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 of the Dublin homosexual circle to which Johnston belonged. 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. Sankey, who had introduced Johnston to the group after meeting him on Rathmines Road (Pillar kept a wine and tea shop in Rathmines) 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 be heard in a nearby court, 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, the then head of the Irish Post Office. One of the enduring mysteries of the Dublin Scandals is why Johnston, a wealthy young man, voluntarily chose to give evidence against Cornwall in this 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, and the frankness of the information shared, demonstrates how pitifully young he was at the time.