The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  In Sydney, the men found much suspicion of Fenians at all levels of society. The new British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Kimberley, had sent off a coded cable warning all the Australian governors of intelligence, which he said he did not fully believe but felt it right to send, that a Fenian filibustering expedition was about to leave San Francisco to raid Melbourne, Sydney and Otago. The governor of South Australia unwisely sent an en clair, uncoded, telegram on the subject to Lord Belmore, and so soon the word was leaked to the press by telegraph employees. Militia units started drilling in Sydney and the British Naval Squadron arranged gun practice in the Pacific Ocean outside Sydney Heads. Finally it took the British Consul in San Francisco to assure Kimberley that there was no basis for the rumour.

  A Fenian dinner was held in Sydney for these last released Fenians, four of whom decided to stay in New South Wales, one—Flood—to go to the new gold-fields of Queensland, three to go to San Francisco. The chair argued that there was ‘more liberty, freedom and toleration (with the exception of a few persons)’ in Australia than in any other country in the civilised world, and for that reason no one was more attached to it than the ‘Sons of St. Patrick.’

  John Goulding, a charming young carpenter from Cahirciveen in Kerry, who had taken part in the 1867 Kerry uprising and had been sentenced to five years just in time to be put on Hougoumont, had been very well treated by an urbane Irish farmer John Feehan, who owned land on the south coast of New South Wales at Gerringong. Feehan himself was of Fenian disposition, well-read—possessing his own extensive library of works on Irish history—and affluent. Gerringong itself lay in a lovely valley between steep coastal mountains and the Pacific. Goulding’s contacts with Ellen, Feehan’s daughter, helped him decide to take up Feehan’s offer to go farming. Twelve years later, as Ellen Feehan’s husband and a successful dairy farmer, he died of congestion of the lungs at the age of thirty-eight, leaving his widow and seven young children, and was buried on a headland by the Pacific. Goulding’s widow, Ellen, would live till 1938, and told her grandchildren that one of the reasons her husband had become a Fenian was that when a boy, he had been walking his dog near Kell’s Cove, Kerry, when it presumed to bark at the landlord’s coach. The landlord ordered his coachman to shoot the beast.

  A former Fenian prisoner who would live to achieve some retribution against the penal settlement of Western Australia was Michael Cody, who went gold-seeking in the bush and then settled in Sydney as a hotel keeper. He became organiser and fund raiser of the Fenians in New South Wales, an administrative task which only partially suited his man-of-action temperament. Meanwhile, in Park Street, Sydney, John Flood and Edward Kelly Wood, began a newspaper under the same name as Mitchel’s New York newspaper—the Irish Citizen. It existed largely to combat, over the course of a state election, the anti-Irish hysteria encouraged for political purposes by Sir Henry Parkes. The election over, Flood now joined the gold rush to the Palmer River goldfields, 2,000 miles north of Sydney in tropical Cooktown in Queensland. Here, after two years mining, this former editor of the Wild Goose took up the editorship of the Cooktown Courier. In that humid monsoonal port, closer to New Guinea than to Brisbane, he married an Irish immigrant and moved south to a more temperate zone of Queensland, working as a newspaper editor in the gold-mining town of Gympie, where he also became secretary of a gold mining company. Throughout, he remained a devout editorialist for Irish land reforms, and, like O’Reilly in Boston, for Home Rule as the first step towards an independent Ireland. He died an honoured citizen in Gympie in 1909.

  An old friend of Kenealy’s from Cork, Con Keane, who had once found it hard to get his child baptised because the nominated godfather was a Fenian, also waited out the residue of his sentence in Queensland, working as clerk of petty sessions and mining registrar on a number of gold-fields, including Charters Towers and Cloncurry. In such places one encountered much genial Irish company and even Fenianism, but when he died in 1891 at Limestone, Queensland, he had not been reunited with his wife and two children.

  O’Reilly’s future as eminent Bostonian was still a-forming in Staniford Street, Charlestown in 1870–1. He was certainly not fully free of Western Australia, and was delighted to find out that Jessie’s father Warder Woodman, whose occurrence sheet had not shown that he had visited the camp at 10.30 p.m. as he had earlier claimed, had evaded more than a reprimand. For a time, too, he sent copies of the Pilot to Maguire in Dardanup and to Father McCabe, the latter of whom would ultimately leave the colony to take a parish south of Minneapolis.

  Like Meagher when he had first arrived in America, O’Reilly was, nearly from the start, a busy lecturer for a range of causes—the Engineer Corps of the 9th Regiment, St Stephen’s Church in Boston, Home Rule in Ireland—but he returned frequently to the question of un-amnestied soldier Fenians. There were eight civilian and fifteen military prisoners who had been excluded from the latest amnesty and were still serving sentences. Chambers, one of the military prisoners still in gaol in Britain, wrote his chain mate O’Reilly a plaintive letter which O’Reilly read regularly from public platforms. ‘It is my birthday as I write this, and I know I am turning it to the best account by writing to such a dear old friend … I will count the time I spend here as nothing if I could only see the factions in America and elsewhere all united in one grand organisation.’

  There were of course soldier Fenians in Western Australia who were either free or about to be: Patrick Killeen of the horse artillery, for example, who would spend the rest of his life, which did not end until 1925, in Western Australia working on the outlying stations. A particularly pathetic aspect of his career was that he had applied to have his wife and children sent out to Australia, but his file in the Home Office showed that he had previously declared himself unmarried, a position which disqualified him from the privilege of reunion. Yet he was free, and a number of O’Reilly’s other friends from prison were either free or close to it, with a finite term to serve. Their names did not weigh on O’Reilly as much as those of the men who, like himself, had been serving life sentences.

  In the early Australian winter after O’Reilly’s escape, the life-sentenced soldier Fenian Thomas Hassett, feeling the first rain fall through the roof of his hut, believed that he could not sustain yet another season in imprisonment. He decided to try a similar strategy to O’Reilly’s. Hassett was a tough campaigner. He had served with the Papal Brigade in Italy, and then in the 24th Infantry. In early 1866 he had walked off sentry duty at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, and reported in his scarlet uniform with knapsack, rifle and sixty rounds of ammunition, to an upstairs room in Donald Street full of other Fenian deserters. Now he was serving a life sentence and bore over his heart the loathed letter ‘D.’

  In June of 1870, he cleared out from a work party, and turned up at the Fullam brothers’ house in Perth, asking them to hide him. The Fullams, knowing that it meant re-imprisonment for them, tuberculosis or not, gave him the modest and wary help they could. Various ticket-of-leave Irishmen he called on suggested he go to Bunbury, where they would make arrangements to get him aboard an American whaler. He was, however, given only £1, as much as his friends could raise, to make the 130 mile journey. He knew that, held in trust by Noonan and the others against his name, was £30.

  In the Bunbury district he was taken in by a poor Irish family who gave him employment and pay in kind, and he hid with them for some months. When eventually he went to town and found a whaling captain who agreed to ship him out for £30, he sent off an urgent request for his money to be sent down from Perth. It never came, and the whaling captain sailed without him. His friend James Wilson would later write to John Devoy and complain that the Relief Fund trustees, Noonan, Brophy, and O’Mahony, had been culpable in not freely advancing any money for escapes. But Noonan and Brophy had made particularly successful lives for themselves in Western Australia, which they would have forfeited if implicated in an escape.

  Left frantic, Hassett smuggled himself
aboard the Southern Belle, but surrendered to the water police as they were about to penetrate his hiding place with their long steel probes. Having been on the loose for ten months, a highly punishable time, he was sent back to Fremantle prison and sentenced to three years hard labour, the first six months in solitary confinement. This was his most disabling experience, from which in his way he would never revive. And it was as if in Boston O’Reilly, always recaptured in his own nightmares, shared Hassett’s waking horror. O’Reilly’s lifetime problems with sleeplessness had begun.

  28

  HOME RULE AND DYNAMITE

  I am glad you are sick of all these claptrap proceedings and bloody England meetings … I wish to the Lord there wasn’t so much ranting and blatherskite. I’m sick of the Irish papers.

  John Boyle O’Reilly to John Devoy, 1871

  In January 1871, O’Reilly was delighted to hear that in a new batch of pardoned Fenians was his old friend the recruiter and Foreign Legion veteran John Devoy, along with the most hardline of Fenians, O’Donovan Rossa. Devoy and Rossa almost at once took ship and arrived in America with three other pardoned men, John McClure, a young man named Harry Mulleda, and Charles Underwood O’Connell, thus making the ‘Cuba Five,’ named for the steamer on which they had crossed the Atlantic. Devoy approached New York with a desire to heal all the rifts and redeem Fenianism. O’Donovan Rossa, tough, amiable, whimsical, was an unyielding revolutionary. He would be joined by his poetic wife and, working from the hotel he acquired in Lower Manhattan, would ultimately found the infamous Skirmishing Fund, a predecessor of such twentieth century structure Noraid, for the underwriting of acts of modern terror against Britain.

  As the Cunard steamship Cuba was off the Battery, it was greeted with the enthusiasm so often recounted in this narrative—yet again torches blazed and cannon boomed; city fathers and Fenian wings came out by launch and boarded the steamer. Behind the courtesies, O’Donovan Rossa discerned ‘that the question of our reception had grown into a party fight.’ On the dock, ‘the usual hand-shaking having taken place,’ wrote the New York Irish People on 28 January 1871, the former Young Irelander and New York Superior Court Judge Richard O’Gorman welcomed the released prisoners.

  Devoy in his Recollections recalled damningly that O’Gorman took ‘no part in Irish affairs since his arrival in the country and was active only in American politics.’ While he was still speaking for Tammany and the Savage or O’Mahony wing of Fenianism, the Roberts/Senate group turned up by cab and made their attempt to seduce the five. Fenian General F. F. Millen pointed to O’Gorman and told O’Donovan Rossa, ‘Unlike this gentleman, I don’t offer you a reception at the hands of the City Government, but I extend to you the hospitality of the United States.’ A Tammany health commissioner named Mullaley asked, ‘Are you the United States, sir?’ General Millen said, ‘No, but I desire to save the men from being a tool of the Tammany tricksters.’ In an interview in the New York Herald, Devoy expressed disgust at the scene. ‘Do they think that by dangling the dollars before us they can influence us?’

  To welcome the newly released ‘Fenian exiles,’ the O’Mahony wing of the Fenians organised a grand parade so massive that engravings were struck for sale to Irish-America. Some $22,000 was collected through a subscription raised by Tammany, and of this $15,000 was handed to the Fenian exiles through O’Donovan Rossa, the financial agent elected by them. The balance was used in paying the hotel bill at the Metropolitan on Broadway—the same which had once been Meagher’s home. According to Devoy’s memoirs, this amounted to a sumptuous $6,000, more of it run up by Tammany men than by the exiles.

  By May 1871, John Boyle O’Reilly was able to sense the faction-weariness in the 29-year-old John Devoy and warned him that ‘the great mass of the Irish people have never belonged to any organisation for national revolution.’ The disaffection of the freed men was such that the Cuba Five found almost welcome a fraternal visit from American Communists, proposing the impossible, an alliance between Irish revolutionaries and those who had embraced the rugged, temporal, universalist faith of Marx and Engels. At the First Communist International in London, Karl Marx had spoken with some point of ‘the people of Ireland who more and more are replaced in the North by machines and in the South by sheep, although in that unhappy land even the sheep diminish in numbers, though not so rapidly as the men.’ Marx had also condemned the prison treatment of O’Donovan Rossa and others. Now a delegation of the North American Central Committee of the International Working Men’s Association waited on the exiles at the Metropolitan and congratulated them on their release from prison. One of the Central Committee suggested that the Irish should not isolate themselves but join in the struggle against the common enemy.

  O’Reilly was one of the nine members of a committee to welcome the Cuba Five to Boston, and his nomination was opposed by a Fenian who said that the released men would shoot fellows like him, renouncers of the Fenian creed. O’Reilly confessed to Devoy, ‘John, I hate that infernal name—Fenianism. It has done us more harm than thoughtless men can see.’ O’Reilly’s committee decided not ‘to inflict a reception on you here—but to send you instead the proceeds of a general subscription.

  This was all of a piece with O’Reilly’s contempt for blarney. Amongst other examples, he despised a common utterance of Irish supporters of demagogues: ‘He’s a friend to the Irishman is simply an insult, and should be resented accordingly.’ For the Irishmen and women O’Reilly frequently saw in Boston’s rougher quarters were in fact friendless election fodder. A Cork immigrant to Boston would report being shocked on seeing the wharves and wretched tenements of East Boston, ‘with ragged, hungry-looking, dirty children playing in the ash-heaps of a nearby railroad … Thinks I to myself:—” Is this the great country of peace and plenty there is so much talked about?” ’ As late as 1890, 65 per cent of Boston’s Irish-born performed the lowest of manual labour, and nearly 50 per cent of Irish-born women were servants. Early in his American career, before he had a good job, he had advised his sisters: ‘I hate New York and Boston, which are all corruption and misery for poor girls.’ Tuberculosis, alcoholism, mental illness and a sense that they could not match the pace of America were the common lot of the lower orders of Boston Irishdom, and men and women from Donegal and Mayo approached the heavy machinery of the new, proliferating Massachusetts textile mills with the tentativeness of a people who still believed in the malign influence of fairies. In Boston’s North and West Ends Irish young contributed massively to the infant mortality rates. Smith O’Brien’s daughter Charlotte went so far as to say of New York when she visited it in 1880 that three out of four of the children of the Irish poor died in infancy! ‘It would keep you poor burying your children,’ one woman told her. Charlotte’s report might have been impressionistic, but she took the same picture from the slums of Boston. O’Reilly realised in 1871 that in the circumstances under which most Irish lived in the cities of America, politicians who claimed to be ‘a good friend to the Irish’ were offering very little except bare toleration.

  John Devoy got a job as a journalist at the New York Herald and started work to achieve factional peace through an Irish Confederation. O’Reilly warned Devoy the various factions had too long a history of grievance to be brought to the same table. ‘Take my word for it,’ O’Reilly advised his friend, on the basis of his own bitter, destructive imprisonment, and what he had seen on the Canadian border in 1870, ‘the men who make the most noise now will be the first to fall through … The political prisoners have the confidence and affection of our people everywhere, and I am convinced that that confidence would be increased untold were they to settle down for a time, and begin a commonplace business course.’ There was in any case an organisation already in existence which would ultimately give Devoy, Rossa and the other released Fenians a new home. It had been founded in July 1867 by Jerome J. Collins and a number of men from both wings of the Fenian movement, and named the Clan na Gael, the United Brotherhood, or—in the cr
ude code used by the movement—the VC. The Clan still recognised the council of the IRB at home as the de facto government of Ireland, and pledged to support it.

  Rossa would in the end be expelled from Clan na Gael for his championship of the Skirmishing (or more accurately, dynamiting) Fund, but little Devoy, having joined, remained for half a century its organiser in chief and its celibate and daring high priest. As two old men, Devoy and Rossa would in the twentieth century, on the eve of the Easter Uprising, be reconciled at O’Donovan Rossa’s deathbed, and Devoy would still, as crusty Clan head, be in place in 1920 to fall out with Eamon De Valera over diplomatic and fund-raising tactics in America.

  O’Reilly and Devoy were at one in that personal appeals kept coming directly or indirectly to them from rebels still in prison in Britain and in Australia, from men who were not merely names but whom they had recruited. It may have been one of the factors which made O’Reilly an insomniac, frantic worker, as if he were living in fact for other men as well as himself. In Western Australia, Hassett’s attempted escape showed the remaining seven soldier Fenians who were serving life sentences that they could not depend on Noonan’s committee to finance O’Reilly-style getaways. In 1871, Martin Hogan, former soldier, a man of restless energy, thirty-four years old and looking towards a limitless existence as someone less than a citizen at peace, saw in a newspaper smuggled into Fremantle gaol that amongst Fenians recently released in amnesty from British prisons was Peter Curran. In Curran’s pub in Dublin, Hogan and others had undergone Fenian drilling. Hogan wrote illicitly to Curran now, using Father McCabe as his postbox, and in the hope that the letter would be given wide circulation.