Queer Places:
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Holy Trinity, High Street, Nordelph, Norfolk, PE38 0BL, UK
Edwin Emmanuel Bradford[1] (1860 – 7 February 1944) was an English clergyman and Uranian poet and novelist.
Rev. E. E. Bradford,
John Gambril Nicholson and Rev.
S. E. Cottam – knew one
another. Cottam, Bradford and Bloxam, founder of The Chameleon, were all at
Exeter College, Oxford.
Bradford attended Exeter College, Oxford, received his B.A. in 1884, and was awarded a D.D. He was vicar of Nordelph,[2] Downham Market, Norfolk, from 1909[3] to 1944. Towards the beginning of his life Bradford was an Anglo-Catholic but he subsequently became a Modernist. He was at one time a great friend of The Reverend S. E. Cottam, M.A., with whom he had been an undergraduate classmate.
Bradford's verse was outspokenly homoerotic, but also remarkably popular during his lifetime given the prudery of Victorian England. W. H. Auden and John Betjeman were entertained by the apparent naïvety of Bradford's poetry.[4] [5] Betjeman's friend George Alfred Kolkhorst collected Bradford's novels.
Bradford's work can just barely be interpreted as a sign of innocent "romantic friendship" with youths, but several verses, such as "The Bather in the Blue Grotto at Capri" and "Alan", are plainly erotically inspired. Many of his poems are direct though sometimes self-effacing pleas of love to the young males in his life. In Bradford's own words:
Here's a loyal and a loving heart,
Take it, lad, or leave it.
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