Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, died in Brixton prison on 25 October 1920 on the seventy-fourth day of his hunger strike, and was buried the following Sunday afternoon in his home city.[1] That same afternoon, in ‘scenes unparalleled in the history of Newcastle’, a symbolic funeral procession for the ‘Great Irish Patriot and Christian Martyr’ made its way through the city’s streets from the Bigg Market to Town Moor, where a ‘solemn demonstration’ was held that combined Irish republican politics and Catholic funeral rites.[2] This post will examine the Irish response in the North East of England to MacSwiney’s hunger strike and death, and set that response against the tradition of nationalist funeral processions and public mourning for the nationalist dead in the region.
Terence MacSwiney, who was Commander of Cork’s No.1 Brigade of the Irish Republican Army, had begun his hunger strike on 12 August 1920 after his arrest at Cork’s City Hall.[3] The following week he was transferred to Brixton prison in London, and, from that date until his death almost eleven weeks later, his ordeal became central to the republican campaign in Britain, as the Irish Self-Determination League (ISDL) under the direction of its vice-president, Art O’Brien, issued emotive press bulletins charting his slow decline, organised silent prayer vigils outside the prison, and vigorously countered negative publicity emanating from official British and other non-sympathetic sources.[4]
Coinciding with MacSwiney’s hunger strike and equally important to the ISDL’s campaign to mobilise Irish nationalist opinion in Britain was the British government’s banning of the Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, from visiting Ireland in August 1920, as the government feared that his pro-independence speeches would incite violence.[5]
Newspaper reports of pro-Mannix demonstrations in Manchester and MacSwiney’s hunger strike prompted Newcastle’s ISDL branch to organise a meeting on 25 August in the Socialist Hall in Pilgrim Street.[6] In the chair was Richard Purcell, president of the Newcastle branch, who spoke passionately about ‘the martyrdom of the Lord Mayor of Cork’, saying that ‘if he died it would be the last nail in the coffin of English rule in Ireland’ and added, to ‘loud applause’, that ‘all Irishmen should be ready to offer their lives for Ireland if need be’.[7]
A few days later, an outdoor meeting in Jarrow, featuring Richard Purcell, Gilbert Barrington, Theresa Mason, and the rest of the ISDL’s Tyneside leadership, expressed their ‘horror and indignation’ at the ‘atrocious treatment’ of MacSwiney, warning that ‘Irishmen in England would be prepared to stop at nothing in their determination to support the principles for which the Lord Mayor of Cork was prepared to die’.[8]
The momentum was maintained with an outdoor meeting on Town Moor on the following Sunday evening, 29 August, when Richard Purcell said that a telegram had been sent to MacSwiney ‘in the name of the Sinn Feiners and the Irish people of Newcastle offering their lives in order that their motherland might be free’.[9] Thereafter, indoor and outdoor meetings organised by the ISDL and the Irish Labour Party (IrLP) continued to be held across the North East to demand the Lord Mayor’s immediate release.[10]
The campaign was not, however, confined to political meetings, and an extraordinary meeting was held in Jarrow after Sunday mass on 29 August, when Father Henry Mackin and his congregation approved the sending of a telegram to the Prime Minister, Lloyd George:
‘The congregation of St. Bede’s church, Jarrow, which provided 1,200 soldiers for the war, protest against the Government’s offensive action towards Archbishop Mannix… We also protest against the treatment of the Lord Mayor of Cork as unjustified and request his immediate release.’[11]
Protests against the ‘slow murder’ of Terence MacSwiney continued to dominate Irish political meetings across the North East of England until his death on 25 October 1920.[12]
At the news of his death, the window blinds at Newcastle’s Irish National Club were drawn, and a telegram sent to Cork City Hall offering sympathy to MacSwiney’s widow on the ‘lamented death of [her] martyr husband’.[13]
The British Cabinet had been warned by the Home Office’s Directorate of Intelligence that after MacSwiney’s death ‘Sinn Fein outbursts and rioting will occur in towns such as Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, and Newcastle’ and that ‘there is undoubtedly a strong strain of fanaticism among the younger Sinn Feiners, many of whom are pledged by oath to obey orders, regardless of the cost to themselves; for this reason reprisals will probably be attempted in the event of the Lord Mayor’s death.’[14]
In the event, however, the Cabinet was informed by the Directorate that: ‘The death of the Lord Mayor of Cork has overshadowed all else in Sinn Fein circles but the activity is perhaps best described in the words of my Yorkshire correspondent, who writes that there has been “a glut of rosary recitations and religious services”’.[15]
In the North East, the first of these ‘religious services’ was a requiem mass in Newcastle’s St. Mary’s Cathedral celebrated by Father Joseph Newsham on Saturday 30 October and nationalists from all the Irish political, friendly, and social organisations in the city were represented, including the National Club, Ancient Order of Hibernians, Irish National Foresters, Gaelic League, Irish Literary Society, and the ISDL.[16]
The following day, Sunday morning masses were said for MacSwiney ‘in almost every parish in the diocese’,[17]and that afternoon, Tyneside’s ISDL leadership stage-managed a symbolic funeral procession from the Bigg Market to Town Moor. Leading the procession was an Irish tricolour ‘draped in black and at half-mast’ followed by a harp-shaped floral wreath carried by two children. Then came Gateshead’s IrLP boy’s band followed by the hearse bearing a coffin draped with a large tricolour. Walking on either side of the hearse were under-bearers wearing ISDL armbands. Some two-thousand people joined the procession, and newspapers reported that, as the hearse passed by, onlookers were seen ‘to raise their hats and perform religious devotions’ (the sign of the Cross).
On Town Moor, an estimated five-thousand people gathered, though Gilbert Barrington later claimed fifteen-thousand ‘mainly English, who listened attentively and without interruption to the strongly worded discourses addressed to them’.[18] The demonstration opened with the hymn, Hail, Glorious St. Patrick, so beloved by the Irish Catholic diaspora, and a decade of the rosary.[19] Then followed speeches from clergy and nationalist leaders with Richard Purcell proclaiming that ‘by his death’ MacSwiney had ‘triumphed over his enemies’, and that ‘his spirit went on, and the principles for which he had died would live until the republican flag waved over a free Ireland’.[20]
There was no overt police interference in either the procession or demonstration in Newcastle on Sunday 31 October 1920, though undercover police were watching and later reported to the Directorate of Intelligence.[21] At the same time, the Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle, although not endorsing displays of mourning for MacSwiney outside of church, had not forbidden his clerics from taking part in such displays.
This contrasted markedly with a procession planned for Newcastle upon Tyne on Sunday 15 December 1867. Three weeks before, on 23 November, three Fenians, William Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O’Brien, had been publicly executed in Salford following the rescue of two Fenian leaders from a prison van on 18 September and the shooting dead of a police sergeant during the rescue. The day after the executions, there was a procession in Manchester that appears to have been ‘a spontaneous expression of indignation and anger’ over the hangings.[22] A week later, Fenians organised a second funeral procession in the city, determined to exploit to the full the anger and sympathy felt by the local Irish for the ‘Manchester Martyrs’, and the procession attracted several thousand, with thousands more watching, despite warnings from the pulpit not to take part.[23]
In Newcastle, a notice had been printed in the Newcastle Chronicle calling for a meeting to be held on Sunday 15 December in Haslam’s dining rooms in Clayton Street ‘to consider the desirability of organising a funeral procession to commemorate’ the three men executed in Salford. Commenting on this notice, the Newcastle Daily Journal claimed that there was ‘an under-current of agitation and of mischief abroad’ amongst those Irish in Newcastle sympathetic to the Fenian cause, which this proposed meeting clearly confirmed. The Journal then fuelled the mounting Fenian hysteria by claiming that ‘a suspicious looking’ stranger had been seen in the city, and it was believed that he was a ‘Yankee Irishman’, who had ‘put the Fenians in Newcastle in motion, to get up this proposed “funeral procession”’.[24]
On Sunday 15 December, though the dining rooms had banned any ‘funeral procession’ meeting from being held there, people still gathered in Clayton Street to see if anything happened. Nothing did. Two days before, on Friday 13 December, Fenians in London had exploded a bomb at Clerkenwell Prison in an attempt to free Fenian prisoners, killing and wounding people living in houses nearby.[25] After this ‘outrage’, it is probable that Fenians in Newcastle decided that a procession commemorating Fenian dead, if, indeed, one was being planned, would have generated far more anger in the city than sympathy.
The police in Newcastle, however, expected the procession to take place and reserves were held in stations across the city in case of disorder.[26] The Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle too took the possibility of a procession very seriously and warned local Catholics in an open letter from taking part in any processions to commemorate the executions. Copies of this letter were posted around the city on Saturday 14 December and it was read from the pulpit at masses the next day:[27]
‘Should some misguided men, either in this town or in its vicinity, still determine… [to organise the procession] we not only earnestly and affectionately entreat you, but, also, by the authority which we hold from God, and by virtue of our sacred office, command you not to join them… Such a procession… will not benefit the souls of those in whose fate you sympathise, neither will it be productive of any good to yourselves, nor to your long-tried country, but only serve as an occasion to your opponents to inflict injuries both upon it and upon you.’
In November 1868, with diocesan consent, anniversary masses for the ‘Manchester Martyrs’ were said in churches across Tyneside,[28] and sporadically thereafter, including in 1921,[29] when the first anniversary of Terence MacSwiney’s death was also marked with masses in churches in Middlesbrough and on Tyneside, where ISDL members marched from Willington Quay to St. Columba’s church in Wallsend.[30]
Not all Irish nationalist funeral processions and commemorations in the North East of England, however, were for nationalist dead from outside the region, and in October 1872 the Darlington Telegraph compared the funeral of Owen O’Hanlon in the town to ‘the famous funerals of the Fenian martyrs in Ireland and at Manchester’. Hyperbole aside, this funeral marked a first for the North East, attracting ‘Fenians’ from across the region to what the nationalist newspaper The Irishman described as the ‘manslaughter of a patriotic Irishman’.[31]
Owen O’Hanlon was an ironworker in Darlington and was, according to the press, ‘locally known as a leader among the Fenians’.[32] He had been injured whilst being arrested by police and had died the following day, having reportedly told his mother ‘If I die, it is the police who have done it’. At his inquest, a doctor admitted that, whilst the wound on the back of O’Hanlon’s head may have been caused by a fall as the police claimed, ‘a policeman’s baton’ could also ‘be likely to produce such a wound’.[33]
O’Hanlon was well-known to the police in Darlington. In early 1869, he had been suspected of involvement in the murder of an alleged Fenian turned informer in the town, but had been released for lack of evidence.[34] Later that same year, he was found guilty of pointing a loaded pistol at a policeman, the same policeman who had arrested him on suspicion of his complicity in the murder of the ‘informer’, and sentenced to twelve months imprisonment.[35]
On the day of O’Hanlon’s funeral, 12 October 1872, some two hundred men wearing ‘green favours’ took turns to carry his green cloth-covered coffin from his parent’s home in Albert Hill to the Catholic chapel and thence to the cemetery, where three thousand joined the funeral service conducted by a local priest. Reporters noted that when the procession passed Northgate police station ‘a fearful groan broke from the procession and the roar of angry execration was repeated along the long line of the crowd’.[36] The funeral, however, passed off peacefully.
The pattern for this and subsequent nationalist funerals in Ireland and across the Irish diaspora, including the North East of England, had been set by the reburial of the remains of the exiled Young Irelander Terence Bellew McManus in Dublin in 1861. This piece of political theatre with its solemn procession, graveside oration, nationalist symbols and the blending of republican and Catholic rituals was initiated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood and organised by the National Brotherhood of St. Patrick.[37] And its purpose was to mobilise supporters, inspire onlookers, and publicly demonstrate opposition and resistance to British rule in Ireland.[38]
In December 1891, steel worker Thomas Banaghan was killed in an accident at a works in Middlesbrough.[39] Born in Glasgow to an Irish-born father, Banaghan was described in the nationalist newspaper United Ireland as ‘a life-long believer in the sternest and most uncompromising gospel of Irish Nationality’.[40] A description which almost certainly identifies Banaghan as a Fenian, though he was also a member of Middlesbrough’s Amnesty Association and the Irish National League of Great Britain.
The description of his funeral procession – to escort ‘an Irish patriot to his grave on foreign ground’ – supports this identity, as ‘men of the Old Guard travelled up from neighbouring counties to pay the last honours, while the Nationalists of Middlesbro’ [sic] and Stockton numbered six or seven hundred strong’.The procession, led by Middlesbrough’s St. Mary’s Cathedral Band and Stockton’s ‘Irish National Band’, marched over two miles from Middlesbrough to the Catholic cemetery at North Ormsby, where more people had gathered. The burial service was then conducted by a local priest. The floral tributes placed on Banaghan’s grave were from Middlesbrough, Stockton, Hartlepool, Jarrow, Leeds, Wakefield, Keighley, York, and several Lancashire towns. All places where the Irish Republican Brotherhood had found support.
One of Banaghan’s pall bearers was Patrick Walsh, the younger brother of John Walsh, the Invincible. Patrick Walsh died three months later in March 1892 and the funeral of this ‘captain of the Old Guard’ was also attended by men from across the region. [41] The Irish MP, Joseph Nolan, was also present. He was linked to American Fenians and had acted as Parnell’s ‘bridgehead’ to the IRB.[42] Nolan had also accompanied Parnell in July 1891 to Newcastle upon Tyne to meet the North East’s pro-Parnell leadership. Two of the men who pledged their loyalty to Parnell during that visit were Thomas Banaghan and Patrick Walsh.[43]
The funeral procession through the streets of Newcastle for Terence MacSwiney on 31 October 1920 marked not only the highpoint but also the end of such Irish nationalist processions in the North East of England, as public remembrance returned to the confines of the church.
In August 1922, following the sudden deaths of the Irish Free State’s leaders, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, requiem masses were celebrated in St. Mary’s Cathedral, Newcastle upon Tyne.[44]
‘Not since the magnificent church was consecrated has it held so many people within its walls. The congregation overflowed through the porch onto the street… The catafalque in the sanctuary was draped with the Irish national flag and stood between rows of flaming torches… The great majority of those in the congregation wore the tricolour bound in crepe as a rosette. The fervour of a great grief was in the sacred building… women wept and men exhibited emotion.’[45]
Amongst the packed congregations attending these two masses were representative from the old and the new Irish nationalist organisations on Tyneside that had accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty – the United Irish League of Great Britain, Irish National Club, Ancient Order of Hibernians, Irish National Foresters, Tyneside Irish Brigade Committee, Irish Labour Party, Tyneside Pro-Treaty Committee, Irish Republican Brotherhood, and Irish Republican Army. Only the anti-Treaty republican rump of the Irish Self-Determination League boycotted the masses,[46] disregarding the popular demand of the North East’s Irish for ‘reason and not revolvers’.[47]
On 10 August 1922, two days before Arthur Griffith died, IRA Volunteers Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan were hanged for the assassination in London of the former Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson.[48] In the staunchly republican ISDL branch in Jarrow a ‘silent tribute’ was held at the start of their meeting for ‘Ireland’s heroic dead’.[49] From the North East’s local, Catholic, and nationalist press, however, Jarrow’s response appears to have been an exception and the executions appear to have had little impact on the local Irish population, and there was to be no funeral procession in the North East of England for these two men. The appetite for such expressions of republican and Catholic theatre had passed.
[1] Francis J. Costello, Enduring the Most: The life and death of Terence MacSwiney (Brandon, 1995).
[2] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 30 October 1920; Tyneside Catholic News, 6 November, 1920.
[3] Mary MacDiarmada, Art O’Brien and Irish Nationalism in London 1900-25 (Dublin, 2020), p. 102.
[4] MacDiarmada, O’Brien, pp. 103-4.
[5] Kester Aspden, Fortress Church. The English Roman Catholic Bishops and Politics, 1903-63 (Leominster, 2002), p. 88.
[6] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 19 August 1920; Blyth News, 19 August 1920; Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 21 August 1920.
[7] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 26 August 1920.
[8] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 28 August 1920.
[9] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 30 August 1920; the ISDL also organised meetings in Seaham and Middlesbrough, Auckland and County Chronicle and Stanley News, 2 September 1920, and Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 30 August 1920.
[10] For example, at Hebburn, Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 30 August 1920; Middlesbrough, Newcastle Daily Chronicle 30 August 1920; Seaham, Auckland and County Chronicle and Stanley News, 2 September 1920; Birtley, Tyneside Catholic News, 4 September 1920.
[11] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 30 August 1920.
[12] The emotive description ‘slow murder’ was used in a resolution passed by the ISDL’s Jarrow branch, Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 24 September 1920.
[13] Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 28 October 1920.
[14] Report on Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom, Home Office Directorate of Intelligence (RORO 71), 9 September 1920.
[15] RORO 79, 4 November 1920.
[16] Catholic Times and Catholic Opinion, 6 November 1920.
[17] Catholic Times and Catholic Opinion, 6 November 1920.
[18] Barrington’s ‘English’ were, probably, like himself, second or third generation Irish, Bureau of Military History, Dublin, BMH/WS 773: Witness Statement, Gilbert Francis Barrington (Dublin, 1952), p. 11.
[19] Hail, Glorious St. Patrick, “Thy people, now exiles/ on many a shore/ shall love and revere thee/ till time be no more.” Kevin Mayhew (ed), Hymns Old & New (Bury St. Edmonds, 1983), 191a.
[20] Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 1 November 1920 and Tyneside Catholic News, 6 November 1920.
[21] RORO 79, 4 November 1920. In Manchester, police estimated some 40,000 joined the procession, including some in Volunteer uniform, whilst in Liverpool a procession was followed with a service before ‘an open grave’. However, there were no disturbances requiring police intervention, unlike in Ireland which continued to be ‘in a disturbed and restless state’, and ‘the week-end coinciding with MacSwiney’s funeral was an extremely bad one’ with five police killed.
[22] Mervyn Busteed, The Irish in Manchester c.1750-1921 Resistance, adaption and identity (Manchester, 2016), p. 224.
[23] Busteed, Irish in Manchester, p. 225.
[24] Newcastle Daily Journal, 14 December 1867.
[25] Patrick Quinlivan and Paul Rose, The Fenians in England 1865-1872 (London, 1982), pp. 76-94.
[26] In Liverpool, where a Fenian procession was threatened, it was reported that 800 police and 2,000 special constables were on duty on Sunday 15 December. There was no procession there nor anywhere else in England that Sunday. Newcastle Daily Journal, 16 December 1867.
[27] Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 16 December 1867.
[28] In Gateshead, Felling, Jarrow, and Newcastle. The Irishman, 14 November, 5 and 26 December 1868.
[29] In Newcastle. Weekly Freeman’s Journal, 10 December 1921.
[30] Tyneside Catholic News, 29 October 1921; Weekly Freeman’s Journal, 22 October 1921.
[31] The Irishman, 26 October 1872.
[32] Newcastle Daily Journal, 12 October 1872.
[33] Newcastle Daily Journal, 25 October 1872.
[34] Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 8 February 1869; The Irishman, 6 March 1869.
[35] Newcastle Daily Journal, 16 December 1869.
[36] The Irishman, 26 October 1872.
[37] R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society 1848-82 (Dublin, 1985), pp. 75-8.
[38] See Guy Beiner, “Fenianism and the Martyrdom-Terorism Nexus in Ireland before Independence”, in Dominic Janes and Alex Houen, eds., Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern to Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford 2014), pp. 200-5.
[39] Northern Echo, 14 December 1891.
[40] United Ireland, 2 January 1892.
[41] United Ireland, 12 March 1892.
[42] James McConnel, ‘Fenians at Westminster: The Edwardian Irish Parliamentary Party and the Legacy of the New Departure’, Irish Historical Studies, 34.133 (2004), pp. 45, 60.
[43] Freeman’s Journal, 20 July 1891.
[44] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 17, 19, and 28 August 1922.
[45] Requiem mass for Michael Collins. Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 28 August 1922.
[46] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 29 August 1922.
[47] Weekly Freeman’s Journal, 6 June 1922.
[48] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 14 August 1922.
[49] ISDL Jarrow branch Minute Book 1922-23, 25 August 1922.
exiles in england 