Four Green Fields: Trollheart's History of Ireland

[Trollheart]

The Manchester Martyrs

Alluded to briefly in the previous chapter, this incident followed hard on the heels of the Fenian so-called Uprising, and centred on two men, Colonel Thomas J. Kelly and Captain Timothy Deasy, both senior figures in the IRB, who had arrived in Manchester for a meeting of the Supreme Council, and who were promptly arrested. Oddly enough, reflecting something that would occur almost a hundred years later, when serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, the infamous Yorkshire Ripper who had been hunted - without any success - by the police for nearly four years, was arrested on a charge of soliciting, without any idea who he was, Deasy and Kelly were charged with loitering with apparent intent to rob a shop. It was only when they were brought to the police station that their true identities were confirmed, and they were re-arrested as members of the Fenian movement.

On September 18 1867 Deasy and Kelly were being transferred via police van from the court to jail, when a man jumped out and pointed a pistol at the driver of the van. Immediately, about forty armed men jumped over a nearby wall and seized the horses, shooting one. The guards quickly fled, and the armed men tried to force the door of the van to free their commanders, using axes, crowbars and sledgehammers. Finding the lock resistant to their efforts they called upon the sergeant in the van to open the door. He refused, and so they blew the lock off with a gun. Unfortunately, that was the moment the sergeant chose to look through the keyhole and he was shot dead, accidentally. Deasy and Kelly escaped, and were said to have fled to New York.

The Manchester police, in the meantime, rounded up almost every Irish person they could find, and brought them in as suspects with not a shred of evidence, but when one of your own has been killed I guess the rule book goes out the window. Irish as charged, they were brought before the magistrates, and despite almost all of them having witnesses to their not even having been in the area at the time, these alibis were completely discounted and 26 of the 28 men arrested went forward for trial. The men seen as the principle offenders - William Philip Larkin, Michael Allen, Michael O'Brien, Thomas Maguire and Edmund O'Meagher Condon - were tried together as one defendant, under the principle of common purpose joint justice, which holds that anyone involved in an illegal act is as guilty as the man who pulls the trigger, basically. After a trial that lasted five days, and was proven to have heard evidence from so-called witnesses who had perjured themselves, the jury nevertheless took just over an hour to find all five men guilty of murder.

All were sentenced to death, but Condon and Maguire had their sentences commuted. O'Brien, Allen and Larkin however were hanged in a public spectacle on November 23 outside Salford Jail. Since the original attempt had been made while trying to effect a rescue, and given the strength of Fenian sentiment in the city, over 2,500 troops were drafted in to ensure that another such attempt was not made. The execution of the three men, seen as nothing more than a desire to satisfy the rabid anti-Irish and anti-Fenian fervour of the English, was decried across the world and made the men martyrs to the republican cause. Even Frederick Engels noted in a letter to Karl Marx that "So yesterday morning the Tories, by the hand of Mr Calcraft, accomplished the final act of separation between England and Ireland. The only thing that the Fenians still lacked were martyrs. They have been provided by Derby and G Hardy. Only the execution of the three has made the liberation of Kelly and Deasy the heroic deed which will now be sung to every Irish babe in the cradle in Ireland, England and America ... To my knowledge, the only time that anybody has been executed for a similar matter in a civilised country was the case of John Brown at Harpers Ferry. The Fenians could not have wished for a better precedent. The Southerners had at least the decency to treat J. Brown as a rebel, whereas here everything is being done to transform a political attempt into a common crime."

Like every martyr executed by the state, the hanging of these three men served to drive more and more Irishmen to the republican cause, and strengthen sympathy for it among the Irish in England. The last cry of O'Meagher Condon from the dock before being led away became the rallying cry and unofficial anthem of Irish republicanism: "God save Ireland!"

By contrast, another action carried out by the IRB in England had precisely the opposite effect.

The Clerkenwell Explosion

Three days prior to the execution of the "Manchester Martyrs", Richard O'Sullivan Burke and Joseph Casey had been arrested in London after having bought explosives in Birmingham, and imprisoned in Clerkenwell Prison. On December 12 an attempt was made to free them by blowing a hole in the prison wall, but the bomb failed to go off. The next day they tried again. This time the bomb did explode, but having been warned of the attempt the prison authorities had ensured nobody was in the exercise yard, as they should have been at that time.

Unfortunately, as with so many  bombings, innocents suffered. The bomb was placed on a costermonger (trader)  barrow, and when it exploded it also took out several houses opposite the prison, killing twelve people and wounding over a hundred. Oh and yes, you know I checked: December 13 1867 was a Friday! Eight men were arrested and tried, but two turned state snitch and gave evidence against their companions. Michael Barrett, who had protested his innocence, saying he had been in Scotland at the time, was convicted and hanged, earning himself the dubious distinction and place in history of being the last man to be publicly hanged in England: the practice was outlawed five months later.

In the aftermath of the Clerkenwell Bombing, and particularly with the failure of the Fenian RIsing, the IRB rewrote its constitution to allow it to pursue other means than violence, "until it had the full support of the people", As a result, efforts were channelled into supporting Parnell's Land League and Land War/

Across the big water though, they had other ideas...