In the summer of 1938, Richard Cobb, a young English historian, visited Dublin to make sense of a traumatic moment from his recent past.
This was actually his second visit to the city. A few years earlier, Richard visited an Irish schoolmate in Dublin, Edward Preston Ball. After some unsettling interactions with Edward’s mother Lavena, Richard cut short his first visit to Ireland. From what Richard could observe, Edward and Lavena had a deeply fraught mother-son relationship.
Richard and Edward went their separate ways after their education at the elite Shrewsbury School. Edward went back to Dublin and attempted to insinuate himself into the acting world of the newly formed Gate Theatre. Richard, meanwhile, took up a place at Oxford University.
In February 1936, during the second term of his studies, Richard learned from a newspaper report that Edward’s mother had gone missing from her Booterstown home. Darkly but instinctively, Richard immediately suspected that Edward had something to do with it.
The suspicion was shared by the detectives investigating the case across the Irish Sea.
Although Lavena Ball’s body was never found, the police discovered enough evidence in her home and within her abandoned car to charge Edward with the murder of his mother.
A jury found the nineteen-year-old Edward guilty and criminally insane. Throughout his incarceration in Ireland’s Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Dundrum, Edward wrote letters to Richard with a clockwork regularity.
The only break in their correspondence came in 1938, when Edward temporarily lost correspondence privileges as the result of an escape attempt.
In 1985, after decades as a pioneering figure in French revolutionary history and ‘history from below’, Richard Cobb returned to this story from his personal past. That year, he published A Classical Education, a memoir about his friendship - of sorts - with the Irish murderer Edward Preston Ball.
I am not a generally a true crime reader, but I was curious enough about this case to read through Cobb’s book. I was glad that I did.
Cobb wrote interestingly about 1930s Dublin, a city where much of the population had intimate experiences of violence following years of political tumult.
But what really fascinated me was an anecdote that introduced Richard Cobb’s speculation that the ultimately lethal animosity between mother and son had something to do with Edward’s sexuality.
Ahead of his trip to Dublin in July 1938, Richard wrote to some Dublin acquaintances of Edward, including a fellow actor who had once shared a flat with Edward and a prison warder who befriended him after he was first arrested.
The warder, a man named Michael Feeney, struck up an unusually familiar tone with Richard in their correspondence. They arranged to meet outside a Bank of Ireland branch in Dublin one afternoon.
I’ll let Richard Cobb continue the story:
‘In his letter, he had offered to do whatever he could to contribute to the enjoyment of my stay in Dublin. I realised, with some dismay, on meeting him, that he had meant this in a very precise way. For he was not alone. He introduced me to his companion, a handsome young man with fair curly hair, very bright eyes, rather vacant, tall, with a beautiful figure…’
Michael emphasised to Richard that this man, a young police officer named Brendan, was ‘a very good friend’ of his. With that, he walked into the crowd, leaving Brendan and Richard alone.
What followed was a one-sided coded dance, as a queer Irish man went on what he assumed was a kind-of-date with an English visitor. Meanwhile, Richard, the baffled English visitor, only gradually realised what, exactly, was happening.
The two made it all the way out to a coastal walk before Brendan finally ‘took the plunge’, as Richard Cobb described it in his memoir:
‘was I not then a fairy, too, he asked; Michael had said that I was, and had suggested that we two might have a good time together, making his point only too clearly by adding that there were plenty of secluded spots a bit further on…’
Taken aback, Richard cleared things up, emphasised that he had no interest in what Brendan was suggesting and the two parted ways, with Brendan receiving a £5 note from Richard for his troubles.
I had opened the book intrigued to read a tale of one man’s friendship with a young murder in 1930s Dublin. I found more than I bargained for: a rare insight into how queer men interacted with one another in that particular time and place.
Reflecting on the event, Richard surmised that the prison warder Michael had believed Edward to be Richard’s boyfriend. Since Edward was incarcerated, Michael felt he would do Richard a good turn by introducing him to another man.
Just like Richard Cobb, I had stumbled into this world accidentally.
So much research into marginalised worlds relies precisely on these kinds of accidental discoveries, small moments we encounter and earmark for further exploration down the line.
Sometimes, these stories are unexpectedly concealed within murky corners of the past, like the now largely-forgotten tale of an early 20th century murderer.