“THAT THIS, the most perfectly natural & necessary & easy joy in the world should be branded as abominable, is so utterly silly, that I almost fail to believe the idea can be seriously entertained, & almost fail to realise the risk.” Geoffry Wheatly Cobb, the wealthy owner of Caldicot Castle in Wales, wrote this in 1909, when he was 51. Cobb had turned to his diary to confide the sex he’d just had with a crew member for his training frigate Foudroyant. The handsome youth, half his age, “came quietly to my cabin & into my bed & lay naked in my arms.”
Cobb had picked up strawberry-blond Will Swadling as a sixteen-year-old smoking on a bench at Newport Station. Swadling was among many trainees Cobb recruited and occasionally bedded: fetching youths were engaged in conversation, and sometimes more, whenever and wherever sighted. Cobb’s diaries provide a rare, intimate view of life within that fraction of society then known as “The Upper Ten Thousand.” His fortune enabled him to be master and commander of an alternative realm in which his forbidden sexuality could be freely indulged. However, the diaries are also a window into a remarkable maritime enterprise.
A true mid-Victorian, born in 1858, Cobb hailed from an upper-class family that had been building wealth since the 18th century through land, banking, and paper manufacturing. Lord of the manors of Brecon and Caldicot and justice of the peace for Brecon and Monmouth, he was also a gentleman honored for his charity. However, as he told his diary: “It is not only in my case that Philanthropy [in Greek]is really Pæderasty [ditto].” “Supposing everyone knew,” Cobb wrote, “could they possibly blame me, or if they did, could they really feel the horror they express? … These lads are of my own kind. We can be naked together, we can perform natural functions together without a suspicion of shame in ourselves or of blame from others.”
Cobb’s other passion was naval history. After he learned in 1892 that the Admiralty was selling Lord Nelson’s flagship HMS Foudroyant for scrap, he bought the ship with his father’s help and spent the immense sum of £25,000, restoring it and turning it into a training ship. In 1897 the Foudroyant was wrecked in a storm, and with his father’s death, Cobb inherited most of the family’s fortune. The following year he replaced his lost ship with the HMS Trincomalee, an 1817 frigate. After a refitting, he renamed her Foudroyant.
Over several decades, Cobb’s generosity, however self-serving, provided hundreds of working-class youths—whom he uniformed, fed, educated, and trained at his expense—with an experience their parents could never have afforded, far superior to anything the Royal Navy offered. “They have had the time of their lives,” Cobb wrote in 1922, “and I have seen them leave much better boys than they came.”
For a quarter-century Cobb moored the Foudroyant at Falmouth in Cornwall, where she was a beloved scenic addition to its harbor. The crew, mostly Cornish and Welsh, became part of the community. The ship’s band played at local functions, and the crew’s football prowess was regularly on display at matches. Several also married Falmouth girls and settled there. In 1912, Cobb was bestowed Freedom of the Borough for his contributions to the town, and in 1925, after he’d saved another historic warship, Implacable, a newspaper would print: “His name will be held in remembrance for generations to come.”
Cobb believed he was doing God’s work. During one Sabbath service on the Foudroyant he experienced an ecstasy at the sight of what he and the Lord had created, writing afterward: “The blue uniforms & the fair strong faces & bright hair & the vivid colour of the flags & the scarlet ports & the bright brasswork & the brown polished bitts & stanchions. And I & God who made it & love it. I took His work & burnished it & set it in this perfect frame. I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t loved it with the passion that men call infamous because they cannot share it.”
More than a fulfilled fantasy, his training ships were the realization of a wet dream on an epic scale. “I realise fully how open I am to blame in the world’s eyes,” Cobb wrote. “Not in regard to the young boys when I take them. I don’t think a mother could love them with a tenderer or more blameless love. But when they get big it is different. Then they appeal in another & still more irresistible way.”
Amongst Cobb’s favorites, he considered his soulmates to be two Welsh youths he’d taken on as trainees and who remained as crew. The first was John “Jack” Ruddick. In the diary, Cobb writes: “Jack is my own heart,” and confesses to being so overcome by the sight of him that he fantasizes about giving up Caldicot Castle and his other Welsh residence and living with Ruddick, then 24, on Foudroyant. The second, later trainee was one Joseph “Joe” Parker.
However, Cobb despaired over what he well knew: Their engagement with him constituted favors on their part—he was a patron, not a passion. They were but two in a constant tide of youths; Cobb never wanted for company. He commissioned portraits of his favorite trainees from his friend, the painter of sun-dappled naked youths Henry Scott Tuke, which were hung like icons in the Foudroyant’s wardroom.
All this was vastly expensive. Operating the Foudroyant cost more than £5,000 a year, and Cobb eventually spent £120,000 on his “hobby,” straining his finances. In December 1921, he succumbed to the beseeching of the Anglo-American heiress Anna Beach and married her to keep the ship and its trainees in his possession. It was an unconsummated mariage blanc, but the 54-year-old Anna was, as a relation put it, “crackers” about her 63-year-old beau. With the patience of Job, she’d pursued Cobb for years—possibly decades—before landing him. Anna was aware of her husband’s homosexuality and financially supported some of his lovers when they aged out of their roles and after his death: Jack Ruddick and his wife became housekeepers for her London residence, and Joe Parker her butler at Caldicot.
In 1927, the Falmouth Harbour Commissioners issued the Foudroyant an eviction notice, claiming its inner-harbor mooring was needed for more important vessels. Although other ships were issued notices to quit, Cobb’s circle believed there had been an official desire to push the Foudroyant out of Falmouth because of local gossip about the activities occurring aboard.
Cobb died in 1931, and the fate of most of his diaries—like many historic documents touching on homosexuality—is unknown. In 2009, three volumes turned up, allegedly in a box of junk. They are now held by the National Museum of the Royal Navy at Hartlepool, where Cobb’s frigate, restored to its original name Trincomalee, is permanently moored.
While Cobb’s ownership of the frigate is not strictly Royal Navy history, and therefore not the museum’s remit, it wanted to make the diaries accessible. The publication of my nonfiction historical trilogy A Secret Between Gentlemen, which detailed dozens of Edwardian upper-class gay lives, including that of Cobb, convinced the museum’s chief curator that I might be the appropriate person to bring this about. A transcription of the diaries was graciously provided to me.
Besides many prosaic passages, Cobb’s diaries contain fine and evocative ones, including eloquent defenses of homosexual desire. As his impassioned letters to newspapers pleading for the preservation of historic ships also demonstrate, nothing brought out the romantic in him like an old battleship or a comely lad. Additionally, the diaries feature unintentionally comic notes, bald statements that are laugh- or gasp-worthy today—beguiling glimpses of a privileged yesteryear.
As for Cobb’s name being held, as was once written, “in remembrance for generations to come,” he has become little more than a historical footnote. Yet while acknowledging his failings, ironically, never was the nation more in need of those with the will and means to lift up working-class boys and enable them to enjoy, as Cobb wrote: “strenuous work and play which shall not only harden their muscles and quicken brain and hand, but shall do so under conditions and surroundings calculated to fire their imaginations and inspire them with those ideals of duty and service which are the foundations of the character we wish to develop.”
I hope Cobb’s still-missing volumes will come to light. The surviving back-of-envelope notes he made for his diary suggest the care he put into its composition, and that he didn’t just write for himself but also in the hope they would be read by others in a more understanding time.
Peter Jordaan is the editor of Days of Youth: The Lost Diaries of Geoffry Wheatly Cobb.
