CHAPTER 11

A Bomb Outside the Police Station: Fenian Troubles

1880s

The bomb consisted of a piece of iron gas piping … filled with explosives and iron nails …

hen the Prince and Princess of Wales paid a visit to Liverpool, the Lord Mayor for that year said to the Prince: ‘You have passed through the portion of Liverpool in which 200,000 Irish people reside.’ The Mayor was worried. He had expected serious trouble. But the Prince replied: ‘I have not heard a boo or a groan; it has been simply splendid.’

But this was entirely typical of a time in which the idea of a ‘Fenian’ was a statement about a serious public fear. The word comes from an old Irish word, fene, meaning ‘the people.’ In 1868–78, it had been the fear of Fenian attacks that had led to the London police selecting officers to be drilled in the use of revolvers. By 1868, there were 400 pistols locked away for safety but ready for use in London police stations.

The Mayor and Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, presiding at the assizes, had been very worried about the royal visit. They had good cause to be. Liverpool had been one of the targets of the Fenians, the secret revolutionary society fighting for an independent Irish republic. The Irish Republican Brotherhood had been founded in 1858, and the Fenians had at first been a branch of extremists in America. By 1880 they had expanded, and at that time a certain O’Donovan Rossa was keen to make the Fenians well known for terror by bombing key targets in Britain. Rossa had certainly had experiences which would harden his attitudes to the British: in 1869, when he was in Chatham prison, he had thrown his own urine from his jerry-pot at a warder, and his punishment had been thirty-five days with his hands manacled behind his back. By 1870 he was out again, and contesting the Tipperary seat in a by-election.

The most outrageous bombing by the Fenians had taken place in Clerkenwell in 1867, when an explosion killed thirteen people; then in Manchester, in the same year, a police van with Fenian prisoners was ambushed and a police sergeant called Brett was shot and killed. Liverpool’s turn was to come: obviously, a place with such a massive Irish population would make the authorities nervous. The military were often on the alert in these years.