Paying the Piper: The Last Men Hanged for Being Gay in Britain and Ireland
It’s been thirty years since the homophobic ordinances which condemned Oscar Wilde were struck off the Irish law books. Thirty years! My contemporaries and I narrowly avoided being born convicts – although given the upstarts I know, it would be marvellous if we still had something you could do them for! When homosexuality is recriminalised under a far-right regime, I intend to be the quisling reporting you all. I’m just bitter. Many moons ago, I was in the Phoenix Park with pals. A charity worker in a mascot costume, an oversized red Hershey’s kiss, toddled towards us. He was promoting the Blood Transfusion Network. Surveying the limp-wristed nellies before him – men-who-have-sex-with-men were prohibited from donating until last year – he turned on his giant foam heel. Spotting me, ungainly and awkward, a leaflet was pushed into my fist. How did that blood-drop know I wasn’t “getting any”?
This isn’t the article I intended to write. I have a marvellous lesbian piece percolating. It’s like pulling teeth to shake it out, though; this one came natur’lly. The story of the last men executed in these islands for sodomy. It was 1835, a crossroads of history. William IV, the sailor king, sat on the throne – as the great names of the century built their reputations. Darwin embarked on his five-year expedition. Princess Victoria bided her time as childbearing age eclipsed Queen Adelaide. Cardinal Newman, then an Anglican deacon, started the Oxford Movement, bringing a revival of Roman thought to the Church of England. Catholic Emancipation came on the coattails of The Liberator Daniel O’Connell’s 1828 election in Ireland. John Stuart Mill toiled as an administrator for the East India Company. And Charles Dickens began his career as a cub reporter.
Newgate Prison was among the beats the twenty-three-year-old journalist covered. It was here he met today’s subjects: James Pratt, thirty, and John Smith, ten years his senior. (“Oliver Twink” and “David Cop-a-feel” to you and I – no.) Pratt and Smith had been caught in that act so “feloniously, wickedly, diabolically against the order of nature”; the “most detestable, horrid, and abominable crime – among Christians not to be named – called buggery”. “Their doom was sealed,” wrote Dickens “they well knew that for them there was no hope in this world”. A third man, William Bonill, was tried as an accomplice. Pratt and Smith were found copulating in his lodgings. Bonill, sixty-eight when life expectancy was forty, had form in bringing gentlemen home. Sometimes two a day! He’d left to fetch drinks when the boarding house’s proprietor, George Berkshire, caught his guests making love. That portentous jug of ale gave Bonill the “lesser” sentence of transportation. He died in a Tasmanian asylum in 1841.
While only three men had been executed for sodomy in the second half of the eighteenth century, the number ballooned to over fifty by the first third of the nineteenth. The Buggery Act of 1533, one of the ways Henry VIII commandeered the land of innocent priests and monks (though conviction no longer required evidence of “the seed of man”, just proof of penetration), held sway. Despite the recently founded Metropolitan Police administering a new form of social order since 1829, questioning capital punishment was taboo. Sodomy drew the severest penalty as house-breakers and horse-thieves were banished to penal colonies. And yet Newgate hadn’t seen a hanging in two years! This was due to public queasiness about such spectacles, not liberalising views on crime. Every death row prisoner Dickens encountered in his November 1835 visit had their sentences commuted by the King, with the exception of our heroes. “The two short ones,” a gaoler grunted “are dead men”.
Pratt and Smith were scapegoats. In many respects, their greatest misdemeanour was their backgrounds. James was a former stable hand with his own family; and John, a lowly labourer. In the decade when rotten boroughs (uninhabited mounds and villages that had long collapsed into the sea) lost their ability to send representatives to Parliament, James and John were more interested in bread than reform. They evidently liked cake, too. After Pratt had vainly searched London for a day’s work, he met the other men in an inn and gladly accepted their booty call. Even a presiding magistrate said: “The detection of these degraded creatures was owing entirely to their poverty, they were unable to pay for privacy, and the room was so poor that what was going on inside was easily visible from without”. (Bear that in mind the next time you’re at a low ebb on a Saturday evening and nearly cop off with some thirty-six-year-old who lives with his parents in Lucan.) In the wrong place at the wrong time, Pratt and Smith became casualties of the small-minded and vindictive intrusion of the homeowner and his mealy-mouthed wife. The Berkshires wanted rid of their tenant, “the old villain” Bonill – and did so by condemning two innocents.
Despite a contemporary broadside claiming “the evidence against these wretched men was so conclusive, that not the least shadow of doubt remained of their guilt”, the Berkshires were vague and contradictory on the stand. “Both their trousers were down,” George Berkshire recalled “they pulled their clothes up as quick as they could, and fell on their knees, and offered me their purses, and begged hard for me to let them go”. Yet neither he nor his “modest woman” Jane could confirm whether they observed penetration. A jolly difficult thing to see through a keyhole!
Homosexuals in the upper echelons of society could fulfil their desires undetected by nosy landlords. Pratt and Smith weren’t so lucky. True, there were the molly-houses: the closest thing the underworld had to a “safe space” but they were on the decline by the 1830s. Moreover, unlike the wealthy Bishop of Clogher, figure of a gay sex scandal in 1822, James and John had no opportunity to abscond on bail. Nor were they even permitted to testify during their show trial at the Old Bailey. “Thou shall return to the place where thou came,” the judge seethed “and from thence to a place of execution where thou shall hang by the neck till dead”. The men departed the dock in hysterics. “And may the Lord have mercy upon your soul!”
“The grave will soon close over me,” John Smith wrote “and my name entirely forgotten”. Unlike James, whose wife and children faced the workhouse, John had nobody to mount a campaign attesting to his good character. Still, Charles Dickens ensured his name wasn’t lost to history. “A Visit to Newgate”, published in the 1836 collection Sketches by Boz, eerily predicts the fate of Fagin in Oliver Twist, a year later. “It is a long, sombre room, with two windows sunk into the stone wall, and here the wretched men are (blindfolded) on the morning of their execution, before moving towards the scaffold.”
Parted in prison (“their offence” – which at no point Dickens criticises – “rendered it necessary to separate them”), they went to the gallows together. Like a couple. James and John may have crossed paths through a one-night stand gone horribly wrong; it was nonetheless striking to see two ordinary men put to death for a victimless crime. Memories of the Vere Street Coterie of 1810, in which the dwellers of the White Swan molly-house felt the full brunt of the law, resurfaced. Self-righteous peasants, with their buckets of excrement and rotten offal, were shocked that the gays in the pillory were normal folk like you or I; not three-headed monsters! Of the nearly sixty sodomites strung up in the early 1800s, would it have been alarming to them that some were in loving, long-term relationships?
I’ll leave you with a report in the Surrey Advertiser which vividly depicts their end far better than I can:
While Smith was being pinioned, Pratt appeared to suffer dreadfully. His groans resounded through the prison, and while he was pinioning, repeatedly exclaimed, “Oh, God, this is horrible, this is indeed horrible.” He at this time was so weak, that the executioner’s assistants found it necessary to hold him in their arms to prevent him from falling to the ground. The necessary preparations having been performed, the bolt was drawn, and after a very short struggle the culprits ceased to exist.
The death penalty for consensual sex between men was abolished in 1861. At a time when homosexuality was a mental illness to be rectified by castration (a view that persisted for another century), the establishment realised that gay couples needed to be expunged from public view. As Foucault writes in his History of Sexuality: “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species”. For this reason, the charge of sodomy was replaced with that of “gross indecency” – which, along with the Labouchere Amendment of the conservative 1880s, ultimately sent Oscar Wilde down.
But I like to think when James and John heard the hissing at Newgate, many in the crowd expressed disagreement at their fate.