By Dr. Bill Lipsky–
“Yesterday morning, at the usual hour,” the Morning Post informed its readers on November 28, 1835, “the sentence of the law was carried into effect upon James Pratt … and John Smith … convicted at the September Sessions of the Central Criminal Court of a capital offense.” Theirs was a crime so distasteful that the newspaper dared not specify what it was, although everyone at their execution knew.
Pratt, 30 years old, and Smith, 40, had been arrested on August 29, 1835, with another man, William Bonill, 68. Until then, Pratt worked as a groom, living with his wife and children in Deptford, in southeast London. Contemporary newspapers described Smith as an unmarried laborer, although some sources claim he worked as a servant. His home was in Southwark, in central London. Bonill also lived in Southwark, in a boarding house owned by Jane and George Berkshire.
The Berkshires claimed later that they became suspicious of Bonill because of the numerous male couples who visited his quarters. Their boarder, it seemed, was allowing men to use his room, as a courtesy or as a source of income, for “nefarious, sodomitical purposes.” When Pratt and Smith came to visit him on August 29, his landlords decided to find out for themselves exactly what was going on.
After the men arrived, the Berkshires took turns peering through the keyhole to Bonill’s room, later claiming to see “Pratt laying on his back with his trowsers [sic] below his knees, and with his body curled up—his knees were up—Smith was upon him—Pratt’s knees were nearly up to Smith’s shoulders—Smith’s clothes were below his knees … and a great deal of fondness and kissing.” They immediately burst through the door to stop such indecency, then notified the police.
At their trial on September 21, 1835, at the Old Bailey, an all-male jury found Smith and Pratt—not “having the fear of God before [their] eyes, nor regarding the order of nature, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil”—guilty of “feloniously, wickedly, diabolically, and against the order of nature, carnally … commit[ted] and perpetrate[d] the detestable, horrid, and abominable crime (among Christians not to be named) called buggery.”
Having done so “to the great displeasure of Almighty God, to the great scandal of all human kind, against the form of the statute in such case made and provided, against the peace of our said lord the king, his crown, and dignity,” Judge Baron Gurney, who presided at their trial, sentenced them to death by hanging. Bonill, convicted of conspiring to allow buggery to be committed, was deported to Australia for 14 years, an exile he did not survive.
Not everyone agreed with the verdict or the sentence. Hesney Wedgwood, the magistrate in Southwark who bound over Smith and Pratt for trial, argued forcefully in a private letter to John, Lord Russell, then Home Secretary, later Prime Minister (and grandfather of philosopher and Nobel Prize recipient Bertrand Russell), that the two men be granted clemency. For Wedgwood, their guilt or innocence was not the issue because, he believed, they were victims of a greater social issue.
“There is a shocking inequality in this law in its operation upon the rich and the poor,” he wrote. “The only reason these two had been doomed among the rather many enthusiasts for this victimless offense was that they were penurious enough to have to pursue their desires in a lodging-house … where they were easily spied-upon.” Their discovery, he concluded, “was owing entirely to their poverty.” Unfortunately, he could not persuade any authority to commute the sentences.
Neither Pratt nor Smith knew or even noticed a young man, one Charles Dickens, who toured Newgate Prison, where they were being held, on November 5, 1835, barely three weeks before they were executed, but he was about to grant them literary immortality. He described them at length in “A Visit to Newgate,” the last scene or chapter of Sketches by Boz, his first published book, which appeared in 1836.
Dickens was never squeamish when writing about poverty, squalor, child abuse, exploitation of women, and other ills of Victorian society, but he was unable to mention the crime for which Pratt and Smith were about to be hung. He stated only that they were being housed with another man in the press-room because “the nature of [their] offence rendered it necessary to separate them, even from their companions in guilt.”
He described Smith and Pratt as being “at the upper end of the room.” One sat with “his back towards us, and was stooping over the fire, with his right arm on the mantel-piece, and his head sunk upon it.” The other had a “pale, haggard face, and disordered hair, an appearance which, at that distance, was ghastly … . They well knew that for them there was no hope in this world. ‘The two short ones,’ the turnkey whispered, ‘were dead men.'”
Indeed, they were. On November 27, guards brought Pratt and Smith, protesting their innocence, from their cells to the execution platform in front of Newgate Prison. Spectators, who formed a larger crowd than usual, began hissing. Within minutes of the hangman placing the nooses around their necks, the men were dead. They were buried in a common grave, with others executed at Newgate, in the City Cemetery, Manor Park, London.
Smith and Pratt were the last two men executed in England for buggery. The Offences Against the Person Act, passed in 1861, replaced the penalty with deportation or a lengthy prison term. One hundred years later, the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967 finally decriminalized same-sex intimacy between two consenting adults in Great Britain. Still forbidden in many places, sodomy remains a capital offense in Afghanistan, Iran, Qatar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
Bill Lipsky, Ph.D., author of “Gay and Lesbian San Francisco” (2006), is a member of the Rainbow Honor Walk board of directors.
Published on April 9, 2020
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