Blood and Rage: A Cultural history of Terrorism

Friedrich Engels, whose wife was a Fenian, wrote that ‘The only thing the Fenians lacked were martyrs. They have been provided with these.’ Outrage at the executions was evident in America, Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, as well as across Europe. In Ireland itself, huge mock funeral processions were held, which suggested that the Catholic hierarchy had modified its earlier condemnations of godless Fenian ‘socialists’ in favour of endorsing the sentimental Irish nationalism often espoused by its priests. The death of Brett was regarded as merely collateral damage in such circles.

The Fenians at large in England resolved to redouble their violence, in anticipation of which they stepped up their arms procurements. Crucial to these endeavours was another Civil War veteran, Ricard O’Sullivan Burke, who had fought from Bull Run to Appomattox, before going on to become a Fenian arms procurer in Birmingham, where as ‘Mr Barry’ or ‘Mr Winslow’ he purchased arms allegedly on behalf of the Chilean government. Burke was identified to Scotland Yard detectives while staying in Bloomsbury in central London. After a scuffle he was arrested together with his confederate Joseph Casey in Woburn Square. Burke was remanded to the Clerkenwell House of Detention, one of two prisons in an area favoured by English artisan radicals, Welsh milk suppliers and many Irish, Italian and Swiss immigrants. The area was known for clock-making and printing, as well as demonstrations on its Green. The House of Detention, which included an exercise yard, was ringed by a wall that was three feet thick at the base and twenty-five feet high. Tenement houses ran parallel with the wall along one side of respectively Corporation Lane and Corporation Row.

Aided by sympathetic female visitors, who included his sister, the imprisoned Burke was in contact with Fenians in London with whom he exchanged messages written in invisible ink. He devised his own escape plan. In the yard he had noticed that the outer wall had been weakened by men repairing pipes buried under the road. The escape bid was led by another Civil War veteran, James Murphy, formerly of the 20th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, who together with a Fenian from Fermanagh called Michael Barrett misused the proceeds of a collection for a new church to assemble enormous quantities of gunpowder. These purchases alerted the police to what was afoot, although they also had agents within the Fenian conspiracy.

On 12 December 1867 Murphy and two helpers wheeled a tarpaulin-covered barrow through the darkening winter streets of Clerkenwell. Underneath was a thirty-six-gallon kerosene barrel filled with gunpowder. They lobbed a white ball over the wall, the signal for Burke -who was circling the yard on exercise – to halt as if to remove a stone from his boot. Outside, Murphy lit the initiatory fuse, which spluttered and went out. Undertaking one of the most dangerous things to do with gunpowder, whose main drawback as an explosive is that it easily becomes damp, he returned twice more to relight the increasingly short fuse. Eventually the three called it a day and left; inside the walls Burke was returned to his cell.

On Friday the 13th at 3.30 p.m. the barrow and barrel reappeared alongside the prison. Some of the children playing in the street were co-opted into what became a game of fireworks. One of the bombers, dressed in a brown overcoat and black hat, even lit the squib used to ignite the barrel by taking a light from a boy smoking a cigarette. Although a low rather than a high explosive, which creates what experts call a burning event, gunpowder delivers a prolonged and steady propellant push useful for quarrying rocks or expelling projectiles from cannons. When the bomb went off, most of the explosive force hit the tenements opposite rather than the prison wall, although an inverted wedge was blown out of that, sixty feet long at the top and narrower at the wall’s thicker base. The breach in the wall was irrelevant since, as a precautionary measure, the suspicious prison authorities had relocated Burke and Casey to cells in a remote part of the jail. The explosion was heard in suburban Brixton south-east of the Thames, and even, according to a man who wrote to the Standard, some forty miles away. Fifty firemen arrived to pick their way through the rubble, while hundreds of policemen milled around. Guards units took up station in and around the prison. Gas mains were excavated to provide light for rescuers combing through the rubble. Three people were dead, a seven-year-old child called Minnie Abbott, a thirty-six-year-old housewife, Sarah Hodgkinson, and a forty-seven-year-old brass finisher, William Clutton. Terrible injuries were inflicted, many involving fractures to the facial bones, although an eight-year-old girl coming home with a jug of milk sustained terrible lacerations to her knee. An eleven-year-old boy had to have eight fingers amputated. The death toll of local residents rose to twelve over the following weeks, while hundreds more had sustained injuries. Four hundred houses had been damaged. Rumours flew about Fenian plots to blow up the Arsenal at Woolwich, the Tower of London and York Minster. Fifty thousand special constables volunteered to patrol the streets and civil servants went about armed. There was dark talk in the Spectator of the need for bayonets to be deployed, although the magazine had been sympathetic to the demotic nobility of the Fenian uprising in Ireland. More practically, a local clergyman organised a Clerkenwell Explosion Relief Fund that dispensed aid and pensions to the victims and their rescuers.7

Michael Barrett was caught test-firing a revolver while in Glasgow and brought back to London. He and five others went on trial at the Old Bailey in April 1868. The cases against Ann Justice and John O’Keefe were dismissed by the judge, and the jury went on to acquit three other defendants. Barrett alone was found guilty of murder. He spoke at great length before sentence was passed, disputing the evidence and the witnesses brought against him, one of whom he dismissed as a ‘prince of perverts’. He was sentenced to hang. In another trial, Ricard O’Sullivan Burke was sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. Attempts to reprieve Barrett took place at a time when the authorities in Australia and Canada had hanged Fenians who had shot a renegade Fenian (he had since become a Canadian cabinet minister) and wounded the duke of Edinburgh on a tour of the Antipodes. Barrett was taken out from Newgate prison to be executed on a fine May morning, as people who had rented gallows side seats in the Magpie and Stump for up to £10 sang ‘Champagne Charlie’ or ‘Oh My, I’ve Got to Die’. When Barrett appeared the crowd cheered, with boos and hisses for Calcraft. Barrett died instantly, the last man to be executed in public in England. After an interval of an hour, Calcraft appeared – to shouts of ‘Come on, body snatcher!’ – to cut the corpse down. The bells on St Sepulchre’s rang nine times. A martyr had been born. So had the habit of calling the Irish ‘Micks’, because thenceforth the Fenians (and the Irish Guards) were popularly referred to as the ‘Mick Barretts’.

As Barrett assumed his place in Irish martyrology, the sufferings of some eighty imprisoned Fenians became the stuff of legend and the object of complex calculations on the part of the British authorities who, regardless of party, were pursuing a moderate reform agenda in Ireland, with Disraeli’s Tories emollient towards the Catholic Church, and Gladstone seeking land reform and disestablishment of the Protestant Church of Ireland. The majority of Irish nationalists responded with calls for land reform and Home Rule. At the extreme margins of Irish politics, the Fenian prisoners taxed the dispassionate ingenuity of British statesmen. The need to maintain law and order -ultimately through executions and imprisonment – had to be balanced against the spiral of violence this might unleash, and against the wider political repercussions in Ireland and further afield, especially in the US, where politicians were hungry for the Irish-American vote. Did one treat them as criminals or as political prisoners?

While the Fenian convicts were spared the full disciplinary rigours of Victorian jails, those who acted up were kept in solitary confinement or in irons for periods of time that seemed cruel. Tales of the plight of the prisoners swelled the ranks of Fenian activists and sympathisers, for they were the objects of emotive campaigns on their behalf, campaigns which routinely highlighted the sufferings of the prisoners’ innocent wives and children. Everywhere as the cold-blooded facts of terrorist outrages responsible for their conviction faded from memory, the plight of the imprisoned occupied the emotional foreground. Gladstone’s administration eventually opted for the sensible tactic of releasing the small fry, then expatriating the ringleaders, while keeping Fenians who had been members of the armed forces in detention, that being the issue on which queen Victoria refused to be persuaded towards leniency.8

Rage at the ‘injustices’ and ‘indignities’ heaped upon imprisoned Fenians also led to thoughts of retaliation and revenge among their supporters. The enraged included Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, who in 1871 had been amnestied by the Gladstone government from a fifteen-year jail sentence on condition he remove himself to America. A dipsomaniac over-fond of whiskey and cigars, Rossa was given to sanguinary bombast, threatening to reduce London to ashes with the aid of a dozen arsonists, who would bring ‘the fires of Hell’ to the imperial capital. The erratic Rossa, known to detractors as O’Dynamite, was only fitfully connected to Clan na Gael, a US-based secret society founded in June 1867 under John Devoy to oppose Irishmen lured into supporting Home Rule.

In 1876 this secret society mounted the daring escape from the Imperial prison at Fremantle in Western Australia of six imprisoned Fenians, who were spirited out to international waters on a US-registered whaler called the Catalpa. Its flag can still be seen in the national museum in Dublin. This propaganda coup fuelled the notion of a skirmishing fund to finance attacks against Britain and its global interests, the first project being an invasion of Canada, which it was hoped the US would take advantage of. This resulted in a few inconsequential border skirmishes. A great deal of Clan money was mercifully squandered on a schoolmaster and inventor called John Holland, the genius who offered to build a Fenian submarine. Ever more elaborate models led to actual boats initially propelled by steam lines from a surface ship, and then, after the successful installation of engines, unaccompanied. Mishaps included a Fenian flying through the air when, having forgotten to tighten a hatch, an air bubble propelled him skywards. Holland’s habit of suing all and sundry eventually led the Clan to steal his boat, which then was left to rust – like a riveted porpoise -while others spirited away its engines. But an idea had been born. In 1900 the same inventor’s USS Holland would become the first submarine purchased by the US Navy.

John Devoy, the Clan’s most intelligent leader, decided on what he called a New Departure in 1878 which supported Charles Parnell’s constitutional form of Irish nationalism, but others in the leadership simultaneously embarked on a campaign of terror, as did O’Donovan Rossa, with whom, to complicate matters, the Clan occasionally cooperated. Much of the rhetoric familiar from more contemporary terrorist movements was evident in embryonic form among these Fenians in the 1880s, although their avoidance of the term terrorism means that more emphasis has been placed on Russian nihilists as the progenitors of the tactic. In fact, what the Russians did, rather than what they said, was more akin to the targeted assassination of key imperial figures, with a view to isolating the government from society, than an attempt to create mass panic so as to influence the political process.9

The early Fenian notion of a people’s army representing the oppressed nation’s will through insurrectionary violence was gradually displaced by that of terror campaigns designed to sap the morale of the more mighty imperial enemy. This change of tactics was because there was no substantial support for the insurrection, a truth that was cleverly concealed within the Fenians’ own analysis: ‘We should oppose a general insurrection in Ireland as untimely and ill-advised. But we believe in action nonetheless. The Irish cause requires Skirmishers. It requires a little band of heroes who will initiate and keep up without intermission guerrilla warfare – men who will fly over land and sea like invisible beings – now striking the enemy in Ireland, now in India, now in England itself as occasion may present.’ The conceit of the enlightened vanguard would become familiar to all manner of modern terrorists.

The preferred weapon was influenced by the Russian nihilist attacks that had culminated in the assassination of tsar Alexander II on 1 March 1881 by terrorists hurling small grenade-like explosives at their target. Nitroglycerine had been invented by Ascanio Sobrero, a Piedmontese chemist, who by mixing glycerine with sulphuric and nitric acids made a yellowish, sweet-smelling liquid with curious properties. A small quantity blew up in his face. Pursuing a different tack, Sobrero tried a trace on a dog, which died in agony, but which was revealed to have hugely distended blood vessels in its heart and brain. British doctors subsequently discovered that nitroglycerine brought relief for the paralysing pain of angina pectoris. In the 1860s the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel discovered how to stabilise nitroglycerine by absorbing it into a solid, using such things as kieselguhr, sawdust or gelatine, the end product being sticks of dynamite with names like Atlas. Nobel also invented gunpowder-based detonators to trigger the dynamite explosion.10

The Fenian terrorist Rossa endeavoured to bask in the remote glow of the Russian nihilist assassins by advertising in his newspaper courses in manufacturing bombs by a Professor Mezzeroff, ‘England’s invisible enemy’. Mezzeroff was a tall, sharp-faced man with curly hair arranged around his pate and a ‘grizzly moustache’. Habitual wearing of black clothes and steely spectacles rounded off the sinister effect of a character straight out of Dostoevsky or Conrad. His origins were mysterious, although he had the accents of an Irishman. His father was Russian, but his mother was said to have been a Highlander and he enjoyed US citizenship. Students were encouraged to pay US$30 for a thirty-day course in making dynamite, although Mezzeroff’s enthusiasm was greater than his knowledge of chemistry. He claimed that dynamite ‘was the best way for oppressed peoples from all countries to get free from tyranny and oppression’. A pound of the stuff contained more force than ‘a million speeches’.11

Instead of initiating a burning event, with pressures up to 6,000 atmospheres in milliseconds, dynamite causes a shock wave with pressures of up to 275,000 atmospheres. In other words, compared with gunpowder, a dynamite explosion is like the difference between being knocked off a bicycle by a car and being hit by an express train. Moreover, unlike cumbersome barrels of gunpowder, lightweight dynamite could be concealed within small containers or included in brass grenades whose fragments would cause death and injury when thrown. Different detonators became available to bombers, beyond the gunpowder-based fuses that had to be lit. They included systems based on acids burning through wads of paper pushed into holes in a series of pipes; percussive mechanisms involving timers and a revolver; or alarm-clock-based ‘infernal machines’ that ticked away to oblivion. These enabled terrorists to minimise personal risk by practising place and leave, although there was considerable risk to anyone who happened along. A weapon of such lethality would inevitably entail collateral civilian casualties, even when it was used to decapitate a state’s leadership or against fixed strategic assets such as arsenals or dockyards. Hence the anticipatory formulation of ethical evasions before the Fenian campaign had even started. Dynamite terrorism was the tactic of the weak in an otherwise impossible conflict. There were no immutable laws of war because evolving technologies tended to make them redundant. In any case, as Ireland was not a sovereign state, Irishmen were absolved of international inter-state conventions. In obeisance to the spirit of the Victorian era, the ultimate rationalisation was that dynamite was the apogee of scientific warfare. Hence the respect accorded to Mezzeroff, later immortalised as the ‘Professor’ by Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent.

Both Rossa and the Clan embarked on campaigns of terror, using Irish-American bombers rather than British- or Irish-based Fenian sympathisers who were thought to be too susceptible to penetration by British detectives and secret agents, some of whom like Henri le Caron operated across the Atlantic.12

These were not random attacks against high-profile individual human targets, but campaigns with their own rhythm of multiple successive strikes whose object was to spread fear and panic. Their opening target was chosen for its symbolic value: an army barracks in the town where three Irish martyrs had been hanged. On 14 January 1881 Rossa’s bombers struck in dense fog at Regent Road Barracks in Salford, although the bomb placed in a ventilator shaft in the wall did most damage to a neighbouring butcher’s shop and a rope factory where a seven-year-old boy was slain. Further attacks in February were foiled when police raided a steamer named the SS Malta, with a cargo of cement from New York, in whose hold they found cases containing six bombs fitted with clockwork detonators. Three months later an alert policeman extinguished the burning fuse of a blasting-powder-based bomb placed in a recess below the Egyptian Hall in London’s Mansion House. In May, a crude pipe bomb caused minimal damage to Liverpool’s police headquarters. A month later, two of the bombers were caught after they left a bomb built into a cast-iron gas pipe outside the town hall in the same city. Some brave policemen dragged it down the steps of the town hall just before it exploded. The two Fenian bombers received sentences of life and twelve years’ imprisonment. The sole other success the police enjoyed was to discover a Fenian arms dump in a stables which a Mr Sadgrove had rented from a Swiss watch maker in Clerkenwell. This contained four hundred rifles, with shamrocks embossed on their stocks, sixty revolvers and about seventy-five thousand rounds of ammunition. Sadgrove, or John Walsh as he was called, was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. Although the lethal effects of Rossa’s campaign were minimal, it added to the horror occasioned by the murders in Phoenix Park of lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, senior members of the Dublin administration, who were slashed to death with twelve-inch surgical knives by a gang called the Irish Invincibles, and ensured that the general public were stricken with anxiety and terror. They had good reason because Rossa’s shambolic Skirmishers were about to be augmented by killers with a more professional approach, although the irrepressible Rossa helped fund them. His newspaper the United Irishman openly solicited donations to terrorism, sometimes publishing donor letters: ‘Dear Sir, Inclosed [sic] find $3; $2 for my yearly subscription for “the United Irishman”; and $1 for dynamite. I think it the most consistent remedy for old tyrant England. Wishing you and the “United Irishman” success, I remain, etc. Thos. O’Neill.’

More substantial funds came from the US Clan leader, a Chicago lawyer called Alexander Sullivan, who simply redirected some of the impressive sums which Irish-Americans had given to the Irish Land League’s rural activities. A rock of a fellow, always armed and wearing cowboy boots, Sullivan had earlier killed a man who called his wife ‘a tool of Jesuits’ and had subsequently shot and wounded a political rival in New Mexico. Despite this background, Sullivan reinvented himself as a lawyer with vice-presidential ambitions in any party that would have him. Rossa and Sullivan effectively ran parallel campaigns of terror, although the sources of funding and some of the personnel overlapped.13

Rossa’s men struck first in late January 1883 in Glasgow. Two large bombs destroyed a gasometer in the city gasworks, causing considerable damage to neighbouring industries and injuring eleven people. In the early hours of the following day, late-night revellers happened upon a bomb designed to bring down a stone aqueduct carrying the Forth and Clyde Canal over a road. An off-duty soldier poked around in an oval bonnet box made of tin which erupted in his face. The bombers moved to London.

Seven weeks later, a policeman discovered another bonnet box, this time behind the offices of The Times newspaper in Playhouse Yard. He managed to kick it away, causing the crude lignine bomb to malfunction. Shortly afterwards, just as Big Ben was striking nine, a massive explosion went off amid new government buildings in Parliament Street. These buildings and the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police ‘A’ Division looked as if they had survived a major riot. Gladstone appeared next morning to survey the scene. Policemen were stationed at all key buildings and guarded key public figures. A new Irish Special Branch, under chief inspector ‘Dolly’ Williamson, and dedicated to Fenian terrorism, was established in a small building at the centre of Great Scotland Yard, a warren of narrow streets and courtyards off the east side of Whitehall where the Metropolitan Police still stable horses. On 21 May The Times published a letter from ‘a considerate dynamiter’ warning that ‘thousands, perhaps millions, of your innocent citizens, before another April comes around, will be no more’. Writing from Colorado, the correspondent advised the British to evacuate women and children before the Fenian bombers returned.14

The weakest link in Rossa’s campaign was that his explosives were being smuggled into Britain on American ships bound for Cork or Liverpool, a procedure that gave the watching police their biggest breaks. The next wave of bombers, despatched by Sullivan’s Clan rather than Rossa, resolved to manufacture their bombs in England, to avoid having to run the gauntlet at Irish and British ports where security had been stepped up. Their leader, Dr Thomas Gallagher, visited Britain in the guise of an American tourist in 1882. From a large family of Irish immigrants, Gallagher had worked in a foundry as a teenager, studying medicine in his spare time. He had the natural authority of a healer in his part of Brooklyn, while his studies had also involved the chemistry needed to make bombs.

Gallagher sent one Alfred George Whitehead – or Jemmy Murphy, to give him his real name – to England to establish a cover for a bomb factory. Whitehead rented a shop in the Ladywood district of Birmingham, where he set up a phoney paint and decorating business, with £10 of brushes and wallpaper on display for customers. This cover enabled him to purchase large quantities of chemicals, whose odour would be masked by that of oil and paint. Alert suppliers began to wonder about the quantities of pure glycerine Whitehead was buying, and noted his Irish accent, stained fingernails and acid-bitten clothes. Undercover police officers began to purchase brushes and wallpaper, finally breaking into the shop at night to take samples of the chemicals littered around. They noticed that acids burned holes in their socks. The most ominous clue was a coat with the label Brooks Brothers, Broadway, New York, then and now a famous US clothing firm.

Although they had the bomb master under surveillance, the police had no clue to the identity of the bombers. Gallagher had recruited them the previous year from young men who belonged to New York’s many Fenian clubs, with names like Emerald Club or Napper Tandy. Gallagher himself sailed to Britain, together with his alcoholic brother Bernard, whom he left in steerage. Gallagher was carrying $2,300 and a letter of credit for £600. He and his bombers made trips from London to Birmingham to pick up Whitehead’s explosives. Despite the doctor’s clear instructions, the less bright members of his team imagined that one could pour nitroglycerine into a bag or trunk without the need for rubber bags inside. On one occasion, eighty pounds of nitroglycerine were poured into two fishing waders, which, tied off at the knees, were then taken to London in a portmanteau. Station and hotel porters buckled under the weight, speculating that the case contained gold sovereigns or iron bars. The police followed the bombers from Birmingham to London and then pounced to effect their arrests. Whitehead was detained in his bomb factory. The entire cell were sentenced to life imprisonment. In another triumph for the authorities, some ten Glasgow ‘Ribbonmen’ (violent Catholic nationalists who wore green ribbons) and two of their Irish-American recruiters were convicted in December 1883 of the Glasgow bombing campaign. A more stringent Explosive Substances Act put the onus of proof that possession of certain chemical compounds or actual explosives was entirely innocent upon the person caught with these substances.