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bioStories
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ordinary lives
The Kindness of Oscar and Thomas
by Eleanor
Fitzsimons
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O
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n Monday, May 17, 1897, three frightened children
were made to stand in line in the high-ceilinged central inspection hall of
Reading Jail in Berkshire. The two older boys had been issued with coarse
prison uniforms, each one emblazoned with a pattern of broad arrows signifying
that the wearer was, for the time being, the property of Her Majesty’s
Government. The youngest boy was so slight that no uniform could be found to
fit him and he wore instead the ragged clothes that he had been arrested in.
Each boy carried his bed sheet under his arm. All three had been convicted of
snaring rabbits and were waiting to be escorted to the cells that had been
allocated to them.
By chance the three lads were spotted by Prisoner C.3.3 as he was being
escorted back to cell number three on landing three of C Block, located high
above where they stood. A compassionate man, he was moved by the abject
vulnerability of these children; they reminded him of his own two sons, aged
ten and almost twelve at the time, although thoughts of his own beloved boys
caused him nothing but anguish. Prisoner C.3.3 was due for release within two
days, but the crime for which he had been convicted carried with it the
probability that he would never see his sons again. He missed them dreadfully:
‘I envy other men who tread the yard with me. I am sure that their children
wait for them’, lamented the man we know as Oscar Wilde.
Wilde encountered a good many child
convicts during the seventeen months he spent in Reading Jail, but he had never
before seen one as young as the little lad who couldn't find a
uniform to fit him. Determined to help if he could, he
made inquiries and learnt that the boys would be freed if
someone paid a fine that was clearly beyond the means of their parents. Once he
was back in his cell, he scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and slipped it
under his door in the hope that it would catch the eye of Warder Thomas Martin
as he patrolled the corridor. This scrawled note has survived and reads as
follows:
‘Please find out for me the name of A.2.11. Also, the names of the
children who are in for the rabbits, and the amount of the fine. Can I pay this
and get them out? If so I will get them out tomorrow. Please, dear friend, do
this for me. I must get them out. Think what a thing for me it would be to be
able to help three little children. I would be delighted beyond words: if I can
do this by paying the fine tell the children that they are to be released
tomorrow by a friend, and ask them to be happy and not to tell anyone.’
The fine was paid and the children freed.
Wilde’s reference to ‘A.2.11’ demonstrates that he had also used this opportunity
to inquire about a fellow adult prisoner, a young soldier named
James Edward Prince who was being held in a cell located on the landing below
him. Although it was perfectly obvious to the inmates of Reading Jail that this
unfortunate man was suffering from some form of mental disturbance, his
unorthodox behaviour had earned him the label ‘malingerer’. Rather
than dealing with him sympathetically, the prison authorities prescribed a
regime of regular beatings, and his anguished howls reverberated throughout the
jail. Once he had discovered this man’s name, Wilde planned to use his access
to the popular press to raise awareness of his plight and shame the authorities
into intervening. His primary concern however, was for the children.
The notion of imprisoning children might seem barbaric to us now, but it
was common practice in Victorian England, and represented a
significant improvement on the treatment that had been meted out during the
early part of the nineteenth century. Under the Bloody Code, a set of draconian
laws that were in force between the years 1688 and 1815,
children and adults alike were regularly sentenced to death for stealing; as recently
as 1814, the year before the code was
repealed, five children, all of them aged under-fourteen, were hanged at the
Old Bailey for relatively minor transgressions.
Although their lives were spared during the years that followed,
children frequently lost their liberty and their dignity. More often than not
the crimes perpetrated by them were a direct response to the awful poverty they
experienced; convictions for poaching and stealing food were commonplace. During 1845, seven children—six boys and one
girl, not one of whom had reached his or her tenth birthday—were incarcerated
in Reading jail. All had been sentenced to hard labor, with several
suffering the further indignity of being whipped on release. When seven
year-old Frank Stockwell was convicted of arson in 1884, he became the
youngest prisoner to serve a sentence in Reading Jail. In 1891, a ten year-old
boy was sentenced to three days in Reading for stealing cherries. The following
year, an eleven year-old boy got twenty-one days hard labor followed
by twelve strokes of the birch upon release for poaching rabbits.
Many of the warders in Reading Jail were family men
who sympathized with the children under their charge, but each
was fully aware that any attempt to express their compassion could lead to
their instant dismissal, and leave their own families vulnerable to the very
desperation that might result in their incarceration. One man among them was
prepared to act on the pity he felt in defiance of the very real threat hanging
over him. Warder Thomas Martin had been assigned to C Wing in February 1897,
just two months before Wilde was due for release, and during that time the two
Irishmen had struck up a strong and unlikely friendship.
Thomas Martin soon earned a reputation for compassion. He shared Wilde’s
concern for the children who had been sent down for poaching rabbits and as
soon as he realized that the youngest of them was too upset to
eat the unpalatable, dry bread that constituted a meal, the kindly warder
brought the boy some sweet biscuits that he had paid for himself. The poor
child was so grateful for this act of generosity that he mentioned it
innocently to a senior warder, having no notion of the harm this would cause.
For this minor act of kindness, Thomas Martin was dismissed from his post and
obliged to forfeit his pension.
Days later, Wilde, a free man by then, was horrified to read of Martin’s
dismissal in the Daily Chronicle. Since he had been assigned to
C-wing, Martin had shown great kindness to many of the inmates, and in
particular to the man he called ‘the poet’. In defiance of prison
regulations, he had kept Wilde supplied with copies of the Daily
Chronicle and a steady delivery of Huntley & Palmer Ginger Nut
biscuits, which he obtained from the factory next door. On one occasion, as
Wilde lay ill in his prison bed, Martin fetched him a prohibited bottle of hot
beef tea, which he concealed beneath his shirt to avoid detection. As he
returned to Wilde’s cell, Martin was summoned by the Chief Warder and obliged
to stand talking to his superior for several minutes as the scalding bottle
burned his skin.
Wilde had long planned to use the unique insights gained during his time
in Reading Jail to campaign for prison reform and in a letter he wrote to Lord Alfred
Douglas, later published as de Profundis, had declared: ‘The prison
system is absolutely and entirely wrong. I would give anything to be able to
alter it when I go out. I intend to try.’ Martin’s dismissal gave him
the impetus he sought. Although Wilde had left England by then, and was in
Dieppe at the time, he wrote a long letter, which he
telegraphed to Henry William Massingham, Editor of the Daily Chronicle, protesting at the dismissal
of Martin and highlighting the cruel treatment meted out to the children that
were held in English prisons. This letter was published in full on May 28,
under the heading: ‘THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN: SOME CRUELTIES OF
PRISON LIFE’. It began:
‘I learn with great regret, through
the columns of your paper, that the Warder Martin of Reading Prison has been
dismissed by the prison commissioners for having given some sweet biscuits to a
little hungry child’.
The thrust of Wilde’s argument was that children,
unlike adults, simply do not have the capacity to understand, let alone
reconcile themselves to, the notion of being punished by society for some
perceived transgression: ‘The terror of a child in prison is quite limitless’,
he wrote. Realizing that his argument would be more persuasive if he
cited individual cases, Wilde described how on one particular occasion, as
he was heading to the exercise yard, he witnessed the small boy who occupied a
dimly lit cell located across the corridor from his own being spoken to sternly
by two warders, one who was in the cell with him and another who stood outside.
Wilde describes how, in the face of this onslaught,
the boy’s face became, ‘like a white wedge of sheer terror’, adding that,
‘there was in his eyes the terror of a hunted animal’. The next morning, Wilde
overheard the child crying out for his parents and begging to be released.
Rather than offering him any words of comfort, the warder on duty repeatedly
told him to keep quiet, although in the man’s defense it must be
remembered that he was prohibited from offering assistance and would have
been dismissed if discovered doing so. To compound matters, this particular
child had not even been convicted of any crime, but was being held on remand at
the time.
One practice that concerned Wilde
in particular was that of keeping children locked in their cells
for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours. Reading was primarily an
adult prison and few special provisions were made for its younger inmates. If
several children happened to be present in the prison at any given time, then they
were permitted to receive one hour of school instruction in the prison
classroom. Besides this, and the short time they spent in chapel, each child
would pass the remainder of the day in solitary confinement, obliged to
confront the horror of their circumstances while utterly alone.
Perhaps the most poignant line in Wilde’s epic poem, The Ballad
of Reading Gaol, written while he was in exile in France, reads: ‘For
they starve the little frightened child, Till it weeps both night and
day’. Wilde was horrified by the poor quality of food provided to inmates:
breakfast at half-past seven consisted of a small piece of dry prison bread
accompanied by a tin of water; at twelve midday each prisoner was served a main
meal composed of a tin of coarse Indian meal ‘stirabout’, a type of cornmeal
porridge; finally, at half-past five, a supper that was identical to the
unpalatable breakfast was brought to each cell. Children who were upset and
frightened could barely stomach this indigestible fare, but no alternative was
offered.
Wilde proposed a series of reforms to address the shortcomings he
highlighted, the most fundamental of which was that no child under the age of
fourteen should be sent to prison at all. Yet he was pragmatic enough
to realize that there was little likelihood of such a radical
proposal being adopted and suggested instead that children who were
incarcerated should at least have access to a dedicated workshop or schoolroom
during the daytime and at night should sleep in a dormitory overseen by a
night-warder. Wilde also advocated that children be allowed to exercise for at
least three hours a day and receive a diet of tea, bread-and-butter and
wholesome soup.
As to the warders, Wilde allowed that they were decent men on the whole
who were constrained from showing any kindness to their charges, but he singled
Thomas Martin out for particular praise, writing:
‘I know Martin extremely well, and I was under his
charge for the last seven weeks of my imprisonment. On his appointment at
Reading he had charge of Gallery C, in which I was confined, so I saw him
constantly. I was struck by the singular kindness and humanity of the way in
which he spoke to me and to the other prisoners’.
Although Wilde’s letter whipped up considerable public sympathy for
Martin, the Prison Authorities would not entertain his reinstatement, and
vociferously defended their actions in dismissing him.
Although little is known of what became of Thomas Martin after his
dismissal, what is certain is that, in spite of Wilde’s eloquent plea in
his defense, he experienced a long and difficult period of
unemployment, although efforts were made to raise funds on his behalf. In
February 1898, a sixteen page reproduction of Wilde’s letter in pamphlet form,
entitled The Case of Warder Martin was published by Murdoch
and Co. and offered for sale to the general public at a penny a copy. A note
from the publisher, carried on the front page, read:
‘Martin was dismissed. It happened in May last year. He is still out of
employment and in poor circumstances. Can anybody help him?’
Wilde continued to campaign for prison reform. On March 24, 1898, a day
that fell during the week that the Home Secretary’s Prison Reform Bill was due
to be read for a second time, he had a follow-up letter published in the Daily
Chronicle outlining, ‘what reforms in our present stupid and barbarous
system are urgently necessary.’ It seems his campaigning was effective as, when
the Prison Reform Bill became law in August 1898, a number of the changes
contained within it replicated exactly the proposals proffered by Oscar Wilde.
As to the friendship between Wilde and Martin, although the two never
met again, the warder maintained his admiration for ‘the poet’. After learning
of Wilde’s death in 1900, Martin contributed a chapter entitled, ‘The Poet in
Prison’ to R.H. Sherard’s Life of Oscar Wilde, published in 1906.
Sherard, a loyal friend to Wilde, dedicated this biography to Martin and his
touching dedication reads:
To T. M., who in the extreme of adversity, proved himself the true
friend of an unhappy man’.
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