World AIDS Day

Tom Hayes Excerpts

Wednesday 27th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales). I wish to speak about the 1980s in Britain to reflect a perspective that may be more common in this place since the general election. I recently asked the Library what was the average age of Labour MPs first elected in 2024, and the answer is 43 years—it was quite a relief to hear I was below that.

For so many of us in this place, the 1980s made us who we are. For those of us who are gay, either we or the gay people we knew grew up with the legacy of stigma and a deficit of self-acceptance. Thankfully, where we lacked a political language, there were ways to weave together the grief, fear, shame, anger and regret that was forced upon gay people by homophobia, some of which was on the part of the state, some of society, and some of the tabloid press in the era defined by Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Too often the response of gay men was:

“Run away, turn away, run away, turn away”

because

“the answers you seek will never be found at home

The love that you need will never be found at home.”

For many young gay men, they were the smalltown boys who Jimmy Somerville sang about, and they ran away to places such as London, Manchester or Bournemouth.

One man who left for Bournemouth was John Eaddie. Until very recently, we have known very little about John. We know he was gay. We know he ran a guest hotel that was a haven to meet and drink in the late ’70s and early ’80s. We know he was charming and friendly. We know he was not the kind of guy to throw himself in front of the camera—in fact, he would be the one taking photographs. We know it was not in a big city but by the seaside where John presented doctors with the first signs of a mystery illness in 1981. We know he quickly deteriorated and ended up in hospital. We know that his carers in Bournemouth, baffled, sent him to the Royal Brompton in London, where his immune system was rapidly collapsing. And we know that he died in his tenth hospital day on October 29 1981. His cause of death, at the age of 49, was recorded as “pneumonia”.

John’s death is in fact the first recorded AIDS death in Britain. His story remained a mystery for 40 years, and we only know now because of a research team, which involved Paul Brand, Nathan Lee and Mark Jordan wading through thousands of death records. I want to thank that remarkable research team, as well as Paul Brand for his help with parts of this speech. As the Member of Parliament for Bournemouth East, I am honoured to put the name of John Eaddie, a former Bournemouth resident, into the official parliamentary record. No longer, I hope, will he be known as “Patient Zero” or the “Brompton Patient”. As a gay man whose generation was being born as John’s was being devastated, I am honoured to remember John and his story, and to help alongside others to contribute to the eradication of the stigma of HIV and AIDS.

Many of those who died of AIDS did not have children, and their older relatives are dying, so before this period passes into the past, we must tell their story. We must hold it here, thank the doctors and nurses in the LGBT community and allies who went far beyond every call of duty to care, and honour everyone who suffered and died, or anybody who lived in shame and died in secrecy. No longer will the last record of John Eaddie be in The Lancet medical journal, where even in that record there was no mention of AIDS as his cause of death, because it had not been invented as a term at that point. Known for much of my lifetime as “Patient Zero”, I believe we can now finally honour the man by his real name: John Eaddie. May he rest in peace.