The Naked Rambler: AND SITTING

The Naked Rambler's outfit - hiking boots and socks - doesn't fit the legal system. His tailor-made ASBO says he mustn't be naked in public.

The cost to the taxpayer of his 10-year incarceration to date is the equivalent of 100 entry-level bespoke suits, if you can still find them for £4k.

Our tegument today is Winchester Crown Court, an architectural affront. Indoors, a bicycle is parked next to a bust of Lord Hailsham. The reception area is gaudy with tinsel and the guards are in possession of a turkey hat. Made of plush to simulate raw flesh, it plays tinny music while the legs judder. 'The best ten pounds I ever spent,' says a guard.
 
The Naked Rambler, aka Steve, has a compulsion to defy authority. This has led him to the highly controlled environment of solitary confinement. Does he seek this control? He expresses his compulsion by not wearing clothes. He does, however, have control over his behaviour: he wore clothes in order to travel to meet his children, undressing on arrival. He has refused a job in a nudist reserve, presumably because it doesn't give him an obvious mode of defiance.

Steve is like parchment - something blank on which other people can impose their ideas: hero, martyr, mischief-maker, loony, PTSD-sufferer, victim of the law's inflexibility who has suffered a grotesquely disproportionate punishment. His skin has something of parchment's dryness and sallow glimmer in the harsh downlights of the dock, on what is probably his fortieth court appearance.

I'm also working on an analogy with polenta - yellowish, bland, and prone to mysterious lumps as is Steve's right leg.

He reminds me a bit of the anti-protein campaigner Stanley Green, an eccentric part of the Oxford Circus scenery for 25 years who made that naff precinct more human.

But Steve's own body is his protest banner, his cause is himself. He has won the support of a loyal entourage, he is polite and co-operative when arrested, albeit inconsiderate on the hygiene front, but he lacks ironic self-awareness and soaks up the altruism of others. His conversation is solipsistic and his choices mean that he can't contribute to society by paying tax or doing voluntary work.

In court today Steve wishes to be unrepresented, but his long-suffering brief is here as amicus curiae in a gallant attempt to offer him some necessary cover - Matthew Scott is 'always known for his helpfulness to the courts in whatever he does,' says the judge.

'Do you want to say you're sorry?' asks the judge.

'I'm not sorry,' says Steve, his breath misting the glass in front of the dock.

Even so, Steve gets off with what sounds like the minimum sentence. He could be out soon - but for how long? Will he take the judge's advice to seek an alteration to the ASBO, which he has outgrown? The default expression on the face of the guard escorting him in the dock is 'We've got a right one here.'
  

And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. - Genesis 3:10. 

Traditionally, public nakedness has been seen as a punishment (here is an Air France executive after an attack by disgruntled workers). So why should society punish the already naked?

Coda: the only inappropriate erection in this story is Winchester Crown Court and Steve appears confident that he can get around without being plagued by such. This should give comfort to any citizen pusillanimous enough to feel outraged by someone who would have been seized by any self-respecting Renaissance painter as a scrawny model for John the Baptist.

I've blogged about Steve here and here.

In court with the Naked Rambler

[Note: you’ll see that I’m not drawing the characters, just casting them from Spotlight.]

Someone has left a startling amount of male and female imagery lying around outside Winchester Crown Court. 

It's a bracing reminder that we're here because of the Naked Rambler's genitalia and buttocks, frequent sightings of which have excited magistrates' opprobrium to such a degree that he now has his own special ASBO which leads with lumpen logic to a potential infinity of jury trials - this is his fourth - and custodial sentences.

'Prometheus', Gustave Moreau, 1868

He’s a huge burden on the taxpayer: a one-man Trident but with arguably less deterrent effect.

Before the jury are admitted, The Naked Rambler aka Steve (Jim Dale) is summoned from the deep. 

I hear shackles rattling à la Marley’s ghost - surely he isn’t chained? The usher assures me that it's the jangle of the accompanying official’s keys to the cells. But later I’m told that, when out of sight, he’s in handcuffs.

Steve must have been wearing clothes occasionally - his forearms and neck are darker than his bony chest and shoulders. He is thinner and rangier than the last time I saw him, in August; his beard is on the march again. 

From my viewpoint, only his top half is visible. In the dock he is shielded by a wooden screen below, glass above. He gazes up to heaven like a grizzled terrier or leans forward, straining to hear, his nose against the glass. 

He rubs off the condensation from his breath and a fragment of Yeats, writing about Keats, comes to mind:

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,

With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,

For certainly he sank into his grave

His senses and his heart unsatisfied

Hmn, a bit dark for Steve, but it’s there.

To my mind, the only person truly naked in this court is barrister Matthew Scott (Tim Piggott-Smith), who has been Steve’s loyal brief in the past.

Inaccurately billed as 'leading QC' on the front page of the latest Sunday Times, Scott is nevertheless top man - nobly standing on the sidelines as an unofficial amicus curiae without brief, wig, robe or ability to raise an invoice, because Steve wishes to represent himself. But that’s impossible if you aren't allowed in court at the same time as the jury. Steve won’t promise to remain seated - with his genitals out of the jury’s sight - so he is sent back to the cells.

Prosecuting counsel: ‘Mr Gough does have a wish often to stand up.’

Judge: ‘We can’t ask a prison officer to chain his legs to the floor.’

A Police Community Support Officer (Billie Piper) is looking after cellophane packets containing a pale grey marl top and tracksuit bottoms, ready for Steve to pop on if he relents.

Steve when at liberty

During one of the longueurs triggered by attempts to fit Steve’s caprice into court procedure, Scott asks his pupil (whose duties may not have been explained adequately at interview) to stand fully clothed in the witness box, then in the dock, ‎and scrutinises him to assess whether the offending genitalia really could be seen by the jury. Then Steve himself is summoned back to the dock for the same exercise. When Steve stands up, ‘The top of the pubic hair is visible, my lord.’

Judge love

The judge (Timothy West elided with Ronnie Barker) is humane and authoritative. He is particularly considerate towards Scott and expresses profuse gratitude: to represent this, in my notebook, I sketch a heart and a flower, then realise with horror that I have drawn in the court, my biggest fear as it’s illegal to do so.

It’s tempting to glamorise Steve as Joan of Arc or Peter Grimes or Job (‘Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither’) but that would be false.

I won’t regale you with Steve’s Fotherington-Thomas comments about the human body because I think they are irrelevant. I spend a lot of time drawing people who are naked as models or performers. Whether professional or enthusiastic amateurs, they embrace discipline and stick up notices on doors to the outside world saying NO NUDITY BEYOND THIS DOOR.

Steve hasn’t found the door. He isn’t even looking for it. His struggle is not concerned with some right to be naked in Asda, but with an eccentric compulsion to challenge authority.

He is using nudity as a figleaf.‎

‘The arguments against me have no foundation,’ he says.

The judge questions his intransigence: ‘Do you think something is going to change in your lifetime?’

‘Probably not.’

‘You’ll just get older and colder?’

In the court cafeteria, the clock has stopped. 

   
Steve is remanded in custody awaiting a psychiatric report and sentencing.



 

The Naked Rambler and raw Clare

'I thought - fxxx! That is what I am!' says Stephen Gough, aka the Naked Rambler.

We each have to deal with our discovery of what we are. Steve's method is to go around undressed: 'I wanted to express that purity of what I am in the most obvious way.' So far his obviousness, or obliviousness, has cost him and the taxpayer nine years in prison.

When Enid Blyton played tennis in the nude, no one complained to the police. Context is all. Steve has just been released from HMP Winchester wearing nothing but a watch and hiking boots. His minders have got him to a safe house where he is giving an interview for The Sunday Times.


'They say I'm a solipsist,' he says, stumbling over the word. 'Narcissistic.' He is animated after his latest spell in solitary. The criminal justice system is not at its most nimble when having to deal with people like Steve. Can't we just yawn and ignore them?

He has a dedicated team of friends even if the patience of a few is fraying. Some naturists are concerned that his doggedness is alienating what they rather touchingly call 'the textile world'.






Here's a naked man behind bars (below): Sound II, Antony Gormley's lead statue from a cast of his body, in the crypt of Winchester Cathedral. The figure is contemplating water, not himself.

Steve's prison-pale body is functional, hardy, bone and sinew, gently softening with time; he laments his giant frogspawn-y varicose veins. I wonder how his nose got broken.

My head aches: I banged it on a car door, pre-dawn groggy, at the start of a Keystone Kops aquaplaning trip up and down the M3 to find Steve. (We track him down in Sainsbury's car park, in the back seat of a car with blacked-out windows.)

He rambles on nakedly in a borrowed room, well furnished with good books and family photos. The house speaks of security and comfort, a tender love of grandchildren. Steve has been absent from the lives of his children and he anticipates re-arrest before long.

He reminds me of the Carry On actor Jim Dale; also of the vulnerable warrior in Descanso de Marte (Mars resting, 1640) by Velázquez. Steve used to be in the Marines, where he was a cold-weather expert, of course.

An old soldier was the model for the body of Voltaire nu, by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1776). Both figures are saved by drapery, which Steve refuses.









Talking of which, a seasoned copy editor slows down when certain words appear. Or should appear. 'Public' is one. And sure enough, a sloppy editor has allowed Steve to refer to being charged 'under section 5 of the Pubic Order Act' in a chapter he wrote for a book called Naked Hiking.

Garment approaching from the right in Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus'...

...and in this exquisitely composed Daily Mirror photo

Above all, Steve makes me think of the nature (not naturist) poet John Clare, who was a stranger to his family but not to incarceration.

I like what's called 'raw Clare' - his poems without the fig leaf of tidied-up punctuation, spelling and vocabulary imposed by editors. But because of his chaotic writing methods, raw Clare is hard to determine. This version is from the raw-ish, heroically controversial Oxford edition, which is not above bearing down to impose garments, silently, but let's not go into that now:

'I AM'

I am - yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost: -
I am the self-consumer of my woes; -
They rise and vanish in oblivion's host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes: -
And yet I am, and live - like vapours tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, -
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes, where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God;
And sleep as I in childhood, sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below - above the vaulted sky.

After Steve's interview with the writer Alev Scott we leave the house, making sure the neighbours won't see anything to cause offence. I apologise profusely to the owner.

'That's all right,' he says, kindly. 'You should see who we've got coming tomorrow.'

British sense of humour/proportion

And if you want the serious gen on all the above, start by googling Steve's barrister, Matthew Scott.