The Manchester Martyrs

MERCIER PRESS

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Blackrock, Cork, Ireland

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© Joseph O’Neill, 2012

ISBN: 978 1 85635 951 1

Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 056 4

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 057 1

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For Mick Corrigan and all those who have kept alive the memory of the Manchester Martyrs

Introduction

The hairs on my arms and neck bristled with the surge of a disquieting emotion. The silence was like none I had ever experienced. Beyond the silence, outside it, was the sound of rain gurgling in the gutters, the relentless Manchester rain falling in great skeins buffeted by the November winds. I was seven years old. It is a moment that will stay with me forever.

Throughout the 1950s, when I was growing up in Manchester, the minute’s silence at the spot where the Martyrs died was part of our annual commemoration, a fixture in the calendar of men like my father and many of their children. Together with the Mass, sometimes celebrated by the bishop of Salford, and the prayers at the Martyrs’ monument in St Joseph’s Cemetery, it did more than forge a bond between the Irish community and the men who, there in our adopted city, died for Irish freedom. Ritual has the power to express the inexpressible. It fashions our hearts.

In the 1960s, however, those who had commemorated the Martyrs became scattered and disparate. The city’s programme of slum clearance – the PR men had not yet coined the euphemism ‘inner city regeneration’ – meant that the wrecking ball smashed the flimsy walls of the cramped houses and pubs once thronged by the nineteenth-century Manchester Irish. The rubble filled in the old cellars and the rafters and floorboards fed bonfires that lit up the night. The Irish of Moss Side, Hulme, Ancoats and Chorlton-on-Medlock were physically and socially on the move.

Their children, with that chameleon plasticity that marks the Irish wherever they settle, assimilated, the next generation even more. As the conflict in Northern Ireland intensified, commemoration of the Martyrs became, for some, an expression of support for a strident and brutal ideology that invoked past injustices as a rationale for present atrocities. Many saw this development as a subversion of the Martyrs’ memory, a misappropriation of the past in the service of current political dogma. The inevitable conflict vitiated the tradition of remembrance and a welter of accusations and counter-accusations drove away most of those who for many years had been the mainstay of the commemoration.

As conflicting groups claimed the legacy of the Martyrs, the events surrounding their execution were forgotten and no one remembered their story. Were they terrorists justly executed for the slaying of a Manchester policeman or were they victims of ‘perfidious Albion’? Were they champions of the oppressed working-class, noble bearers of arms in the on-going struggle against international capitalism? Or were they simply Irish republicans, part of an unbroken tradition linking Wolfe Tone to the hunger strikers?[1]

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for those who seek to manipulate the past in the service of the present, slogans and rallying cries are crude filters through which to view history. The past remains infuriatingly elusive, nuanced and contradictory and the complexity of people’s lives can never be reduced to a war cry. There is far more to the story than its political dimensions.

Certainly, it is a story about political idealism and nationalistic fervour. But it is also about personal bravery, faith and how a group of men prepared themselves to suffer with dignity a public death before a baying crowd eager for any sign of fear. It is about the intrigues of a secret, oath-bound revolutionary conspiracy. It is about one of the most infamous court cases of the nineteenth century. It is about injustice. It is about the fraught relations between England and Ireland. It is about the Irish in England and particularly in the damp, quixotic city of Manchester which has, in equal measure, welcomed us and resented our presence.

I became reacquainted with the story about fifteen years ago and the more I researched the more fascinated I became. Interviews with some of those who had participated in the commemorations, especially Gerry Finn, whose commitment to the memory of the Martyrs over many years gave him a unique insight into the development of the public remembrance, brought me inevitably to the late J. P. (Jimmy) McGill. I had known the latter’s bookshops since childhood, without ever realising that he was for decades a moving force in maintaining the commemoration of the Martyrs. Shortly before his death, Jimmy deposited the papers of the Manchester Martyrs Commemoration Committee and related items accumulated over a lifetime, with the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, and it was there that I did a great deal of the research for this book.

Having written many articles and given numerous talks on various aspects of the incident, my brother-in-law suggested that the story was deserving of an accessible account. He provided the first incentive to write this book and over a decade later I acknowledge my debt to him. Since then I have met numerous people in Manchester and Ireland who agree with him and without exception they have been unfailing in their generosity and support, always anxious to share information with me and explain what the Martyrs mean to them.

A Note on Sources

This book is not an academic tome, nor is it a work of fiction. It is a history book written for the general reader who prefers not to have every fact and opinion annotated by reference to obscure sources. It is not a polemic and I hope such views as I express or imply are reasonable. Throughout they are grounded in the evidence and nowhere do they go beyond the known facts. I have sought to step aside and let the story speak for itself. If there are morals or lessons to be drawn from it, I leave you to draw them and confine myself to turning facts into narrative.

Fortunately, there are a great number of relevant facts available, many of them previously unused. Foremost among these are those in the Linen Hall collection, a vast archive of diverse material relating to the Martyrs and their commemoration. It includes booklets, pamphlets, newspaper cuttings and correspondence, together with miscellaneous references to the Martyrs gathered by Jimmy McGill during a lifetime of study.

Newspapers have also proved invaluable sources. Luckily for the historian, Manchester for certain periods in the nineteenth century had up to seven newspapers. Many provide not only verbatim accounts of the court proceedings, but also statements made by a range of interested parties, together with detailed background information about the circumstances under which people were arrested, their appearance, employment and education.

Many of the principal characters also left accounts of these events and Fr Gadd, who ministered to the men while they awaited execution, recorded their reactions during their final days. Many journalists had both access to and contacts within the prison and reported on developments throughout.

Using these and many secondary sources I have sought to construct a narrative which captures the drama inherent in the events while at all times remaining true to the facts.

A Note on Dialogue

All the quotations and reported speech in this book are taken from contemporary newspaper reports, court records or the memoirs and accounts of those directly involved in the events described and other sources. In some cases, particularly in Chapters 8 and 9, I have depicted developments in scenes which involve dialogue. In all cases these scenes are based on the first-hand recollections of those involved and contemporary sources.

[1] For more details about the main characters and organisations see Appendix 1.

Prologue

New Bailey Prison, Salford

,

Saturday 23 November 1867, 8.03 a.m

.

Calcraft drew the noose tight under Allen’s left ear. He could hear the prisoner snorting through the hood covering his head. Allen drew up his shoulders until they touched the noose, as if he would shrug off the rope. The crowd fell silent.

The hangman looked back along the scaffold at the other two hooded figures. O’Brien’s shoulders were flung back as if he would face down death. A string of spittle dangled from the hem of Larkin’s hood. This is it, Calcraft thought. He drew his hand down from his chin, pulling the white fibres of his beard into a rope.

Fr Gadd took one stride backwards from the drop, but Calcraft stayed, savouring the moment.

‘Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy,’ the priest intoned.

Pushing up against the barriers, the mob strained to see through the mist. The three men shot through the drop. The crowd gasped like a great beast startled.

Calcraft descended the ladder to the pit, his movements deliberate. Before he reached the bottom, he heard the breath rattling in Larkin’s throat. The man’s tethered legs thrashed as he gurgled.

Calcraft turned to Allen, swaying at the end of the rope, face snapped skywards. With two fingers the hangman touched his shoulder, spinning the body round. Stone dead, his neck snapped like a stick of charcoal.

Larkin’s body was still pulsing. Calcraft reached for the rope, drew it to him. Holding Larkin steady, he lifted his foot to the manacle that bound the twitching ankles. Carefully he placed his shoe on the shackle. His body flexing, he leaped up onto the back of the dying man, setting the rope pitching.

Again he levered and jerked, levered and jerked. Tendons popped. Bones cracked. He stepped down, his feet silent on the planks.

‘The soldiers are coming,’ rose the cry from below, beyond the black drape that hid the drop from the mob. Yelps and shrieks carried up from the street, the clatter of boots and clogs on the cobbles.

Calcraft patted his skullcap. He looked up at O’Brien, whose shoulders still twitched. He’d never seen a man go to the scaffold with such courage. He lifted his leg, ready to jump up on O’Brien’s back.

‘Leave that man alone!’ came a voice from the foot of the ladder. Calcraft turned in disbelief. The priest had appeared without a sound. Before the executioner could speak Fr Gadd advanced towards him, his right arm extended, the black book clutched against his black soutane. His face was as white as his Roman collar.

‘He ain’t dead, sir. I must finish him off,’ protested the old man.

The execution of the Manchester Martyrs

Courtesy of Mercier Archives

‘Incompetent buffoon.’ The priest’s waxy skin was now shot through with rage. ‘Get back!’ The priest pointed his arm towards the ladder.

The old man’s mouth opened. He hesitated. ‘I must stay, sir. It’s my duty.’

‘So long as you keep your hands off him,’ said the priest.

Calcraft stepped back, his lips puckered like a scolded child’s. He folded his hands behind his back.

Fr Gadd wrapped the chain of the crucifix around O’Brien’s fingers and took the other hand in his.

‘Take courage, Michael,’ he whispered. ‘Your loving God has not deserted you. Nor shall I.’

He bent his head in prayer, causing the body to sway:

Out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord!

Lord, hear my voice!

Let your ears be attentive

To the voice of my supplications!

O’Brien groaned.

1

‘Ireland Made Me’

It takes you by surprise. This part of the cemetery is as fresh and well tended as a military graveyard. Not far from the futuristic museum with its roof like a great axe head suspended in the air, where the paving, slick with rain, runs out, you reach a narrow tarmac path. The smell of damp earth is strong and even in the shelter of the monumental masonry the fitful wind tears at your hair and coat. Then you see it: the first of a Calvary of Celtic crosses. Bolted to the grave fence, which is as tall as a baby’s cot, is a heart-shaped plaque bearing the legend ‘God Save Ireland’. In the feeble December light the sandstone cross is gunmetal grey. Inscribed on the base are three names and below them, again, ‘God Save Ireland’. The grave itself is empty.

Not six strides away is the burial place, marked only by a grave curb, of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. On the other side of the path is a monument to the hunger strikers of 1981.

Here in Glasnevin Cemetery’s Republican Plot, where the elaborate headstones speak of a love of country now lost to us, Ireland’s past appears as an unbroken tradition of patriotic self-sacrifice. In this place where death is transmuted into imperishable glory, chisel and mallet have fused nationalism and religious faith.

Another empty grave, this one dug in a Kilkenny churchyard in 1848, is part of the story of James Stephens, the man who shaped the lives of so many of those now enshrined in Ireland’s nationalist pantheon. If it is possible to say some men’s lives were determined by a single year, then Stephens was such a man and the year was 1848. Just as he was to play a major role in Irish history in the years after this crucial pivotal point, he was the product of the nation’s development in the decades before that defining year. Ireland’s past had shaped James Stephens to such an extent that he could justly claim ‘Ireland made me’.

Stephens burned with a profound sense of grievance. Since the Union of 1801, Ireland had been ruled directly from Westminster, where MPs from Kerry and Connemara sat with their counterparts from Cornwall and Kendal. When Stephens was born in 1825, practising his faith, and that of almost the entire population, was not only illegal but entailed social and economic ostracism. It was only with Catholic Emancipation in 1829 that the British government dismantled the Penal Laws – legal prohibitions which made the practice of his faith a crime, restricted his ability to own property and limited his opportunities to move up the social hierarchy.

In his campaigns to achieve Catholic Emancipation, the man known as The Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, had called ‘monster meetings’, demonstrations attended by enormous numbers of people with no previous role in the political system or experience of activism. Though committed to non-violent campaigning, O’Connell nevertheless demonstrated the effectiveness of mobilising large numbers of the powerless and impoverished. The significance of this was not lost on Stephens, who was convinced that the poor and those with no voice in politics were not simply an inert and lethargic mass: effective organisation might shape them into a force to drive a revolution.

Though O’Connell was also known as ‘the king of the beggars’, nothing he did improved the economic plight of the Catholic population during Stephens’ formative years. Irish peasants were among the poorest in Europe and their privation appalled foreign visitors. Despite Catholic Emancipation, the land remained largely in the hands of absentee landlords and the descendants of Protestant settlers. As for the bulk of the population, by 1840 forty-five per cent of Irish farms consisted of fewer than five acres and half the population relied on potatoes, with two million entirely dependent on them. Many more eked out a living on miniscule holdings supplemented by work as farm labourers. Such industry as there was, chiefly around Dublin and especially Belfast, was insufficient to sustain a population that remained perilously dependent on an agricultural economy which for decades had teetered on the brink of catastrophe.

The sense of injustice which coursed through Stephens’ veins was neither abstract nor theoretical. He didn’t construct it from propagandist tracts or works of political philosophy. The evidence for it was all around him, everywhere he turned. It stunted the lives of millions of his compatriots who lived from day to day knowing that their very survival was questionable.

What’s more, Stephens’ Ireland was in many respects an occupied country. Barracks, manned by the Irish constabulary, an armed police force, and the presence of large numbers of British troops permanently stationed in the country, maintained crown control.

The consequences of Ireland’s economic structure and British control became apparent in the 1840s in a manner impossible to ignore. The failure of the potato crop in 1845 and the following years led first to hardship and then to starvation. It threatened the families of millions of small peasant farmers and landless labourers with annihilation. The great hunger of the last European famine – Ireland’s greatest calamity since the Black Death of the fourteenth century killed half the population – gnawed deep into the Irish mentality and shaped the country’s development for the next century and a half.

The Famine killed a million people and drove another million abroad. From a pre-Famine figure of 8,500,000, Ireland’s population, alone of European countries, fell for the next 125 years. Death, terror and depopulation stamped on the mind of every politically aware Irish person the conviction that Britain was unfit to rule them. The Famine proved, at the very least, that Britain’s attitude to Ireland was one of callous indifference. Some nationalists saw it in a more sinister light: it was genocide.

Nor was its impact confined to Ireland. As a child in Liverpool, the sight of those escaping the Famine had a profound effect on the future Fenian, John Denvir. Gaunt and spectral, they stank of poverty and death. Their degradation made an indelible mark on Denvir. ‘It will not be wondered,’ he wrote in The Life Story of an Old Rebel, ‘that one who saw these things should feel it a duty stronger than life itself to reverse the system of misgovernment which was responsible.’

James Stephens

Courtesy of Mercier Archives

What’s more, the Famine created the Irish diaspora, to which Stephens was later to attribute such a key role in his strategy for Irish independence. There were Irish people in North America and ‘mainland’ Britain long before the Famine, but it was the mass exodus fuelled by fear of death that accounts for the fact that today there are seventy million Americans and one in five people in Britain with Irish ancestry. It was this vast body of embittered exiles and their descendants, with their inherited anti-English sentiments, that Stephens sought to harness to the cause of Irish independence.

In 1848, however, when Stephens decided to throw in his lot with a group of idealistic, largely middle-class nationalists, known as Young Ireland, he was still virtually unknown. William Smith O’Brien, a leading figure in the Young Ireland movement, had a national reputation, and Stephens decided to take up arms with him. The group attempted a rising at Ballingarry, County Tipperary, although the result was a few inconsequential skirmishes with the police, contemptuously dismissed by the authorities as ‘the Battle of the Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch’. Stephens was wounded in the thigh and subsequently went to ground, seeking to escape the round-up that followed the incident. To put the authorities off the scent, his friends arranged his funeral and had a coffin buried in a Kilkenny churchyard. The Kilkenny Moderator even published his obituary, assuring its readers that Stephens had been an inoffensive young man and ‘an excellent son and brother’.

Stephens escaped to France, disguised as a servant. It was then, at the age of twenty-three, that the former engineering student made a decision: he would break the power of the British Empire. Where Young Ireland had failed, he would succeed. At that time, the empire he challenged was the greatest amalgam of territory and the mightiest economic and military power in the history of the world. It far exceeded the empires of Rome and Egypt, the Greeks and the Mongols in all their pomp. It controlled a quarter of the world’s population and was master of sub-continents and great swathes of territory in every region and zone on earth. Yet Stephens set himself the task of stunting its inexorable progress and rolling it back from the place of its inception, its first colony. He never allowed any setback, disappointment or reversal to deflect him from his goal. He bore poverty, imprisonment, betrayal, rejection by his comrades, accusations of treachery and even military defeat with the stoical resignation of the first Christian martyrs. His confidence in his ultimate triumph was, from the outset, unassailable.

Energising him through all his trials was a version of Ireland’s history which he summarised in his Fenian proclamation of 1867 and which he had imbibed growing up in a Catholic, nationalist family. It was a source of inexhaustible sustenance for him and became a central