This post explores the background to a heated night in Newcastle upon Tyne in February 1884, when Michael Davitt, former Fenian gun-runner and ex-Dartmoor prisoner, came face to face with Tyneside Fenians opposed to the Irish Land League, the very cause that had defined his nationalism since 1879.
The Amnesty Association was formed in Dublin in 1868, following the failure of the Fenian rising the previous year, and quickly established itself as the most popular political organisation in Ireland since the days of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association.[1] The demand for the release of the prisoners was soon echoed in Britain, and on Sunday 24 October 1869 a demonstration on Newcastle’s Town Moor saw some twenty thousand people from across Tyneside call for parliament to ‘open the prison doors, and set the captives free’.[2]
In January 1871, the Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, determined to redress Irish grievances during his first ministry, announced a general amnesty for the Fenian prisoners,[3] though this was conditional on their being banished from the country.[4] Excluded from this amnesty, however, were sixteen former British soldiers and those, like Michael Davitt, recently imprisoned for treason-felony.
Michael Davitt had been born in Straide, County Mayo, in 1846. Four years later, his family was evicted from their farm for non-payment of rent and their cottage burnt. Leaving Ireland to find work, the family settled in the Lancashire mill town of Haslingden. Michael too worked in a mill until, aged eleven, he lost his right arm in an accident at work.[5]
In 1865, nineteen-year-old Michael, then working for a local printer as a typesetter, joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and was soon appointed centre of the Rossendale circle. After leading his circle in the aborted attack on Chester Castle in 1867, Davitt was appointed the IRB’s organising secretary in England and Scotland tasked with supplying munitions to the Fenians in Britain and Ireland.[6]
Operating in the guise of a pedlar, Davitt evaded police detection for almost two years, until in May 1870 he was arrested whilst buying fifty revolvers from a supplier at London’s Paddington station. Found guilty at the Old Bailey of treason-felony, Michael Davitt was sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude.[7]
Agitation for the release of all the remaining Fenian prisoners continued in Ireland and Britain after January 1871, and in October 1872 John Nolan, secretary of the Amnesty Association and a member of the IRB’s Supreme Council,[8] spoke at mass meetings in Sunderland’s Victoria Hall and on Newcastle’s Town Moor, where he bid his audience ‘to organise and to labour… unceasingly until the poor prisoners were free’.[9] Gladstone, however, refused to release Davitt, arguing in parliament that Davitt had been ‘part of a secret organization for distributing arms, and, if possible, laying the foundation for future revolution’.[10]
Michael Davitt, his health damaged by years of hard labour, was finally released from Dartmoor prison on ticket-of-leave (parole) on 18 December 1877. Travelling to Dublin the following month, Davitt and three of the released former soldiers, were feted as national heroes at celebrations organised by the IRB. Two months later, Davitt, having rejoined the IRB in London on his release, was elected to the IRB’s Supreme Council in place of John Walsh as joint representative of the North of England alongside William McGuinness of Preston.[11]
Quick to exploit public interest in the released prisoners, the IRB organised meetings in Glasgow, Liverpool, and elsewhere,[12] and on Monday evening 6 May 1878 Irish nationalists from across Tyneside gathered in Newcastle’s town hall, with some in the thousand-strong audience having marched with flags flying and band playing from South Shields.[13] In the chair was Newcastle Councillor Bernard McAnulty, who welcomed and introduced Michael Davitt and Thomas Chambers, late corporal in the 61st Regiment, of whom John Devoy wrote ‘Next to John Boyle O’Reilly… the most intelligent and best educated of the Fenian soldiers was Thomas Chambers’.[14]
During his speech, which covered his years in prison and his hopes for Ireland’s future, Davitt said to laughter that ‘the organisation to which he belonged eight or nine years ago had died out’, but added to cheers ‘in future years the same spirit might again crop up and confront England when she least expected it’.
Davitt, however, was beginning to question his revolutionary past. In August 1878, he travelled to the United States for the first time on a lecture tour for Clan na Gael (the foremost Irish-American republican organisation) and met John Devoy, who championed with his ‘new departure’ both revolutionary and constitutional action to secure Ireland’s independence. At a meeting of the IRB’s Supreme Council in Paris in January 1879, however, Davitt and Devoy, who was there as the Clan’s representative, failed to persuade the Council to support an Irish parliamentary party, whilst continuing planning for a revolutionary war against Britain.
Meanwhile, as a severe agricultural depression gripped Ireland, Davitt had concluded that land ownership was the immediate and more important issue facing Ireland, and, after holding meetings across the west of Ireland, he formed the Irish National Land League in October 1879 with Charles Stewart Parnell as president and himself as one of the secretaries.[15] The purpose of the Land League was to co-ordinate the farmers’ increasingly violent opposition to the landlords, and the British government’s unwavering support for those landlords fuelled the spread of the League in Ireland and prompted widespread condemnation in Britain.
In November 1879, as the Land War intensified, Davitt was briefly arrested in County Sligo, accused of using seditious language, and promptly used his arrest to further promote the Land League. On Sunday 30 November, Davitt spoke in Gateshead, having been escorted across the Tyne from Newcastle’s Central station by ‘cheering crowds’ to the ‘martial strains of music’. After being introduced by Councillor McAnulty, Davitt denied that his language had been ‘inflammatory’ and would lead to ‘insurrection’, and stressed that the land agitation in Ireland was ‘a national movement’ that would be ‘fought’ within the ‘limits of the Constitution’. But he added ‘the evils of the system of landlordism in Ireland… had to be crushed’.[16]
Davitt had stopped attending IRB meetings during the autumn of 1879, but in late April 1880 came face to face with IRB members violently opposed to the Land League for what the Supreme Council had denounced as ‘its demoralising principles’.[17] The confrontation happened at a crowded public meeting in Dublin’s Rotundo, chaired by Parnell, when a fight broke out after a ‘Mr. O’Hanlon’ tried to speak from the platform. (This was almost certainly Michael O’Hanlon, one of Ulster’s IRB leaders, who was vehemently opposed to anything that diluted the IRB’s commitment to armed rebellion.) After O’Hanlon was manhandled, the platform was rushed by his supporters and, during the ensuing melee, Michael Davitt was ‘either thrown or forced to jump off the platform’, though without serious injury. Eventually O’Hanlon was allowed to read his resolution, which declared that ‘the Nationalists of Dublin’ were protesting the ‘deceptive action’ of Parnell and others, ‘who are trying to convert the people from the proper course to independence’ and that the Land League’s actions had been ‘injurious and deceptive’. O’Hanlon then tore up his resolution and left the platform escorted by some twenty of his supporters.[18]
A few days after the Rotundo meeting, the Executive of the IRB’s Supreme Council issued a manifesto, which, while repudiating the actions of ‘a few irresponsible and unauthorised individuals’ at the meeting and denying any complicity in the disturbance, savaged those who advanced ‘the sham of the “new departure”’. These ‘Agitators’, asserted the manifesto, ‘hold forth in the Home Rule League, the Land League, at the hustings, or that exalted platform, the floor of the British House of Commons’ with their ‘vapourings and false doctrines’, and ‘their treacherous designs against the freedom and national independence of Ireland’. The manifesto concluded with a warning: ‘if they persevere in such a course we shall be obliged to adopt measures that will end their career much sooner than anticipated’.[19]
But was this a serious threat?
The following month, Davitt was expelled from the IRB’s Supreme Council, when he ignored a direct order to attend to IRB business in the North of England, and instead chose to travel to the United States on Land League business, where he remained for six months.[20]
On 2 February 1881, as civil unrest and violence spread across rural Ireland and the government threatened internment for anyone suspected of involvement in the unrest, Michael Davitt was recalled to prison. Without access to letters or newspapers until his release from Portland prison on 6 May 1882, Davitt knew nothing of the suppression of the Land League and imprisonment of Parnell and the League’s leadership in October 1881; the subsequent issuing of the ‘No Rent Manifesto’; his own election, unopposed, to parliament in February 1882 (disallowed as he was a convict); and the eventual agreement between Parnell and the British government – the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ – that opened his cell door.[21] That same day, the Invincibles struck in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.
Davitt unequivocally condemned the murders of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, and, when interviewed by the police a few days later, asserted that he was ‘no longer a Fenian’ and added that he ‘believed his own life was in danger and that only imprisonment had saved him from assassination’.[22]
After his release from prison, Davitt continued to attack landlordism and to demand land reform from the platform and in print, but, politically, he was out-manoeuvred by Parnell, when he agreed to support a new organisation to replace the Land League. This was the Irish National League formed in October 1882 to campaign for both self-government and land reform. Dominated, however, by Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party, Home Rule became the new League’s focus.
On 1 January 1883, Irish nationalists from across Teesside packed Middlesbrough’s Temperance Hall to hear Michael Davitt present his ‘Solution to the National Land Question’. During his speech, he said that ‘the gifts of Irish landlordism had been crime, poverty, discontent, and social misery’; that its institutions were ‘workhouses, prison, and emigration schemes’; and that the whole system was only maintained ‘by English money, with an army of 30,000 soldiers’. Davitt then offered his solution to Ireland’s ‘Land Question’ and that was to ‘exile… the fifteen thousand landlord vampires, who have sucked the life-blood out of Ireland’s veins for centuries’.[23]
With Davitt on the platform in Middlesbrough were two known Fenians, Michael Kelly, who took the chair, and John Walsh, both of whom had been employed as Land League organisers.[24] There were almost certainly other Fenians present, one of whom, Daniel O’Leary, had moved a resolution, seconded by John Walsh, at a meeting in June 1874 of Middlesbrough’s Home Rule Association, expressing ‘delight’ in the election to parliament of John O’Connor Power,[25] who was at the same time Connacht’s representative on the IRB’s Supreme Council.[26] As in Dublin in 1880, however, not every Fenian in the audience supported the ‘new departure’, and the cry of ‘Home Rule is no good’ was heard, when a resolution was passed in its favour.[27]
Two weeks later, Michael Davitt was in Oldham’s Co-operative Hall for a public meeting and was met not with cheers, as in Middlesbrough, but with ‘hisses and howling’. Then, even before he had begun to speak, the platform was stormed by men armed with ‘life preservers, cudgels, and pieces of iron piping’ and intent on breaking up the meeting. The attackers, however, were forced back into the body of the hall by those on the platform ‘swinging’ chairs. The fighting continued until the police restored ‘comparative quiet’, aided by a drum and fife band playing the Fenian anthem ‘God save Ireland’. Before the police finally ejected his opponents, Davitt taunted them saying ‘when you were sitting in taverns I was fighting the English Government. I never ran away from the Government, and I’m not going to be frightened by a band of cowards… These so-called Nationalists are Irish traitors and cowards’.[28]
When the hall was being cleaned up after this meeting, a revolver cartridge was found amongst the debris of smashed chairs and broken window glass. So, was Michael Davitt, as he feared, in real danger of assassination by Fenians zealots?[29]
In late 1883, after a four-month spell in an Irish prison for delivering an ‘inflammatory’ speech,[30] Davitt began a speaking tour of England to promote land nationalisation in Ireland, and on 12 February 1884 he mounted the platform at Newcastle upon Tyne’s town hall.[31]
On the platform with chairman, Councillor Bernard McAnulty, were several other town councillors, local Catholic clergy, and Tyneside’s Irish grandees.[32] After a few introductory words from the chairman, Michael Davitt rose to speak ‘amidst cheering, waving of hats, and hooting’. Whilst most of the audience, particulary those in the gallery, were ‘in sympathy with’ the speaker, some forty or fifty men in the body of the hall set out to disrupt the meeting and attempted to rush the platform, but were stopped by ‘a strong body of Mr. Davitt’s friends, stationed immediately below the platform’. Fists, sticks, and broken chairs were used in the ‘free fight’ that ensued, during which Davitt faced his opponents and, for a few minutes, held a revolver he had taken from his pocket.
As the fighting subsided, Davitt tried to speak but again was howled down. Then, as the fighting resumed, Davitt was heard to shout ‘You will not frighten me’, and put his hand on his revolver in his left-hand pocket. He was persuaded, however, by others on the platform not to draw his pistol.
As police, led by three superintendents, tried to subdue the fighting, they were assisted by two of the priests on the platform. Father Matthews from St Joseph’s Church in Gateshead
called on any of his parishioners present to ‘sit quiet for the honour of Gateshead’, whilst Father Pius Cavanagh from St Dominic’s Church in Newcastle called for order and appealed for Davitt be heard. Whilst the Dominican was heard with ‘respectful silence’, as soon as Davitt tried to speak again the fighting resumed. He was then heard to shout above the noise and confusion ‘I am not going to be beaten by them. There are sufficient to drive them out’.
Eventually, after an hour and a half, order was restored in the hall, as some men were ejected by the police and Davitt’s supporters, whilst others left voluntarily. Davitt then spoke briefly. He began by explaining that he was opposed because he had set up the Land League and that his opponents were no better than the landlords in Ireland, and he finished by stating that Home Rule was ‘the only solution of the Irish problem’, but that Home Rule did not mean the separation of Ireland from England.
According to author Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt, after the Oldham meeting, was prepared for what might happen in Newcastle, and claimed that this was ‘not by any means the first or only time when he had the occasion to be thankful that he carried such a weapon’.[33] Davitt was again seen to produce a revolver during a rowdy parliamentary election meeting in Navan in July 1892.[34] His revolver, however, remained firmly in his pocket when he next spoke in Newcastle a month later, as the Tyneside Fenians did not try to disrupt that meeting.[35]
How many other Irish nationalist politicians carried revolvers in the late nineteenth century is not known, but one who almost certainly did was Charles Stewart Parnell, who was ‘an excellent shot with rifle or revolver’.[36]
After Parnell’s death in October 1891, one of his lieutenants, T. P. O’Connor, Irish nationalist MP for Liverpool Scotland since 1885, claimed that Parnell used to travel with a revolver in his coat-tail pocket, and on one occasion, when both were staying in a seedy hotel room, hid a fully-loaded revolver under his pillow.[37] O’Connor later added to this story by saying that Parnell ‘had a constant sense that he would be assassinated some day by his political opponents, and it was equally part of his character to be prepared to defend himself to the death against any attack made upon his life’.[38]
[1] Owen McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Féin (Dublin, 2005), p. 40.
[2] Newcastle Daily Journal, 25 October 1869; The Flag of Ireland, 30 October 1869.
[3] Douglas Kanter, ‘Gladstone’s First Ministry and Ireland’, Journal of Liberal History, (Winter 2018-19), pp. 30-37.
[4] Thirty-three prisoners were freed and exiled, including John Devoy and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Patrick Quinlivan and Paul Rose, The Fenians in England 1865-1872 (London, 1982), p. 149.
[5] Noel McLachlan, ‘Michael Davitt’, Dictionary Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/biography/davitt-michael-a2437
[6] Quinlivan and Rose, Fenians in England, pp. 29-31.
[7] See my earlier post: Fenian revolvers in Newcastle, 1870.
[8] Owen McGee, ‘John ‘Amnesty Nolan’’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/biography/nolan-john-amnesty-nolan-a6220
[9] The Irishman, 2 November 1872.
[10] William Gladstone in reply to a question from Issac Butt, Hansard, 25 July 1873, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1873-07-25/debates/7d1b4fb0-15bc-4af1-94d0-f5fe61b6d8e3/AmnestyToPoliticalPrisoners
[11] McGee, The IRB, p. 58.
[12] In Liverpool, the meeting’s chairman was John O’Connor Power, MP and late member of the IRB’s Supreme Council, Liverpool Mercury, 29 April 1878; in Glasgow, the chairman was John Torley, Scotland’s representative on the IRB’s Supreme Council, Glasgow Herald, 30 April 1878; and the ex-prisoners also visited Oldham and St Helens, The Irishman, 18 May 1878.
[13] The Irishman, 11 May 1878.
[14] John Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel (New York, 1929), p. 150.
[15] R. V. Comerford, ‘The land war and the politics of distress, 1877-82’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, vi, Ireland under the Union, 1870-1921 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 26-52.
[16] Freeman’s Journal, 1 December 1879.
[17] The ‘Times’-Parnell Commission: Speech delivered by Michael Davitt in Defence of the Land League, (London, 1890), p. 185.
[18] Freeman’s Journal, 30 April 1880.
[19] Irish Times, 3 May 1880. This manifesto was quoted by Michael Davitt in October 1889 to the Parnell Commission, as evidence that the Land League was not part of the IRB. The Special Commission Act, 1888. Reprinted from The Times, (London, 1890), vol.4, p. 127.
[20] McGee, The IRB, pp.72-3. Also see ‘Times’-Parnell Commission: Speech by Michael Davitt, p. 185.
[21] McLachlan, ‘Michael Davitt’.
[22] Ibid.
[23] North East Daily Gazette, 3 January 1883.
[24] See my earlier posts: M J Kelly, Newcastle’s Fenian school teacher and John Walsh-Middlesbrough’s ‘Invincible’.
[25] Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 2 June 1874.
[26] O’Connor Power was elected MP for County Mayo, and took the oath of allegiance, during the Supreme Council’s three-year support for the constitutional Home Rule movement. When the Supreme Council ended that support in 1876, O’Connor Power was expelled from the IRB. James McConnel, ‘Fenians at Westminster: The Edwardian Irish Parliamentary Party and the Legacy of the New Departure’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 34, no. 133 (May, 2004), pp. 42-43.
[27] North East Daily Gazette, 3 January 1883.
[28] Liverpool Echo, 15 January 1883.
[29] Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 18 January 1883.
[30] McLachlan, ‘Michael Davitt’.
[31] Davitt had been invited by Newcastle’s No:1 branch of the Irish National League of Great Britain. Tickets were priced at one shilling, six pence, and three pence. United Ireland, 2 February 1884.
[32] Freman’s Journal, 13 February 1884; Shields Daily Gazette and Shipping Telegraph, 13 February 1884, Newcastle Courant, 15 February 1884; Gateshead Observer, 16 February 1884.
[33] Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt, Revolutionary, Agitator and Labour Leader (London, 1908), pp. 145-46. On 26 April 1916, during the Easter Rising, Sheehy-Skeffington, after his arrest, was murdered by a British Army officer.
[34] Irish Independent, 11 July 1892.
[35] Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 20 August 1892.
[36] Frank Callanan, ‘Charles Stewart Parnell’, Dictionary of Irish Biography,
https://www.dib.ie/biography/parnell-charles-stewart-a7199
[37] Carlisle Express and Examiner, 17 October 1891.
[38] Cork Daily Herald, 9 June 1896.
exiles in england 