The Legend of the Phantom Highwayman

MERCIER PRESS

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Blackrock, Cork, Ireland.

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First published in 1983 by The Children's Press, an imprint of Anvil Books

This edition published by Mercier Press, 2011© Tom McCaughren, 1983, 1991, 2011

ISBN: 978 1 85635 802 6

Epub ISBN: 978 1 85635 963 4

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 85635 960 3

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‘There he is!' he heard a voice shout. He tried to run, but somehow the road seemed to get steeper and steeper and he didn't have the strength to climb it. It was like a nightmare. Next moment, he felt a hand grabbing him by the shoulder, and he knew he was caught.

It was then that the strangest thing of all happened.

As Tapser looked up, he saw the phantom highwayman above him, blunderbuss in hand. And from afar he seemed to hear a voice say, ‘Stand and deliver!'

‘Hugh Rua,' he gasped sickly to himself.

‘Stand and deliver!' he seemed to hear the phantom figure say again.

Tapser's head was spinning. He felt an arm going around him, and a cool breeze on his face as he was carried through the night, holding on for dear life behind the phantom rider. The cape was flapping in his face and he reached up to brush it away but lost his grip and found himself falling, falling, falling …

‘Tapser,' he heard a voice saying.

He looked up. Someone was bending over him and a coat was brushing his face. He pushed it aside and saw the dark figures of the phantom highwayman and his horse rearing up into the night sky …

During the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, when the stagecoach services were spreading throughout Ireland, highwaymen were a serious problem. Sometimes operating in groups, sometimes alone, they would appear on lonely country roads to hold up coaches at pistol point and rob the passengers.

Posters were put up offering rewards for information leading to the capture of the highwaymen, and various steps were taken to protect passengers. Soldiers on horseback escorted coaches through remote mountain areas and other places where highwaymen were likely to strike. At first the mail coaches carried one armed guard, but by the turn of the nineteenth century they had started to carry two. In 1808, passengers on the Dublin to Cork route were assured that a newly acquired coach was copper-lined and therefore bulletproof!

In spite of such precautions, some travellers continued to find themselves looking down the barrels of the pistols of highwaymen ordering them to, ‘Stand and deliver, your money or your life.' In 1827, for example, a £50 reward was offered for information about the person or persons who had attacked the Dublin to Cork mail coach and fired a shot, the contents of which, to quote the poster, ‘passed through the hat of one of the passengers'.

The robbing of travellers, of course, didn't begin with the stagecoaches. Many a luckless person was waylaid and robbed in the days when the only way to get around was by foot or on horseback. Indeed, there was a time when it was usual for people intending to go on a journey to make their will, in case they might meet an untimely end at the hands of a robber.

Some of the more notable highwaymen were people who had fought for one lost cause or another, while some had been dispossessed of their lands. Inevitably, a number have been portrayed as Robin Hood characters who robbed the rich to help the poor. Many others, it must be said, had no such pretensions, and whether they were local heroes or common criminals, highwaymen were hunted relentlessly by the authorities, and most of them met the same fate – death by hanging.

Since this book was first published in somewhat shorter form in 1983, many young readers have asked me if Hugh Rua, the legendary figure in the story, was a real highwayman. Well, all I can say is, he could have been! However, all the other highwaymen mentioned did exist.

Thomas Archer, for example, was a fugitive from the 1798 rebellion. For two years his bands of ‘brigands' as they were called, roamed the Ballymena area of County Antrim where this book begins.

There's a story in
Old Ballymena
, a collection of articles originally published in the local
Observer
newspaper in 1857, that shortly before Archer's capture he had murdered a loyalist farmer with whom he had had a violent row ‘on the public road'.

Some years ago I heard a similar story from a neighbour of mine in Ballymena, Mr William Rodgers, on whom the character Mr Stockman in this book is based. Mr Rodgers, who was in his eighties at the time, said his grandfather told him he knew Archer. He also told him how a local farmer had recognised the highwayman at Kilrea Fair. The farmer threatened to tell the Redcoats, as the British soldiers were known, and that night Archer arrived at the man's home where he shot and killed him.

While the name of the farmer given in the two accounts is different, they seem to relate to the same incident, and Mr Rodger's account, which he confirmed to me shortly before he died, suggests a motive for the murder.

A coach similar to the
Londonderry Mail
, which features in this book, may be seen in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum at Cultra, Holywood, County Down, and a visit to the museum is recommended.

My interest in stagecoaches and the idea for this story go back to my boyhood days in Ballymena. My father, who worked for Ballymena Borough Council, told me about the coaches and how, on their journeys from Belfast to Derry, they would have come up through Coach Entry, where the council stabled some of its horses, and then on to the Old Coach Road near our home.

Coach Entry, incidentally, is off Castle Street, where Archer was born, and opposite a large Norman mound called the Moat, where he was hanged.

It was when I was working as a young reporter in Ballymena that I first came across the practice of poteen making, which also features in this story. Poteen is a kind of whiskey: it's home-made and it's illegal as the law only allows whiskey to be made in licensed distilleries. I remember covering a number of prosecutions against poteen makers when I travelled to the Glens of Antrim with my friend, solicitor Jack McCann, to attend hearings of the local court. Later, as I pursued my journalistic career in other parts of the country I found that poteen making wasn't confined to County Antrim!

As a boy I also visited the glens, gazing in wonder at the sheer beauty of what the glaciers had left behind. Sometimes I would be going with my parents or other members of my family to the ‘shore' as the seaside there is called. On other occasions I might be lucky enough to be accompanying Mr Rodgers when he was delivering confectionery to shops in the glens. The delights of such a journey in a van full of sweets and chocolate are obvious, and there was great competition to see who would be allowed to go with him. As a result, he was never short of willing hands when it came to loading his van from the storeroom on his farm or collecting supplies from Giffin's Sweet Factory on the Waveney Road in Ballymena. I hope young readers will enjoy my account of the ‘sweet run' and the adventure it leads them to in what I have called
The Legend of the Phantom Highwayman
.

Tom McCaughren
2011