Charlie.
The press calls Charles Salvador aka. Charles Bronson "Britain's notorious prisoner" but who gave him that label? And should it mean he's never allowed to be free?
Previously: What's water?
For many journalists, columnists, and commentators, propaganda is so commonplace they can't even see it.
Update: This edition was updated later on the day of first publication (7 March 2023) to incorporate information on a 2016 assault on another inmate by Salvador as well as accusations that he’s part of a racist prison gang. Thank you to Gavin for sharing the material from JENGbA and Searchlight with me.
The new section starts from the paragraph that begins, “However, The Guardian’s story does include an incident” and ends with the line “…even in the extremely limited environments in which Salvador lives.”
Charles Salvador is as much a character as Charles Bronson was before him; he is a performance by a man who has spent the majority of his life on the small stage of prison life and largely within the enforced soliloquy of solitary.
Beyond ‘Charlie’ there is a man who was once called Michael Peterson; a man who committed his first crime aged 11 and first went to prison as a teenager. In 1974, when he was 22, Peterson was sentenced to 7 years for armed robbery. His violent behaviour in prison led to his stretch, well, stretching to double its original length and he was released in 1988 — after stays in secure mental hospitals where he was forcibly medicated, as well as prisons (he was transferred 8 times in a single year).
He lasted less than a year outside of prison, changing his name to Charles Bronson — without ever seeing a film by the actor whose name he borrowed — as part of his short-lived but brutal career as a bare-knuckle boxer.
Bronson robbed a jewellers to acquire a ring for his girlfriend — he sold the other items he took — and was arrested. While witnesses declined to give evidence, his girlfriend flipped and became a prosecution witness. Charged under the Bronson name, he decided to abandon his identity as Michael Peterson and was sentenced to another 7 years in prison.
As before, he was a highly dangerous and disruptive presence — “a one-man riot” — taking hostages, and subjecting both guards and other prisoners to violence and being subject to it himself (in 1989, at least two prisoners stabbed him in the back multiple times in a sustained attack; he refused to speak to the police about it).
Bronson was released again in 1992. He spent 53 days outside before being arrested again on a charge of conspiracy to commit robbery. In February 1993, the charges were dropped and he was fined £600 for breaking his girlfriend’s lover’s nose. Sixteen days later, he was arrested again for conspiracy to rob and possession of a sawn-off shotgun. While on remand, he took a civilian librarian hostage, demanding a blow-up doll, a helicopter and a cup of tea. He released the man after claiming to have been disgusted when he farted in front of him.
He pleaded guilty to possession of the shotgun but not guilty to the conspiracy charge. He told the court that he had acquired the shotgun because he intended to use it to kill himself. On September 14 1993, he was found guilty of intent to rob and not guilty on the conspiracy charge; his co-defendant was found not guilty on all charges. Bronson was sentenced to 8 years in prison.
Taken from Belmarsh prison to Wakefield, he was held for 40 days in isolation, kept naked for the whole time. In November 1993, he was transferred to Hull. The following Easter, he repeated his old trick of taking a hostage, this time the deputy governor, who was released after Bronson was overpowered by guards.
After another transfer, he was returned to Wakefield, confined to a cell nicknamed ‘the Hannibal Cage’ (5.5 x 4.6m, caged windows and doors, cardboard furniture, and a concrete bed). It was during that period that he was encouraged to try art by prison officers, Mick O’Hagan and Alan Jarvis. He took to it and O’Hagan said in a Channel 5 documentary:
[Bronson] was the only prisoner I ever did that with and it paid dividends because none of my staff ever got assaulted by him. We're the only prison he's never kicked off in.
Bronson was in constant solitary confinement and being moved almost weekly when his father died in September 1994. He attacked the governor of High Down prison but, while incarcerated at Lincoln, was allowed to meet children with Down Syndrome with whom he got on well. He was briefly taken out of solitary only to be sent back when he returned from 30 minutes of exercise time 30 minutes late.
In April 1996, he took a doctor hostage at Birmingham prison; five months later Bronson took an Iraqi hijacker and several other prisoners hostage after the Iraqi bumped into him in the canteen and did not apologise. He said he was “losing it badly” and during the hostage situation he spoke about his dead father and told the hostages that “any funny business” would be met with him “snapping necks”. He demanded a plane to Libya, two submachine guns, 5,000 rounds of ammunition, and an axe.
He released one hostage; chanted for ice cream; felt guilty after he hit one of the other prisoners over the head with a tray and insisted that they hit him over the head four times so they could “call it quits”; and finally agreed to release the hostages after slashing himself with a razor. His behaviour led to his sentence being extended by seven years (reduced to five on appeal).
In October 1996, Bronson took a doctor hostage after becoming agitated having expected a visit from his lawyer. He released the man — who later refused to assist the prosecution — after 30 minutes. Almost three years later, in January 1999, Bronson took a civilian social worker hostage after the man critiqued one of his drawings. He smashed up the prison and managed to knock himself unconscious for a few minutes when he wrenched a washing machine out of the wall. The resulting siege lasted 44 hours; Bronson was transferred to Whitemoor prison and given a new discretionary life sentence, to last at least 3 years.
Later that year, he was moved to a special unit set up specifically to house him, the multiple killer Robert Maudsley — who committed three of his four murders within psychiatric hospitals and prisons after his first conviction — and the brutal murderer Reginald Wilson.
In the years since, Bronson married and divorced — he’s been married four times — and attempted to be granted parole multiple times. In 2014, he attacked the governor of HMP Woodbill over a dispute about his mail — including letters from his mother — being withheld; two years were added to his sentence and the prison admitted his post may have been “unacceptably processed”. Bronson changed his name to Charles Salvador, in tribute to Dali, in 2014. In a hand-written statement on his website, he wrote:
The old me dried up... Bronson came alive in 1987. He died in 2014.
In November 2018, Salvador was found not guilty at Leeds Crown Court on a charge of grievous bodily harm; it followed an incident involving the governor of Wakefield prison. Salvador said:
For the first time in 44 years in prison, I never intended to be violent. I never meant to hurt the governor.
Since he started writing poetry and painting, Salvador has won 11 Koestler Arts awards for his work. He has had 11 books published — most in collaboration with other writers — and has tried to demonstrate the potential for him to make a living outside prison by selling his drawings.
In June 2020, Salvador won a court battle to be allowed to have his parole board meeting held in public. And that’s why I’m writing about him: his first public hearing took place yesterday.
The point of laying out the events of Salvador’s life is to show that it’s possible to explain them without reaching for language that frames him as an unknowable monster or buys into the tabloid line that he’s “Britain’s most dangerous prisoner”. Clearly, he has been a danger to others and himself over the years, but aren’t there more than a few clues in his life of alienation and solitary confinement that suggest why a multitude of reasons for that?
The problem is that most journalists who report on ‘Charlie’ cannot resist using the most loaded possible language; it is not enough to present the facts to readers, they must ramp up the fear and loathing. For example, The Times news story on the parole hearing begins:
At the age of 70 the prisoner who renamed himself after the actor Charles Bronson continues to exude a malevolence which could win him an Oscar.
After half a century in jail, much of it in solitary confinement, Britain’s most notorious prisoner appeared at a parole board hearing on Monday to appeal for freedom.
He’s “Britain’s most notorious prisoner” because newspapers keep saying that he is; many other prisoners have committed more serious crimes than Salvador — he is just better at marketing than most of them.
David Brown, the Times reporter dispatched to the court, intends to maintain the legend; in his report, not only does Salvador “exude a malevolence which could win him an Oscar” but his sunglasses — explained by him later in the report as because of sensitive eyes caused by so long in solitary — are there to “[conceal] any malicious intent”.
Salvador is quoted saying…
I’m fighting the penal system that has done humiliating things to me for decades. If I was a dog I’d have had the RSPCA on my side.
… and The Times treats it as a quip, even as it notes he was forcibly injected with psychoactive drugs in high-security mental hospitals and is still only allowed to leave his cell for a maximum of 90 minutes a day.
Every report about Salvador uses the Bronson name for SEO and recognition reasons and the “Britain’s most notorious prisoner” line out of sheer laziness. Who maintains the official chart of notoriety and does his consistent status as the most terrifying toppermost of the poppermost make ‘Bronson’ the Beatles of ‘beastly’ lags? It’s a beloved tabloid cliche but even the so-called ‘quality’ press clutch it close in their reports.
Like The Times, The Guardian opens its report on the parole hearing with talk of Salvador as “one of the UK’s longest serving and most notorious prisoners”. It also, in common with The Times, makes reference to Salvador “rocking back and forth” when not speaking during the hearing. This is an institutionalised person but neither report considers that fact.
However, The Guardian’s story does include an incident that is missing from most reports and oddly absent from Salvador’s extension Wikipedia page:
Asked about an incident in 2015 when he threw his own faeces at another prisoner Bronson claimed the inmate had killed four people and had insulted him and threatened to stab him. Bronson said: “I should have hung him.”
While covered extensively in contemporaneous press reports, this assault seemed to have slipped off off his rap sheet. It’s odd that Haroon Siddique, The Guardian’s legal affairs correspondent, doesn’t include more details here as he wrote a story for the paper in 2021 about the inmate who Salvador assaulted: Kevan Thakrar. He was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 35 years in 2008 for the murder of three men and the attempted murder of two women following a dispute over drugs. His brother, Miran, fired the shots but Kevan was convicted under the unjust law of joint enterprise.
In 2011, Thakrar attacked three prison officers with a broken bottle, injuring all three. At trial, his defence said he had engaged in a pre-emptive attack against racist staff; after hearing extensive evidence on his experiences in prison, the jury accepted his explanation and he was acquitted. It was then that Thakrar was transferred to the Close Supervision Centre (CSC) system, which brought him into close contact with Salvador.
In November 2016 — it seems either Siddique or parties at the parole hearing got the wrong year — the Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association (JENGbA) campaign published a blog post that included an account of the assault:
After a serious racial assault by a prison officer on Kevan Thakrar 2 weeks ago which we shall go into further detail in our letter of complaint to Wakefield Governor, JENGbA have just received a call from Kevan Thakrar to be told he has been subjected to another racist attack today. Fellow prisoner in the Closed Supervision Centre (Solidarity Confinement) at Wakefield, Charles Bronson has assaulted Kevan today by collecting and storing faeces in a plastic bottle. He deliberately threw it over him as he walked by his cell from behind his cage. Kevan knows he has been encouraged to do this by the prison officers who have continually subjected him to racist abuse by offering incentives to the other inmates in the CSC. When Janet Cunliffe and myself, visited him a couple of months ago the other inmates screamed racist abuse at us when we left, of course we complained but we were ignored. If they can do that with impunity to visitors and not punish anyone what might happen to Kevan behind closed doors is truly terrifying.
This assault happened in front of officers, Kevan was being escorted by 7 officers as is the norm whenever he is allowed to leave his cell, yet no action has been taken against Bronson and he is remaining on enhanced regime thereby sanctioning his behaviour. Not only did he throw a bottle of shit at Kevan, he shouted racist abuse and was not once ordered to stop. Bronson is one of the ‘Death before Dishonour’ racist gang that is being recruited in prisons and operating inside HMP Wakefield...
Last week, Searchlight, the anti-racist, anti-fascist magazine, published a piece about Death before Dishonour, naming Salvador/Bronson:
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is in denial over the activities of a violent anti-Muslim gang operating in some of Britain’s most secure prisons. Despite conceding a recent court case which established a litany of racist attacks by the gang, calling itself Death Before Dishonour, and collusion by some prison staff, the MoJ told Searchlight that it was ‘not a live issue’ and could offer no information about the gang’s activities.
Death Before Dishonour is concentrated in Close Supervision Centres (CSCs), which house prisoners viewed as highly dangerous, and boasts among its members Charles Bronson, one of the most notoriously violent inmates in the prison system...
...The Death Before Dishonour attacks started in 2015 when [Thakrar] was moved from Full Sutton prison to Wakefield. The Wakefield CSC already housed Charles Bronson and other Death Before Dishonour members. Bronson was well known for his antipathy to ethnic minority prisoners and especially Muslims.
What started as a campaign of threats and harassment progressed to assaults and attacks where liquids, including urine, were thrown at Thakrar. His lawyers wrote to the prison authorities but nothing was done and the harassment continued over many months...
...After the attack on Thakrar, Bronson was brought up on a charge before the prison governor, but the hearing was conducted without Thakrar present and Bronson was found not guilty. Only one month later another Death Before Dishonour member, Douglas Gary Vinter, said to have been one of the gang’s founders, threatened Thakrar and spat on him in the presence of some 15 prison officers, yet still nothing was done.
There are scant mentions of Death Before Dishonour in the national newspapers since 2016 when The Sun and others did cover the Bronson connection, and the group has not been named during his public parole hearings so far.
Thakrar and Salvador offer different accounts of the event but while the latter, as Bronson, claimed to have converted to Islam during his four-year marriage to Fatema Saira Rehman (2001 - 2005), he renounced it when the relationship ended. Racist gangs are common in UK prisons; even in the extremely limited environments in which Salvador lives.
Despite the omission of further details on the 2016 event and attributing it to the incorrect year, Siddique does deserve some credit for quoting more thoroughly from the hearing than The Times did and mostly avoiding scary adjectives while describing Salvador.
Of course, The Sun doesn’t; it calls him “Britain’s most violent prisoner” — it must be looking at a different chart rundown — and indulges in its usual trick of having middle-class hacks talk like minor characters from The Sweeney:
The notorious lag was locked in ‘cages and boxes’
Sky News illustrates its story with a picture of Salvador from 1992 — 31 years ago — and goes for the old reliable “Britain's most notorious prisoner” label. And there’s no shortage of weird asides (“his trademark rumbling voice”; “dubbed one of Britain's most violent offenders” — by whom?).
The Mirror — despite noting in other stories that people wrongly think Salvador is a killer — also calls him “Britain's most notorious prisoner” and adds that other unsourced claim (“… dubbed one of the most violent offenders in the country…”) into the mix. The Telegraph also opens with the “most notorious prisoner” line and, like Sky News, has views on what Salvador’s ‘trademarks’ are:
Wearing his trademark dark sunglasses and a black suit with braces, the 70-year-old self-described “retired prison activist” said he has changed his ways and there would be no more “rumbles” behind bars.
In fairness, its report includes a detail that other publications have omitted:
He remains in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day because of staff shortages in the prison.
Leaving off the part about “staff shortages” works much better when you’re painting a picture of BRITAIN’S MOST NOTORIOUS PRISONER.
The Daily Mail goes with “Britain's most violent prisoner” for its report and gives readers a rundown of his ‘greatest’ hits. But it — like the other pieces I’ve quoted — avoids including any balance about the man they insist on calling ‘Bronson’. His awards for art go unmentioned, as do the anecdotes that a former fellow prisoner recently shared about him.
Michael O’Brien — one of the Cardiff Newspaper Three who were wrongly convicted for the killing of Phillip Saunders in 1987 — told the Talking True Crime podcast1 that Salvador had protected him:
Charlie spoke up for me. One of the prison officers was trying to bully me, and he went in and he said, “You touch him, you call me to deal with.” I was only a skinny thing. I was only about eight stone and Charlie was this big lump. They went, “No, you’re all right, Charlie.” I thanked him for that because he did stick up for me. He was a con’s con.
Addressing those repeated claims that Salvador is the “most notorious/violent prisoner in Britain”, O’Brien said:
There are loads of myths in the paper about him being the most dangerous person. I know he’s done some crazy things, but he is not a murderer and he gets treated worse than a sex offender. And I find that really, really offensive when you consider he’s never killed anyone.
Yes, he's done things. He's taken people hostage, but you don't know the story behind it. The people in prison know the story, he took the hostage and asked for a helicopter and an ice cream. Can you really take that seriously?
I went back and searched through the Newspapers.com database to see who the press considered “Britain’s most notorious prisoner” in 1997, the year after he asks for guns, a helicopter, and ice cream after taking hostages. The universal choice was Myra Hindley. By the year 2000, The Daily Telegraph had bestowed the title on Bronson:
The reality of life spent as one of Britain’s most notorious prisoners was laid out before a jury yesterday when Charles Bronson told of the “living hell” he had endured in the years before he took a teacher hostage.
Bronson, who is in jail for conspiracy to commit robbery, told Luton Crown Court that he had spent nearly all of the past 26 years in prison. He was now confined 23 hours a day in a stark cell with a window that cannot be opened and furniture made of cardboard.
The Telegraph of 23 years ago was more sympathetic and honest about how Salvador’s existence than the ‘modern’ version.
In the ‘true crime’-addicted environment of 2023, of course, it’s easier to imagine Salvador as a character, say the Bronson figure portrayed by Tom Hardy in the film Bronson (2008), than it is to think of him as a complicated figure — as much a victim as a perpetrator; a protestor and an artist as much as a violent villain.
When he was preparing to play Bronson, Hardy sat down with him. In one, the actor explained that he was having a hard time (“I’m not happy, I’m not in a good place. I can’t be with a woman and yet I can’t be without one…”). Bronson replied:
Do you remember the floods? Do you remember that boy who got his foot stuck in the grate and the river kept rising and it kept rising and it kept rising, and eventually they tried to get him out but he drowned? Well, that wouldn’t have happened to me. Do you want to know why? Because I’d have said, “Cut it off now.” Tom, what I’m trying to say is, right, what I’m trying to say, son, is sometimes you’ve got to cut a little piece of yourself off, no matter how much it hurts, in order to grow. In order to move on.
The reporting about Salvador has not moved on. It calls him by his previous name and clings to a trophy the press awarded him 23 years ago. His “notoriety” is a product of the media but it will be central to the decision of the parole board. He has done many violent and terrible things in his life but there are many greater monsters who have been freed to touch grass and die in their own beds. Henry Kissinger has never seen the inside of a jail cell.
Thanks to DKD for reading the draft.
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The Newsquest podcast that the company has been promoting by piggybacking on police press conferences in the most grotesque way. See more here.
I really enjoyed this article Mic. Balanced, nuanced and thought-provoking: everything the everyday media isn’t.
Keep up the good work 😊