Lord Belmore, the urbane, personable governor of New South Wales, an Anglo-Irishman and lord of grand Castle Coole in Fermanagh, was near the prince to see Fenian evil apparently manifest itself on, of all colonial turfs, his own! The bullet had entered to the right of the prince’s spine and lodged in the flesh on the right side of the chest. The prince—it was reported—sought no anaesthetic when having it removed. As a young, robust man, he would make a good recovery. But the repercussions of the attack would not be nearly so superficial as the wound.
O’Farrell claimed when arrested that the Fenian organisation had allotted him the task of assassinating the queen’s son. On the eve of his execution in Darlinghurst gaol, Sydney, in late April, he withdrew the statement about a conspiracy, and said he had acted alone. Lord Belmore himself—who did not wish a witch hunt—said that his own opinion, ‘although it is not shared by my leading advisers’ was that ‘the balance of probabilities was in favour of the truth of his dying statement.’ But loyalists from New South Wales to British Columbia were only too willing to believe O’Farrell, and to paint all Irish Catholic immigrants in O’Farrell’s colours. Worse, demagogues such as Sir Henry Parkes, Attorney General of New South Wales, saw votes and new popularity in promoting the idea that O’Farrell was a visible sign of a pervasive, fanatic network amongst Irish Australians. Even in the bush, on his farm at Gundaroo, south of Goulburn, Tom Larkin, blacksmith and Royal Mail carrier, child of Irish Ribbonman convict Hugh Larkin, felt the force of sectarian suspicion.
Attorney General Parkes was so anxious to prove a conspiracy that he allowed a prisoner named Charles Miller, a convicted confidence man who had shared a cell with O’Farrell, to be released from Darlinghurst Gaol to begin an investigation into Fenian cells in the towns throughout the bush. Every communication between agent Miller and the Inspector General of Police dealt not with hard intelligence but with money. From the Albion Hotel in the gold-mining town of Grenfell came an urgent telegram: ‘Not sufficient funds for Bathurst—please send more money.’ Miller continued to swan his way from country hotel to country hotel, implying by letter that he was closing in on Fenian cadres.
A further index of the frenzy was that even a primitive Methodist journalist named Boggis, of the Newcastle Chronicle, was under investigation for saying at a camp meeting that Prince Alfred was, ‘a Sabbath breaker, a gambler, and, if report speaks true, a drunkard.’ A Detective McGlone of Berrima was investigated for opinions expressed at Shalvey’s Hotel, where he was reported to have said that if a poor man with five children were killed, no one would pay this much account.
Questions were asked in the New South Wales legislature about even the humblest of Irish labourers: the intended St Patrick’s Day demonstration of certain persons styled ‘Fenians’ on No. 5 contract of the Great Western Railway Works. In fact, the police reported, ‘Persons did collect, but were easily dissuaded from marching.’ An Irish employee of a baker named Mr McBurnie, delivering bread in Edgecliff, an Eastern suburb of Sydney, was reported to have said that the Prince was a rare boy for the girls, but if he took away a wife of his, he would cut him and pickle him in salad oil.
Belmore was appalled by this sectarian fever, but Parkes relished it.
The tide of feeling against the Irish in Australia and elsewhere was probably accentuated too by events in Canada, where the Canadian politician D’Arcy McGee paid an exorbitant price. In the list of his anti-Fenian sins was included not only his refusal to call for mercy for the captured Fenians of 1866, but also a speech made in Wexford, when he went in 1865 to represent Canada as Minister of Agriculture and Immigration at the Dublin International Exhibition. The speech he gave was entitled ‘Twenty years’ Experience of Irish Life in America,’ and encouraged Canadian immigration, and attacked Fenian threats against Canada. In his speech McGee called his republicanism of 1848 an ‘honest folly which had nothing in common with the Punch and Judy Jacobinism of the Fenians.’ The speech, belittling ’48, offended even former Young Irelanders. In North America it bred Fenian hostility.
With the invasion of 1866 repulsed, and Canadian Confederation accomplished in 1867, Prime Minister John A Macdonald had to pay off various Irish supporters from the Maritime provinces of Canada, and D’Arcy McGee lost his cabinet position. He decided to stand for the new federal seat of Montreal West. A Fenian sympathiser, the lawyer Bernard Devlin, who had ten years before invited McGee to come to Montreal, opposed him in Montreal West’s three wards—Saint Antoine, largely Protestant, Saint Lawrence, French-Canadian; and Saint-Anne’s, Irish. Taking the lead of the Irish Canadian, Devlin and his supporters denounced McGee as ‘the Goulah of Griffintown’—Griffintown being the Saint-Anne’s ward location of McGee’s offices, and ‘Goulah’ being a reference to Goulah Sullivan who had betrayed O’Donovan Rossa’s Phoenix Society in 1858. The Montreal Fenians denounced McGee as equal with Corydon the informer, and Massey the vacillator.
Fatally, McGee declared he had strangled Fenianism and would not be annoyed by its carcass. Walking to his committee rooms in Griffintown, he was pelted with stones thrown by pro-Fenian Irish, and soon found it impossible to hold a public meeting. He arranged now to have his exposé of Fenianism published in the Montreal Gazette. His articles spoke of a number of railway police who had refused to take the loyalty oath during the Fenian invasion. He asserted that the Fenians had gained influence in the St Patrick’s Society of Montreal, of which Devlin was president. He named names.
McGee won Montreal West itself by a slight majority, though he ran behind Devlin in the Irish Saint-Anne’s ward. When the victory was announced, Devlin’s supporters attacked McGee’s committee rooms. It was a little over ten years since his life had been endangered by Toronto Orangemen. Now he was at risk from his own. He told the Canadian House of Commons that the suspension of Habeas Corpus, which had been in operation since the invasion of the previous year, should remain in force because of Fenian influence in the St Patrick’s Society. Here was McGee wielding one of the traditional weapons of oppression in Ireland against his own people in Canada!
McGee was in Ottawa, representing Montreal West, for most of that glacial winter of 1867–8, the same period during which the Hougoumont men were at sea and then settling into their Western Australian regime. After considerable research by at least one Fenian assassin, McGee was followed to his lodgings at Mrs Trotter’s in Sparks Street, Ottawa, in the early hours of 7 April 1868, after a late night sitting of the Canadian House of Commons. It was barely a month after O’Farrell shot the prince in Sydney and a week before McGee’s forty-fourth birthday. According to the police, an Irishman named Whelan lay in wait, and, moving up as he paused to open the door, ‘had come behind and shot him through the back of the neck, the ball passing out through his mouth and carrying away some of his teeth.’ McGee died almost at once. John A. Macdonald was immediately informed, and McGee’s body was still lying in Sparks Street in a sea of blood when the Prime Minister arrived and knelt beside him. A half smoked cigar lay by McGee’s hand, and a hat newly bought to celebrate the opening of Parliament. Macdonald sent a telegram to McGee’s parish priest in Montreal, who broke the news to Mrs Ann McGee at home in St Catherine’s Street at four in the morning. McGee’s 10-year-old daughter, Peggy, had just received a letter from her father: ‘Mamma sent me all your kind messages and kisses, which I have counted up, and find that you owe me in all 220. Remember that.’ Macdonald considered McGee’s assassination a tragedy. The man was ‘just at the beginning of his usefulness’ as ‘the most eloquent prophet of Confederation.
McGee’s state funeral was a massive affair. The man convicted and executed for the murder, Patrick James Whelan, was a tailor by trade, who had served in the British army for nine years. His employment as regimental tailor in Toronto, Kingston and Quebec, all garrison towns, suggests that he may have tried to recruit Fenian sympathies from amongst Irish soldiers. During the election campaign of 1867, he worked as a scrutineer for Devlin.
There wer
e no witnesses to McGee’s shooting, but Whelan was depicted as following McGee over some time. On 1 January 1868, Whelan had gone to McGee’s Montreal house and warned him that an attempt would be made to burn it down. Finally, Whelan had been in and out of the Parliamentary gallery, watching McGee the night of the assassination, and possessed a pistol of the same calibre as had killed McGee. His defence counsel argued that the circumstantial evidence was consistent with both guilt and innocence. After the trial and on the eve of his execution, Whelan signed a statement that he had been present at the killing but had not fired the shot. This was consistent with the recent opinion of ballistic experts that the bullet which killed McGee did not come from a box of cartridges Whelan was carrying.
From the attack on Prince Alfred, and perhaps from that on McGee, which confirmed the idea of Fenianism’s worldwide malice, there was fallout in Western Australia. The soldier Fenian Martin Hogan, working at the quarry in Perth in a mixed gang, responded to one Warder Munday’s maligning of the Irish by walking off the job. But Hogan was not given the justice he expected from the resident magistrate; he was sentenced to six months hard labour in separate confinement, which was as bad as anything Pentonville or Millbank could provide—hard labour, a bread and water diet, strict silence, and confinement at night in a cell without bedding, or, if with bedding, then without clothing.
Hogan, former dragoon, would in the end serve three months of this bitter regime, darkly occupying his thoughts, before the medical superintendent recommended he be removed because of peril to his health. He was transferred to a work party at Champion Bay.
And perhaps there was a fallout for O’Reilly too. The Chief Warder of the Bunbury area, to whom Warder Woodman sent him with messages, accused him of dallying between the road camp and Bunbury. The penalty would be to receive no mail for six months. This was a refined psychological torment—O’Reilly was to carry letters to other prisoners but to be given none for himself. During the penalty period, he was shown a black bordered letter and told, ‘You will receive it in six months.’ When O’Reilly did receive it, it broke news of the death of his handsome mother, Eliza Boyle O’Reilly.
In Western Australia the rainy season coincided with winter—June, July and August. Inadequate road camp structures, whether in the Perth-Fremantle area or further south in Bunbury, were incapable of keeping moisture out, and the scant bedding could not combat damp and cold. For the middle-aged and consumptive Fullam brothers, Luke and Lawrence, former Drogheda shoemakers, the winter at McGarry’s West Guildford camp near Fremantle was most dangerous. But most prisoners found the habitual pettiness of the system the most disabling. Thomas Duggan, a Cork schoolmaster, who had written under the name ‘Mushra’ for the Wild Goose, and 20-year-old Maurice Fitzgibbon, were charged with being absent from Warder McGarry’s Fenian work party. Duggan claimed that they had gone mushroom-picking in a field 400 yards from their camp and been ambushed by four policemen. The police kept them for two days in a lock-up until a magistrate returned them to their party. Warder McGarry had his merit allowance suspended for ‘allowing the convicts at West Guildford to ramble about the bush and do as they like.’
Almost routinely, a great number of letters the Fenians wrote and received during their prison term were confiscated for containing ‘improper matter,’ particularly reflections on Irish politics. The otherwise ‘well-behaved’ John Kenealy had the most letters suppressed—one outward and four inward from family and friends in Ireland, particularly from his brothers Daniel and Nicholas.
Young John Casey, the Galtee Boy, got into a strange imbroglio over a letter. Expecting to get his ticket-of-leave at the end of October 1868, and having no resources for freedom, he wrote a pleading letter, without permission, to the Catholic Bishop of Adelaide. Somehow the mail was not delivered, and was returned to Fremantle as a dead letter. Casey was sentenced to three months hard labour. A gentle young man of literary tendencies, he was horrified at being locked up with the hard cases of the chain gang. Kneeling to pray on his first night, he was assaulted with a shower of books and caps. ‘One fellow beside me commenced singing a highly immoral song; a second recounted with pride numerous exploits of ravishing unfortunate girls in London, and robbing through their agency, their masters’ houses …’ Casey was delighted when the Comptroller-General altered his sentence to one month’s solitary in Fremantle.
Despite these minor infringements, and the anti-Fenianism in the air, Henry Wakeford, the new Comptroller-General of Convicts, suggested to Hampton that the Fenians receive tickets-of-leave earlier on account of generally good behaviour. Only Martin Hogan was excluded from this provision. Hampton wrote to the Home Secretary in Whitehall in terms which would have amazed the late Smith O’Brien, suggesting it might be politic to give the Fenians early tickets-of-leave, ‘when they have completed half the regulated time for granting such indulgence to convicts generally.’
This was his near-to-last vice-regal act—he left the colony in November 1868, going home to England with a sick wife and in less than good health himself. His temporary successor, a 60-year-old military veteran, Colonel John Bruce, would quickly be embroiled in a contest with the Fenians.
The conflict arose from the behaviour of Assistant Warder Howard, who had received orders to move his Fenians north to West Guildford, only five miles from McGarry’s Fenian group. Full-blown mutiny broke out on 1 February 1869 in Howard’s camp, when Howard charged one of his Fenian work party, David Cummins, with ‘idleness and insolence,’ and another, the Dublin pike maker Michael Moore, with insubordination. Hugh Brophy, former Dublin centre and intimate of James Stephens, was convict constable in Howard’s party, the same post O’Reilly occupied far to the south in Bunbury, and when instructed to march Cummins and Moore to Perth to face charges, refused. Instead, with Moore, he made his way to Perth to register his grievances. The Superintendent in Perth ordered that all those refusing to obey Howard’s orders be arrested. By the time that was done only one remaining Fenian, the young cook, Thomas Cullinane of Ballymacoda, Cork, was left. He refused to remain alone, and ensured that he too would be marched away.
On the day the mutiny got out of hand at Howard’s camp, the royal yacht Galatea arrived with the convalescent Prince Alfred aboard. His visit to such a small colony, one full of supposedly disaffected Irish, was in many ways an act of valour. There was a grand reception by the remaining troops of the 14th Regiment, and the Volunteer corps. Then, escorted by Colonel Bruce and Wakeford, Prince Alfred toured the Fremantle penal establishment. It is quite possible that Comptroller Wakeford communicated news of the Fenian disturbance at Guildford to the prince or his attachés, to reinforce that the party should beware.
After five days on the island, spent at cricket matches and government receptions, the prince left on Bruce’s advice, by the back entrance of Government House, and was conducted to the Perth jetty where the launch of the Galatea awaited him. The Fremantle Herald claimed that the prince had visibly been in a nervous state throughout his stay. The previous arrival of Brophy and his companion, come to Perth to complain of the conduct of Howard, the mutinous state of the rest of the party now under arrest, and the fact that twenty ticket-of-leave Fenians were around Perth and Fremantle, ‘caused, as his friends assert, great fears in the mind of the Acting Governor which in an evil hour led him to advise the prince to hasten his departure.’
As the prince left, the rebellious two dozen or more Fenians in Perth prison were now given an ultimatum to go back to their old work party or be punished, and when they refused were ordered to a variety of gangs. But they refused to work with any party except the Fenian group of Warder McGarry. Ultimately, they were all returned to Fremantle at Wakeford’s order to be put in solitary confinement until they cracked, which they had no intention of doing.
These men were playing with skill the game of passive political defiance, and Acting Governor Bruce saw the potential scope of the rebellion. What if the concept of communal action spread to the entire
Fenian, or even the entire convict population? Bruce and Wakeford agreed amongst each other that as a first step Warder Howard should be replaced at West Guildford by another officer. The Fenians had managed in one month, without planning, to drive the son of Queen Victoria out of Western Australia (Bruce was not to know that many of the prisoners would have found an attack on the prince’s person morally indefensible), and to win their moral victory over Her Majesty’s humbler servant Warder Howard. In the negotiations to get the Fenians back to their camp and their labour, they were told informally for the first time by Wakeford that there was world pressure for pardons, and it might be nullified if they persisted with these disturbances.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 69