The Great Cat Massacre

by Gareth Rubin

  So, in 1871, the five men found themselves on a Cunard liner sailing for New York. If the British authorities hoped their exile would be a low-key affair and the Irishmen would be keeping their heads down from then on, they would have been somewhat disappointed by the Fenian funfair that greeted their arrival. Not only were they the guests of other Irish émigrés, but they were also invited to the White House to meet President Ulysses S. Grant. The President hated Britain for supporting the Confederacy in the Civil War and wanted to pooh-pooh the current government in revenge.

  But, despite sitting down to a little fried chicken with the US President, the Fenian Brotherhood was divided and much smaller than in the past. One of the splits was down to a hare-brained scheme five years earlier to get their own back on Britain by invading Canada. Then, the Fenian army, mostly made up of 1,000 young men with nothing better to do, had assembled in plain sight on the American side of the border, allowing the Canadian authorities to fully comprehend what they were about to do (if not why on earth they wanted to do it). On the morning of 1 June 1866 they crossed into Canadian territory near Niagara Falls and threatened the strategically irrelevant town of Ridgeway.

  Boding ill for the Fenians, by the end of the day half their men had deserted, apparently treating the voyage more as a day trip than an invasion. Despite this, they managed to win a small battle against Canadian troops after the Canadians mistook one of their own regiments for another and accidentally retreated. The Fenians, who found themselves in control of Ridgeway but without any plan for it, burned it to the ground, then scarpered before British reinforcements could arrive. In fact, after one more brief battle, they turned tail for home and most either swam across the Niagara River back to the US, or paddled across it on logs and surrendered their arms to the American authorities. The huge waste of time that the invasion represented exacerbated the split in the ranks of the Brotherhood, and it was a divided campaign for Irish independence that Devoy and his pals discovered. A new leader was needed and the British government had graciously sent just the man.

  Settling down in the US, Devoy took a job as a clerk and joined a secret society, the Clan na Gael – The Irish Family. It gave him a power base away from the Brotherhood, which spent most of its time bickering about internal politics. For a while, he was unsure how to go about uniting the Irish in America until a scheme to do just that fell into his lap.

  In 1874 he received a letter. It was from one of his fellow Millbank prisoners who had been transported to Australia for life and had somehow seen a newspaper story about Devoy’s arrival in New York. It began: ‘Dear friend, this is a voice from the tomb…’ and asked for his help in organising a campaign to get him and some fellow Fenian prisoners pardoned. Instead, Devoy had an idea: if he could spring his colleagues from Australia and bring them to America, he and they would be the toast of the nation. Soon he had convinced the Clan na Gael to give him the funds to charter a getaway ship: the Catalpa, which had a Portuguese crew and an American captain. In 1875 it set sail for Australia, arriving in 1876 to find that the prisoners were not closely guarded when out in work parties (on the grounds that there was nowhere they could run to unless they wanted to die in the Bush). A message was soon sent to the Irishmen from two Fenian agents, John Breslin and Tom Desmond, who had arrived earlier, purporting to be businessmen. In a daring daylight operation, the convicts made a run for it and got to the Catalpa, helped by the fact that most of the British were watching a sailing regatta at the time.

  But they were far from safe. The crew of the Catalpa soon realised they were being followed by a Royal Navy gunboat, which was steaming towards them. The gunboat’s captain demanded the prisoners be handed over or he would open fire, to which the captain of the Catalpa responded: ‘We sail under the protection of the flag of the United States. Fire on us and you fire on the American flag.’

  It was a clever move – a jailbreak was one thing, but the British captain didn’t want to start a war. He backed off and the Fenians made it to America. The ‘American’ defiance of the Royal Navy meant both Irishmen and Americans felt proud. They even had their own theme song:

  Now boys, if you will listen,

  A story I’ll relate

  I’ll tell you of the noble men

  Who from their foe escaped

  Though bound with Saxon fetters

  In the dark Australian jail

  They struck a blow for freedom

  And for Yankeeland set sail.

  On the seventeenth of April

  Last the Stars and Stripes did fly

  On board the bark Catalpa,

  Waving proudly to the sky

  She showed the green above the red

  As she did calmly lay

  Prepared to take the Fenian boys

  In safety o’er the sea.

  When Breslin and brave Desmond

  Brought the prisoners to the shore

  They gave one shout for freedom;

  Soon to bless them evermore

  And manned by gallant Irish hearts,

  Pulled towards the Yankee shore

  For well they knew, from its proud folds,

  No tyrant could them drag.

  They had nearly reached in safety

  The Catalpa taut and trim

  When fast approaching them

  They saw a vision dark and dim

  It was the gunboat Georgette,

  And on her deck there stood

  One hundred hired assassins,

  To shed each patriot’s blood.

  The gunboat reached the bounding bark

  And fired across her bow

  Then in loud voice commanded

  That the vessel should heave to

  But noble Captain Anthony

  In thunder tones did cry

  ‘You dare not fire a shot

  At that bright flag that floats on high.’

  ‘My ship is sailing peacefully

  Beneath that flag of stars

  It’s manned by Irish hearts of oak

  And manly Yankee tars

  And that dear emblem near the fore,

  So plain to be seen

  Is the banner I’ll protect,

  Old Ireland’s flag of green.’

  The Britisher he sailed away,

  From the Stars and Stripes he ran

  He knew his chance was slim

  To fight the boys of Uncle Sam

  So Hogan, Wilson, Harrington,

  With Darragh off did go

  With Hassett and bold Cranston,

  Soon to whip the Saxon foe.

  Here’s luck to Captain Anthony

  Who well these men did free

  He dared the English man-o’-war

  To fight him on the sea

  And here’s to that dear emblem

  Which in triumph shall be seen

  The flag for which our heroes fought,

  Old Ireland’s flag of green.

  Devoy was a hero and the new leader of the cause. Over the next few years, he developed his strategy, which began with overruling his colleagues, who wanted to use terrorism – blowing up civilians in England would only lose them popular support in America, he reasoned. By 1868, there were two million Irishmen in America and he was eager to make the campaign a popular one with mass involvement but there needed to be a specific issue. He focused on land reform – giving Irish land to the natives.

  In 1879 Devoy broke the letter of his agreement with the British authorities, as well as the spirit, by returning – in secret – to Ireland. He wanted to organise the army that he still hoped would rise. This wasn’t a forlorn prospect – there was much unrest in the country as bad weather had meant a poor harvest and it was only down to a massive relief operation jointly run by Britain and America that the whole country wasn’t starving. As part of the groundwork, Devoy returned to America with the Irish political leader Charles Parnell, MP, who went on a speaking tour of the country, kicking off with a meeting in Madison Square Garden att
ended by 10,000 people. He also spoke in the US House of Representatives, gaining the support of the government. Along the way, he raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cause, and in two years that had reached half a million dollars.

  Officially, the money was to go to the Irish Land League, but instead it went to the militant Irish Republican Brotherhood for their forthcoming violent insurgency. All of it went through the hands of a priest, Father Lawrence Walsh, presaging the involvement of Catholic parishes in laundering money for Republican violence. The campaign may have been partly responsible for the British Parliament passing the Land Act of 1881, which mitigated much of the suffering.

  Devoy’s dual strategy of political pressure from within Parliament, and a parallel underground preparation for violent insurrection, was paying some dividends, though not as quickly as he had wanted. Then Parnell’s death from a heart attack at the age of 45 dealt a terrible blow to the campaign, which ran out of steam and fractured. As a result, the revolution never came. But Devoy was far from finished; he switched tactics again and over the coming decades continued to build vital support in America. In 1916 he conspired with Roger Casement to bring German weapons to Ireland by submarine to arm the volunteers of the Easter Uprising and his influence undoubtedly contributed to the partition of Ireland in 1921 – and to the raising of funds for Republican terrorism for decades.

  John Devoy lived to see the Irish Free State. Had the British not offered him a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card, it might never have come about.

  THE COCK CROWS – CHARLES BERESFORD FUMBLES IN THE DARK, 1891

  There is a flower within my heart,

  Daisy, Daisy!

  Planted one day by a glancing dart,

  Planted by Daisy Bell!

  Whether she loves me or loves me not,

  Sometimes it’s hard to tell;

  Yet I am longing to share the lot

  Of beautiful Daisy Bell!

  Daisy Daisy,

  Give me your answer do!

  I’m half crazy,

  All for the love of you!

  It won’t be a stylish marriage,

  I can’t afford a carriage,

  But you’ll look sweet on the seat

  Of a bicycle built for two!

  We will go tandem as man and wife,

  Daisy, Daisy!

  Ped’ling away down the road of life,

  I and my Daisy Bell!

  When the road’s dark we can despise

  P’liceman and lamps as well;

  There are bright lights in the dazzling eyes

  Of beautiful Daisy Bell!

  I will stand by you in ‘wheel’ or woe,

  Daisy, Daisy!

  You’ll be the bell(e) which I’ll ring, you know!

  Sweet little Daisy Bell!

  You’ll take the lead in each trip we take,

  Then if I don’t do well;

  I will permit you to use the brake,

  My beautiful Daisy Bell!

  Lord Charles Beresford was the darling of the newspapers. An MP and naval commander (ending up as an admiral) who would often leave Westminster for a short while to fight in the waters off the Sudan or Egypt, he was also known in his circle as something of a sexual athlete. Perhaps most importantly for our story, he was also a close friend and adviser of the Prince of Wales, soon to be Edward VII.

  All of this endeared him to many an impressionable upper-class female, one of whom was the Countess of Warwick, Frances Evelyn Greville – ‘Daisy’ to her friends, and the inspiration for the eponymous music hall song. When she wasn’t out inspiring songs, Daisy was equally busy as the mistress of the married Prince of Wales. And his pal, Charles Beresford. And many other members of the House of Lords. She must have been utterly exhausted when she crawled home to her husband, Lord Brooke. And she wasn’t very discreet about her extra-curricular activities – she was, in fact, widely known as ‘the babbling Brooke’.

  One weekend, the Prince, Beresford, Daisy and a host of others were at a house party. At night, Beresford crept out of his room to find Daisy’s. He stole in and leapt upon the bed, loudly crying, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ This understandably startled the Bishop of Chester and his wife, who woke up to find a madman on their bed pretending to be a farmyard animal. Whether Beresford eventually found which room Daisy was really staying in has not been recorded, but the revelation of their affair strained relations between himself and the Prince, and ended up with Beresford threatening to publicly reveal details of Edward VII’s affairs to the press.

  The enmity continued to fester so that, when reform of the Navy was on the public agenda a decade later, Edward ignored Beresford’s arguments for broadening out its deployment in favour of those of the First Sea Lord, who preferred a more specialised service based on torpedo boats and dreadnoughts to rival Germany – exacerbating the arms race between Britain and Germany which led to the outbreak of the First World War.

  THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND – PROMOTING IDI AMIN, 1948

  Idi Amin, genocidal maniac, cannibal, racist, madman, British Army cook and good friend of Saudi Arabia, seems to embody the danger of employing people without really getting to know what makes them tick first.

  Amin enlisted in 1946 to feed the King’s African Rifles and it was the Ugandan boxing champion’s size – six feet four inches tall and weighing in at twenty stone – that got him noticed by the officers. Britain was looking for a new generation of leaders to take over in her former colonies when they were granted independence, and men were needed who would command respect, who would be looked up to. In the new African republics, these would not be men with degrees in macroeconomics, they would be men like Amin. ‘Not much grey matter, but a splendid chap to have about,’ as one British officer described him.

  Indeed, he was promoted far more quickly than his intelligence deserved but that might have been part of the appeal – low intelligence meant low ambitions, which meant pliable and unlikely to cause too much trouble. Soon the cook had become an officer with ambitions his superiors had no idea he harboured, and a brutality that would revile millions around the world.

  The men who promoted him were not, however, entirely insensible to Amin’s violent nature. He was nearly court-martialled when, as a lieutenant, he saw action in Kenya in 1961 and ordered his men to kill dozens of local tribesmen, leaving their corpses to be torn apart by hyenas. Amin also personally tortured many men – castrating a number of them to gain information. Naturally, this was not the normal behaviour of a cook but since Uganda was about to become an independent nation with the much-loved Kabaka of Buganda as the head of state, the British authorities chose not to make one of their last acts the prosecution of the man who was about to become the senior native officer in the Ugandan Army. They informed the Prime Minister designate, Milton Obote, but he too decided to do nothing: he didn’t want to rock any boats just weeks before independence. Of course, rocking and, preferably, sinking any boat with Idi Amin in it would have been a boon to the world beyond anything else Obote could possibly have achieved in his entire life.

  The day of 9 October 1962 was one of mixed fortunes for Uganda. It gained independence, but also one utterly psychotic new major, Major Amin. Within a few months, the British officers who had given him his first leg up had left for home, crossing their fingers that he wouldn’t turn out to be as mad as he looked. As soon as they left, the new Ugandan government, in need of senior officers to take their places, bumped Amin up to Colonel and Army Chief of Staff. One quick brutal overthrow of Kabaka by Obote and Amin was pushed up to General Amin – one of the fastest rises for a chef in the history of cookery. Obote was sure he could control Amin, however. After all, he was just a cook with a brain the size of a carrot – and Obote had read Socialist theory.

  It surprised precisely no one when Amin mounted a coup. The only surprise was that he waited until 1971 to do so, using the occasion of Obote’s absence at a meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Singapore to decide that Uganda would b
e a better place with him in charge. Britain was almost certainly aware of Amin’s plans – well, who wasn’t? – but did nothing because Obote looked to be heading down the path of Marxism and that wouldn’t be much good either. So the British government thought it might as well sit back and watch to see how things turn out.

  The United Kingdom recognised Amin as the new ruler quicker than you could say ‘pastry’ and the people of Uganda, having no clue what they were letting themselves in for, gave him rapturous support. Even one British observer remarked: ‘I have never encountered a more benevolent and apparently popular leader than General Amin.’