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COPYRIGHT 2001 Irish American Cultural Institute
On 23 November 1867 three Irishmen--William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O'Brien--were executed in Manchester, England. They had been found guilty of murdering a policeman during a successful attempt to rescue two Fenian prisoners from a police van in Manchester. Although the policeman had been killed with just one shot, allegedly by accident, five men were sentenced to death for the killing. Shortly afterward, one of them, Thomas Maguire, was pardoned, and another, Edward O'Meagher Condon, an Irish-American, was reprieved owing to insufficient evidence. As all five men had been tried together on the one indictment and convicted on the same verdict, many observers expected that the case against the other three men would also be dropped. When they were executed, many Irish nationalists believed that the government had refused to exercise mercy not because the men were unquestionably guilty, but in order to satisfy English public opinion, which expected that somebody would be punished for the crime. Much sympathy was also aroused among the Catholic community in Ireland because the three men, who were believed to be devout Catholics, did not receive a proper Christian burial, their bodies having been covered with quicklime in Salford jail. (1)
The executions had an immediate impact on public opinion in Ireland. The Irish nationalist press expressed feelings of outrage. Many mock funeral processions were held across Ireland within days of the executions to commemorate the three men. (2) These men became popularly known as the "Manchester martyrs." For over fifty years demonstrations were held to mark the anniversary of their execution. Thus far, however, little attention has been paid by historians to the Manchester-martyr commemorative demonstrations that were held after 1867. (3) These demonstrations were popular not only in Ireland but also throughout the Irish community in Britain and the US and could vary greatly in size and character, depending on the locality in which they took place. For example, in Britain the usual practice was simply to offer a mass for the souls of the martyrs on their anniversary. In the US commemorative concerts and lectures were often held to mark their anniversary. These events were most popular in those cities that had a large Irish population, such as New York and Chicago. In Irish country towns people often gathered by torchlight in a town square to hear a commemorative speech by a local politician. During the 1870s the Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.) usually organized the demonstrations in both rural and urban Ireland. After the formation of the Land League, however, many of the demonstrations in rural Ireland were organized by supporters of the constitutional nationalist movement. By contrast, the demonstrations in Dublin were remarkable for the extent to which control of the demonstrations lay more firmly in republican hands. For this reason they were of continued interest to the Dublin Metropolitan Police, which suspected that their success or failure was a rough guideline to the degree of influence that the I.R.B. exercised in the city.
On 11 September 1867, six months after the abortive Fenian Rising in Ireland, the police in Manchester apprehended the acting Fenian leader Colonel Thomas J. Kelly and his associate Captain Timothy Deasy. Exactly one week later, as Kelly and Deasy were being transported in a prison van from court back to jail, they were rescued by a body of armed Fenians. During the rescue, depicted in this sketch, an English police sergeant named Charles Brett was killed when one of the rescuers fired a shot through the ventilator of the locked back door of the van. The shot fatally wounded Brett, though the intention was probably not to kill him but to frighten him into opening the door or to break open the lock. A woman prisoner inside the van then took the keys from the dying Brett and passed them out to the rescuers through the ventilator. Kelly and Deasy quickly ran off and were never recaptured (Illustrated London News, 28 September 1867).
Within a month after the rescue of Kelly and Deasy, five men were placed on trial for the murder of Sergeant Brett in the assize courthouse at Manchester, as shown in this sketch. All of them were capitally convicted. Although none of the five had fired the shot that had killed Brett, four of them had taken active parts in the rescue that led to his death. After the trial, amid much popular speculation over the justice of the sentences passed, authorities pardoned one of the prisoners and reprieved another. But on 23 November 1867 the other three men--William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O'Brien--were executed at Salford jail. The hangings stimulated a strong adverse reaction among Irish nationalists, many of whom honored the memory of the three executed men for decades afterward (Illustrated London News, 9 November 1867).
This article focuses primarily on the Dublin demonstrations and argues that they were significant forms of nationalist mobilization. The article is divided into two main sections. The first section provides an overview of the demonstrations held in Dublin between 1867 and 1916. The second section analyzes the phenomenon of Manchester-martyr demonstrations and explains why the Manchester martyrs continued to be regarded as important icons for many Irish nationalists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
I
On 8 December 1867 a large demonstration in the form of an ersatz funeral procession was held in Dublin and was attended by approximately fifty thousand people. (4) To prevent the demonstration from being suppressed, the organizers decided that nationalist flags, banners, or emblems should not be carried, although most made the symbolic gesture of wearing green ribbons or an item of green clothing. John Martin, a former member of Young Ireland, took a leading role in organizing the demonstration, as did John Waters, a doctor and leading I.R.B. man. Immediately after the executions Martin purchased a plot in Glasnevin cemetery for the purpose of erecting a memorial cross for the Manchester martyrs. That was unveiled four months later. The mock funeral procession in Dublin followed the same circuitous route through the city as that taken by the Fenian funeral of Terence Bellew McManus in 1861. (5) Despite the involvement of the I.R.B., however, the event was not, as was the case with the McManus funeral, a purely Fenian affair. Only one of the four men on the organizing committee was an I.R.B. man, although I.R.B. men played an important part in marshalling the procession. (6) Immediately after the success of this demonstration Dublin Castle ordered the arrest of a handful of its participants and prohibited the holding of similar demonstrations throughout the United Kingdom. (7)
Owing to the prohibition of mock funeral processions, Manchester-martyr demonstrations in Dublin did not take this form again until 1874. In the meantime, each year on the Sunday closest to the anniversary of the executions, several thousand people visited the cenotaph, often at different times of the day, to pay their respects. (8) These events took place with little or no advertising and were essentially spontaneous gatherings, similar in character to the initial demonstration held in 1867. They were very solemn occasions during which the crowd, most of whom were wearing green ribbons, recited prayers for the dead and then decorated the cenotaph with floral wreaths. Amateur bands, flags, and banners, which were a prominent feature of Manchester-martyr demonstrations in later years, were usually absent. Only twice during this period were these occasions used specifically for political purposes. In 1869 the Amnesty Association advertised the event, and money was collected at the cemetery gate for the amnesty cause. Meanwhile, inside the cemetery speeches were made by two I.R.B. men protesting against the Catholic Cemeteries Committee's decision not to allow a monument to be placed over the grave of the 1867 rebel Stephen O'Donoghue. (9) As a funeral procession through the city was banned, it was decided instead to have a procession starting from within the grounds of the cemetery. During this procession the graves of several deceased I.R.B. men, in addition to the cenotaph of the Manchester martyrs, were visited and decorated. This practice was followed at almost all Manchester-martyr demonstrations held in Dublin over the next fifty years. (10) In 1873 the anniversary of the Manchester martyrs was celebrated by a monster amnesty demonstration that attracted, at the very least, eighty thousand people. This demonstration, which was preceded by a huge procession through the city center, was held within walking distance of Glasnevin cemetery so that those present could also visit and decorate the Manchester martyrs' cenotaph. (11)
In 1874 and 1875 large processions of several thousand men took place from the city center to Glasnevin cemetery in honor of the Manchester martyrs. (12) In 1874 the Freeman's Journal reported that the crowd was so large that it was impossible to judge how many people were present. According to the police, however, only three thousand people took part in this funeral procession, which was organized and headed by a leading I.R.B. man in Dublin, Thomas Bracken. (13) The 1875 demonstration was even larger and was organized by both the I.R.B. and the Amnesty Association. In subsequent years, however, the demonstrations failed to attract a large crowd on an annual basis. This appears to have been due to the demise of the Amnesty Association as a formal organization and to various internal disputes within the Dublin I.R.B. Each year between 1876 and 1878, despite the presence of amateur bands, the demonstrations in Dublin attracted no more than one thousand people. (14) The largest demonstration in the late 1870s was probably that held in 1879. This was more successful primarily due to better advertising. (15) This would indicate that by the late 1870s the demonstrations were no longer spontaneous gatherings and that careful preparations were necessary if they were to attract relatively large crowds. Processions on the way to the cemetery also became less frequent, and on most occasions the participants simply gathered at the cemetery gates before marching in procession around the cemetery.
Although press reports indicate that the demonstration in 1880 was quite large, according to the police it was the smallest anniversary demonstration held in Dublin, with fewer than one hundred people present. (16) This surprised the police, who had expected that because of the enthusiasm created by the land war, a larger than usual demonstration would take place in Dublin. Shortly beforehand, however, they learned that it was "somewhat publicly known" that the I.R.B. was boycotting the demonstration...
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