This rather explicit letter from 20 year old Malcolm Johnston, heir to Johnston’s Bakery, Ballsbridge, to James Pillar, a Rathmines wine and tea merchant three times his age, was included in the brief to Counsel in the Dublin Scandals trials of 1884, in which Pillar was an accused and Johnston the key prosecution witness.
The elderly Pillar was the eminence grise behind a circle of young Dublin men of all classes who met in his shop after hours for homosexual orgies. Those in the group referred to one another by nicknames. Pillar was ‘Pa’, and Johnston, who lived on Clyde Road, ‘Lady Constance Clyde.’ ‘Baby’ in the letter is Lieutenant Villiers Sankey, who had brought teenage Johnston to Pillar’s shop after an accidental encounter in Rathmines. Sankey escaped prosecution but his army career was derailed as a result.
The trials were deemed too scandalous even for non-participating barristers to attend – one counsel, who tried to sit in while waiting for his case to get on in a smelly and overcrowded court nearby, was summarily evicted. As Pillar pleaded guilty, it is not known if this letter was read out in court. Certainly its content would have been far too scandalous for newspapers to repeat.
The 1884 prosecutions arose out of a failed libel action brought by Gustavus Cornwall, head of the Irish Post Office, and one of the enduring mysteries of the Dublin Scandals is why Johnston, a wealthy young man, voluntarily chose to give evidence for the defendant in the libel action. Johnston disappeared after the subsequent prosecutions, and I have not been able to find any further details of what happened to him. His writing style, punctuated with exclamation marks, evidences how young he was at the time.
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