The author and Labour MP on his book about the last men in Britain to be hanged for their sexuality, his misgivings about the Church of England and the novel he always goes back to
Chris Bryant has been Labour MP for Rhondda since 2001. He is the shadow minister for creative industries and digital, and former chair of the Commons committee on standards and privileges. He has published eight books; his ninth, James and John: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder, out last month, reconstructs the lives and deaths of James Pratt and John Smith, who in 1835 became the last men to be hanged for homosexuality in Britain.
James and John both tells the story of a terrible injustice and highlights how widespread the persecution of gay men was in this country: 404 British people were sentenced to death for the same “crime”. How did you alight on this particular case?
A couple of years ago [in 2020], I wrote a book called The Glamour Boys about some gay Tory MPs in the 1930s who were killed in the war. I had to get my head into the law as it was in the 1920s and further back. And that’s how I came across this case. I’d assumed it’d be impossible to find out much about James and John: they were working-class guys – and one of them was called John Smith. But then I discovered not only that Charles Dickens visited Newgate prison when they were held there, but also the government had literally just appointed the first inspectors of prisons. And their first visit was to Newgate when James and John were awaiting execution, so they wrote about it extensively in their report to parliament.
