19th Century: Persecution
The 19th century was a time of increased persecution of queerness, with trials for sexual acts among men seeing a significant increase across the country, although they remained uncommon in Cumbria. While prosecutions are a sad reminder of the legal position of gay or bisexual men in Britain, they can also offer possible evidence for leniency.
A Capital Offence
The Tudor Buggery Act remained in force through the first quarter of the 19th century, meaning men could still be put to death for sodomy. While changes in social attitudes and fears caused by urbanisation led to an increase in persecution across England, trials remained rare in Cumbria. It was very difficult to prove guilt and judges weren’t keen to pursue cases since the punishment was so extreme. There appear to have been no relevant hangings in Cumberland or Westmorland in the century after 1735 and only 6 men were hanged for buggery at Lancaster, none of whom were from north of the sands.1
In 1811, Thomas Kellett was convicted of “of an assault upon a young man with intent to commit an unnatural offence” — almost certainly an attempt to have sex with another man. He was sentenced to a year in prison and two days on the pillory in Carlisle and Penrith. Although he received a lesser punishment than hanging, the pillory could still result in physical attacks and public humiliation. Curiously, the Carlisle Journal (right) reported that “the culprit did not receive the slightest molestation from the populace,” during his time in Penrith, suggesting the people of the town may have been fairly unconcerned about his crimes.
The Buggery Act was replaced in 1828 by the more general Offences Against the Person Act. Although the crime and punishment remained much the same, the burden of proof was lessened to make convictions easier. But a general movement away from the death penalty and changes in legal (though not moral) attitudes towards sodomy meant that from 1835 sentences would be reduced.
In 1860, the 18-year-old John Eccles was sentenced to death for committing ‘an unnatural offence’ at Burton-in-Kendal, but the judge noted that “the extreme penalty of the law would not be carried into effect.”2 Some judges made their personal feelings about the crimes known, even if they were bound by precedent:
James Hogarth, 25, was found guilty of a misdemeanor in having on 6th of January attempted feloniously to commit an unnatural offence. The learned Judge in passing sentence, said that he regretted he could not send [the] defendant out of the country; he could not even give him hard labour; the sentence was two years’ imprisonment in Lancaster Castle.— Westmorland Gazette, 28th March 1840
Two Cases of 1844
In the spring of 1844, two men connected with Cumbria were tried for same-sex activities and received very different treatments.
The first was Rev. Henry Heathcote, a 40-year-old father of two and Church of England cleric, who had been curate of Hawkshead church from 1831 to 1833. He was living near Bristol at the time of his trial, where he was accused of attempting “to commit an abominable crime” with four men over a period of months. He was found guilty on two counts of common assault, for which he was fined 40s, and one of solicitation to commit an unnatural crime, which landed him a 12 month spell in prison.
While Heathcote was awaiting his trial, Alonzo Johnson was arrested for sodomy in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, along with his partner David Denham. Johnson was an itinerant actor, originally from Leicester, who had apparently “been going about the town some weeks dressed in women’s clothes” before he was discovered in the act with Denham.
He can’t have long been out of prison. The previous summer, he was sentenced to six months by the Westmorland courts for stealing a black silk cloak and linen apron from Elizabeth Simpson of Wool Pack Yard in Kendal. Five years before that, he had been in the Kendal courts charged with stealing a bell pull from the Nelson Tavern (in Oddfellow’s Hall) on Highgate and received a month in prison. The Westmorland Gazette snottily described him as “a young man, not apparelled in the first style of fashionable elegance”. He’d previously been in Carlisle for a few months, seeking work, after leaving an acting troupe in Newcastle.
In their 1844 trial, Alonzo and David Denham were both found guilty and sentenced to death, which was commuted to transportation for life. They were transferred to a London prison before embarking on the 4 month journey to the remote Norfolk Island (left), 850 miles west of Australia, which was reserved for the most heinous criminals. Alonzo was given 3 years’ labour with 18 months’ hard labour but his repeated transgressions, including one case of sodomy and one of trying “to incite one Thomas Scott to commit an unnatural crime,” meant he wasn’t freed until 1865.
He lived until 1892 but his remaining years in Tasmania were punctuated by spells in prison for petty crimes or in poorhouses. He was buried in Hobart.3
Later Reforms
The Offences Against the Person Act was updated in 1861 to officially replace the death penalty with penal servitude.
In 1874, two labourers from Barrow were tried under the act. Patrick Dolan, 30, was found guilty of attempting to commit an unnatural offence on two occasions and was sentenced to 10 years’ penal servitude. William Henry, 23, was found guilty of committing an offence in a different incident and given 20 years. Four years later, another young labourer, John Graham, was found guilty of attempt in Workington and sentenced to 18 months hard labour “with an expression of disgust from the judge”.4
Prosecutions against queer men increased significantly after the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act effectively made any sexual activity between men illegal under the vague notion of ‘gross indecency’. The maximum sentence was reduced to two years in prison, with or without hard labour.
Benjamin Fletcher, a 47-year-old vagrant labourer, was given the full penalty for attempting to ‘assault’ Glaswegian hairdresser Thomas Connelly in Ryan’s Lodging House on Rowcliffe Lane in Penrith in June of 1891.
It is no coincidence that the majority of the men put on trial throughout the 19th century were lower class, poorly educated and in some cases vagrant. Since conviction relied on witnesses, those unable to afford privacy were more likely to be caught and were less able to pay off witnesses or law enforcement. The law was known to be unfair, but little was done to resolve it.
A curious case reported in Maryport in 1866 may indicate the difference in treatment of lower and upper-class men accused of ‘unnatural crimes’, since the respectable offender is not named and there seems to be no more said about it in the papers:
ABOMINABLE AFFAIR AT MARYPORT
Our correspondent sends us an account of an affair which has put Maryport in a ferment, but which is of so horrible and incredible a nature that we can hardly bring ourselves to record it. The parties concerned, too, move in the upper sphere of society in that town, the chief offender being a ship owner. His daughter was, we believe, the affianced of a respectable young man, but the discovery to which we allude has not only made their union impossible, but has fixed upon her own father a monstrous, unnatural offence, hateful to all laws save those in the statute book. The people of Maryport have been excited by the event as they never were excited before. — Carlisle Examiner & North Western Advertiser, 20 October 1866.
Notes
- Five of the Lancaster hangings were connected with the Warrington group in 1806: Joseph Holland (50), Isaac Hitchen (62), Samual Stockton (50), Thomas Rix (47), John Powell (45). For details of the trial see Norton, R. (2008) ‘A Sodomite Club in Warrington, 1806‘, Homosexuality in Nineteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook, <accessed Feb 26>. The sixth man was Adam Brooks from Bolton-le-Moors, executed in 1810. ↩︎
- Carlisle Examiner and North Western Advertiser, 28 February 1860. The actual nature of the offence is not stated and may not refer to same-sex activities. The majority of cases described as such in Cumbria at this period appear to have involved bestiality. ↩︎
- In 2026 the writer, actor and director Robert Jarman won a fellowship in Tasmania to write a fictional account and stage play about Alonzo Johnson. https://libraries.tas.gov.au/slat/fellowship/recipients/ [accessed 17 April 26] ↩︎
- Cumberland and Westmorland Herald, 1 November 1879. ↩︎