by Payne, Chris
Arrests, Escapes, Trials and Promotion
July 1867 – November 1867
While the Irish police forces had arrested large numbers of the rank-and-file Fenians during March, many of the leaders had escaped. Apart from Fariola, these included Gustave Cluseret, Ricard Burke, Thomas Kelly and William Halpin – amongst others. Warrants were soon issued by Dublin Castle for their arrest, and these individuals must have been high up the list of the ‘wanted men’ at Scotland Yard. However, in June and July 1867 Clarke had to fit in his court appearance in the Lilley v. Earl of Cardigan action, and also an investigation into a series of robberies of banknotes, gold watches and rings in the officers’ quarters at the Tower of London. These enquiries during June led to his arrest of Charles Stuart, a corporal in the 1st Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, who was tried and found guilty at the Old Bailey on 8 July.103
Soon thereafter, Clarke was back on Fenian duties and, together with ‘Dolly’ Williamson, made a breakthrough by arresting Fariola. The young chief of staff had returned from Paris in May and was now living in London under the name of Eugene Liebehrt. Fariola subsequently published his own account of the arrest on Saturday 13 July 1867 in Regent Street, facilitated by yet another informer:
We walked along in the twilight, chatting on the approaching meeting, when suddenly I felt conscious of a tap on my shoulder.
‘I arrest you in the Queen’s name!’
‘What d’ye mean? Show me your warrant.’
‘Come, come, none of that. How do you call yourself?’
‘Eugene Liebehrt.’
And then the Inspector turned to Mr. Frawley.
‘Who are you?’
‘No necessity to tell you. Look at my number, I’m a commissionaire.’
‘And who’s that with you?’
‘Why – why that’s General Fariola!’
Now, it’s just within the range of possibility that the Inspector came upon me by hap-hazard; but it does strike me as suspicious that Mr. Frawley was so pat with my name, and that his explanation had been so readily accepted, and also that a thick posse [sic] of well-armed constables was at hand to the Inspector’s call, as if in preparation for possible resistance to capture.104
The arrest was at a rather inconvenient time as Clarke and the three inspectors, Tanner, Thomson and Williamson (who had recently been promoted to chief inspector), were busy with police arrangements for the State visit of His Imperial Majesty the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire Abdülaziz I, who had arrived in London only the day before.105 Although the Ottoman Empire was in decline, this first visit of a sultan to Britain was of considerable importance politically and as a public event.106 Despite the State visit, someone at Scotland Yard had the job to transfer Fariola to Kilmainham Prison, Dublin, and that task fell to Inspector Thomson who, according to Fariola, ‘was as kind to me as his duties permitted’.107 In gaol, Fariola joined William Halpin who had been arrested by the Irish police earlier in July on board the City of Paris in Queenstown harbour where he was en route to New York from Liverpool. Tipped off by a Liverpool source, the police had been accompanied by the informer, Corydon, who had pointed out Halpin to the arresting officer. To add further substance to Halpin’s identity, Clarke later visited Dublin, together with at least one witness, Emma Muntz, who had lived in the lodgings occupied by Halpin and Kelly in February; Muntz identified Halpin in prison as the man she had known as ‘Mr Fletcher’.108
Fariola appeared in front of magistrates at Castle Yard, Dublin, on several occasions in July. Clarke gave evidence that he had ‘arrested the prisoner in Regent-street, when he denied he had ever been in the American army, and said he had only just arrived from Paris’.109 The fact that Clarke gave evidence of the arrest rather than Williamson suggests that he, rather than Williamson, was the ‘inspector’ referred to in Fariola’s description of the arrest. Mayne, sensitive to concerns that Fariola’s trial might make public the fact that the Metropolitan Police had detectives on covert surveillance duties in Paris, wrote to Lord Naas that he didn’t want Sergeant Manners (one of the detectives based in Paris) used as an identification witness in Fariola’s case, and that he had therefore asked the lodging-house keeper at Great Portland Street to be sent to Dublin for this purpose.110 When Fariola was finally arraigned before the Special Commission Court in Dublin in November he had decided to plead guilty. Not surprisingly, in his own account in The Irishman, Fariola strongly rebuts the idea that he acted as an informer or gave useful information to his captors, and it does seem that most of the information presented in his confession is likely to have been known to the Irish and English authorities. Even so, the confession was regarded as ‘extremely interesting’ by Samuel Anderson, Ireland’s Crown solicitor, and in Benjamin Disraeli’s words was ‘the only complete account of the plans and resources of the Fenian Conspiracy’.111 Indeed, Fariola’s confession and his articles in The Irishman remain fascinating and unputdownable first-hand accounts of the Fenian rising, as fresh today as when they were written.
In early 1868, Fariola’s confession delivered what he desired, an early release and a passage for Fariola, his wife and child to Australia. In contrast, his former colleague William Halpin, who was put on trial immediately after Fariola, pleaded ‘not guilty’ and was rewarded with a sentence of fifteen years’ penal servitude for his part in the conspiracy.112 After Fariola’s release, his engagement with revolutionary republicanism appears to have ceased. His experiences with the Fenians probably provided enough politics, economic hardship and in-fighting for a lifetime. He stayed in Australia for about twenty-six years, working as a planter and later as an engineer. By 1894 he was living in Siam and, just before his death, in Sicily. As a former officer and wounded American Civil War veteran (he had received a bayonet wound in his foot) he was eligible for an invalidity pension, and he was finally buried at Arlington Military Cemetery, Virginia, in 1914.113
Soon after Fariola’s arrest, Clarke’s help on Fenian matters was requested by the Irish police:
SI [Sub Inspector] Rodolphus Harvey proceeds this evening to London for the purposes of procuring evidence respecting the case of William Harbuison [sic] and others charged with complicity in the Fenian conspiracy and to request that you will formally authorize Sergeant George Clarke of the Detective Department of the London Police, who on a former occasion assisted SI Hamilton in his enquiry respecting this case, to give his assistance to SI Harvey in endeavouring to obtain such further evidence as may be possible with reference to it.114
Harbison was one of four Fenian representatives of the four provinces of Ireland, who had been sent to London to confer with the Fenian leader, Thomas Kelly, at a meeting that had taken place earlier in the year, probably on 10 February in Kelly’s lodgings. The meeting had constituted its participants as a Provisional Government for Ireland, and Harbison had been arrested after the failed rising. The request for help indicates that Clarke had also co-operated with Irish police on previous occasions. The date of the Fenian meeting that involved Harbison is also close to the time when Clarke had been making enquiries at residences in London where the Fenian leaders had rented rooms. As it turned out, whatever help Clarke gave to the Irish police, the investigations of Harbison were probably wasted; he never came to trial as he died beforehand in a Belfast prison cell on 9 September from an aortic aneurysm. However, there was some public suspicion that Harbison had been murdered in prison, and his funeral procession was reported as one of the largest demonstrations that had ever taken place in Belfast.115
It seems that this case was only the tip of the iceberg in the co-operation between Scotland Yard and the Irish police. Something of the scale of assistance given at this time (but sadly, nothing of the detail), can be measured by the Irish Government’s payment of £1,060 16s 3d (equivalent to c. £48,000 today) in September 1867 ‘for expenses incurred by the Metropolitan Detective Police in connection with the Fenian Conspiracy’.116 In the same month, the government’s hopes for further Fenian ar
rests and convictions were raised and then dashed again over a few days. Following increased Fenian activity in Manchester, police vigilance was heightened there in early September. In the early hours of the morning of 11 September, a policeman patrolling near the Smithfield Market area of the city centre spotted four suspicious characters of whom two were arrested. One of these proved to be the Fenian leader Colonel Thomas Kelly; his companion was identified as another Fenian, Captain Timothy Deasy. Williamson was sent up to Manchester to keep an eye on proceedings, and was probably accompanied by Clarke. When Kelly and Deasy were brought before magistrates on 18 September, Williamson confirmed the men’s identities and they were remanded in custody. As Kelly and Deasy travelled back to prison, the ‘Black Maria’ in which they were travelling was ambushed by about three-dozen Fenians, several armed with revolvers, in a rescue attempt planned by, amongst others, Ricard Burke. In the process of freeing Kelly and Deasy, the officer in charge of the van, Sergeant Charles Brett, was shot and killed. Several of the rescuers were arrested immediately, at or near the scene, but Kelly and Deasy successfully disappeared.117 Their escape was promptly followed the next day by the issue of a reward notice and description of the two men. The section relevant to Kelly was as follows:
THREE HUNDRED POUNDS REWARD – Whereas two prisoners, who were charged at Manchester with being concerned in the Fenian conspiracy, were this day violently rescued from custody by an armed mob and escaped. Description of the prisoners:- Colonel Thomas J. Kelly, age 36, height 5 feet 6 inches, hair (cropped close), whiskers and beard brown, eyes hazel, flat nose, large nostrils, stout build, one tooth deficient next to double one on right top side, scar over right temple, small scar inside of right arm, large scar on inside of belly from an ulcerated wound; dress, brown mixture suit, coat (with pockets at sides), deerstalker hat…118
The telegraph wires must have been red hot between Manchester and Scotland Yard, as the cost of telegraphic messages flying backwards and forwards in the first few days after the rescue amounted to £123 17s.119 With no immediate sightings of the two men, the rescue prompted widespread criticism that was not only directed at the Manchester Police. The Irish authorities, encouraged by Robert Anderson, had apparently sent a telegram to the Home Office, before the rescue, warning that an attempt might be made to free Kelly and Deasy, but the telegram was not addressed appropriately and was only received by the relevant Home Office official after Kelly and Deasy had been rescued. Scotland Yard’s Detective Department also did not escape the flak as the Home Office felt that the men on the spot, including Williamson, should have reinforced the guard on the prison van on their own initiative.120
As the hunt for Kelly and Deasy continued, the police came in for criticism from civil servants, politicians and even from their ‘own kind’; some detectives from G Division, Dublin, sent across to Manchester to help in the search reported back:
… English policeman, are not cheap at any price. I never met such thirsty fellows in my life … They know as little how to discharge duty in connection with Fenianism as I do about translating Hebrew or marshalling troops to fight a battle, but of course a Dublin officer is only an officer from Dublin, and London leads the day…121
Setting aside a natural rivalry between forces, this was still a damning indictment, which in fuller detail reached the desks of both the Irish chief secretary (Lord Mayo) and the Home Secretary (Gathorne Hardy who had replaced Spencer Walpole), and only reinforced their concerns about the capacity of the English police to deal with Fenian issues. Queen Victoria was also not amused and wrote to the Home Secretary: ‘the government ought to take some very stringent measures … to increase the police forces or to make the detectives more efficient.’122
While the search for Kelly and Deasy was intensive, numerous arrests were also made of men who were suspected of having participated in their rescue and in the murder of Sergeant Brett. By the end of October the Crown had selected five men (from almost thirty arrested) for immediate trial, against whom the evidence was felt to be particularly strong. The men were William Allen, Michael Larkin, Michael O’Brien, Edmund Condon and Thomas Maguire. All five were found guilty of murder by the jury and were sentenced to death. In an unprecedented development, reporters who had heard the evidence in court petitioned on behalf of Maguire’s innocence. After a Home Office review of the case, Maguire received an unconditional pardon, and the death sentence received by Condon (an Irish-American who, with Ricard Burke, had been instrumental in the planning of the rescue of Kelly) was commuted. However, despite an Irish deputation storming into the Home Office in support of a reprieve for the three remaining men, none was granted. Allen, Larkin and O’Brien were executed in public at the New Bailey Prison, Salford, on 24 November at the hands of William Calcraft who, fearing Fenian reprisal, was nervous and bungled the execution; effectively, the men were strangled to death.123 The three executed men have gone down in history as ‘The Manchester Martyrs’. Kelly and Deasy were never re-arrested; intelligence from the British Consul in New York in August 1869 indicated that Kelly ‘is now employed by the Post Office here, being in charge of Station F, a branch receiving office’, and had been employed there for at least three months.124 This rapid transition from leader of a large revolutionary republican group to working in a post office surely reinforces the maxim that reality is stranger than fiction! Nonetheless, Kelly did continue his links with Fenianism through the Irish republican movement in America.
Between the rescue in September and the end of November, concern in England and Ireland about the Fenian menace was inevitably heightened, and something approaching panic seems to have set in. There was increased suspicion that an alliance had been developed between English radicals and the Fenians, and warnings from the superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police speculated that the Fenians ‘are buying up arms in Birmingham and sending them to many parts of England, and it is spoken of by several that another Fenian rising is imminent’.125 Arrangements were made in October to make additional arms available to the police by supplying a total of 174 Adams’ revolver pistols across the twenty-nine principal police stations in the London Metropolitan area.126 The safety of Queen Victoria came into question when the Mayor of Manchester sent a telegram to the Home Office on 14 October to alert them ‘of the intention of Fenians to go to Scotland and seize the person of the Queen’. Somewhat to the queen’s irritation, she was surrounded for several days at Balmoral by an increased police presence under the control of the long-serving Superintendent Walker (the same but somewhat older ‘Inspector Stalker’ who had been featured by Dickens in 1850). As Walker regularly telegraphed over the next few days, it was ‘All quiet on Deeside; no strangers about’.127
Across England, ‘Fenians’ were being seen under virtually every stone. In Reading an enthusiastic local police force arrested James Queen, a hawker, and his stepson Peter Griffin on 10 November, following claims that Queen offered to administer the Fenian oath in a public house. ‘There have been two detective officers in the town since Monday last [11 November], by order from the Home Office, and they have been engaged in making inquiries into the case. Nothing has been elicited to show that Queen is a Fenian or in any way identified with the movement.’128 Clarke was undoubtedly one of the two detectives mentioned; Griffin was freed on 11 November and Queen on 13 November, with a warning.129 However, if you turn over enough stones something significant will be found, and on 20 November Inspector Thomson, accompanied by an informer, arrested Ricard Burke and a companion, Joseph Casey, in Woburn Square, Bloomsbury, with the assistance of a local policeman, P.C. Fordham.130 Both policemen were quickly rewarded for their ‘gallant conduct’.131
The already eventful year of 1867 had still not ended and there were further developments to come, including an increase in the number of detectives based at Scotland Yard. Perhaps in response to Queen Victoria’s earlier interjection about the detective force, Sir James Fergusson (Undersecretary of State at the Home Office) wrote to Mayne
on 9 November to inform him that the Home Secretary ‘is pleased to authorise the increase of the detective Police Force by the addition of one Inspector and three Sergeants’.132 A few days earlier, on 1 November, Mayne had written to the Home Secretary, putting forward an unidentified sergeant for an unspecified new appointment: ‘he is intelligent, trustworthy, and would I am confident prove himself worthy of the appointment if you think fit to select him.’133 On 26 November 1867, Clarke (now 49 years old) was promoted to inspector (the only member of the detective team who was promoted at that time).
The principal consequence of the changes to the detective department was an increase in the number of detectives to fourteen; scarcely a radical step forward, but nonetheless a small response to recent criticisms and to the undoubted under-staffing of the detective function in the Metropolitan Police. Of the detective team that existed in 1864, seven were still present in November 1867; these were Chief Inspector Williamson; Inspectors Tanner, James Thomson and the newly promoted Clarke; and Sergeants Palmer, Druscovich and Mulvany. Amongst several new sergeants, the appointment of John Meiklejohn, from V Division (Wandsworth) was to prove particularly significant in the later career of Clarke, Druscovich and Palmer, and for the subsequent reputation of the entire detective department.134
With his promotion to inspector, Clarke’s pay now rose to £200 per annum and provided him with the financial flexibility to move house. From about this time, he decided to rent a property at 20 Great College Street, Westminster, where he was to live for the rest of his life. It was within easy walking distance of Scotland Yard and had a pub a few doors away.