Chapter XXV, of Cassells Illustrated History of England, Volume 9 page 2

For some months after this Fenianism lay comparatively inactive, and the public alarm had time to subside. But in September England was again unpleasantly reminded of it by an event which took place at Manchester, and which, in the audacity of its design and the desperate manner of its execution, was sufficiently startling. The Manchester police, about the 10th of the month, arrested two men who were behaving in a suspicious manner at dead of night, and on each of them was found a loaded revolver. From communications held with the Irish police, it was discovered that these men were Fenians of considerable military rank in the brotherhood - Colonel Kelly and Captain Deasey. They were remanded at the police-court on their arrest; and on the 18th, after their second examination, they were to be removed in the ordinary police-van to the city gaol. As they were about to enter the van, the police saw two more suspicious looking men loitering about, and a constable seized one of them, who attempted to stab him. This caused the police to handcuff Kelly and Deasey, and they then entered the van. In the remaining compartments of the van - a vehicle of the ordinary well-known type - were placed the ordinary prisoners, mostly women; and Police-sergeant Brett occupied the little compartment just inside the door, which was locked, and the keys handed in to him through a little opening in the roof. Seven policemen rode outside the van, and four more came after in a cab; but none of these were armed except with the usual policeman's staff. The van drove off along its accustomed route, over Ardwick Green and along the Hyde Road, in the outskirts of Manchester. There is a railway-bridge which crosses this road; and the van approached this bridge about four o'clock. As it did so, a tall fair-haired young man ran out in front of it into the road, and presenting a revolver at the driver summoned him to stop. A large body of men made their appearance at the same moment; and then, without giving the driver the option of obeying the summons, fired several shots at him and the other policemen on the roof, chot the horses one after another, hurled a stone which brought the driver from his seat, and clambered I up to the roof of the van to be in readiness to break it open if the door could not be forced. Then followed an indescribable scene. The small body of unarmed constables made a brave defence of the door; but axe and crowbar were being vigorously employed, and forty or fifty men armed with revolvers were carrying on the attack and firing without mercy. A crowd began to gather; but the Fenian revolvers kept them back for the most part. Two of the constables, Bromley and Trueman, were wounded; a civilian named Sprossen was shot in the ankle. Still the door resisted; a hole had been made in the roof, and stones had been let fall on the head of Sergeant Brett; he had been summoned to give up the keys, but he steadily refused. Then a panel of the door gave way, and one of the assailants, the tall young man who had led the attack, and who was afterwards identified as William O'Meara Allen, presented his revolver at the wounded policeman with a fresh demand for the keys. When this was refused, he fired at the lock of the door, and blew it open. Again he demanded the keys - for the cells of the van were each of them locked - and again was refused. Then he fired point blank at the head of Brett, who fell mortally wounded, the bullet having passed straight through the skull. The keys were now secured, the doors unlocked, the two prisoners released. As a witness at the trial swore, Allen said to one of them, " Arrah, Kelly, I'll die for you before I'll deliver you up! " Then Kelly and Deasey made off, Allen threatening to shoot any one who followed. The Fenians then dispersed, running across the fields or into the town; and all of them escaped for the time with the exception of four, including Allen, who were run down. Brett died very soon after receiving the shot.

It may be imagined that so bold a rescue created consternation in the minds not only of the inhabitants of Manchester, but of all English people. It was the most reckless act that the Fenians had as yet attempted; and the uncompromising use of force, while it horrified people, showed them once for all what a dangerous thing the Fenian conspiracy was. It showed that the " Irish element " in the great English towns was just as disaffected as the Irish in Ireland. It showed that there was discipline and skill enough in the Fenian camp for an outrage requiring the co-operation of fifty men to be planned without discovery, and to be executed in broad daylight in the outskirts of one of the most populous cities in England. It showed that the Fenians were not afraid to risk their own lives for their cause; and, still more, that they had no scruple about taking the lives of those who stood in their way. The seriousness of the occasion was such that the Government issued a special commission for the trial of the prisoners, who, with the four who were captured just after the rescue, numbered twenty- nine. The judges were Justices Blackburn and Mellor, and before them twenty-six of the men who had been arrested were arraigned, in different detachments, on counts extending from the charge of wilful murder to the charge of riot and assault. There is no need to state the facts of the trial at length; when the law had once been laid down, the case became one simply of identification. The Attorney-General, Sir John Karslake, held the Crown brief, and explained the law - namely, that if men conspired and combined to effect a rescue, prepared to use force if they were opposed, and if from their action during the rescue death resulted, that amounted to the crime of murder. The prisoners Allen, Larkin, Gould, Macguire, and Shore were all identified by numerous witnesses as having led the attack on the van; and many witnesses swore to Allen's having fired the fatal shot. They were all found guilty, and, though each of them denied having actually committed the murder, they were sentenced to death. To Macguire, however, who was convicted in spite of very clear evidence of an alibi, the Home Office sent a pardon; and Shore's punishment was commuted, because he had not been armed with a revolver, but had only thrown stones. But with the others the law took its course. Great efforts were made to obtain a reprieve, and much energy was displayed by a section of the press in showing that the crime for which they were to suffer was political, and was not murder. But it was of no avail; the Ministry then in power was not likely to take that view, nor even to recognise the proposition that no political offences are capital. On November 23, the three men were executed at Manchester, in the presence of enormous crowds of people. Their memory was consecrated by " processions " of their countrymen, held on December 1 - a Sunday - in Manchester, and in Dublin, Limerick, and other Irish towns. The Irish populace persisted in regarding the three men as martyrs to the cause of Ireland.

Whatever ultimate effect the execution had, it did not prevent certain desperate sympathisers from outdoing in nefarious audacity the executed men. It was known that the feelings of a large class of Irishmen were embittered by the execution; but it was not suspected that within a very short time a deed would be perpetrated in London which would throw the Manchester rescue into the shade. Such a deed was, however, done; and, once for all, it implanted in the minds of all classes of English people a feeling of hatred towards Fenianism which nothing has been able to root out. Two men, named Burke and Casey, had been arrested in London on a charge of being Fenians; they were imprisoned, under a remand, in the Clerkenwell House of Detention. This prison has, as usual, an exercising-ground within its walls, and at a fixed hour in the afternoon the prisoners are exercised there. The wall of the exercising-ground ran along Corporation Lane; it was about twenty-five feet in height and two feet in thickness, becoming slightly thinner towards the top. The partisans of the Fenian prisoners determined to blow down this wall during exercise-time, to give them a chance of escaping in the confusion. Accordingly, about a quarter to four on the afternoon of December 13, a man came along the lane wheeling a truck, on which was a barrel covered with a white cloth. This truck he left opposite the wall, disappeared for a moment, and returned with a long squib, which he fixed in the barrel. He then coolly borrowed a light from some boys who were playing about close by, applied it to the squib, and ran off. In a few seconds a horrible explosion took place, sounding like the discharge of a park of artillery, and sending a shock through all that district of London. The prison wall tottered and fell. The houses opposite were shaken to their foundations, and several of them, after rocking for a moment, came crashing down. The screams and groans of wounded people, mingled with the noise of falling rafters, and the clouds of dust that rose from the ruins, choking the light of such lamps as stood the shock, added to the horror of the scene. When search could be made, it was found that at least forty people, many of them women and children, were seriously hurt; one was dead already, and three died soon afterwards in the hospital. The others, with their various degrees of injury, were taken care of at St. Bartholomew's and at the Free Hospital, Gray's Inn Road, until their recovery. It may be added that Burke and Casey did not escape, the governor of the prison having, for that day, changed their hour of exercise, so that when the explosion came they were safely in their cells.

The excitement caused by this outrage was such as cannot be described. Crowds of people thronged the scene of the explosion, and 500 police and a body of soldiers were necessary to keep order. Rumours of all kinds found their way about London - that the Bank of England was blown up and sacked; that the Tower of London was destroyed; that the explosion was but the first of a series of plotted outrages meant to avenge the " Manchester martyrs." These ideas, however, subsided when the facts came to be known. The police immediately succeeded in arresting six men and a woman named Ann Justice, on a charge of complicity in the crime; but their trial and ultimate fate must be told in a future chapter.

It was in this year that society was startled by certain revelations of the proceedings of trades unions which were made before a commission sitting at Sheffield. A number of mysterious outrages had taken place periodically in that town; and a Royal Commission, which had been appointed to investigate the nature and working of trades unions, determined to probe to the bottom the supposed connection between these acts and the unions. Accordingly it delegated its functions to three barristers, of whom Mr. Overend, Q.C., was chairman, and sent them down to Sheffield to inquire into the matter. A special Act of Parliament was passed, allowing these gentlemen to give "certificates of indemnity" to any witness who should confess to any illegal acts, for it was known that without such certificates the questions of the commissioners would never be answered. The result of the commissioners' inquiry was to discover facts that thrilled all England with mingled horror and wonder. We found a kind of " vehmgericht," or secret tribunal, existing among us, passing sentence of death, and having its sentences executed; punishing offenders against its secret laws, by acts, the perpetrators of which could never be brought before their country's justice; depriving obnoxious workmen of the means of life, setting the rules of the trade in the place of law.

The cases which most excited public interest were those of crimes instigated by one Broadhead, the secretary of the Sawgrinders' Union. A man named Linley had broken the rules of the trade by taking more apprentices than the proper number. In the words of the trade, he was "filling it with lads." For this offence, which was supposed to injure the chances of the men, Broadhead confessed that he had " set on " two workmen, named Orookes and Hallam, to " do for " Linley - that is, to disable him, or even to kill him, if necessary. This fact, which is but one out of many, was revealed first of all by Hallam himself. When called upon to give his evidence he was completely unmanned. He twice fainted away; and when he came to himself, he could only speak in a whisper. In this way he confessed with slow articulation how they had murdered Linley. They had first bought a revolver, and followed Linley about every night for six weeks, watching their opportunity. Then they changed their plan and bought an air-gun, of which they first of all made trial upon some rabbits in a neighbouring wood. Afterwards they marked Linley down in a public-house in Scotland Street; they entered a backyard, and. saw him sitting in a parlour. Then with great difficulty Hallam induced Crookes to shoot. The bullet entered Linley's head, and he died some time afterwards. The two murderers ran off and escaped, and the coroner's jury was obliged to return a verdict of " wilful murder against some person or persons unknown." Hallam got £7 10s. for the deed. He confessed that he did not know Linley personally, and that he owed him no personal grudge. He took his life merely because he was injuring the trade.

Hallam's evidence was confirmed by Crookes, and the evidence of both by Broadhead. The revelations made by the latter were what really brought home to the public mind the strength, the rigour, the unscrupulousness of the trade organisations. Under promise of a certificate he confessed not only to the murder of Linley, but to the destruction of machinery, the blowing up of houses, the mutilation, or attempted mutilation, of whole families. " I hired Dennis Clark," he said, " for £3 or £5, to blow up Hellewells." He owned that he had paid a large sum to blow up the house of a certain Parker, and £19 for blowing up Reaney's engine-house; and he admitted many more acts of the same kind. Moreover, he admitted that he had arranged many of the outrages with the secretaries of other unions - one, Bromhead, secretary of the Pen and Pocket Blade Grinders, and William Hides and William Skidmore, secretaries of the Saw-handle Makers and of the Jobbing Grinders. He even confessed that he had written letters to the newspapers, denouncing, as "infamous deeds" and " hellish deeds," the very acts which he had himself instigated and paid for. The outrages were very varied in character, some being merely cases of rattening - that is, preventing a man's working by spoiling his tools or machinery; others being cases of injury to the person, or of the destruction of premises. The most common form of these grosser outrages was to hang a canister of gunpowder in the chimney of the obnoxious workman or master, or to fling a canister of powder into the fire through the window. In other cases, as in that of Linley, shooting was resorted to. The evidence of Broadhead and the others revealed the whole system in its full details; and disclosures of the same kind, scarcely less terrible, were made before commissioners who sat at Manchester. What appeared most strikingly, and what alarmed the other classes of society most, was the way in which these disclosures were received by the workmen. They seemed to take it as a matter of course that the so-called interests of the separate trades were to be advanced at whatever cost. The laws which have always been held to be vital to the existence of society were as nothing beside the laws of the trade. A man's life and property were his own just so long as the union chose to allow him to enjoy them - that is, just so long as he obeyed the union rules. The public, as we have said, was thrilled with horror and wonder; to statesmen and social philosophers, the revelations of the power and audacity of the unions gave much food for painful reflection.