In 1835 James Pratt and John Smith became the last people to be hanged in England for a crime so heinous that no newspaper dared print its name. Instead, it was rendered as “b-gg-ry”. Pratt and Smith had been discovered in a room by a nosy landlord and his wife, who had taken it in turns to peer through the keyhole before calling the police.
Even these busybodies, however, seemed shocked at how heavily the law had pressed on their errant guests. When the case came before the Old Bailey, Mr and Mrs Berkshire pleaded with the judge to show mercy – they liked to run a respectable house, but stringing up James and John was not what they’d had in mind.
The Berkshires weren’t being disingenuous. They had every reason to believe that the case would never reach court, or at least that it would end up being thrown out. In teeming London, where working men frequently had to share a bed or “make water” in public, many potential offences could be explained away as misunderstandings. And in those cases where men were convicted and condemned to death, the sentence was mostly commuted to transportation.
In recent years there had been a softening in public opinion towards penetrative sex between men which, while “wicked”, “diabolical” and “against the order of nature”, no longer seemed to require the ultimate sanction, especially when their crime had involved neither violence nor theft. It had been more than a dozen years since the privy council had ordered a similar execution for the crime at Newgate Prison.
Quite what made the case of Pratt and Smith different is hard to say. Neither had ever been in trouble with the law, and were not the kind of men that the public tend to particularly dislike. Pratt was married with children – his wife stuck by him throughout.
The pair were discreet too, having paid a man called William Bonill to let them use his room, which he rented from the Berkshires. Bonill ended up convicted as an accessory and was transported to Van Diemen’s Land – modern-day Tasmania.
Probably Pratt and Smith were simply guilty of being poor. That was certainly the opinion of Hensleigh Wedgwood, the magistrate who had originally committed them for trial and, in the light of their death sentence, wrote to the home secretary asking for clemency. He pointed out that men with money could afford to rent secure places to take their male lovers or, at the very least, bribe the landlord and servants into silence. If charged, such gentlemen made bail, at which point they might scarper to France, Germany or Italy.
Pratt and Smith, by contrast, were at the mercy of a rough and ruthless system that threw them into stinking Newgate prison – also known as “Hell above ground” – and marched them smartly up to the gallows. Within 12 weeks of their arrest they were dead.
Chris Bryant, a long-serving MP who became the first person to celebrate his same-sex union in the Palace of Westminster in 2010, rightly sees the story of Pratt and Smith as one that needs retelling for as long as there are places in the world where homosexuality is punished by death: among them Saudi Arabia and Uganda. Admirable though that aim is, it can’t disguise the thinness of the material that he has to work with here. Neither Pratt nor Smith left diaries or letters, so it is impossible to know what they were thinking or feeling. Instead, Bryant looks outwards, conjuring a word picture of pre-Victorian London by examining its public records. Consequently, even the most minor upper-crust character is given a full and lavish family tree. No street can be mentioned without a rundown of all the shops that lined it.
The intention is to suggest a certain social density to a world that unblinkingly put gay men to death. But the narrative result is to dislodge the story of James and John from its proper place, at the heart of the story.
• James and John by Chris Bryant is published by Bloomsbury (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
