The first batch of Dublin Fenians having now been dealt with, the judges took the train to Cork. As in Dublin, the outskirts of the city were patrolled by cavalry, and field-guns rolled into town. The Cork men were transferred from the city to the county gaol again. This enabled the court to empanel a county jury of landowners.
Kenealy saw his friends sent out of their cells one by one, and marched through a passageway into the nearby county court. John Lynch, Brian Dillon (a polite young man with whose family Kenealy sometimes took tea), Charles Underwood O’Connell, and Tom Duggan were all convicted and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude. A few others received 5- or 7-year sentences. Rumours reached Kenealy in his cell as he awaited his own turn that ‘some persons were using influence to keep my trial back and allow me out on bail with two or three others who were not brought to trial.’ Even friendly warders told him the government feared acquittal in his case, since there was little documentary evidence to prove that he had proposed that the Crown should be deprived of its sovereignty over Ireland.
The first day of the new year of 1866 brought a quick end to the rumours Kenealy might be released. On 1 January, he came through the tunnel and rose up the steps to the dock to stand trial. There were two chief witnesses against him—Pierce Nagle, a copy-reader of the Irish People who had been used against other accused men in Dublin and Cork, and a man named Warner. In the course of his own Fenian initiation, Warner, a former soldier, testified, he had learned the passwords and signs. One of the passwords was ‘Speed,’ and ‘the sign given by placing the thumb on the back of the hand … Geary’s public house was the place of resort for Fenians, and if a stranger was there the way he would ascertain whether or not he was a brother was to ask him if he was a “Speed.” ’ Warner admitted to the defence that he had himself sworn in fifty Fenians between late 1864 and July 1865, but that, he said, was merely to give himself good entrée into the Fenian organisation. He had made a pretence of taking the Fenian oath and becoming a Catholic just to expose the Fenians! He had already testified in Dillon’s trial that he had seen Kenealy chair a Fenian meeting at Geary’s pub-grocery.
The next day Nagle the informer appeared. He had by now been required to repeat information many times and to face the contempt of defence lawyers and the accused. Edgy, he asked Kenealy’s junior counsel, Dowse, ‘Do you think that I am a dog, that you speak to me in this manner?’ ‘Oh, no,’ said Dowse, ‘God forbid I should compare you to such a faithful animal.’ ‘Well,’ retorted Nagle, ‘there are some decent men I have not identified, but now I won’t spare one of them.’ Nagle identified Kenealy as being in the habit of visiting the Irish People office on his journeys through Dublin.
A letter was presented by the prosecution, written by Brian Dillon to O’Donovan Rossa and declaring that ‘John K’ would meet Stephens at the Italian Hotel, Cork. When Stephens had visited Cork in April 1865, the prosecution claimed, Kenealy was in a group greeting him and Mrs Stephens at Mrs Thompson’s boarding-house, Myrtle Hill Terrace. Mrs Thompson, the Myrtle Hill boarding-house keeper, could not, when called to the stand, swear that Kenealy was at her place—‘He is changed since I saw him. He is stouter.’
Timothy Heggarty, the Cork blacksmith, who had been caught in England, deposed that he made a sample pike for 3 shillings and 6 pence for Kenealy to take to Dublin. Butt tried to undermine the deposition; he told Heggarty, ‘You didn’t say so in your initial evidence after your English arrest, but only on the boat home.’ But the prosecution also depended on two letters of Kenealy’s—one to Luby and the other to Rossa. The letter to Rossa thanked him for a pair of opera glasses, and the prosecution wrongly argued that opera glasses were code for arms. The court called the cashier of the Queen’s Old Castle to identify the writing, but since there was no signature, the cashier would not say that the handwriting was Kenealy’s. ‘Even Judge Fitzgerald took a hand by threatening him with imprisonment for contempt if he did not make some more definite answers … The cashier’s name was Alex O’Leary, and when Habeas Corpus was suspended in 1866, he was punished with 18 months in prison.’
Next the court put in the stand Mr Fitzgibbon himself, the proprietor of the Queen’s Old Castle, the man who had promoted the young Kenealy to his senior buying post. According to the Cork Examiner he identified Kenealy’s handwriting. But according to Kenealy himself, Fitzgibbon loyally indicated that he too could not swear to it. ‘I never paid attention to his writing. I looked only at the signature … These letters are only signed John.’
Mr Butt was about to address the jury when the court ordered a recess of half an hour, and Kenealy was taken down to the holding cell under the court. One of the defence lawyers visited him and said that the court had offered to release him if he pleaded guilty. They wanted to wrap up the session, and given the holes in their case, a guilty plea with a suspended sentence might be the best the commission could hope for.
Kenealy refused: ‘almost every crime on the calendar, including capital traitors to our country, was charged in the indictment. That was too much to swallow—we could not plead guilty.’ The judges, Keogh and Fitzgerald, were obviously disappointed to get this answer. They ‘both stared at me when returning to their seats.’ In his summing-up, Butt declared that the jury had at the bar ‘a young man who had hitherto occupied a respectable position and borne a good character, and on whose honourable exertions others were dependent.’ Kenealy’s Glenlara family, which included five younger brothers and sisters as well as the older brother Daniel, were clearly not prosperous, if they had ever been, and were happy to receive remittances from Cork. The guilt of the prisoner, said Butt, ‘can only be established by very refined criticism, putting together a word here and there, denoting an act done at one time with an act done at another time of trifling importance.’ Butt questioned whether Kenealy was even in Cork at the time Stephens was in the city. As to Kenealy’s visits to the Irish People, Luby was a scholar. Of course Kenealy would want to visit him. At the times Kenealy called in, the newspaper was being distributed legally through Her Majesty’s mails.
There was no quick verdict. The young prisoner could see many hopeful faces around the crowded courtroom. While the jury was still out, two American officers were also brought into the dock area to await the fixing of bonds—they were to be released on bail on the condition that they left the British Isles. Some of these men would in fact simply alter their base of operations to England. ‘We talked to each other freely, and one of the gentlemen assured me that even if I were guilty, my imprisonment would not last long. The Fenians would take Canada, in some incredibly short time, and would, of course, demand our release.’ Obviously Kenealy had by now heard the idea of an invasion of Canada. He observed aloud that, ‘After they take Canada, they will go to New Zealand and help the Maoris. Ireland can wait.’ One of the Americans told Kenealy, ‘I don’t blame you for feeling badly, but my presence here shows what I wanted.’ Their bonds fixed, after a warm handshake the Americans left.
The jury returned and the foreman told the bench that there was a disagreement, and that one juror did not believe a word of the evidence. Judge Fitzgerald said he could not conceive how an intelligent jury could have any difficulty in arriving at a verdict. ‘It was plain that the ambiguous expressions used in the letters could have only one meaning, and he continued to impress on the jury that it was their duty to convict.’ The jury returned soon after and not surprisingly found Kenealy guilty on all counts. Asked if he had anything to say before sentencing, he declared, ‘I am sure, from the charge of Your Lordship, the jury could find no other verdict than has been found. The verdict against me has been found by the means by which political convictions have been always obtained in this country.’ Justice Fitzgerald told Kenealy the verdict was fair. ‘… you seem entirely to ignore that there were, under your own hand, three letters which to every reasoning mind carried the inference that you were a party to this conspiracy.’ He confessed to a reluctance to treat Kenealy harshly, but, �
�You at least should have understood the folly and criminality of a course which had it been for twenty-four hours temporarily successful, the probability is that this very city in which we are administering justice would have been first in ruin and bloodshed.’
He was sentenced to ten years.
The Cork Fenians were brought up to the capital in trains with barred and painted windows, and put in Mountjoy prison. Here they were photographed—becoming pioneers of the mug shot, each holding across his chest a board that was hung by string around his neck, on which his name and number were written in chalk. In his mug shot Kenealy looked perhaps more lost than he was. Even so, no one here was happy. The cells in Mountjoy were 10 feet by 7 and contained a water closet, table, stool and a hammock-bed ‘made like a coffin.’ Each prisoner was handed one pound’s weight of oakum to be picked during the first day of imprisonment.
O’Donovan Rossa, Luby, O’Leary and others had already arrived in England, and had been marched through Yuletide streets into Pentonville prison near Euston station in London. That name, Pentonville, was a penal byword, designed to reduce physical contact, conversation and other stimulation between prisoners and the outside world. Roofless cells were supervised by felt-slippered wardens patrolling on catwalks above. The prisoners were not to move about their cells by day, but were to sit picking oakum. In the spirit of a penal system which favoured dull rather than sharp sounds, a wooden clacker was used to signal exercise and lock-up times. The diet was designed to remove all the excitement of variety. Bread, 4 ounces of meat and 1 pound of potatoes, and 1 pint of porridge was the daily menu. In every cell, Rossa tells us, craving for food was intense. The Catholics began by refusing meat on Fridays, but even a strong man such as Rossa soon repented of that.
On the first working day, as the prisoners were marched out, John O’Leary whispered to Rossa, ‘This is hell.’ ‘ “Yes,” said I, “hell.” ’ Even at the weekly bath, barriers of sheet-iron were erected down the middle of the washing trough to prevent conversation. Exercise was taken in a large yard in what was called ‘the coach-wheel.’ ‘It had fifty spokes, and on every spoke was a wall ten feet high. Between every two of these walls one of us was confined.’ O’Donovan Rossa took to throwing a small piece of slate he had found in his cell over the barrier of the coach-wheel with a few words written on it. Once he got the slate back with return greetings from a fellow prisoner.
Rossa was also able to mutter to someone in the straight line of prisoners during Mass in the chapel, ‘Where is Stephens? Are they going to have a fight? How many of ye came?’ He learned that Stephens had escaped, and that the men kneeling behind included Kickham, Brophy, the newly arrived Kenealy, and an Irish American, William Roantree. In the exercise yard the following week he happened to be in the compartment next to Kenealy, who threw him a message written on slate. ‘When I had gotten the latest news they had brought from Ireland, our “telegraphs” focused on our cold and hunger.’ John Lynch, a Cork associate of Kenealy’s, whispered to Rossa one morning, ‘Rossa, the cold is killing me.’ Indeed Lynch would be sent to Woking hospital and within a few months was dead.
One morning at six o’clock, the twenty-four accumulated Fenians arrested in ’65, including John Kenealy, were taken from their Pentonville cells, connected by chains, and transported by van through London streets to a railway station. They arrived by train at Portland station, on the south coast of England, and were loaded into vans which took them through the town to Portland prison on its coastal heights. It was another penitentiary on the Pentonville model, inside whose gates the politicals were lodged in basement cells which had not been occupied before, each cell 7 by 3½ feet. The walls between cells were of corrugated iron.
Fenian prisoners were put to work in the wash-house—O’Donovan Rossa congratulated himself on having seized the job of working the water pump. Next they were required to work in the Portland quarry, in a valley 300 yards from the main prison. Here, on great stone benches in a large pit, in isolation from other prisoners, they worked with chisel and mallet at blocks or ‘nobblers’ of building stone. Occasionally they pushed the blocks on the trolleyway, or were set to clean the privies in the punishment cells.
In the spring of 1866, Rossa was sent back to London, to Millbank prison. The Fenians he left in Portland were still confident. What was of comfort to Kenealy and other sentenced Fenians was that the structure was still intact. The Captain was out there somewhere. Many Fenians were still at work.
If Kenealy was representative of civilian Fenians, John Boyle O’Reilly, whose career was remarkable, was characteristic of Fenians within the British army. O’Reilly had been born on 28 June 1844 in the tower of Dowth Castle, which served as a National school. This was an area of Druidic burial tumuli, such as the now famous Newgrange, heroic mounds which bespoke Beltane Night, the pagan Night of Blackness before St Patrick’s arrival. But for O’Reilly’s father, William David O’Reilly, a reader of the Nation, Beltane Night still prevailed in ill-governed Ireland. The kingly hill of Tara, consecrated by a lost Croppy battle during the 1798 uprising and site of a Monster Meeting, was within a walk of O’Reilly’s birthplace. The Boyne, river of national loss for some, of rational triumph for others, ran sweetly to the north.
John Boyle was the second of three sons and had five sisters. His parents had the resources to be bookish, to subscribe to the Nation and to write and admire verse. A later friend of O’Reilly’s claimed the boy was a thoroughly accomplished writer by the age of twelve. By 1855, at the age of eleven, O’Reilly was capable enough to join the staff of the Drogheda Argus as an indentured print-monkey, copyboy and writer. He had replaced his elder brother Will, whose health had not stood up to the work, but for whom the Argus had paid a £50 premium to the family. When John Boyle O’Reilly was fifteen, the proprietor of the Argus died, and the family suggested O’Reilly go across the Irish Sea to Preston, Lancashire.
O’Reilly worked in Preston for four years at the local newspaper, the Guardian, living with his uncle James and aunt Cissy in Deepdale Road, and serving as an NCO in the local militia, the 11th Lancashire Volunteer Rifles. Although admirers would suggest that this early service had a subversive intent, there is no evidence.
He was nineteen when in March 1863 his father wrote asking him to come back home and find work on an Irish paper. His mother was missing him. O’Reilly at nineteen years was the sort of yearning young man who tried to combine in one body the athlete, the poet and the rebel. Yet he did not join an Irish paper. For whatever reason, he joined the elite 10th Hussars, the Prince of Wales’ Own. It has been suggested that his was a seditious enlistment. It may equally at first have meant a lack of journalistic opportunity. In any case, he was certainly a Fenian soon thereafter, even as he transformed himself into a distinguished member of Troop D, and became the regimental boxing champion.
Such elegant regiments as the 10th Hussars were targets for the Fenian recruiters, such as eccentric Pagan O’Leary, an ex-seminarian and Mexican War veteran, who believed literally in Tír na n-Og, the Land of the Ever Young, inhabited by all the heroes of Ireland. When Pagan was arrested, an equally vivid figure, William Roantree, a handsome, two-revolver-packing veteran of General Walker’s filibustering, and later of the US Navy, took over. He recruited amongst garrisons from Dublin to Cork, Waterford to Derry. At a word from the Captain, Stephens, these men, carrying their arms with them, would desert the British army and join the civil Fenians in an unstoppable rebellion.
But Roantree, himself a victim of Meehan’s loss of documents, was arrested in September 1865. He was replaced by a young man named John Devoy, for whom there was a warrant out at the time of his first meeting with Trooper O’Reilly. Devoy first met Boyle O’Reilly in October 1865, a meeting between two men who would ultimately have enormous impact on the Irish abroad.
O’Reilly’s regiment was stationed at Ireland Bridge Barracks, now Collins Barracks, on the western outskirts of Dublin, and Devoy was taken there by a young Fenian v
eterinary surgeon. Admitted by Fenian sentries, they were led then to where the 10th Hussars were quartered in tents in one of the enormous barrack squares which characterised garrisoned Ireland. O’Reilly was cinching his saddle to get ready to ride to Dublin Castle with a dispatch from General Rose, commander of British forces in Ireland. Devoy remembered O’Reilly as an exceptional soldier, handsome, muscular, intelligent, with penetrating dark eyes. Though only twenty years old he was a very active Fenian sub-recruiter in an army in which more than thirty out of every hundred soldiers were Irish. Rather like American troops in Vietnam who wore the peace sign on their helmets, O’Reilly had embroidered Fenian devices on the underside of his saddlecloth and in the lining of his military overcoat. From that time to the following February, when they would be arrested, Devoy saw O’Reilly nearly every day, encouraging him to widen his organisation into other regiments.
Devoy had something of a headquarters in Clare Lane, in Peter Curran’s public house, not far from Dublin’s Merrion Square. These were seriously managed premises—there was a stress on sobriety amongst Fenians, and Devoy tried to create an ethos of temperance. At Curran’s in early 1866, when some Fenian trials had already been concluded, Devoy introduced O’Reilly and others to a recently arrived, stylish, mustachioed man named John McCafferty, who had been a Confederate cavalry officer with Morgan’s raiders in the Civil War. McCafferty had at one stage taken a detachment of his men behind Union lines, captured an ammunition dump, loaded it on barges and brought his booty down the Mississippi raked by fire from Federal batteries. He argued from his Civil War experience that swords were ornamental, but revolvers counted. McCafferty dismissed the skill of Fenian Martin Hogan, a renowned swordsman of the 5th Dragoon Guards, who had with one cleave of his sabre cut in two an iron bar.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 61