Thomas and Austen: a gay relationship in the MERL archives?

On 20 May 1883, in Auckland, New Zealand, Austen Gardner (an Englishman who emigrated to New Zealand three years earlier) sat down in his home with pen and paper. He began writing a letter to a farmer back in Kent, named William Champion. Austen had sent several letters back to England, but none were quite like this.

The letter begins:

Dear Mr Champion,

I have been waiting these several months hoping and still believing you would have written to me to tell me all particulars concerning your brother’s illness and death, for I have heard scarcely anything about it, considering the most intimate terms which you know always existed between us. I should have felt it kind if you had you done so, but I suppose you did not think about it. If he ever had a photo taken, I trust you will send me one as slight remembrance of one whom I shall ever remember among the chief of my kind friends and whose death I certainly have felt very much. If there are any private letters of mine to him I trust you have had them destroyed.

I know how hurt he would have been if his letters to me since I left England had been made public in the same way. I felt vexed to hear one of mine had been made the subject of peoples’ conversation when it should have been destroyed without anyone knowing anything about it. It was poor Mr Champion’s desire that I should tell him everything, how I was getting on and he even said that if I found I had made a mistake, he would assist me back again if I required it, and on the very day at Gravesend when he saw us off, he told me that if he ever gained any more capital he would let me have some at once.”

We don’t know how William Champion reacted to this letter from the other side of the world. Several paragraphs on the original document have been crossed through, so he may have tried to strike out parts he wished to obscure. Perhaps he immediately carried out Austen’s request, feeding handfuls of correspondence into his kitchen fire. The only thing we know for sure is that he kept this letter, stashed amongst business papers. We can only speculate as to why.

Love letters in rural archives

As I scanned through the scores of letters on rents and tithes in William Champion’s archives, Austen’s choice of “intimate” stood out to me. It’s not a term you typically find in these sorts of documents.

The more I read, the more I became convinced that this letter was indicative of a past relationship between Austen and William’s brother. From other documents in this series of archives, I discovered William’s brother was named Thomas. There’s a request for a photograph, the phrase “chief among my kind friends”, and, most tellingly, the demand for the destruction of letters.

Love letters were a frequent source of evidence used against gay men during criminal prosecutions. After all, this was a time when homosexuality was punishable by cruel and lengthy prison sentences. It would be another fifteen years until Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in Reading Gaol, where he was subjected to hard labour. Love letters were usually destroyed once read.

Austen also mentions he was “vexed” when the contents of a letter to Thomas became public knowledge. Not only does this give us another clue as to the contents of the letters between Thomas and Austen, but it may suggest something deeper about the views that 19th century rural people had about homosexuality. If locals knew about the pair, and were presumably gossiping about it, why did no one go to the police? Could it be because rural community was more important than any negative feelings about same-sex relationships?

It is also noteworthy that Austen is remarkably vague about his reasoning for emigrating to the other side of the world. One possibility is that he left due to fear of prosecution, now that his relationship with Thomas was out in the open.

I believe letters like this one can help us challenge the misconception that gay or queer relationships did not happen in the countryside. Many queer histories of England only mention the countryside in passing, which is logical because significantly more archival material exists to evidence queer lives in cities. For example, police reports tell the story of raids into queer clubs and bars. LGBTQ+ archives like Stonewall keep a record of activism that was only visible in cities. It is easy to assume that gay and lesbian people did not live in the countryside, or – if they did – they were so isolated that they were never able to express their sexuality.

Terminology

You may have noticed the question mark at the end of the blog title. I feel the need to justify the ambiguity this implies.

Firstly, I’m unsure if I’m comfortable with the word “gay” in this context. We cannot know if Thomas or Austen were attracted to only men. Austen had a wife, Gertrude, and children, though this doesn’t necessarily prove anything. Even if they were both attracted solely to men, Austen or Thomas wouldn’t have used the word “gay” to describe themselves, which only acquired its modern meaning around the 1960s.

Attributing modern terminology to historical relationships can lead us to overlook the nuances involved. Austen and Thomas couldn’t access the many terms we have at our disposal for identifying our sexual and romantic preferences, nor did they have a community that could help them to define themselves. The word “gay” may be too broad, or it may be too narrow. Possibly something like “romantically dissonant” may be better, but I’m wary of sounding too academic when it comes to such personal, relatable stories!

Furthermore, it’s impossible to determine with 100% certainty that the two men were in a relationship at all. Given both the illegality and public condemnation of homosexuality, it’s no surprise that letters like this one are packed with euphemistic language. Without seeing the letters that William Champion was requested to destroy (and presumably did), we have no evidence of open declaration of romantic or sexual attraction. Even if we’re 95% sure (which in this case, I am), there is usually going to be an inevitable element of speculation involved.

This uncertainty is key to current conversations around how these records are catalogued in archives. In fact, Austen’s letter presents a fascinating case study of how LGBTQ+ records are often catalogued. The letter, first catalogued in the late 1960s or early 1970s, is one of the few letters from William Champion’s farm (Vale Farm) to have an individual catalogue entry, so the cataloguer must have realised there was something special about it. Yet while the 1970s catalogue record relates much of the content of the letter, it doesn’t make any mention of Thomas and Austen’s implied same-sex relationship. Perhaps the cataloguer simply didn’t know that the phraseology of the letter suggested such a thing, or they were wary of the stigma around homosexuality at the time.

Even now, it’s no easy task for archivists to simply change catalogue entries to reflect new findings. Archivists are responsible for representing records exactly as they see them, so speculation tends to be taboo. However, this doesn’t help researchers of LGBTQ+ histories, who will be searching collection catalogues for terms that don’t appear in letters like these, and instead are only implied.

My research

I ask you join me in a moment of empathy for Thomas and Austen, whatever the nature of their relationship. Whilst they spent their final years apart, their endings were happier than many gay men of the time. The name Thomas was remembered fondly by the Champion family. In the 1930s, another Thomas Champion appears, who I believe was the great-nephew of the original. They were not ashamed of him.

Histories of rural queer relationships—how they were experienced, responded to at the time, and archived—forms the heart of my research at the University of Brighton, where I’m currently in the first year of a PhD. This represents one of the first significant findings that I’ve made at MERL, and my research will continue in the MERL archives, county record offices, LGBTQ+ archives and beyond.

If you’re interested in the idea of queer rural histories, be sure to keep up with my work – follow me on Bluesky or keep following the MERL blog for more of my findings over the coming years. If you know of any archives that may hold stories similar to that of Thomas and Austen, please do drop me a line, as I’m always keen to follow up new leads.

Further reading

Although there is little in the way of literature on rural queer histories, I would recommend the below to anyone who wants to start their own research on the topic:

• A Practical Guide to Searching LGBTQIA Historical Records by Norena Shopland
• James and John by Chris Bryant
• Set My Hand Upon The Plough by Enid Barraud
• Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Queer Rural Studies edited by Gray, Johnson, Gilley
• British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives edited by Brian Lewis