Tag Archives: IRB

#1  The Catalpa Rescue: ‘A voice from the tomb’

Posted on by

Fremantle Prison

If ever a man was deserving of whatever is the Irish equivalent of the description ‘righteous gentile’ it has to be Captain George Anthony, a man that few Irish people have ever heard of and one OF the least likely collaborators with a noteworthy Irish nationalist project. He was well compensated for his efforts on behalf of the Fenian movement, but he earned every dollar, and it was dollars in which he was paid. More on George Anthony later. 

One thing you can say for the Fenians is that, while they may not have been top notch organisers of rebellions—which was really their raison d’etre—think the 1867 Rebellion which the Irish Constabulary (before they became ‘Royal’) were able to handle on their own, and the 1916 Rising, a military disaster that paid off in the longer term because of the knuckle-headedness of the British response. 

But boy could those Fenians organise a stonking prison break. 

They got James Stephens, their leader (‘Head Centre’) out of Richmond Gaol in Dublin in 1865 when he’d barely had time to unpack his toothbrush. Then in 1919 the IRB top dog, one Michael Collins, engineered the escape of Eamon de Valera from Lincoln Prison. But the greatest Fenian breakout of all time took place 150 years ago this week, the spectacular Catalpa rescue.    

It all began with a letter. 

This was a poignant missive sent by a jailed Fenian, James Wilson, to the New York Herald journalist and Clan na Gael leader, John Devoy, in New York. It began with the ominous words ‘Dear Friend, remember this is a voice from the tomb’.

Let’s backtrack. Who was James Wilson? Who was John Devoy? Where was ‘the tomb’?

Devoy and Wilson were both former members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. They were also connected in that Devoy’s job within the IRB had been to recruit Irish soldiers in the British Army into the Fenian movement. Wilson, although not sworn in by Devoy himself, was one of sixteen British Army veterans who participated in the 1867 Rising (among them was the great Irish-American journalist John Boyle O’Reilly, later editor of The Boston Pilot) who were captured, court-martialled and sentenced to death.  The sentences were later commuted to transportation. Within four years of the rebellion most of the Fenian veterans jailed—or transported to Australia—the so-called ‘civilian prisoners’, had been released or amnestied. These included Devoy himself who was exiled to the USA on board the ship the Cuba, becoming one of the ‘Cuba Five’. The fiery and erratic Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa was one of the other members of the ‘Cuba Five’. They were obliged to remain in exile until their original prison terms would have naturally expired. 

However, an exception was made by the British government of the ‘military prisoners’, the small cohort of former British soldiers who had been transported on board the last transport ship, the Hougoumont, sent from Britain to Western Australia (by then the only Australian province still taking prisoners from Britain). They had been given life sentences and they were going to die of old age in one of the most fearsome gaols in Australia, Fremantle Prison. 

Fremantle might just as well have been Alcatraz, the famous Federal prison in San Francisco Bay from which there were no confirmed escapes[1]. Its impregnability was helped by the fact that it was surrounded by the frigid waters of the Bay. Fremantle was on the western Australian coast, so escape westwards was circumscribed by thousands of miles of empty sea and an equal number of hungry sharks. To the east was the great Australian bush in which only the indigenous Aboriginals had the nous and the guile to survive for more than a couple of days. 

In 1874, writing on his own behalf and on behalf of five other ‘military’ prisoners with no hope of release from Fremantle, James Wilson managed to smuggle a twelve plage letter out of the prison. It struck an emotional chord with Devoy. The letter went as follows:

Dear friend, 

Remember this is a voice from the tomb. For is not this a living tomb? In the tomb it is only a man’s body that is good for worms, but in the living tomb the canker worm of care enters the very soul. Think that we have been nearly nine years in this living tomb since our first arrest and that it is impossible for mind or body to withstand the continual strain that is upon them. One or the other must give way. It is in this sad strait that I now, in the name of my comrades and myself, ask you to aid us in the manner pointed out… We ask you to aid us with your tongue and pen, with your brain and intellect, with your ability and influence, and God will bless your efforts, and we will repay you with all the gratitude of our natures… our faith in you is unbound. We think if you forsake us, then we are friendless indeed.

James Wilson

The Fremantle Six

James Wilson was one of six Fenians still mouldering in Fremantle Jail with little or no prospect of amnesty. The others were Thomas Darragh, Martin Hogan, Michael Harrington, Thomas Hassett, and Robert Cranston.[1] Devoy was conscious of the fact that the awful fate of the ‘military prisoners’ was, in part, attributable to his own recruiting efforts in the 1860s. The question was what, if anything, was he going to do about it? He could use his journalistic platform, and his prominence in the Irish-American republican organisation Clan na Gael, to start a concerted propaganda campaign aimed at the USA in an attempt to embarrass the British government into releasing the ‘military’ prisoners. Or, he could formulate and execute a daring plan that would secure the release of the prisoners from under the noses of the British colonial authorities. Devoy chose the latter option. James Wilson didn’t know it, but his letter had struck home. 

Help was on the way.      

[1] There was a seventh ‘military’ prisoner but he was persona non grata among his fellow Fremantle Fenians because he had offered to name a number of participants in the 1867 Rising in return for clemency. The offer was refused by the government but Wilson and the others were aware of it and shunned him. He would pay for his treachery by being excluded from the escape plans.  

[1] Frank Lee Morris and the Anglin Brothers may or may not have escaped successfully from Alcatraz in 1960 so let’s not have a fight about it. 

On This Day – 10 November 1861 The funeral of Terence Bellew McManus

Posted on by

Terence_Bellew_McManus_(Young_Ireland)

 

Say what you like about the Irish republican movement since the 1860s but you’d have to concede, they do great funerals. There would have been no … ‘The fools, the fools, they have left us our Fenian dead’, from Patrick Pearse in 1915, had the IRB not transported the body of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa from New York, to have him buried in Glasnevin. That was one of the reasons why the British authorities were quick to dispose of the bodies of the executed 1916 leaders ‘in house’. The last thing they wanted was fourteen Dublin funerals.

But the obsequies of Rossa were merely an expert copy, convincing but unoriginal. The first great Fenian funeral was that of a relatively obscure Young Irelander, Terence Bellew McManus. He was no Thomas Davis, no John Mitchel, not even a Thomas Francis Meagher. But he had occupied a prominent position in the mid-1850s generational conflict between the romantic nationalists of the Young Ireland movement, and the waning Daniel O’Connell. And he died, in San Francisco, at just the right time.

McManus was a friend of one of the founders of the Nation newspaper, Charles Gavan Duffy. He had made a fortune exporting wool, and then lost most of it in the mid-1840s investing in railroad stock. An enthusiastic British-based Young Irelander he travelled back to this country in 1848, after the authorities declared martial law in anticipation of a rebellion. He was one of the few members of the movement who actually took up arms. He participated in the only military action of the 1848 rising, the infamous skirmish at the Widow McCormack’s cottage in Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary. He eluded capture in Ireland, and returned to Britain. There he was declared bankrupt and just managed to get on board a ship bound for the USA before he was arrested.

The trouble was that the ship on which he was travelling was called back to port, he was hauled off, and tried for treason. His famous statement, that he had acted as he did, ‘not because I loved England less, but because I loved Ireland more’ cut no ice. He was sentenced, like most of his fellow leaders, to be hanged, drawn and quartered—an appalling penalty that remained on the statute books for the crime of high treason. A petition seeking clemency for the convicted Young Ireland leaders, with one hundred and fifty thousand signatures appended, was presented by the Lord Mayor of Dublin to the Lord Lieutenant. The barbaric capital penalties were diluted to transportation. By October 1849 he was settling into life in the penal colony of Tasmania, or van Diemen’s Land

Like a number of his colleagues, McManus managed to escape from captivity—in his case with Thomas Francis Meagher—and made his way, in 1851, to San Francisco. After which McManus disappeared from sight, abjured most political activity, and tried to build up a respectable business, though without much success.  He suffered a fatal accident in January 1861, died and was buried in San Francisco. And that should have been the last we ever heard of Terence Bellew McManus.

However, a campaign began to raise money to put a monument over his grave in Lone Mountain cemetery. But the IRB had a better idea. Instead of a monument, McManus got a two-month one-way trip back to Ireland, via Panama, New York and Cobh. This was followed by a huge funeral in Dublin, skillfully organised and exploited by the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The organisation had not existed when McManus was in his pomp, but included some of his former Young Ireland chums, like James Stephens.

The Cardinal-Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, was allergic to Fenians, and refused to allow McManus’s coffin to lie in the Pro-Cathedral. So, instead, he lay in state in the Mechanic’s Institute, from where his remains were taken, in solemn procession, to Glasnevin cemetery, watched by thousands of Dubliners.

Whether or not this indicated growing support for the nascent Fenian movement, or just confirmed the Irish attachment to a good funeral, it emboldened the IRB and greatly vexed their constitutional nationalist opponents as well as most of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

McManus eventually got his monument, but not until well into the twentieth century. Funds had been raised to build it by 1895 but the inscription was considered too political and the Glasnevin Cemetery Committee refused to allow it to be erected until 1933. He now shares his grave with, among others, Patrick W. Nally, after whom the Nally Stand in Croke Park was named.

Terence Bellew McManus, emerged from relative obscurity to become the central figure of the biggest funeral in Dublin since Daniel O’Connell’s, one hundred and fifty-six years ago, on this day.

 

Unknown.jpeg

 

 

 

On This Day – Drivetime – 13.3.1856 Birth of P.W.Nally

Posted on by

pwnallySgtMcCarthy

In September 2003 the redevelopment of Croke Park led to the demolition of the old Nally Stand and the creation of the Nally Terrace, adjacent to Hill 16. While people would be well aware that the stadium’s Hogan stand was called after the best known victim of the Black and Tans’ unwelcome visit to Croke Park in November 1920 on Bloody Sunday, and that the Cusack Stand was named in honour of one of the GAA founders, how many people would know the story behind the man for whom the old Nally Stand was dedicated in 1952?

Patrick W.Nally, as you might expect, was one of the motive forces behind the creation of the GAA in 1884, though for reasons that will become clear, he was not present at the pivotal meeting in Thurles that established the new body. He was, himself, a well-known athlete who began discussions with Michael Cusack in the 1870s about forming an organisation devoted to the promotion of Gaelic Games.

However, his motives were not entirely sporting in nature. Nally was, at the time, a member of the Supreme Council of the revolutionary nationalist organisation the Irish Republican Brotherhood which he had joined in his early twenties. He managed to keep his republican activities – his job was to import firearms into Connaught – secret from the local Mayo RIC by condemning agrarian outrages. This was, somewhat surprisingly, perfectly consistent with IRB policy. So much so that when he applied for a gun licence the local RIC Inspector advised his superiors that it was safe to grant the request, asserting that Nally ‘would lead a useful and loyal life’. Indeed he did, but not quite in the way the senior policeman anticipated.

With the Land War raging in 1880, Nally’s IRB activities came to the attention of spymasters in Dublin Castle and London. To avoid arrest he left the country for two years, returning in 1882. He was arrested on conspiracy to murder charges the following year – this was a favoured Dublin Castle ploy for jailing people it didn’t much approve of. He was implicated by an informer, another common procedure at the time. Nally was convicted, and sentenced to ten years penal servitude.

Half way through his sentence his father, W.R.Nally, sought assistance from an apparently unlikely source, Captain William O’Shea, husband of Katharine and later Parnell’s nemesis. However, O’Shea, though a conservative nationalist and a bona fide charlatan was a political opportunist with a history of murky associations with the IRB. O’Shea’s self-serving efforts to secure Nally’s early release came to nothing.

Nally did not, in the end, actually serve his full term. But that was only because he died, aged 36, in Mountjoy Prison, days before he was due to be released in November 1891. Efforts had been made by Dublin Castle, with a promise of clemency and other rewards, to get him to implicate Charles Stewart Parnell in the organisation and encouragement of agrarian crime at a Special Commission of Inquiry tasked with investigating such allegations. He is said to have responded to these blandishments “not all the gold or honours that the Queen could bestow would induce Patrick Nally to become a traitor.”

The official cause of Nally’s death was typhoid fever – some, however, suspected foul play. A Dublin coroner’s jury held that his ‘naturally strong constitution’ had been broken by ‘the harsh and cruel treatment to which he was subjected … for refusing to give evidence … at the Special Commission.’

He was pre-deceased by four weeks by the man he had refused to betray to secure his release. At his funeral the same green flag was draped over Nally’s coffin as had enveloped that of Parnell himself a month before.

Patrick W.Nally, revolutionary nationalist and sportsman, was born 159 years ago, on this day.

481525120a5444254371l