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What ‘Life Means Life’ Feels Like
Robert Maudsley, Sidney Cooke and Charles Bronson
One man who knows exactly what it means to be sentenced to spend the rest of your life behind bars – and the ‘invisible licence’ it gives to kill in prison – is sixty-two-year-old Robert John Maudsley, a wild-eyed, long-haired Liverpudlian, who killed one man before he was imprisoned and three more once in custody.
Now living in a specially constructed cell, Maudsley has spent a large part of the past thirty-two years in solitary confinement in what is effectively a two-roomed cage, with bulletproof windows and a team of six prison officers dedicated to looking after him. He is allowed just one hour of exercise outside a day, and never in the company of other prisoners – both for his protection and theirs.
Maudsley’s two-cell unit bears an uncanny resemblance to the one featured in the film version of Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs, but it was created more than seven years before the film itself was released. A visitor has to pass through no fewer than seventeen locked steel doors to reach the unit, which is approximately five and a half metres by four and a half metres. The only furniture is a table and chair, both made from compressed cardboard, and the lavatory and sink are bolted to the floor. The bed is a concrete slab with a mattress.
A solid steel door opens into a small cage within the cell, encased in thick Perspex, with a slot at the bottom through which prison officers pass food and other items. During his daily hour of exercise, he is escorted to the yard by at least three officers. As the Observer writer Tony Thompson noted in 2003, ‘It is a level of intense isolation to which no other prisoner, not even Myra Hindley, has been subjected.’
The effect on Maudsley has been to drive him into a severe depression. ‘My life in solitary is one long period of unbroken depression,’ he has said. It also illuminates the dilemma that lies behind the ‘lock them up and throw away the key’ approach to the incarceration of those who have committed the most heinous crimes – for it reveals the effect it can have on those who receive a whole life sentence.
Maudsley has made no secret of his views, even to the extent of writing to The Times newspaper several times about his treatment. ‘It does not matter to them whether I am mad or bad,’ he has said. ‘They do not know the answer and they do not care just so long as I am kept out of sight and out of mind.’ Now with a pale prison pallor and wispy, thinning hair, Maudsley also said, ‘I am left to stagnate; vegetate; and to regress; left to confront my solitary head-on with people who have eyes but don’t see and who have ears but don’t hear, who have mouths but don’t speak.’
‘Why can’t I have amazing pictures on my walls in solitary rather than the dirty damp patches I currently have?’ Maudsley wrote. ‘Why can’t I possess or purchase postage stamps so I can maintain contact with my family, friends, people who contact me etc; why can’t I have hand-held electronic games in my cell; why can’t I have toiletries? With the open toilet that blocks up here it certainly does smell like a sewer.’
In another letter he asked, ‘Why can’t I have a budgie instead of the flies and cockroaches and spiders I currently have? I promise to love it and not eat it.’
With an exceptional IQ, he has repeatedly asked for access to classical music tapes, a television set, pictures and toiletries, as well as the budgerigar. Some of his requests have been granted. He gained access to postage stamps, for example, but his conditions in the first decade or more of his time in his Perspex cell have left him with a residue of anger as well as depression.
‘If the Prison Service says no,’ he wrote in another letter, ‘then I ask for a simple cyanide capsule which I shall willingly take and the problem of Robert John Maudsley can easily and swiftly be resolved.’
There are those within the Prison Service who see Maudsley as a problem that cannot be solved in any other way than his exceptional confinement, in view of the outstanding danger he presents to other prisoners whom he may come into contact with.
But not everyone shares that view. Professor Andrew Coyle, now Emeritus Professor of Prison Studies at the University of London, and a former prison governor himself, asked me when I discussed the issue with him, ‘Do people really know or understand what “throw away the key” really means?’
In a speech in the United States in 2014, Professor Coyle quoted from a United Nations report to the General Assembly, which said bluntly, ‘Prison regimes of solitary confinement often cause mental and physical suffering or humiliation that amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment … Solitary confinement should be imposed, if at all, in very exceptional circumstances, as a last resort, for as short a time as possible.’
Professor Coyle also cited an example from his own experience as a prison governor in Scotland’s maximum security prison with a prisoner named Thomas McCullough. In 1970 McCullough had been convicted of murdering two people and was ordered to be detained indefinitely in the Scottish Secure Psychiatric Hospital. But in 1976 McCulloch and another patient broke out armed with an axe and a knife. In the course of their escape they killed another patient, a member of the nursing staff and a policeman.
When they were caught, both men were sentenced to life imprisonment, and McCulloch was kept in a specially constructed suite of three rooms – a cell where he slept at night, a living area and a workroom. Three prison officers were present within the suite and directly supervised his movements at all times, and a further team of three rotated their duties with them.
‘At the outset,’ Professor Coyle told me, ‘it seemed likely that he would never be released. But as the years passed the prison staff worked with McCulloch so successfully that he was eventually transferred to lower security prisons and in 2013 was released from prison entirely – although he will remain under supervision in the community for the rest of his life. McCulloch is now living anonymously in the Highlands of Scotland.’
Professor Coyle is convinced that other whole life term prisoners could benefit from the same treatment as McCulloch, but acknowledges that there will always be those who deny it.
There is no doubt, however, that the reasons for Robert Maudsley’s solitary confinement lie in the nature of his crimes, and the legend that grew up around them. In particular, they revolve around the myth that he was alleged to have eaten part of the brain of one of his prison victims – earning him the nicknames of ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’ and ‘Spoons’. The reality is that Maudsley did no such thing, as at least one prison officer who worked with him for almost twenty years has explained repeatedly. Nevertheless, the legend lives on, repeated regularly whenever his name is mentioned. That is not for one moment to diminish the heinous nature of Maudsley’s crimes, nor to dismiss his need for the most severe of penalties. It is simply to suggest that his story is considerably more nuanced than is often told.
Maudsley’s story began with a deeply disturbed and abused childhood, which enraged him. In 1979, during his last murder trial, his defence team argued repeatedly that when he sank into the violent rages that became commonplace, he was often thinking of his parents, and how much he wanted them dead.
‘When I kill I have my parents in mind,’ Maudsley has admitted himself. ‘If I had killed my parents in 1970 none of these people would have died. If I had killed them then I would be walking around as a free man without a care in the world.’
One of twelve children, he was born in Liverpool in 1953, and spent most of his early life in an orphanage. He reportedly found the orphanage relatively pleasant compared to staying at home with his parents – but he was retrieved by them at the age of eight.
‘All I remember of my childhood is the beatings,’ Maudsley has said. ‘Once I was locked in a room for six months and my father only opened the door to come in and beat me, four or six times a day. He used to hit me with sticks and or rods, and once he bust a .22 air rifle over my back.’ Maudsley was eventually rescued by social services and placed in a series of foster homes, while his father told the rest of the family that he was dead.
During the late 1960s, Maudsley became a rentboy in London, and often suffered sexual abuse at the hands of older men, which induced in him a hatred of paedophiles, as well as giving him a serious drug habit. He sold himself to men to support this drug abuse, and he made repeated suicide attempts. Maudsley also spent extended periods in psychiatric care during those years, sometimes telling his doctors that he could hear voices telling him to kill his parents.
In 1973, Maudsley killed one of the men who picked him up for sex. John Farrell, a labourer, produced several pictures of children he had abused, which provoked Maudsley to fly into a rage and garrotte him with wire. Declared unfit to stand trial, he was sent to Broadmoor Special Hospital for the criminally insane. He remained there for four years before killing again – the murder that gave him his nickname and created his legend.
In 1977, at the age of just twenty-four, Maudsley and another Broadmoor patient, John Cheeseman, took another patient, David Francis, a convicted paedophile, hostage and proceeded to barricade all three of them into a secure room in the hospital. Over the next nine hours Maudsley and Cheeseman tortured Francis, before finally garrotting him and holding his body aloft so that the staff could see him through the spyhole in the door. According to legend, Francis’s body was found with his head ‘cracked open like a boiled egg’ and with a spoon hanging out of it.
In reality, Maudsley did not eat any part of his victim’s brains. One prison officer who worked with him explained that Maudsley had, in fact, made a makeshift weapon by splitting a plastic spoon in half to create a rough pointed weapon. He then killed his fellow Broadmoor inmate by ramming it into his victim’s ear, penetrating the brain. Inevitably, the plastic spoon blade was covered in gore, which was alleged to be ‘his brains’.
Ironically after this second murder – even though the crime was committed in a secure psychiatric hospital – Maudsley was declared fit to stand trial. He was convicted of manslaughter and sent to Wakefield Prison instead of Broadmoor. But within a matter of weeks of arriving there, Maudsley killed again. The rage he had felt for years exploded, and he set out to kill seven people in one day. He managed two.
One Saturday morning in 1978 he lured fellow prisoner Salney Darwood, who had been imprisoned for killing his wife, into his cell. Maudsley proceeded to tie a garrotte around his neck and swing him round the cell, smashing his head repeatedly against the walls. He then hid Darwood’s dead body under his bed and went out in search of other victims, but none could be persuaded to go into his cell. Frustrated, Maudsley crept into the cell of fifty-six-year-old Bill Roberts who was lying face down on his bunk. He attacked his head with a serrated home-made knife as he lay there, killing him in a matter of minutes.
His anger satiated, Maudsley calmly went to a nearby prison officers’ office, put the home-made knife on the table and announced to the officers present that they would be ‘two short when it comes to the next roll-call’. Convicted of both murders and sentenced to life imprisonment – though not, at that time, a whole life term – Maudsley was sent back to Wakefield, where he was not allowed to mix with other prisoners. It was the Home Secretary who later decreed that Maudsley should never be released, and serve a whole life term.
Sent to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight for a time in the early 1980s, Maudsley worked with a prison psychiatrist for three years, who came to believe that his patient was making progress at controlling his anger and depression. The treatment was discontinued, however, and Maudsley was sent back to Wakefield, where the prison authorities constructed his first special cell in 1983. He was incarcerated there for more than a decade before being transferred to another specially constructed secure unit at Woodhill Prison near Milton Keynes.
Maudsley’s elder brother Paul has said repeatedly, ‘As far as I can tell, the prison authorities are trying to break him. Every time they see him making a little progress they throw a spanner in the works.’ At one point at Woodhill, for example, he was again reported to have made progress, even to the extent of playing chess with his special group of prison officers, and being granted access to books and music. Nevertheless, Maudsley was eventually returned to the glass cage at Wakefield – before being moved to another specially constructed secure unit.
‘All I have to look forward to is further mental breakdown and possible suicide,’ was how Maudsley put it not long after his return to Wakefield. That certainly seems to have proved the case. In the thirty-two years he has spent in almost constant solitary confinement, Maudsley’s health is reported to have declined, while his mental condition also appears to have deteriorated. There are even suggestions that he has grown his hair and fingernails to excessive lengths, much as the billionaire American Howard Hughes did in the last years of his life.
In 2012 the Daily Mirror reported that Maudsley was in poor health and required two visits from a doctor every day due to the severe weight loss he was suffering as a result of the medication he was taking to control his violent mood swings.
One of his fellow inmates at Wakefield, Charles Bronson, a former professional fighter with a reputation for extreme violence himself, even wrote about Maudsley in his 2007 book Loonyology. Bronson declared, ‘I know about Bob. I’ve seen him go mad, I know what’s happened to him.’ Bronson also alleged that during his one-hour period of exercise each day, which he takes individually as he is not allowed to come into contact with fellow prisoners, Maudsley paces around his separate prison yard – twenty feet long by twelve feet wide – a stooped figure with his eyes fixed on the ground and sporting a long grey beard. ‘Maybe the untold solitary years have made him madder,’ Bronson concluded.
Whatever the exact truth, it is a frightening portrait of the damage that extremely prolonged periods of solitary confinement can inflict on a prisoner. One woman who befriended him in letters during his time at Wakefield, and then visited him on a number of occasions, found him friendly, and reported, ‘Everyone concentrated on the crimes he committed twenty-five years ago. It’s as if they are living in a time loop and no one is prepared to look at him as he is now.’ Those views were expressed more than a decade ago.
The probable truth now is that Robert Maudsley’s health and mental condition have deteriorated so severely that he is left as little more than a husk of a human being with no realistic chance that he will do anything other than die in prison. The question Maudsley raises, however, is whether his fate is what a civilised and humane society actually desires for those who are deemed the ‘worst of the worst offenders’ for their heinous crimes.
Another inhabitant of Wakefield Prison, who helped to bring the jail its nickname of the ‘monster mansion’, received treatment not appreciably different from Maudsley’s and for distinctly similar reasons.
Convicted paedophile Sidney Cooke is now eighty-eight years old, and was born in April 1927 in Stroud, Gloucestershire. He has been in prison with only a nine-month break since his initial remand in custody for the gang rape and manslaughter of fourteen-year-old Jason Swift in November 1985, a period of thirty years, and he too is in exceptionally frail health having suffered a series of strokes. Cooke is mostly confined to bed in Wakefield, although he can sometimes be seen being pushed around in a wheelchair.
Cooke has been called ‘Britain’s most notorious paedophile’, and known by the nickname ‘Hissing Sid’ as a result of his unusual speech pattern, but he was not convicted until he was in his late fifties. As a result he has spent all his later years in prison after a period of at least twenty years committing crimes against children and teenagers without being detected.
Starting out as a farm labourer, Cooke found a job working in a fairground in the 1960s, a career that allowed him to travel the country in pursuit of boys. To help him do so, he set up a children’s version of a ‘Test Your Strength’ machine, which formed a familiar part of many travelling fairs. There seems little doubt that throughout this period he sexually attacked many boys.
By the 1970s Cooke, and a group of paedophiles later described in the media as the ‘Dirty Dozen’, began taking young boys off the streets and drugging them, before raping and abusing them in group orgies. By the mid-1980s, the group had acquired a flat on the run-down Kingsmead estate in Hackney, east London, where they took their young male victims, and sometimes tortured them.
In November 1985, a group led by Cooke each paid £5 to gang-rape fourteen-year-old Jason Swift at one of their orgies. After his body was found in a shallow grave by a dog-walker, an investigation led to the arrest of Cooke, along with three accomplices – Leslie Bailey, Robert Oliver and Steven Barrell. Cooke was sentenced to nineteen years at the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey for the manslaughter of Swift.
Jason Swift’s half-brother, Steve, said after the verdict that he was disgusted that Cooke had only received a similar sentence to somebody who kills someone else in a pub fight. He felt it was far too short. ‘At the very least, part of the sentence for men who attack children should be castration,’ he said. ‘Their pleasure is boys. Take away that pleasure and they have nothing left to live for … But as far as I’m concerned he can never pay his debt to society. The debt of Jason’s life was too great.’
Shortly afterwards, his accomplice in the ‘Dirty Dozen’, Leslie Bailey, confessed to the prison authorities that Cooke was among those who had murdered seven-year-old Mark Tildesley in Wokingham, Berkshire, on 1 June 1984. The boy had disappeared while visiting a funfair in Wokingham that evening, having been lured away with the promise of a fifty-pence bag of sweets. His bicycle was found chained to railings near by.
Cooke contradicted Bailey’s story completely, insisting that in fact it was Bailey who had been the ringleader of the gang that killed Tildesley, and who were believed to have killed at least nine other victims. Bailey himself was murdered in prison in 1993.
In 1991, the Crown Prosecution Service declined to prosecute Cooke for Tildesley’s murder as he was already in prison for the manslaughter of Jason Swift. Cooke’s sentence was reduced to sixteen years on appeal in 1989, and he was paroled nine years later in April 1998. Cooke’s parole caused huge public outrage, and even he admitted that he might reoffend. During his time in prison, he had refused to take part in any rehabilitation scheme.
As a result of the public controversy over his release and police fear for his safety, Cooke was forced to live in a suite of cells at Yeovil police station in Somerset during his period of freedom. The Home Office provided him with a TV, washing machine, microwave and small cooker. But on 26 January 1999, he was arrested again and charged with committing eighteen sex offences between 1972 and 1981. They included the repeated abuse of two brothers and the rape of a young woman.
At his trial on 5 October 1999, Cooke pleaded guilty to sexually abusing the two brothers on ten occasions in 1972 and 1973. He also admitted five counts of indecent assault and five counts of buggery, but he firmly denied the remaining eight charges, which were four counts of rape, three further counts of indecent assault, and one of buggery, all in 1981. The judge ordered them to lie on file. In defence of his actions, Cooke claimed that he was sexually abused as a child, and that when he abused the two boys he thought he had ‘behaved naturally’.
On 17 December 1999, Cooke received two life sentences and the judge told him that he would only be considered for release after he had served at least a five-year jail sentence. That would have come at the end of 2004, but Cooke is still behind bars today. At the time, the director of the National Society for the Protection and Care of Children insisted, ‘He should never have been freed after serving his last sentence. We certainly hope he will never be given the opportunity to hurt a child again. The children who were abused by Sidney Cooke suffered some of the vilest and cruellest sex offences imaginable.’
Aware of his reputation as a ‘loathsome paedophile’, Cooke retired to the security of Wakefield with some relief. In the words of a senior police officer who dealt with him, ‘He certainly does not want to face the public. He is well aware of their reaction to him – and is in some fear of that. He spends a lot of his time watching television. He reads the papers. He cleans his accommodation, he sends out for food, he has his own money. He generally busies himself living under supervision.’
Within a matter of years, however, Cooke suffered the first of a series of strokes, and his health began to deteriorate rapidly.
Sidney Cooke was never sentenced to a whole life term of imprisonment, nevertheless it seems highly likely that he will end his life in jail as he will never be fit enough to be released – in spite of the fact it is difficult to see how he can now present a risk to society, given his physical condition. But there is no sign whatever that Cooke is being considered for parole. In that respect he represents one of the conundrums of the current sentencing regime – a prisoner who probably would be eligible for parole, if there were somewhere that he could go which could provide security and care.
Yet Cooke also epitomises an increasing trend among prisoners subject to long periods of imprisonment, which raises the question: do the Prison Service and prison officers within it have the necessary skills and training to cope with older inmates whose medical, physical and emotional needs present quite different challenges to prison staff who are used to dealing with younger prisoners? The ageing population that is affecting the National Health Service also affects the Prison Service and the small group of prisoners who have been sentenced to a whole life term – or are effectively serving one as a result of the heinous nature of their crimes.
A third prisoner apparently destined to spend the rest of his life in Wakefield Prison is the man often described as ‘Britain’s most violent inmate’, former bare-knuckle fighter Charles Bronson, who is now known as Charles Salvador. He too has never received a whole life sentence and is still only sixty-three, but his reputation would seem to make it highly unlikely that he will ever be judged to present no risk to the general public, and therefore eligible for release on licence.
A distinctly larger-than-life character in every sense, Bronson was born Michael Gordon Peterson in Luton, Bedfordshire, on 6 December 1952, and has spent almost his entire adult life as a prisoner. He has served forty years behind bars, and thirty-six years of those years in solitary confinement, since he was first sentenced to seven years for armed robbery in 1974 as a young man of twenty-two.
But Bronson has used his period in jail to create a distinctive reputation for himself, both as a prisoner and to the wider public, writing a string of eleven books, including his life story, holding a series of art exhibitions of his work as a painter, which won him several awards, creating his own Appeal Fund, and even being featured in a 2008 film about his life, called simply Bronson, in which he was portrayed by the actor Tom Hardy.
Bronson’s website states boldly: ‘40 years, not out. Not a murderer, sex offender, not a terrorist. NOT A DANGER TO THE PUBLIC. 40 years served it is time to free Charles Bronson.’ But Bronson is intelligent enough to add: ‘(This can be disputed into what life imprisonment means. Should Bronson be in prison for life on the definition of life in prison?)’
What cannot be denied is that Bronson’s reputation for violence and non-cooperation during his many years as a prisoner is without parallel in the British prison system.
A bright, gentle child, according to his aunt, Michael Peterson – as he then was – had nevertheless begun to get into trouble with the law by the age of thirteen, and at nineteen only narrowly escaped his first prison sentence for a smash and grab raid. He was given a suspended sentence on the grounds that the judge felt that he deserved one more chance. That was in 1971, but the chance did not last long.
In 1974, the young Peterson was imprisoned for seven years for his part in an armed robbery at a post office in a suburb of Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, during which he stole £26.18. He was imprisoned at Walton Gaol, and his long history of violence in prison began. Peterson soon ended up on the punishment block after attacking two prisoners, and was then transferred to Hull Prison in 1975. Refusing to work, he smashed up a workshop after an altercation with a prison officer and was sent to the punishment block.
Within a matter of weeks he attacked another prisoner with a glass jug, and was charged with unlawful wounding; a further nine months were added to his original sentence. By now his reputation as a highly dangerous inmate preceded him, and he spent the years between 1975 and 1977 switching from prison to prison, though almost always being kept in isolation from his fellow prisoners. It was not until he came into contact with the London gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray that he seemed to calm down slightly, describing them as ‘the best two guys I’ve ever met’, although Reggie Kray in turn called meeting Peterson ‘the most frightening visit I ever had’.
The calm did not last long. Peterson was moved to Wandsworth after threatening to kill a prison officer, only to spend four months in isolation after being caught trying to dig his way out of his cell. The governor wanted him transferred again, but only Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight was willing to accept him. There he attacked a prisoner with a jam jar and was again charged with grievous bodily harm. Peterson attempted suicide and attacked another prison officer and was eventually sectioned under the Mental Health Act 1959.
As a result, in December 1978, Peterson found himself in Broadmoor, where he all but killed a child sex attacker and was reunited with Ronnie Kray. Then, in 1982, he launched his first rooftop protest after escaping to the top of the hospital and tearing off roof tiles. Not long afterwards he did it again, causing £250,000 worth of damage in a three-day protest before he was talked down by his family. Another rooftop protest followed, and Peterson then started an eighteen-day hunger strike.
Even given his own mental problems, Bronson found the experience of life in Broadmoor very disturbing. ‘I witnessed them running into walls, using their heads as rams,’ he wrote later. ‘I’ve seen them fall unconscious doing this. They stabbed themselves with pens, needles, and scissors. One even blinded himself in one eye and another tore out his own testicle. There was one just kept trying to eat himself, biting his arms, legs and feet.’
Bronson was eventually moved to Ashworth Special Secure Hospital, home to Moors Murderer Ian Brady, in June 1984, where he lapsed into another brief period of calm. So calm, indeed, that he was granted release on licence – but not before another rooftop protest and being moved again from prison to prison.
‘I’d been certified mad because of my violence,’ Bronson has said, questioning his time in Broadmoor and Ashworth. ‘I was still violent – but they are now certifying me sane. Where’s the sanity in that? Isn’t the system just as crazy?’
After his release in 1987 Peterson embarked on his short-lived career as an illegal bare-knuckle boxer in the East End of London on the advice of Reggie Kray. It was then that he changed his name from Michael Peterson to Charles Bronson – even though he had never actually seen the American actor whose name he chose.
On 7 January 1988, his sixty-ninth day of freedom, Bronson was arrested in the wake of a jewellery shop robbery and was remanded in custody again, only to plead guilty in June 1988 and receive another seven-year sentence. His prison career, with all its violence, resumed again as though nothing had happened. In 1989, for example, he ran riot in the nude, clutching a spear he fashioned out of a broken bottle and a broom handle, and was transferred again. In 1991 he was stabbed in the back by two fellow prisoners, but refused to discuss any element of the attack with the police and, after a long period of recovery, was again released on licence from prison in November 1992.
This time his period of freedom was even shorter – fifty-three days. Bronson was arrested and charged with conspiracy to rob and once again remanded in jail, but in February 1993 the case was dropped and he was released. Just sixteen days after that, however, he was arrested and remanded, once again on robbery charges. It was while he was on remand that he took a civilian librarian hostage and demanded an inflatable doll, a helicopter and a cup of tea from police negotiators. He released the hostage after being disgusted when the man he was holding broke wind in front of him.
On Easter Monday 1994, Bronson took a deputy prison governor hostage, but was eventually overpowered. Then, in 1996, he took a prison doctor hostage, but was again overpowered. A matter of months later an Iraqi hijacker bumped into him in the canteen and did not apologise. After brooding in his cell, he took two Iraqi hijackers, along with another inmate, hostage in a cell. Bronson then forced the Iraqis to tickle his feet and call him ‘General’, before demanding a plane to take him to Libya, two Uzi sub-machine guns, 5,000 rounds of ammunition and an axe. Eventually he agreed to release the three men, but another seven years were added to his sentence, later reduced to five on appeal.
Nothing changed. There were more hostage incidents – notably one involving a prison art teacher named Phil Danielson in January 1999. Bronson targeted Danielson because he had mildly criticised one of Bronson’s own drawings. Bronson tied him up with computer cable and put him on a pool table in the recreation hall while he danced around with a makeshift spear made out of a pool cue with a home-made knife taped to the tip, while telling Danielson he was going to kill him. Ironically, it was Danielson who had first interested him in art. The siege lasted forty-four hours before he finally released his hostage, who was left traumatised by the experience. In its wake, Bronson received a discretionary life sentence with a three-year minimum tariff for the incident.
Once again he appeared to calm down, although for a time he was placed in the glass cage cell that Robert Maudsley had occupied for more than a decade. Eventually both men were transferred to a newly conformed Close Supervision Centre in the Special Security Unit in Wakefield.
The period of calm meant that Bronson became due for a parole hearing in September 2008, but this was postponed after his lawyer objected to a one-hour interview, requesting instead a full day to deal with the case. Bronson had been claiming he was a reformed character since 2000, rather overlooking the fact that in that eight-year period he had attacked two prison officers, been sprayed with CS gas for refusing to exercise, and spat at a prison governor. The hearing finally took place on 11 March 2009. Parole was refused shortly afterwards, on the grounds that Bronson had certainly not proved that he was a reformed character.
Little has changed since then. In 2013, he was moved to Woodhill Prison near Milton Keynes and on 28 February 2014 he hit the governor over the head several times and was moved again. Then, on 17 May 2014, he attacked prison officers at Full Sutton in Durham after Arsenal – his least favourite football team – had won the FA Cup final. At the end of 2014, still unrepentant, Bronson admitted causing the prison governor at Woodhill actual bodily harm and was sentenced to two more years of imprisonment within his discretionary life sentence.
Bronson’s many years in prison have had a dramatic effect on him. ‘My eyes are bad due to the years of unnatural light I have had,’ he has said. ‘My vision is terrible; I have to wear shaded glasses even to read. Years of solitary have left me unable to face the light for more than a few minutes. It gives me terrible headaches if I do … Years of loneliness in small cells have left me paranoid about people invading my space. I now can’t stand people getting too close, crowding me. I hate people breathing on me and I hate smelly bodies coming near me. Mouths to me are simply for eating – never for kissing … A man needs a routine to cope with such an extreme situation. For me it is my push-ups and sit-ups. I also pace the room and count each step.’
Bronson is also clearly searching for some sense of his own true identity. Nowhere could that be clearer than in his personal life and his appetite for changing his name to assume a new and different identity.
Bronson met his first wife, Irene, in 1971, and eight months later, when she was four months pregnant, they married at Chester Register Office, only to divorce five years later. The couple had a son, Michael. Nevertheless, in 2001, Bronson married again, this time in Woodhill Prison. His new wife was Fatema Saira Rehman, a Bangladeshi-born divorcee who had seen his picture in a newspaper and begun writing to him before visiting him ten times in prison. For a short time, Bronson converted to his wife’s faith of Islam, and insisted that he be known as Charles Ali Ahmed.
After four years, however, the couple divorced, and she subsequently described him repeatedly in the harshest terms. In one newspaper interview, for example, she said, ‘He fooled me – he is nothing but an abusive, racist thug.’ Bronson immediately went back to using his bare-knuckle boxing name.
In August 2014, however, Bronson changed his name again, this time by deed poll, insisting that in future he must be known as Charles Arthur Salvador – in a tribute to the artist Salvador Dali. In a statement on his website, Salvador said, ‘The old me dried up … Bronson came alive in 1987. He died in 2014.’ He also announced that he was renouncing violence. ‘It’s non-violent all the way. It’s a peaceful journey from here on … Coz my heart is at peace and my mind is set on art.’
There are some in the prison system who doubt that Bronson’s transformation will last any longer than his conversion to Islam. Yet he seems destined to see out the rest of his life in prison. He may claim to hate it, but there is also something in his incarceration that feeds his rage, and the conviction that he is the victim, not those whom he has attacked or taken hostage. There is also an element of self-pity in him that turns into a form of narcissism, fuelling his constant desire for notoriety and attention.
Now offering T-shirts for sale on his website, and claiming he wants to be released, the reality is that Bronson has taken eleven hostages, fought with twenty prison officers – leaving one ‘covered in blood and squealing like a pig’, to use his own words – and staged nine rooftop protests, including one lasting forty-seven hours that caused £500,000 of damage. In total, it has been estimated that Bronson has cost the state more than £5million in prison costs, court appearances and criminal damage during his time inside.
As one member of the Prison Officers’ Association has put it, ‘The only reason he hasn’t been even more violent in recent years is because he’s been kept completely isolated. Every time he’s been put back among other prisoners, he’s committed another act of violence.’
Like Robert Maudsley and Sidney Cooke, Bronson has never been sentenced to a whole life term of imprisonment, but has already served more time in prison than they have, and he is still only sixty-three. But he presents the same question to British society and, of course, the Parole Board. Will it ever be safe to release him? Indeed, could he survive in the world beyond the prison walls? He has never known how to use a computer – his website is run by his supporters – and has never even possessed a mobile phone.
Should the new Charles Salvador be left forever to rot behind bars, as a form of retribution for his repeated acts of violence, or should he be released on licence to see if he can survive in a world that he really does not know, in an attempt to redeem his repeated violent crimes?
No one can be certain, but he perfectly illustrates society’s ambivalence to its most infamous criminals. Nor should we be surprised that he is reported to have been asked to take part in the reality television programme I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here if and when he is released on licence.