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Today in 1867, in the grey industrial town of Salford, William Allen, Michael Larkin and Michael O’Brien were hanged for their part in one of the most dramatic episodes of Fenian resistance. By 1861, one in every five people in Manchester was Irish. They were refugees of famine and the long shadow of evictions due to landlordism. The city became a breeding ground for the Irish Republican Brotherhood. It’s backstreets, grim terraced gaffs noisy mills and warehouses formed a sanctuary for the secret movement.
It was in this atmosphere of grinding poverty and resentment that two senior IRB men, Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy, were arrested in September 1867. Their comrades were determined that they would not stay in British custody. What followed was a rescue attempt that was bold to the point of recklessness. A Fenian unit stopped the police van carrying Kelly and Deasy on Hyde Road. In the chaos that followed, a shot was fired. It tore through the lock of the van, ricocheted, and struck Police Sergeant Charles Brett who died almost instantly.
Within hours authorities rounded up 62 Irish suspects. 23 were put on trial. After only sixteen days, 5 men were found guilty under the 1848 Treason Felony Act. Among them were 19 year old William Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O’Brien. Thomas Maguire, a Marine, and Edward O’Meagher Condon, a naturalised American, were also condemned. The trials were swift, despite witnesses contradicting themselves and identification evidence collapsing under scrutiny. A public campaign eventually exposed enough perjury to clear Maguire. Condon was spared execution through the pressure of the American government, though not before delivering the line that would immortalise him. On hearing the death sentence, he stood firm and said, without trembling, “I have nothing to regret, or to retract, or take back. I can only say, God Save Ireland.” Yet even American diplomacy could not save Michael O’Brien, despite the lobbying of U.S. Secretary of State William Seward.
The British government was not in a merciful mood. The political climate demanded punishment, an example, made of Fenianism. And so, on a cold November morning, Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien walked to the scaffold at New Bailey Prison while thousands gathered outside in hushed, furious witness. The tension spilled far beyond Salford. In Dublin, Cork, and Limerick, mass demonstrations filled the streets. In New York, crowds chanted prayers and curses. Even in New Zealand, halfway across the globe, Irish settlers marched in protest. Something had shifted.
The Fenians now had martyrs. And martyrs, once created, cannot be recalled. Friedrich Engels, watching events unfold wrote to Karl Marx that these executions “accomplished the final act of separation between England and Ireland. The only thing the Fenians had lacked were martyrs. They have been provided with these.”
canisgallicus 