Dan Snow's History Hit - The Last Gay Men Executed in Britain

Episode Date: February 18, 2024

Why was Georgian Britain's penal code so bloodthirsty when it came to homosexuality? Was Britain unusually cruel in this regard? And does this animosity persist to the present day? For LGBT+ History Month, we hear the story of James Pratt and John Smith, the last two men executed for homosexuality in Britain.Dan is joined by politician and historian Christ Bryant MP, who takes us back to 1830s Britain and puts us at the centre of this controversial trial.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Anisha Deva.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In 1835, a young Charles Dickens visited the horrific prison in London, Newgate Prison. He described the disgusting conditions in the prison, which were themselves a danger to life. And he then talks about two particular inmates that he was very struck by. They had nothing to expect from the mercy of the Crown. Their doom was sealed. No plea could be urged in extenuation of their crime, and they knew well that for them there was no hope in this world. The two hopeless men that Charles Dickens were describing were James Pratt and John Smith. They were in this dreadful prison, in the shadow of the hangman's noose, for the atrocious

crime of having sex with each other, at least so the pub landlord claimed. Homosexuality, buggery, sodomy was illegal in this period, not just illegal, but punishable technically by death. Very, very few men faced that ultimate sanction, but James and John did. Just a few days after their visit by Dickens, they were hanged by the neck until they were dead. At their execution, the public hissed. There were 73 men in London that were condemned to death that year. Those sentences were commuted in every single case except that of James and John. Why were James and John killed? Why were they even in prison? Well, I've got the politician and historian Chris Bryant back on the podcast to tell me all about it. He's Labour MP

for Rwanda in Wales. He's the current Shadow Minister for Creative Industries and Digital. So he should know exactly what he's doing on a podcast. And he does. This is not his first history book. He's been on the podcast before talking about the other ones, which are fab. But this one is a deep dive, an interrogation of the lives, the trial and the death of James and John. The last two men to be killed in this country for homosexuality.

It's a sobering tale of love, poverty, and bigotry. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off.

And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Chris, great to have you back on the podcast. Great to be here. Another bit of history, a completely different bit of history, yes. You're a shadow minister, you're an active parliamentarian, and you're banging out these great history books. Fantastic. You put us all to shame.

Tell us about James and John. What do we know about their, well, anything about their sort of lives before they got thrust into the spotlight? So James and John is the story of James Pratt and John Smith, who lived at the beginning of the 19th century in that kind of wilderness period between the 18th century, when we know lots of gay history, and Oscar Wilde at the end of the 19th century, when we know lots of gay history. There's this like period when it feels as if homosexuality completely disappeared. And there's all sorts of reasons for that, which we might go into. But James Pratt and John Smith were the last two men hanged for being gay. Now, I wrote this book because I said to somebody that I was thinking about writing it, and they said, we hanged people for being gay. I know we treated them badly, but I didn't know we hanged them.

And it's true. And in particular, in this period from about 1800 to 1835, there was a kind of period of moral panic when we hanged quite a significant number of men for officially for sodomy or buggery, though it was never written down as sodomy or buggery. You couldn't actually say the word, so he had to write S-D-M-Y with gaps in between, even in the court records. Anyway, James and John, what do we know about them? They were both working class men. John Smith was from Worcester. Really difficult to track down a John Smith in the 1830s before the statutory registration of births, deaths and marriages, which started in 1837, as I'm sure you know. So he was born in Worcester, came to work in London as a servant. We know one of the people he worked for, a rather interesting doctor and bibliophile who lived in one of the new houses in North London. James Pratt was originally from Great Burstead, grew up in great poverty. Both his

parents died within a month of each other in different workhouses in Essex. And he too came to London, lived in Deptford, which was kind of on the outskirts of London, very much dockyards at the time. And he too worked as a servant. They were caught having sex in a room in Southwark owned by another man called William Bonell. And the landlord of the property and his wife kind of, first of all, tried to peek in through the bedroom window from having sort of hidden in the stable loft and dislodged a tile to be able to look through and then peeked through the keyhole and saw them having sex together and decided to burst open the door even though it wasn't even

locked which makes one question whether they were actually doing what it was said that they were doing and they were hauled off by the police they were charged at the magistrate's court they were hauled off by the police. They were charged at the magistrate's court. They were taking off to Horsemungo Lane Jail first and then Newgate. And in the trial, do you get an insight into their background or indeed what we might now call gay culture? What do we learn? So this is the really weird thing about the trial because, you know, we're used to lots of trials having very full details, aren't we? The cut and thrust of the lawyers teasing out the evidence. That wasn't what a trial was like in this period at all. The judge basically led the prosecution, led the court, and there was no guarantee that a defendant would have a lawyer at all to defend them. It wasn't guaranteed in law. And in fact, lots of people opposed the idea because they thought that a really clever lawyer would get a scoundrel off, was the kind of argument. And in

fact, even if they did have a lawyer, the lawyer couldn't speak on their behalf. They had to speak on their own behalf. But even more bizarrely, because there was this extraordinary taboo in Britain, in particular in Britain, not elsewhere in the world, about homosexuality and sodomy and buggery, the City of London had told the court, which had only just been set up in 1834 as the Central Criminal Court sitting in the Old Bailey, they had told the court, you cannot produce a verbatim record of everything where the trial is full of salacious details. So in theory, literally all the court record should have said was the nature of the offence, it wrote S.D.M.Y, the judge, the name of those who were charged, the three men, the age,

the name of the jury, which jury it was, whether it was the first, second or third of the week, and the sentence. That was literally all that was meant to be produced. But Henry Buckler, who was the shorthand writer at the time, decided quite exceptionally to produce an appendix, which gives us quite a lot of detail of what happened. So we know that on the 29th of August, James Pratt set off from his home in Deptford, left his wife, Elizabeth, and his young daughter, also called Elizabeth, behind. Their young son, Samuel, had died a few years earlier. He set off into central London to visit an Irish friend of his called Fanny near Hoban Bridge, one of the roughest parts of London, full of rookeries and tenements. It was

where Fagin's Kitchen was in Oliver Twist, which was published just a few years after this. And he set off to have a couple of pints with her round about lunchtime, and then said that he was going looking for a job and he had to get back home to Deptford by six o'clock, so he didn't stay any longer. We know that that afternoon he was seen by the landlord, John Berkshire, though sometimes he's called George Berkshire, going into William Bonell's room and sitting on his lap and then chatting with John Smith. So we think it was an assignation of some kind. That was all on the 29th of August. And then as I say, the door was broken down when John Berkshire and his wife thought that the two men

were having sex and they were arrested by a police officer, one of the newly created police officers. Why do you think he created this appendix to the trial? Because was this rather fascinating? Was this unusual? Or did he think an injustice was being done? Very difficult to tell, isn't it? I mean, look, there is a mystery about the book, which I tried to tease out. Why were they hanged? There's a great book of all the people who were sentenced to death at the Old Bailey for the previous several years. And it has the name, the date that they were tried, what they were charged with, their sentence, sentence of death. And every single one says reprieved, reprieved, reprieved for pages and pages and pages. And then suddenly just the two of them hanged. Nobody had been hanged at Newgate

for more than two years at all. And it was a long time since anybody had been hanged for sodomy at Newgate as well, though other people have been hanged elsewhere in the UK for sodomy. So why were they hanged? And secondly, why were they the last to be hanged? Because they didn't change the law for another 26 years afterwards. It was still a hanging offence to commit sodomy until 1861. And indeed, when we changed the law in 1861, nobody even mentioned the fact that we were changing the law and getting rid of the death penalty for sodomy. So there's a mystery at the heart of this story. And that's what I tried to sort of tease out. The 1830s was a period of phenomenal change. I mean, lots of innovation, you know, there were

the swing riots, complaining about people using mechanised forms in agriculture. It was the first time you had matches, the gin palaces were coming in for the first time. The 1832 Reform Act completely changed the political landscape and the way people got elected, trying to get rid of the old corruption in Parliament. And the Whig-stroke Liberal government and successive different Prime Ministers was clearly trying to change lots of aspects of the law, including the death penalty, which applied at the beginning of this time, 200 different crimes. And we know that the Home Secretary at the time, Lord John Russell, wanted to get rid of the death penalty, but didn't do so. So I just wonder whether the reason that Henry Buckler produced this was because he was scandalised by what had happened.

How do you explain that these people were made an example of, that there was something else going on? Why do you think they were so unusually executed? So what I learned in writing this book is it takes a whole kingdom to hang a man. You have to have a mob that wants hanging. And you certainly did at that time. Interestingly enough, Dickens happened to visit Newgate when the two of them were in prison and saw them in prison and was shocked by them. And of course, Dickens was opposed to the death penalty and wrote very movingly about it. William

Makepeace Thackeray, a few years later, went to another hanging and despised the crowds that gathered because apart from anything else, it was a kind of festival. It didn't feel like justice to anybody. Secondly, you had to have a legal system that supported it. So you had judges and lawyers who wanted to enforce the law. And I think James and John were particularly unlucky in the judge that they had. And in addition, and this is perhaps the key point, and I think I'm the first person who's written about this sort of change in the law. At the time, nobody knows quite why this was the case, but everybody knew that it was the case. You couldn't be hanged once you'd been sentenced to death in London Central Criminal

Court until such time as the cabinet or the Privy Council had met with the King to decide who should hang and who should be reprieved. Elsewhere in the country, judges could decide to reprieve you. But in London, it had to go to the cabinet. So the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and others. And that process was brought forward by the Recorder of London Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and others. And that process was brought forward by the Recorder of London, who was the senior judge in the City of London. He was the person who actually did the sentencing. He was the person who donned the black cap, wore the black gloves for the sentencing and declared, you should be taken from this place to the place of execution and hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead. He was the person who did all that. But the

person in this particular instance was a man called Charles Law. He prospered in the law because his father was also a very senior lawyer. He was a member of the House of Lords and had helped his son get on. But he'd just been elected as a Conservative MP. And the first thing he did when he was elected

was table an amendment to a bill. The bill was intending to make it more difficult to get prosecutions against people for homosexuality. He was trying to make it easier to get prosecutions and convictions for homosexuality. So I think he had a personal animus in it. And in addition to that, when it came to the hanging cabinet in Brighton,

which was in between a reception and a dinner, of course, he didn't present all the evidence. One of the most extraordinary things about this case is that James Pratt was married. His wife, Elizabeth, stood by him all the way through. That must have been really, really tough. She gathered a petition with 53 names on it. Lots of people, you know, bakers, perfumiers, lots of their neighbours, including her doctors who looked after her when she was in childbirth in Deptford. She'd also managed to get James Pratt's former employer to write, who was also a lawyer, asking for mercy. And most importantly of all, the magistrate at Union Hall police officer,

who was the first person who had to send James and John and William on for their trial at Newgate, was a man called Hensley Wedgwood, one of the famous Wedgwood potters. Very liberal, very gentle man. And he wrote this most extraordinary letter to beg for mercy for them, saying, look, this is particularly unfair. Whatever you may think of the crime, the truth is, why should it bring the death penalty? Because it's the kind of thing that can be done by rich people, but poor people have no opportunity of privacy. And that's the only reason why they're being sentenced to death.

None of that was presented to the cabinet. They just decided without the evidence in front of them, and they decided that they should hang. And my suspicion is that in the end, Charles Law wanted a hanging, and he got it. Wouldn't be the last time there was going to be political hanging in that way. What's so particularly unfair is that members of the elite all wanted a hanging and he got it. Wouldn't be the last time there was a kind of political hanging in that way. What's so particularly unfair is that members of the elite were incredibly licentious and having sex with all sorts of people at this period. And it's the fact that poor people

didn't have a country estate and a sexy cave system in the park in which they get up to all sorts. I think that's Dashwood, isn't it, that you're talking about? Yeah, yeah. I can't remember, were they called the Knights of Medmenum or something like that? But even more importantly, in 1833, so just two years before this case, two MPs were both caught having sex in different circumstances. And when it went to court, bishops, deans, dukes, the Duke of Wellington stood character witness for them. And of course, the jury acquitted them. That was clearly double standards. If you were wealthy, you could get away with it. And some, of course, just fled the country. Interestingly

enough, Lord John Russell, he must have known that one of his own relatives had fled the country when he was implicated in a scandal relating to a waiter overseas and was now living in Italy in exile because he couldn't come back to the United Kingdom, which treated homosexuality much more severely than any other country in Europe. And incidentally, it's worth pointing out that England was much worse than anybody else. The Napoleonic Code made no reference to homosexuality, sodomy, or buggery. Most countries hadn't executed anybody for centuries.

And the last case in France, I think, was in 1750. So the UK was a long way behind anybody else. And you do have to wonder about this. Some people who visited London from Germany or Prussia, in fact, at the time, said that one of the extraordinary things was that Englishmen were so frightened of being thought of as homosexual, he didn't use the term homosexual, but that's what he meant, that they wouldn't greet each other by kissing. Previously, everybody had greeted each other by kissing. And so English men greeted each other by shaking hands. And that has never changed. Why is Britain so different from the rest of the world?

Well, what are your thoughts on that? So we mentioned the 18th century. We laughed there, which tell the audience that Sir Francis Dashwood was this guy who founded the thing called the Hellfire Club. And he had these caves in Buckinghamshire. They got up to all sorts. Benjamin Franklin would go down there and they had great big parties and it was seen as a pretty liberal environment, sexual and substance-using environment. I mean, is that just the elite

or do you think something changed in the period that you're talking about? Why in particular in this period what we now call gay culture kind of particularly suppressed? I mean, there certainly were gay venues. We know that mostly because people got into trouble and got arrested and some of them were put in the pillory. There's a particularly

horrific case of the Veer Street gang. A bunch of them were arrested in a pub following an investigation by the local police and the local magistrate who thought it was all disgusting. I mean, they were virtually dead by the time they'd been finished in the pillory. People threw everything at them and whipped them. And it was pretty awful. And we know that there were quite a few prosecutions, mostly of working class men. I mean, that's one of the key bits. Secondly, I think the campaign against slavery, which obviously we all think of as a great

moral crusade, also had a kind of moral panic element to it. I'm not saying that we should not have supported the campaign to end slavery, obviously. But some of the people like William Wilberforce and others who wanted to end slavery on a moral basis rather than any other, also campaigned against vice in society. And so there was a whole society set up for the suppression of vice. Every assizes had to start with the senior judge reading out a declaration against vice. And there were people who were anxious that after the war with France, that lots of people had come back, lots of men in particular, had come back from the continent, having picked up terrible European vices, one of them being homosexuality, because of course, that is how this works. So I think there was that element

of moral panic, which lasted from kind of the 1780s through to the 1840s or so. And that's why, honestly, you hardly see any reference to homosexuality during this period. Whereas Mother Claps Molly House at the beginning of the 18th century, all of that is documented in all the newspapers and in all the court records. This period, the newspapers even tell one another off for reporting any of the details, because they think that this will simply promote homosexuality. You're listening to Dan Snow's History, talking about James and John. More coming up. To be continued... Normans Kings and Popes Who were rarely the best of friends Murder Rebellions And Crusades Find out who we really were

By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit Wherever you get your podcasts I love how much detail you're able to get into in this book I mean were you quite pleased given as you say these working men 200 years ago can be quite anonymous because of the archival footprint they leave up you found other ways around that didn't you and it's a very vivid picture of London and in fact you get quite a lot of detail about the men themselves and you make a joke about some of the evidence a bit untrustworthy because some of it's anatomically impossible, what they were supposed to have been getting up to. Yes, I mean, there have been long rows about whether it should be more difficult or easier to get a conviction for sodomy and whether you had to prove, excuse

me for this bit, whether you only had to prove penetration or you also had to prove ejaculation. And arguably that's when you read the appendix that Henry Butler produced, that's sort of what they're trying to suggest. But actually, it must have been horrifically intimidating and humiliating for the three men. So it's James Pratt and John Smith and William Burnell, who was the person who provided them with the room, who was an older man, retired servant, seems that he'd been married beforehand and had children. But by this stage, he's quite lonely in life. And he ends up being transported to Van Diemen's Land. And we have quite a lot of records of him going out there. And we know who the ship surgeon was. We know some of the other people who

were marching onto the ship just in front of him. He was on one of the hulks before being transported off to Van Diemen's Land. And we know that he died in what was effectively a psychiatric hospital or mental institution, perhaps perhaps with dementia, difficult to tell. Anyway, the point is that what I've tried to do is where I can provide facts. So for instance, James Pratt appears in the Paris records in Great Burstead when he needs money. He's not quite an adult yet, but he gets money to pay for new shoes because his parents are obviously poor. And that's the operation of the poor law. But sometimes all I can create is the world around them and then I'm creating their lives in silhouette. So he was sent to Tasmania? That's insane. For 14 years indeed. And of course after this case, after James and John, all the successive cases were sentenced to death but

immediately reprieved and transported. I mean, heaven knows what it was like on the ships out to Tasmania. From what we know of other periods, would this have had a deterrent effect? Many who want to have sex with men just had to operate under the threat of extreme sanction and terror. Or do you think it would have stopped these meetings taking place? You know, would it have disrupted gay culture, perhaps as the authorities had hoped it might? I've always thought that there are two streams you can never damn up, sexuality and spirituality. And I suspect that a lot more sex happened than we will ever know about. Obviously, it's difficult to find records because it was criminal activity. You do get hints of some of the bars where things happened. But most ordinary men,

if they were sexually attracted to other men, must have been terrified in the main. They could see in the social obloquy that was poured on, for instance, the Bishop of Clore, who was caught in a back room of a pub with a guardsman. There's the story of Viscount Castlereagh, who supposedly told the king that he had been accused of having committed the same sin as the Bishop of Clore and then slit his own throat a few years later. Interestingly, the Conservative government under Peel decided that what it was going to do was it was going to make alleging somebody else was homosexual or being engaged in sodomy or buggery as bad a crime as the committing of it. So one of the other people who was in Newgate, which was absolutely vile, it stank apart from anything else. One of the other prisoners who was in Newgate, which was absolutely vile. It stank, apart from anything else. One of the other prisoners who was in there with them was a man who had been accused of accusing somebody else of being homosexual. Now, he was reprieved in the end, but he was in danger for his life as well.

It's just a terrifying idea, isn't it? It's been happening far more recently than 200 years ago, and indeed it's happening around the world at the moment. As you say, the stream you can never dam, which is your desire, running completely contrary to your also passionate desire to like, stay out of trouble, like keep, you know, not become justice involved or even killed. That must have been terrifying for people. It must be terrifying for people. Well, when James Pratt was married, in all the letters that were presented begging for his reprieve, he was very proud of the fact that he, as an adult, had never had to rely on the parish for financial support. He'd worked, looked after his wife and his daughter, Elizabeth.

Incidentally, Elizabeth, his wife, went on to remarry. And she too, perhaps because her second husband's family refused to support her financially, she too died in the poorhouse. So part of this book is also about how poverty interacts with this story and the inequality of the period. But I think that there's so much you can read from this story against today. I was really struck, not only by the fact that nearly everybody I've told this story to has said, as I said earlier, we used to hang people. And then I say, yes, well, and the president of Burundi only two weeks ago said that homosexuals should be taken out and stoned. And a pastor in

the United States of America last year said that homosexuals should be shot in the head. You know, when I look at history, we now live in the UK, I'm a gay man, we live in a very extraordinary moment when we have phenomenal freedoms and liberties. I look at different times in the past when those liberties have been taken away. The safest place in the world in the 20th century for a gay man to have sex was Berlin in 1930. And by 1936, the Nazis were taking them away and sending them off to concentration camps and killing them. Yeah, the present is neither inevitable nor immutable, and you should not take it for granted. Chris, as a senior politician, a gay man, also as a historian, why do us straights hate men having sex with each other? Like, what's wrong with us?

Well, I think that's a question for you, really. But no, why do British ones in particular? I mean, it's fascinating how many countries in the world have never had a law against homosexuality. And if you look at the countries in the world that have the biggest problems with it today, a lot of them are former British colonies. And you wonder, how did that happen? Why is that one of the legal things that we exported? Such a tough attitude on homosexuality.

And I know people say, well, we stopped hanging people in 1835. But that seems really recent to me, 1835. When you think of all the other things that were being changed already in the 1830s, it just seems extraordinary. And I like to think that Lord John Russell, who in many other regards, I think of as a bit of a hero, because he introduced so many changes to the way Britain works that were for the better. I like to think that he felt ashamed of his part in the hanging cabin at the Met in Brighton in November, and that led to the hanging. I mean, one of the other fascinating bits about this story is you can tell so many things are changing because when they're in Newgate, the very first prison inspectors are appointed. And what's the first prison they come to visit? Newgate. And

they report that Newgate is a disgrace for any Christian country. And Dickens visits, as I said, because he's writing a piece for Skechers by Boz, which appears a little bit later about Newgate. because he's writing a piece for Skechers by Boz, which appears a little bit later about Newgate. So you can tell that lots of things are changing and you just think if only, if only, if only for them it had happened two years later or three years later, they would have lived. Well, Chris Bryant, thank you for writing another wonderful book.

Your last one was about this group of homosexuals who visit Berlin and provide an early warning as to what's going on there. This one is brilliant as well. What's it called? It's called James and John, a story of prejudice and murder. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you.