Published in Windlesora 27 (2011)
© WLHG
Charles Thomas Wooldridge came from a farming family in Garston near Lambourne. Before he joined the army he worked as a railway porter. In 1886 at the age of 21, he joined the Royal Horse Guards, the Blues. While the regiment was stationed in Windsor, he met and fell in love with Laura Ellen Glendell. She lived with her family in St Mark’s Road and worked at the Post Office in Eton. In October 1894 they got married at the Kentish Town Register Office without permission of his commanding officer. This meant that Wooldridge could not bring his wife to live in the married quarters in barracks. Laura rented a house under her maiden name at 21 Alma Terrace, Arthur Road, and Wooldridge visited her there whenever he could get out of barracks.
In April 1895 the regiment moved to London. By this time Laura had become disenchanted with Wooldridge; she had found to her cost that he had a short temper. She asked him not to molest her. When Wooldridge heard that Laura had been seen talking to a Corporal Robert Harvey of the 2nd Life Guards, he visited her and they quarrelled. Laura wrote a letter to the commanding officer stating that her husband had threatened to kill her. The letter was never sent, but was used at the trial.
On 29 March 1895 Wooldridge borrowed a razor and took the train to Windsor, entered the house in Arthur Road and attacked his wife, wounding her on the left cheek. She ran screaming into the road, followed by Wooldridge, who severed the arteries of her throat with the razor. She died instantly.
Wooldridge fled into Windsor, but when he met a policeman in Oxford Road he gave himself up saying: ‘Take me, I have murdered my wife!‘ Wooldridge was sentenced at the Reading Assizes in June, by Mr Justice Hawkins and condemned to death. There were numerous petitions for mercy as many saw the murder as a crime of passion and therefore excusable, but there was no proof that Laura had been unfaithful.
Trooper Charles Thomas Wooldridge was hanged on 7 July 1896 at Reading gaol. Oscar Wilde was one of his fellow prisoners at the time.
The hanging of Trooper Wooldridge moved Oscar Wilde to write one of his most famous poems, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The first verse sets the scene, but Wilde uses poetic licence here:
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
Laura was not murdered in her bed, and Wooldridge would not have worn a scarlet coat like most soldiers in the British army at that time, but the blue coat of the Royal Horse Guards.
Wilde must have seen Wooldridge around the prison and felt some empathy with him since both were outcasts from society:
Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other’s way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say;
For we did not meet in the holy night
But in the shameful day.
The tension in the prison on the morning of the execution can be felt in these lines:
We waited for the stroke of eight:
Each tongue was thick with thirst:
For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate
That makes a man accursed.
And Fate will use a running noose
For the best man and the worst.
The best known sentiment of the poem is expressed in this twice repeated
verse:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,Some with a flattering work.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
The man had killed the thing he loved, and so he had to die
Windsor Local History Group 