It may be imagined that so bold a rescue created consternation in the minds not only of the inhabitants of Manchester, but of all English people. It was the most reckless act the Fenians had as yet attempted; and the uncompromising use of force, while it horrified people, showed them once for all what a dangerous thing the Fenian conspiracy was. The seriousness of the occasion was such that Government issued a special commission for the trial of the prisoners, who, with the four who were captured just after the rescue, numbered twenty-nine. The judges were Justices Blackburn and Mellor, and before them twenty-six of the men who had been arrested were arraigned, in different detachments, on counts extending from the charge of wilful murder to the charge of riot and assault. There is no need to state the facts of the trial at length; when the law had once been laid down, the case became one simply of identification. The Attorney-General, Sir John Karslake, held the Crown brief, and explained the law—namely, that if men conspired and combined to effect a rescue, prepared to use force if they were opposed, and if from their action during the rescue death resulted, that amounted to the crime of murder. The prisoners Allen, Larkin, Gould, Maguire, and Shore were all identified by numerous witnesses as having led the attack on the van; and many witnesses swore to Allen's having fired the fatal shot. They were all found guilty, and, though each of them denied having actually committed the murder, they were sentenced to death. To Maguire, however, who was convicted in spite of very clear evidence of an alibi, the Home Office sent a pardon; and Shore's punishment was commuted, because he had not been armed with a revolver, but had only thrown stones. But with the others the law took its course. Great efforts were made to obtain a reprieve, and much energy was displayed by a section of the press in showing that the crime for which they were to suffer was political, and was not murder. But it was of no avail; the Ministry then in power was not likely to take that view, nor even to recognise the proposition that no political offences are capital. On November 23rd Allen, Larkin, and Gould were executed at Manchester, in the presence of enormous crowds of people. Their memory was consecrated by "processions" of their countrymen, held on December 1st—a Sunday—in Manchester, and in Dublin, Limerick, and other Irish towns. The Irish populace persisted in regarding the three men as martyrs, and Mr. T. D. Sullivan commemorated the deed in the popular ditty, "God save Ireland."
Whatever ultimate effect the execution had, it did not prevent certain desperate sympathisers from outdoing in nefarious audacity the executed men. It was known that the feelings of a large class of Irishmen were embittered by the execution; but it was not suspected that within a very short time a deed would be perpetrated in London that would throw the Manchester rescue into the shade. Such a deed was, however, done; and, once for all, it implanted in the minds of all classes of English people a feeling of intense hatred towards Fenianism.
FENIAN ATTACK ON THE POLICE VAN IN MANCHESTER. (See p. [455].)
Two men, named Burke and Casey, had been arrested in London on a charge of being Fenians; they were imprisoned, under a remand, in the Clerkenwell House of Detention. This prison had an exercising-ground within its walls, and at a fixed hour in the afternoon the prisoners were exercised there. The wall of the exercising-ground ran along Corporation Lane; it was about twenty-five feet in height and two feet in thickness, becoming slightly thinner towards the top. The partisans of the Fenian prisoners determined to blow down this wall during exercise-time, to give them a chance of escaping in the confusion. Accordingly, about a quarter to four on the afternoon of December 13th, a man came along the lane wheeling a truck, on which was a barrel covered with a white cloth. This truck he left opposite the wall, disappeared for a moment, and returned with a long squib, which he fixed in the barrel. He then coolly borrowed a light from some boys who were playing about close by, applied it to the squib, and ran off. In a few seconds a horrible explosion took place, sounding like the discharge of a park of artillery, and sending a shock through all that district of London. The prison wall tottered and fell. The houses opposite were shaken to their foundations, and several of them, after rocking for a moment, came crashing down. The screams and groans of wounded people mingled with the noise of falling rafters, and the clouds of dust that rose from the ruins, choking the light of such lamps as stood the shock, added to the horror of the scene. When search could be made, it was found that at least forty people, many of them women and children, were seriously hurt; one was dead already, and three died soon afterwards in the hospital. The others, with their various degrees of injury, were taken care of at St. Bartholomew's and at the Free Hospital, Gray's Inn Road, until their recovery. It may be added that Burke and Casey did not escape, the governor of the prison having, for that day, changed their hour of exercise, so that when the explosion came they were safely in their cells. Thus the attempt of the miscreants to release the prisoners was completely frustrated. The excitement caused by this outrage was such as cannot be described. Crowds of people thronged the scene of the explosion, and 500 police and a body of soldiers were necessary to keep order. Rumours of all kinds found their way about London—that the Bank of England was blown up and sacked; that the Tower of London was destroyed; that the explosion was but the first of a series of plotted outrages meant to avenge the "Manchester martyrs." These ideas, however, subsided when the facts came to be known. Nevertheless Mr. Gladstone afterwards declared that the Fenian outrages, by fixing public attention upon deeply-rooted Irish grievances, had brought the Disestablishment of the Irish Church "within the region of practical politics."
It was in this year that society was startled by certain revelations of the proceedings of trades unions which were made before a commission sitting at Sheffield. A number of mysterious outrages had taken place periodically in that town; and a Royal Commission, which had been appointed to investigate the nature and working of trades unions, determined to probe to the bottom the supposed connection between these acts and the unions. Accordingly it delegated its functions to three barristers, of whom Mr. Overend, Q.C., was chairman, and sent them down to Sheffield to inquire into the matter. A special Act of Parliament was passed, allowing these gentlemen to give "certificates of indemnity" to any witness who should confess to any illegal acts, for it was known that without such certificates the questions of the commissioners would never be answered. The result of the inquiry was to discover facts that thrilled all England. A kind of vehmgericht, or secret tribunal, seemed to have been set up, which passed sentence of death, and had its sentences executed; which punished offenders against its secret laws by acts the perpetrators of which could never be brought before their country's justice; and which deprived obnoxious workmen of the means of life, setting the rules of the trade in the place of law.
The cases that most excited public interest were those of crimes instigated by one Broadhead, the secretary of the Sawgrinders' Union. A man named Linley had broken the rules of the trade by taking more apprentices than the proper number. In the words of the trade, he was "filling it with lads." For this offence, which was supposed to injure the chances of the men, Broadhead confessed that he had "set on" two workmen, named Crookes and Hallam, to "do for" Linley—that is, to disable him, or even to kill him, if necessary. This fact, which is but one out of many, was revealed first of all by Hallam himself. When called upon to give his evidence he was completely unmanned. He twice fainted away; and when he came to himself, he could only speak in a whisper. In this way he confessed with slow articulation how they had murdered Linley. They had first bought a revolver and followed Linley about every night for six weeks, watching their opportunity. Then they changed their plan and bought an air-gun, of which they first of all made trial upon some rabbits in a neighbouring wood. Afterwards they marked Linley down in a public-house in Scotland Street; they entered a backyard, and saw him sitting in a parlour. Then with great difficulty Hallam induced Crookes to shoot. The bullet entered Linley's head and he died some time afterwards. The two murderers ran off and escaped, and the coroner's jury was obliged to return a verdict of "wilful murder against some person or persons unknown." Hallam got £7 10s. for the deed. He confessed that he did not know Linley, and that he owed him no personal grudge. He took his life merely because he was injuring the trade. Hallam's evidence was confirmed by Crookes, and the evidence of both by Broadhead. The revelations made by the latter were what really brought home to the public mind the strength, the rigour, the unscrupulousness of the trade organisations. Under promise of a certificate he confessed not only to the murder of Linley, but to the destruction of machinery, the blowing up of houses, the mutilation, or attempted mutilation, of whole families. "I hired Dennis Clark," he said, "for £3 or £5, to blow up Hellewells." He owned that he had paid a large sum to blow up the house of a certain Parker, and £19 for blowing up Reaney's engine-house; and he admitted many more acts of the same kind. Moreover, he admitted that he had arranged many of the outrages with the secretaries of other unions—one, Bromhead, secretary of the Pen and Pocket Blade Grinders', and William Hides and William Skidmore, secretaries of the Saw-handle Makers' and of the Jobbing Grinders'. He even confessed that he had written letters to the newspapers, denouncing, as "infamous deeds" and "hellish deeds," the very acts that he had himself instigated and paid for. The outrages were very varied in character, some being merely cases of rattening—that is, preventing a man from working by spoiling his tools or machinery; others being cases of injury to the person, or of the destruction of premises. The most common form of these grosser outrages was to hang a canister of gunpowder in the chimney of the obnoxious workman or master, or to fling a canister of powder into the fire through the window. In other cases, as in that of Linley, shooting was resorted to. The evidence of Broadhead and others revealed the whole system in its full details; and disclosures of the same kind, scarcely less terrible, were made before commissioners who sat at Manchester.
Other proceedings of the trades' unions, which attracted much attention during the present year, were those connected with the strike of the London tailors, and of the engine-drivers on the London and Brighton Railway. The former began on the 28th of April and lasted for several months. In August, ten of the working tailors were indicted at the Central Criminal Court for a misdemeanour in "conspiring together, by unlawful ways, contrivances, and stratagems, to impoverish Henry Poole, George Wolmershausen, and certain other persons, in their trade and business, in restraint of trade, and the freedom of personal action." In the course of the trial the public learnt many facts about the system of "picketing," which was a common device of workmen on strike towards workmen who would not join them. One witness said, "On the 3rd of May I saw over 200 opposite Mr. Stohwasser's shop in Conduit Street. The general conduct of the persons acting as pickets was the following and hissing workmen who had not struck on leaving their work in the evening. They were called cowards, and by other offensive names. That was the general conduct of the pickets from time to time. The pickets also used to resort to certain public-houses—ten or a dozen—which they called committee-rooms. I have seen them meet there early in the morning, and then go on picketing." Another witness, a pensioned sergeant of police, said that he had seen customers go to shops in carriages, and the pickets hang about the carriages until the customers went away. Much evidence was given of a similar character, showing that, although no outrages like the Sheffield outrages were committed, the union had used its forces to prevent obnoxious workmen, by threats, abusive language, and other annoyances, from working at their trade. Baron Bramwell, who presided at the trial, laid down the law on the matter very clearly. He said that the common law of the land made it a criminal offence for two or more persons to conspire by threats, intimidation, or molestation, to deter or influence another in the employment of his industry, talents, or capital. On the other hand, an Act of 1859 declared that "no workman, merely by reason of his endeavouring peaceably, and in a reasonable manner, and without threat or intimidation, direct or indirect, to persuade others from working or ceasing to work, should be guilty of an offence under the former Act of Parliament." After some deliberation, the jury found the leading defendants guilty, but strongly recommended them to mercy on the ground of the obscurity of the law; and a similar verdict was returned immediately afterwards in a case of some more of the tailors. The judge, however, did not wish the conviction to be more than a warning, and the defendants were released on entering into their own recognisances to come up for judgment when called upon.