There is no proof that Harry Bushnell was the “little dark-eyed chap” of whom Oscar Wilde, serving a two-year sentence for acts of gross indecency with another male person, wrote fondly to a friend.

However Bushnell, whose photograph has been discovered in the prison archives, was certainly a fellow prisoner in 1895, and was dark, handsome in an impish way – and only 5ft 2in.

“There is no evidence of an erotic interest, and Bushnell certainly wasn’t the last great love of Oscar Wilde’s life – but there obviously was a friendly interest. Wilde sent him some money when he had been freed and Bushnell, alas, the pattern of his life, was back in prison again,” said Peter Stoneley, a professor of English literature at Reading University, who has been poring through the old prison records now stored at the Berkshire Record Office.

The images, and other material relating to Wilde’s time in Reading, are released to mark the 160th anniversary of the writer’s birth, and will go on public display from next week in an exhibition at the Berkshire Record Office in the town. The prison closed in 2013, and its archives are now in the records office, but the volume covering Wilde’s 18 months there is missing.

The seven mugshots of Bushnell are unique, the only surviving images of the working class men the author befriended throughout his life – though it was his aristocratic lover, Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, who caused his downfall when he persuaded Wilde to sue his father for libel.

Although Stoneley has searched, he doesn’t believe a prison photograph of Wilde exists. “Photographs were expensive, and there was a row over them – the Home Office wouldn’t pay for them, and the prisons didn’t want to pay for them, so only certain categories of prisoners were photographed. Repeat offenders came into that, and Bushnell certainly qualified. Wilde, of course, had been endlessly drawn and photographed, and was one of the most instantly recognisable men in England, so there was no need to photograph him and no likelihood he would ever end up back in prison on the same offence.”

The location where the photographs were taken in jail was so macabre that Stoneley is convinced Wilde was never in it, or he couldn’t have resisted writing of it: the room had a false floor, which could be removed to convert it into the hangman’s execution chamber.

Wilde served 18 months of his two year sentence in Reading, where he charmed the governor who allowed him books and writing paper, and befriended many of the prison officers and fellow inmates even though he was not even supposed to speak to them. Wilde himself immortalised his experience in his anguished letter, De Profundis, written from prison to Bosie, his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas, and after his release, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which became his most famous poem.

However Stoneley, working with archivist Mark Stevens, has pieced together a mass of information about the men who were imprisoned with Wilde, by searching through the volumes before and after his admission: the preceding volume is heavily water damaged, suggesting the missing book was destroyed in some accident in the prison office. As Stoneley went through the names some quickly became familiar, serial offenders like Bushnell.

“He was very typical of many of the prisoners. Theirs on the whole were crimes of poverty, not violence. They stole food, shirts, and boots. Some were obviously token crimes, to get a roof over their heads – these were mostly young men, and the workhouse would have told them to go away and get jobs. The prison regime was only marginally worse than the workhouse, and at least offered some kind of shelter.”

Bushnell was illegitimate, and raised first by his grandmother and then by an uncle. He found occasional work as an agricultural labourer, but was jailed for theft 21 times between 1892 and 1911. Stoneley was astonished to discover that he lived into the 1950s, when he was buried in a pauper’s grave in Reading – but Wilde had tried to help him break the disastrous pattern of his life when he was released himself and sent him £2.10s (£2.50), more than a labourer’s monthly wages.

Among the material found was the actual execution record for Charles Thomas Wooldridge, the soldier hanged for murdering his wife in 1896, inspiring Wilde’s poem and the famous refrain “Yet each man kills the thing he loves … The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword.”

The poem tells of the chill that falls over the prison as the execution and “the hangman with his little bag” approach. The execution record names the hangman, James Billington from Bolton, and notes “general demeanour satisfactory, he appears a respectable person”. The cause of Wooldridge’s death is recorded as “dislocation of vertebrae”. Wooldridge stood almost 6ft tall, and before his execution the prison doctor noted that his neck was “rather long”, which had evidently given rise to some discussion with the hangman about how long the drop should be.

Wilde wrote that his first six months, after he was transferred from Wandsworth to Reading and spent most of his days picking oakum – shredding old tarred rope – until his fingers bled, had almost destroyed him, and that it was the company of the other prisoners, “capital chaps”, which saved him.

“Wilde was certainly the only middle class, university-educated man in the prison. It’s striking that in his photographs Bushnell’s hands are filthy and would have been hard from work, while Wilde’s were soft. The prisoners themselves told him it was worse for him than for them, and they were probably right,” Stoneley said.

One category of prisoner particularly moved Wilde. In 1897, free again, he wrote a long letter to the Daily Chronicle bitterly attacking the treatment of a prison warder in Reading who was sacked for giving some biscuits to a child, telling of such tiny prisoners that the warders had been unable to find any clothes to fit one boy. Among the prisoners Stoneley traced in the two years immediately before Wilde were 22 children: they included a seven-year-old sentenced to a month and two birchings for setting fire to a hay rick, an 11-year-old who stole a paintbrush, and a 10-year-old who killed a duck.

Oscar Wilde and Reading Gaol, Berkshire Record Office, 22 October-February 2015