‘A deadly hatred’: Fenians and Hibernians in Witton Park, County Durham, 1870-1872.

One hundred and fifty years ago, rival Irish gangs of Fenians and Hibernians fought for supremacy in the village of Witton Park in County Durham. This post will explore the turbulent history of that time.

On 21 November 1870, ‘two respectable-looking men’, John Walsh and Thomas Boucher, were arrested by police at Manchester’s Victoria railway station as they boarded a train for Leeds. Boucher was seen to be carrying a parcel and five other parcels were recovered by police from the railway carriage. All contained cartridges. The two were then charged with ‘being Fenians, having in their possession 300 cartridges, and documents in cypher’. Boucher told the police that he had bought the cartridges for his own use and that he intended to buy a revolver once back home. However, he could neither remember the name of the ammunition supplier nor the street where he lived. Walsh simply denied knowing anything about the cartridges. Up before the police court, both were remanded in custody, whilst the police continued their enquiries. However, when again in court, the police offered no further evidence and Walsh and Boucher were discharged.^[1]  

The Fenian John Walsh has already featured in a previous post to ‘Exiles in England’,[2] and readers may remember that he had worked at Bolckow and Vaughan’s iron works in Middlesbrough.[3] Thomas Boucher too worked for Bolckow and Vaughan, but at their iron works in the village of Witton Park, a few miles west of Bishop Auckland in County Durham.

The Witton Park iron works had been opened in 1846 to exploit local coal and limestone and the Stockton and Darlington railway line to the river Tees.[4] By the early 1870s, there were five blast furnaces producing pig iron, together with rolling mills, puddling furnaces, and forges, employing hundreds of Irish and Welsh migrant workers.[5] The Witton Park of that time has been described as ‘a prosperous little town with chapels, shops, benefit societies, schools and community organisations of various kinds’.[6] However, it is probably better compared to a frontier town of the ‘American Wild West’ than a genteel Cathedral city,[7] as one of those ‘community organisations’ was the descendant of the old sectarian Ribbon gangs, the Hibernians, whose influence would have been felt at that time in every Irish migrant community across the North East of England.[8] Moreover the Hibernians were the main recipient of the attacks from the pen of the Fenian, Arthur Forrester.

Born in Salford in 1850, Forrester, is perhaps best remembered today for his oft-quoted line ‘A Felon`s cap is the noblest crown an Irish head can wear’, which he wrote in 1867 as part of his poem ‘Felons of Our Land’.[9] But Forrester was also a journalist and in 1869 wrote a series of articles for the weekly nationalist newspaper The Flag of Ireland under the heading ‘Notes from Saxon Land’.^[10]

Using the pen-name ‘Angus’, which he had previously used when he wrote for the Fenian newspaper Irish People before its suppression by the government in 1865, Forrester’s articles provide an insight into the political and social condition of the Irish in the North of England, though filtered through the eyes of a committed Fenian organiser and gun-runner.

Forrester attacked Irish ‘drinking habits’, ‘anti-national priests’, and Orangemen, who, he asserted, had ‘always been enemies and traitors to Ireland’. But he saved his real venom for the Hibernians, who, he wrote, encouraged ‘hatred and disunion, instead of unity and brotherhood’, and who were ‘one of the most degraded and vile associations’. To Forrester, the Hibernian rank and file were ‘rowdies, whose chief characteristics are ignorance and a rabid aversion to Fenianism’, whilst their leaders, ‘nearly all beerhouse landlords’, were using the organisation solely ‘to make money out of it’.[11]

Forrester declared that in the North East of England, Fenianism had had ‘to fight its way into existence’ against the Hibernians and that ‘even yet terrific melees between the partisans of the two bodies are by no means rare’.^[12]

One such clash occurred in Witton Park on Easter Sunday, 17 April 1870.

According to Arthur Forrester, who spent three months touring the North of England, whilst researching his ‘Notes from Saxon Land’, the North East’s Hibernians were divided into two ‘clans’ comprised of Ulster and Connaught men, who fought each other at every opportunity. Regardless of their divisions, however, both agreed that the upstart – and non-sectarian – Fenians, who had been gaining influence in the region since the mid-1860s, ‘must be crushed’.^[13]

Exactly what happened at Witton Park that Easter Sunday evening is not clear, but, according to the press, a disturbance ‘arose between two factions of Irish at Witton Park, amongst whom an ill-feeling exists’, and the police were called.^[14] When approached by the police, Patrick Kane and Patrick O’Leary dropped the revolvers they were carrying, whilst John McMahon dropped his ‘morgan rattler’ (weighted club). Owen McDonald, however, ran and was found armed with two loaded revolvers hiding in a back street. McDonald’s lodgings were then searched revealing two more revolvers and cartridges, an Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) rulebook, documents, including one ‘with the names of the members in that district’, and electoral ‘canvassing card’ for the imprisoned Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. All four were charged by the police with ‘treason-felony’.

At Bishop Auckland Police Court, McDonald’s barrister claimed, however, that it could not be proved that his client had read the Fenian rule book in his possession or ‘incited people in any way’. And, further, that carrying firearms was not a crime in England and that ‘it was common practice of the Irish of that district to carry revolvers and pistols, in consequence of the feuds and hostilities which existed amongst the two sections of the Irish at the blast furnaces, and at Witton Park works’.

The magistrates agreed and McDonald, though probably the Fenian head centre in Witton Park at that time, was bound over for six months in £50 and two sureties of £25 each. The other three men were also bound over to keep the peace.^[15] Finally, the court, acting under ‘special instructions’, forwarded the six revolvers to the Home Office, together with the seized IRB rule book and documents.

The next ‘serious disturbance’ in Witton Park between the Fenians and Hibernians occurred on Sunday, 2 October 1870. The police had been aware of growing tension in the village for a few days previously and had been expecting trouble. That Sunday evening, some twenty to thirty of the ‘Fenian Brotherhood’ were meeting in a private room in Michael Morgan’s Railway Tavern in John Street, when almost twice that number of Hibernians surrounded the house. The Fenians ran, and ‘soon the streets were the scene of a general melee’.^[16] Fenians who were caught in the open were ‘kicked about like footballs’, and two were left insensible.[17]  The police intervened and arrested seven Hibernians, all ironworkers.^[18] All were subsequently released by magistrates and bound over to keep the peace for three months.^[19]

Further violence in the village saw a Fenian imprisoned for two months after ‘brutally’ assaulting a Hibernian in a beer house in December 1870,^[20] and, probably in retaliation, two Hibernians attacked a Fenian a few weeks later with a coal rake leaving it wedged in his skull.^[21] And this tit for tat violence continued as Fenians attacked a smaller group of Hibernians one Sunday evening in February 1871 leaving one man fatally wounded. This attack led to the conviction and imprisonment of two of the attackers for manslaughter.^[22]

In August 1871, the noted nationalist orator, John O’Connor Power, delivered his lecture on ‘Ireland; her past struggles and present hopes’ to an audience in Spennymoor.[23] English newspapers reported the event as a ‘mass meeting of persons supposed to be Fenians’, and claimed that Power shared his platform with the ‘alleged [IRB] head centres’ from Bishop Auckland, Durham, Tow Law, Willington, Barnard Castle, Crook, Coxhoe and elsewhere in County Durham. When a police sergeant entered the hall, he was met with ‘yells and groans’ and ‘speedily pushed out of the room’, and so the police ‘seeing the excited state of the Fenians, refrained from interfering’.

These reports might be dismissed as just English press hysteria, yet another symptom of the ‘Fenian Fever’ that had gripped the press since the mid-1860s, except that John O’Connor Power, who had been sworn into the IRB by Michael Davitt, was Connaught’s representative on the IRB’s Supreme Council.[24] So, perhaps, the meeting indicates the growing strength, and confidence, of the Fenians in south-west Durham. And chairing the meeting was ‘Mr. O. Duffy’. Recorded on the 1871 Census for Witton Park is an Irish-born, twenty-six-year old iron worker named Owen Duffy.[25] Did he chair this meeting and was he then Witton Park’s IRB head centre?

Matters appear to have come to a head in Witton Park on 13 July 1872, when local Hibernians that Saturday evening were reinforced by ‘sixty to seventy’ more arriving by train from Darlington and Bishop Auckland.^[26] Police were on hand and the outnumbered Fenians remained behind doors, though three were caught in the street and ‘severely beaten’. The next day, the Fenians called for reinforcements and by dusk an estimated five hundred ‘strangers’ had gathered at nearby Woodside. The police, however, prevented a pitched battle and only two men – one from each side – were arrested, and later imprisoned for two months, for carrying offensive weapons.

In its report of the riot, the Liberal Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury asserted that the rivalry between the ‘Irish factions’ had become ‘all the more intensified the closer they come into contact in this country; and the more prosperous their condition the more pugnacity do they seem to display’. And continued by stating that in Durham’s ‘iron districts, the working classes have recently enjoyed an unprecedented degree of prosperity and at no place in county Durham has work been brisker nor wages heavier than at Witton Park and Woodside’, but that the ‘high wages have simply been spent in inflaming the passions, and in securing sword-sticks, revolvers, daggers, knives, and other deadly weapons’.

After July 1872, clashes in Witton Park between Hibernians and Fenians no longer feature in the local or national newspapers. Why did the violence ebb? What had changed?  

There is no obvious reason for this change. Possibilities might include one side ‘winning’ the struggle for dominance; or hotheads from both sides leaving the village; or the police clamping down on trouble before it began; or Irish men simply no longer joining the secret societies. But one change that was reflected in the press was the arrival of constitutional, as distinct from secret, nationalist organisations in Witton Park, and a branch of the National Land League of Great Britain was noted in the village in October 1881.^[27]    

Finally, there was the economic decline of Witton Park. By the late 1870s, the ‘boom time’ was over. The railway companies and Witton Park’s other customers turned from wrought iron to steel, as the cost of steel-making fell; collieries exhausted or uneconomic closed; and strikes added to the iron works’ problems. Finally, in July 1884 Witton Park’s iron works closed for good. But by then many of the Irish workers, who had once filled the Hibernian and Fenian ranks, had left the village seeking work elsewhere.

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[1] Manchester Evening News, 22 November 1870;South Durham and Cleveland Mercury, 26 November 1870; The Irishman, 29 November 1870; Durham County Advertiser, 2 December 1870.

[2] See my earlier post: John Walsh – Middlesbrough’s ‘Invincible’.

[3] South Shields Daily Gazette, 5 March 1883.

[4] Winifred Stokes, Witton Park; a microcosm of the ‘Great Migration’, Durham County Local History Society Journal, No.73, May 2008, pp. 13-23.

[5] The population of Witton Park and environs grew from 1,293 in 1851 to 4,313 in 1871. Ken Biggs, Keith Belton & Dale Daniel, Witton Park: Forever Paradise, (Witton Park, 2002), p. 19.

[6] Stokes, Witton Park, p. 19.

[7] Biggs, Belton & Daniel, Witton Park, p. 27.

[8]  See my earlier post: From Ribbon Gangs to Mayors: The Irish in Gateshead to 1945.

[9] Arthur’s mother, Ellen Forrester, was also a nationalist poet. See Dictionary of Irish Biography:  https://www.dib.ie/biography/forrester-ellen-magennis-a3332

[10] Dr Mark F. Ryan, Fenian Memories (Dublin, 1946), pp. 14-15. For a photograph of Arthur Forrester taken in 1867 on his release from prison, see Trinity College Library, Dublin: https://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/concern/works/1544bp138?locale=en

[11] The Flag of Ireland, 10 March & 31 July 1869.

[12] The Flag of Ireland, 10 April 1869.

[13] The Flag of Ireland, 31 July 1869.

[14] Northern Echo, 3 May 1870; The Flag of Ireland, 14 May 1870.

[15] Northern Echo, 3 May 1870; The Flag of Ireland, 14 May 1870.

[16] Northern Echo, 4 October 1870.

[17] Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 4 Oct 1870.

[18] Northern Echo, 4 October 1870.

[19] Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 15 October 1870.

[20] ‘A deadly hatred exists between these two factions of the Irish at Witton Park, and frequently, and often serious, ruptures are taking place between them.’ Newcastle Courant, 9 December 1870.

[21] Dundee Courier and Argus, 25 January 1871.

[22] Newcastle Daily Journal, 7 February 1871.

[23] Consett Guardian, 19 August 1871.

[24] T.W. Moody and Leon Ó Broin, ‘IRB Supreme Council, 1868-78’, Irish Historical Studies, 19.75 (1975), pp. 327-28; also see Owen McGee, ‘John O’Connor Power’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/biography/power-john-oconnor-a7457

[25] The National Archives, Census Returns for England and Wales, 1871, Class: RG10; Piece: 4926; Folio: 59; Page: 6; GSU roll: 848017.

[26] Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury, 20 July 1872.

[27] United Ireland, 1 October 1881.