The Great Cat Massacre (22 page)

John Devoy was another Irish Fenian. Incensed by the British government’s response to the Potato Famine – which was largely to ignore it – he had dedicated his life to recruiting others to the cause. His most audacious scheme had been to infiltrate Irish regiments in the British Army in order to foment discontent and persuade some of the soldiers to secretly swear allegiance to Irish independence, which, he claimed, would be brought about by an invasion of Irishmen from America.

This plan was not quite as far-fetched as it sounds. The Irish population of the United States was substantial – mostly because the Potato Famine had brought about mass emigration from the starving island. By 1851 around a million people had made it across the Atlantic and the American Fenian Brotherhood, a brother group to Devoy’s Irish Republican Brotherhood (forerunners of the IRA), had raised $200,000 – worth about £10m today – for the cause. More importantly, it had recruited many veterans of the American Civil War to fight. The group claimed to have 30,000 fighting men ready for the invasion, which was planned for late 1865, but poor organisation and squabbling in the ranks meant it kept being put off and eventually the organisation collapsed.

Unluckily for Devoy, his role as a spy in the British camp might have gained him a number of supporters – he claimed to have ‘converted’ 7,000 – but it also gained him a place in Millbank prison at the age of 27. His
prospects were grim in the gaol where he was due to spend the next 20 years of his life. But then the British government made an astonishing mistake. Instead of keeping Devoy in solitary confinement until he was too old to fight, they told him he had a choice: he could either stay in prison for two decades performing hard labour, or he could go to America. All he had to do was promise not to return and that he wouldn’t immediately rejoin the Fenians and start organising another insurrection in Ireland. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he chose the latter option. And so did four other members of Devoy’s group who seemed equally surprised by the kind offer.

So, in 1871, the five men found themselves on a Cunard liner sailing for New York. If the British authorities hoped their exile would be a low-key affair and the Irishmen would be keeping their heads down from then on, they would have been somewhat disappointed by the Fenian funfair that greeted their arrival. Not only were they the guests of other Irish émigrés, but they were also invited to the White House to meet President Ulysses S. Grant. The President hated Britain for supporting the Confederacy in the Civil War and wanted to pooh-pooh the current government in revenge.

But, despite sitting down to a little fried chicken with the US President, the Fenian Brotherhood was divided and much smaller than in the past. One of the splits was down to a hare-brained scheme five years earlier to get their own back on Britain by invading Canada. Then, the Fenian army, mostly made up of 1,000 young men with
nothing better to do, had assembled in plain sight on the American side of the border, allowing the Canadian authorities to fully comprehend what they were about to do (if not why on earth they wanted to do it). On the morning of 1 June 1866 they crossed into Canadian territory near Niagara Falls and threatened the strategically irrelevant town of Ridgeway.

Boding ill for the Fenians, by the end of the day half their men had deserted, apparently treating the voyage more as a day trip than an invasion. Despite this, they managed to win a small battle against Canadian troops after the Canadians mistook one of their own regiments for another and accidentally retreated. The Fenians, who found themselves in control of Ridgeway but without any plan for it, burned it to the ground, then scarpered before British reinforcements could arrive. In fact, after one more brief battle, they turned tail for home and most either swam across the Niagara River back to the US, or paddled across it on logs and surrendered their arms to the American authorities. The huge waste of time that the invasion represented exacerbated the split in the ranks of the Brotherhood, and it was a divided campaign for Irish independence that Devoy and his pals discovered. A new leader was needed and the British government had graciously sent just the man.

Settling down in the US, Devoy took a job as a clerk and joined a secret society, the Clan na Gael – The Irish Family. It gave him a power base away from the Brotherhood, which spent most of its time bickering about internal politics. For a while, he was unsure how to go about
uniting the Irish in America until a scheme to do just that fell into his lap.

In 1874 he received a letter. It was from one of his fellow Millbank prisoners who had been transported to Australia for life and had somehow seen a newspaper story about Devoy’s arrival in New York. It began: ‘Dear friend, this is a voice from the tomb…’ and asked for his help in organising a campaign to get him and some fellow Fenian prisoners pardoned. Instead, Devoy had an idea: if he could spring his colleagues from Australia and bring them to America, he and they would be the toast of the nation. Soon he had convinced the Clan na Gael to give him the funds to charter a getaway ship: the
Catalpa
, which had a Portuguese crew and an American captain. In 1875 it set sail for Australia, arriving in 1876 to find that the prisoners were not closely guarded when out in work parties (on the grounds that there was nowhere they could run to unless they wanted to die in the Bush). A message was soon sent to the Irishmen from two Fenian agents, John Breslin and Tom Desmond, who had arrived earlier, purporting to be businessmen. In a daring daylight operation, the convicts made a run for it and got to the
Catalpa,
helped by the fact that most of the British were watching a sailing regatta at the time.

But they were far from safe. The crew of the
Catalpa
soon realised they were being followed by a Royal Navy gunboat, which was steaming towards them. The gunboat’s captain demanded the prisoners be handed over or he would open fire, to which the captain of the
Catalpa
responded: ‘We sail under the protection of the
flag of the United States. Fire on us and you fire on the American flag.’

It was a clever move – a jailbreak was one thing, but the British captain didn’t want to start a war. He backed off and the Fenians made it to America. The ‘American’ defiance of the Royal Navy meant both Irishmen and Americans felt proud. They even had their own theme song:

Devoy was a hero and the new leader of the cause. Over the next few years, he developed his strategy, which began with overruling his colleagues, who wanted to use terrorism – blowing up civilians in England would only lose them popular support in America, he reasoned. By 1868, there were two million Irishmen in America and he was eager to make the campaign a popular one with mass involvement but there needed to be a specific issue. He focused on land reform – giving Irish land to the natives.

In 1879 Devoy broke the letter of his agreement with the British authorities, as well as the spirit, by returning – in secret – to Ireland. He wanted to organise the army that he still
hoped would rise. This wasn’t a forlorn prospect – there was much unrest in the country as bad weather had meant a poor harvest and it was only down to a massive relief operation jointly run by Britain and America that the whole country wasn’t starving. As part of the groundwork, Devoy returned to America with the Irish political leader Charles Parnell, MP, who went on a speaking tour of the country, kicking off with a meeting in Madison Square Garden attended by 10,000 people. He also spoke in the US House of Representatives, gaining the support of the government. Along the way, he raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cause, and in two years that had reached half a million dollars.

Officially, the money was to go to the Irish Land League, but instead it went to the militant Irish Republican Brotherhood for their forthcoming violent insurgency. All of it went through the hands of a priest, Father Lawrence Walsh, presaging the involvement of Catholic parishes in laundering money for Republican violence. The campaign may have been partly responsible for the British Parliament passing the Land Act of 1881, which mitigated much of the suffering.

Devoy’s dual strategy of political pressure from within Parliament, and a parallel underground preparation for violent insurrection, was paying some dividends, though not as quickly as he had wanted. Then Parnell’s death from a heart attack at the age of 45 dealt a terrible blow to the campaign, which ran out of steam and fractured. As a result, the revolution never came. But Devoy was far from finished; he switched tactics again and over the coming decades continued to build vital support in America. In 1916 he
conspired with Roger Casement to bring German weapons to Ireland by submarine to arm the volunteers of the Easter Uprising and his influence undoubtedly contributed to the partition of Ireland in 1921 – and to the raising of funds for Republican terrorism for decades.

John Devoy lived to see the Irish Free State. Had the British not offered him a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card, it might never have come about.

Lord Charles Beresford was the darling of the newspapers. An MP and naval commander (ending up as an admiral) who would often leave Westminster for a short while to fight in the waters off the Sudan or Egypt, he was also known in his circle as something of a sexual athlete. Perhaps most importantly for our story, he was also a close friend and adviser of the Prince of Wales, soon to be Edward VII.

All of this endeared him to many an impressionable upper-class female, one of whom was the Countess of Warwick, Frances Evelyn Greville – ‘Daisy’ to her friends, and the inspiration for the eponymous music hall song.
When she wasn’t out inspiring songs, Daisy was equally busy as the mistress of the married Prince of Wales. And his pal, Charles Beresford. And many other members of the House of Lords. She must have been utterly exhausted when she crawled home to her husband, Lord Brooke. And she wasn’t very discreet about her extra-curricular activities – she was, in fact, widely known as ‘the babbling Brooke’.

One weekend, the Prince, Beresford, Daisy and a host of others were at a house party. At night, Beresford crept out of his room to find Daisy’s. He stole in and leapt upon the bed, loudly crying, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ This understandably startled the Bishop of Chester and his wife, who woke up to find a madman on their bed pretending to be a farmyard animal. Whether Beresford eventually found which room Daisy was really staying in has not been recorded, but the revelation of their affair strained relations between himself and the Prince, and ended up with Beresford threatening to publicly reveal details of Edward VII’s affairs to the press.