CHAPTER TWELVE
Humiliation and Rage: A Mind and Body Imprisoned
JOHANNESBURG AND PRETORIA
— 1891–1892 —
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
The events at Potchefstroom and the loss of his hand a few months later were a life-changing episode, one so intense that it is impossible to do justice to it.1 It produced a prolonged crisis – arguably, one without end – that affected every facet of the hidden ideologies and patterns of thinking that had shaped McLoughlin’s behaviour up to that point and beyond. It altered the ways in which he saw himself and his newly asymmetrical body and it changed the ways in which he saw others. For months, possibly years, strange aching sensations reminded him that his body and mind were locked into an immutable arrangement: pain, that could only be relieved by the cheapest analgesic of the age. And, when his body and mind eventually arrived at a settlement, they refined the ways in which he was capable of loving someone, or of being loved.
In the absence of a diary, personal correspondence or reliable accounts from anyone close to him there is no easy way of telling what scars the journey to accommodation, rediscovery and reconstruction left him with. Seemingly trivial things could easily have cut as deeply as serious ones. How could a man raised in a cult of masculinity that prized notions of honour, loyalty and physical prowess still function on the frontiers of empire with only one arm? More prosaically, how were such noble values to be reconciled with the fact that he could not readily button a shirt, cut meat, pull up his breeches or tie his bootlaces? He had never aspired to being a model citizen, but how was he to fund the life he had become accustomed to? How was a man who relied on picking locks and pockets, lifting catches and forcing latches for his living, let alone moving and blowing up safes, to go about his business? Was he still a man – and, if so, what sort of man, and by whose definition?
Pain prised open old fault-lines of character and behaviour, leaving him more impulsive and irascible. Between 60 and 80 per cent of all amputees experience impulses emanating from so-called ‘phantom limbs’ for periods whose onset or end cannot be predicted. Discomfort arising from aching, burning or tingling sensations is among the relatively minor symptoms experienced by those who have lost limbs. Others – and more especially those who have lost arms rather than legs – often have to live with the feeling that missing parts have been truncated, or placed in awkward or unnatural positions. Although only ‘imagined’ by the brain via its disrupted nervous system, the victim nevertheless genuinely experiences acute, chronic pain.2
In Johannesburg, men without limbs were not an unfamiliar sight in the 1890s. As the diggings gave way to deep-level mining the usual mishaps with industrial machinery and accidents attributed to unstable dynamite meant that the loss of a limb was hardly a novelty.3 Although always disastrous for the individual concerned, the ways in which amputees were dealt with varied according to the craft-skill and social standing of the victim. Unmarried miners labouring in the ethnic clusters on the mines looked to their countrymen to help see them though periods of recuperation requiring medical support, or to assist them by raising funds for the long journey home. After 1892, these personalised interventions often gave way to funds set up by the growing number of ethnic associations, Friendly Societies and the new mineworkers’ union.
But he was no mine worker and his plight was made all the more serious because, by the time that he underwent the operation, most of his underworld friends had been driven out of town by the recession or were themselves living a hand-to-mouth existence. There was almost nobody around through the early summer months who could offer him a room in which to recover, or help pay for conventional painkillers. The situation worsened once the autumn chill began to stalk the plateau.
He did not stir until mid-morning. Days and nights were spent wandering from bar to bar until he was thrown out. Culturally and perhaps even genetically predisposed to a liking for alcohol, mind and body alike now demanded beer as the cheapest and most readily available palliative.4 He cadged drinks shamelessly from anyone who could sympathise with a down-and-out one-armed man, or from anybody who had any association with Ireland, Manchester or the underworld. Twenty years later, he claimed that there were ‘very few bars’ that he ‘did not know’.5 It was quite a claim; Johannesburg had hundreds of beer halls, canteens and pubs.6 He slept in back yards, on the streets, or wherever he could.
He was just another drunk, a tramp, a half-maimed vagrant in the middle of a recession in a mining town with an uncertain future, and there were few institutions offering on-going charitable relief. When sober, he carried himself like a soldier, but instead of provoking the respect expected of a man drawn from the armed forces, all he evoked was pity. Even some underworld associates saw him not so much as a man who had once played a leading role in the Irish Brigade, but as just another broken Lancastrian stranded on the shifting frontiers of Empire. One or two suggested that he go ‘home’, but he would hear nothing of it. There was nothing there to return to. Manchester and the mills had consumed virtually all of his family. In any case, with the possible exception of young Tommy, in Australia, he had never much cared for any of them.
Three Manchester stalwarts and steadfast drinking partners, boyhood acquaintances from the Smithfield Market, came up with a suggestion of the sort put forward by working men’s associations. It may have come to them because for the moment they were not involved in burglary, highway robbery or safe-cracking but working as miners. Gorman, King and Whelan – all with the first name Tommy – agreed to put up the money for him to buy a barrow that he could hawk vegetables from on a door-to-door basis.7 It was an idea straight out of their Ancoats past and his spirits were so low that he agreed to it.8 He bought a cart and found himself a room behind a house in President Street from which he plied his new trade.9 He was not selling matches off a tray outside a railway station, but it was not far off, and almost any profits ended up in the pub.
Cheap beer and rot-gut spirit with chemical additives to stimulate the palate and offset the watering down process, dulled the worst of the pain. But they were no panacea. Too much, or too little, drink exacerbated pub tensions. There were arguments with landlords trying to keep order or insisting on closing-up, or conflicts with drunks about things which, the next morning, seemed absurd. In low dives, of which there were many, well-lubricated differences of opinion flared up into outright violence. On 31 March 1891, he was arrested in a pub for the destruction of property and sentenced to the usual fine of £2 or seven days.
A sobering week in prison and no relief from his pain reminded him that, without a hand, he was unable to exercise proper authority or defend himself. He sensed that he was being treated with condescension of the sort reserved for war victims, when all he wanted was respect. Within days of his release, he acquired a device that, even when held in a weaker left hand, forced men to take you seriously. He roamed about the abandoned diggings and mine shafts south of the town, on the Robinson Company’s property, emptying the chamber of the Colt revolver until he felt entirely comfortable with it. With a revolver, he could do something more ambitious than selling cabbages from a cart.
Despite a name that suggests otherwise, Maurice – ‘Morry’ – Hollander was a Lancastrian with solid Irish connections. A professional gambler and jewel thief, Hollander played a pioneering role in organised trans-frontier crime on the goldfields. Indeed, he may have been the anonymous character who, in 1895, boasted to the local press that he was the first white man ever convicted of a crime in Johannesburg.10 What is beyond doubt is that within 18 months of the diggings being proclaimed, he had twice been arrested on charges of theft, once having slipped across the border into the Free State to sell stolen jewellery in Boshof, a favourite meeting place for Kimberley diamond thieves. By the mid-1890s, he was so disruptive a force at race meetings at the Johannesburg Turf Club that the stewards got the police to warn him off.
Despite having a criminal profile, Hollander frequently avoided conviction and imprisonment. For this he had well-connected Irish associates and professional gamblers to thank, including Mike Hart, fishmonger’s son and friend of Chief Detective Ferguson. Hart was another of those whom the Public Prosecutor seldom got beyond a preliminary examination and had been one of Hollander’s accomplices at Boshof.11
Henry – known to close friends as ‘Harry’ – Higgins was, despite his unusual antecedents, solidly Manchester-Irish. His grandparents were from southern Ireland. His father, a cabinet-maker, had emigrated to Wales and then moved up the coast and found himself an Old Country wife.12 McLoughlin may have got to know him when Higgins was a still a printer’s assistant back in Manchester, in the 1870s. If not, their paths would have crossed regularly in the betting shops, gambling dens and public houses of Johannesburg or out at the race track. Like Hollander and Hart, Higgins was a professional punter who lived on the margins of the law while evading its clutches.13
In early April 1891, McLoughlin, ‘homeless and penniless’, gave up hawking vegetables. Not knowing where to turn to, he made his way to a set of tawdry rooms on Commissioner Street which Higgins had bought and, in tribute to his father’s County Cork origins, re-named the Queenstown Hotel. He asked Higgins for a place to stay until such time as friends could help raise the cash to re-start his business. Not wanting to deny a brother Irishman, Higgins told him to move into the stables.14
Over the next three weeks, McLoughlin and a half-dozen friends, including a few ‘working’ on nearby east Rand mines, planned a job that would help put him back on the road to recovery. All that is known about the operation is that it was set to coincide with the end of the working week and the end of the month; a time when the town was cash-flush.
On Saturday evening, 2 May, the gang, five-strong, including King and Whelan, sauntered back into the bar at the Queenstown Hotel to celebrate a success and divide the loot. They later swore, under oath, that it was only a meeting to give McLoughlin some of their wages so that he could become a hawker – a tale true in part. Higgins and Hollander were hovering about in the background when McLoughlin was handed a sizeable sum in cash. Great carousing followed until closing time and then on well into the night. McLoughlin, clutching £25 – twice a miner’s monthly wage – eventually staggered back to the stable to sleep it all off amidst the midwinter comfort and warmth of the horses.
He slept fitfully and awoke to find the money gone. He recalled waking up briefly and finding Higgins’s hand in his pocket, but had then slumped back into semi-consciousness. It was outrageous, but knowing that he was dealing with close friends of Ferguson, he tried to compose himself before walking across to the bar. When Higgins and Hollander appeared he asked for a word in private, ushering them into an adjacent lounge.
Finding himself unable to supplicate, he confronted them directly: ‘Give me my swag.’ But as the words came out he could see that they were not taking him seriously. They mocked him, feigning ignorance, pretending not to know what ‘swag’ meant. He felt the anger mounting and the exchanges became so loud and heated that one of the hotel residents, a carpenter named Barlow, appeared to investigate. McLoughlin remained calm enough to tell Barlow: ‘They have gone through me for my money.’
Barlow’s arrival, however, only emboldened Higgins, who was increasingly arrogant and contemptuous. After one more request, which Higgins, yet again, pretended not to understand, McLoughlin lost his temper and pulled out the Colt. Morry Hollander lost his nerve, blurting out that the money had been taken ‘in fun’, and asked Higgins to return it. Higgins, however, stood firm, and McLoughlin took a step towards him. ‘Do you take me for a fool? I am going to blow your bloody brains out!’ Higgins, at last realising the seriousness of the situation, bolted from the room and ran out into Commissioner Street, where he stumbled upon two mounted Zarps.
Left only with the cringing Hollander, McLoughlin put the revolver back into his pocket. Hollander later claimed that when Higgins ran out of the room, he had wrestled the gunman to the floor and that McLoughlin was only freed from his grip when Higgins and the Zarps stormed back into the room. McLoughlin claimed that he told the policemen he had been robbed and that Higgins pleaded with the Zarps: ‘For God’s sake take this man away: he’s got a revolver and threatened to shoot me!’
When the Zarps moved in to arrest him, McLoughlin drew the Colt and fired at Higgins, shouting, ‘Take that you bastard.’ The bullet grazed his forehead, deflecting off the skull and lodging in a wall behind. It was a ‘channel wound’ that was ‘not serious’, but it had been a close call. McLoughlin, with two more bullets in the chamber, made no further effort at firing, and was disarmed, arrested and marched off to the police station.15
Faced with a charge of attempted murder, he appeared at a Preliminary Examination spread over two days that eventually dragged on into a third, on 11 May 1891, when the witnesses for the accused were summoned. The safe-robbers cum charitable miners intent on sacrificing part of their wages to buy a vegetable barrow for a stricken colleague proved unconvincing. Nor did McLoughlin, with his criminal record and an arm lost during a recent jail-break, make a favourable impression on wary Magistrate NJ van den Bergh, who dismissed all the defence submissions, saying that ‘the whole money story [was] concocted’.
The case was serious enough for it to be directed to the Circuit Court. Coming as it did in the wake of his amputation, it prompted a period of self-reflection. For McLoughlin, who took almost as much pride in his ability to control himself as to conduct himself in manly fashion, the incident at the Queenstown Hotel amounted to a serious failure. He saw himself as having been lured into a thoughtless act by Higgins; one that, in retrospect, might be construed as cowardly. The shooting was portrayed as having been controlled and deliberate, as a response that was unfair and unjustified, and he hated Higgins for it. He was forced to tell the Magistrate that he had become ‘aggravated’, that he had got into ‘a passion’, ‘lost control’ and ‘reached the point where he was not aware of what he was doing’.16 It was unmanly, un-soldier-like.17
Issues of courage, honour and self-control formed the core of the code of masculinity that preoccupied him. From medieval times, through the Enlightenment and then on into the Victorian era, the emphasis had shifted from spontaneous outbursts of interpersonal violence between men, to the need for self-restraint and the more thoughtful resolution of conflict governed by rules and regulations. Just as duelling by swords and then pistols had given way to unarmed combat to settle differences, so at that very moment on the Witwatersrand bare-knuckle prize-fighting was slowly giving way to ‘scientific’, gloved boxing under new rules proposed by the Marquess of Queensberry.18 Higgins had made him look cowardly.
Nor, if McLoughlin’s reading at the time was anything to go by, did his self-examination about personal issues end there. While awaiting trial and sharing a cell with a young fraudster named JS Mead, he read a novel based on the life of a nineteenth-century English social reformer, Charles Bradlaugh. We Two, by Edna Lyall, was first published in 1884, and covered terrain that any young man raised in Ancoats could relate to.19
Bradlaugh, an atheist and advocate of birth control, trade-unionism, republicanism and women’s suffrage, was a noted champion of Home Rule for the Irish. More importantly, he was a man of honour who took all oaths and oath-taking extremely seriously. Elected in 1880 to represent the parliamentary constituency of Northampton, Bradlaugh had declined to take the oath of allegiance and insisted on the right to affirm, which earned him the enmity of the Church of England as well as the Catholic Church. After a long dispute and having to be re-elected at by-elections on four occasions, he eventually took his seat in 1886 and, in 1888, successfully piloted a revised Oaths Act through the House of Commons.
Although Lyall’s novel contained a twist in the tail, in keeping with her Christian beliefs, the book explored the need for moral steadfastness amidst the torments of conscience, duty and principle. She cited ancient sages and modern activists alike to drive home her point. Just two examples point in the direction that she wished her readers to follow. ‘You begin in error,’ Plato argued, ‘when you suggest that we should regard the opinion of the many about just and unjust, good and evil, honourable and dishonourable.’ The individual had to act out of personal conviction. Longfellow knew what was required of an admirable man: ‘There’s a brave fellow! There’s a man of pluck!’, he had written, ‘A Man who is not afraid to say his say, Though a whole town’s against him.’
It is impossible to know what short or longer-term influence the book had had on McLoughlin. Perhaps the best we can do is to note that some of his subsequent behaviour was in line with the sentiments expressed in We Two. What is also worth noting, however, is that his reading of the novel came at a moment when his own reputation had dimmed a bit and that of Jack McKeone – said to be in Australia – was as close to that of the quintessential bandit-hero as it ever got among white miners.20 As pertinently, with over 200 hardened white inmates to look after, the reputation of the Kruger government’s prison administration and management was at a new low as it struggled to cope with an embarrassing number of attempts at escape.21
Not all prison breaks were doomed to end in failure. Just 12 months earlier George Stevenson, a young deserter from the North Staffordshire Regiment and a College of Banditry graduate, had escaped from the Johannesburg prison. ‘Stevo’ was known to be leading a risky existence around Commissioner Street under various names, including Davidson.22 It was against this background that the fictionalised Charles Bradlaugh and Captain Dangerous met and another adventurous idea was born.
The cell that McLoughlin shared with Mead was separated from the prison’s perimeter wall by a 12-foot-wide patch of open ground. Beyond that, not unlike at Potchefstroom, lay the street. Starting one Tuesday night, a length of iron and two tins were used to scrape away at the cement floor of the cell. The inmates then tunnelled beneath the open ground, and then on and out, towards the prison perimeter. Loose stones and soil were carefully placed in ‘old handkerchiefs, rags, pieces of blanket’ and so on. At first light the dirt was stacked in the emerging tunnel and the entrance covered with bedding. After four nights’ digging – by Friday 19th – they were at the foundations of the wall overlooking the street. Two more nights would have been sufficient, but sloppy male housekeeping proved their undoing. On the morning after excavations had commenced, an alert warder noticed loose soil on the cell floor and told the Governor, EJ ter Brugge, that he suspected that the inmates were attempting to burrow their way out of the prison.
Ter Brugge, relishing the chance of being seen to thwart a ‘daring attempt’ at escape at a time of national crisis in the prison system, allowed the excavations to continue unchecked for three more nights. On Saturday morning, 20 June 1891, he had Mead and McLoughlin sent for and then proceeded to mock them:
Well men, how about your prospecting syndicate? Have you got shares? You must not blame me if I cannot allow prospecting within the precincts of the gaol. I am chief claims inspector here, and since you have not taken out your claims licences nor paid your poll-tax, and nevertheless are hard at work prospecting, I must refer the matter to the very particular attention of the police magistrate.23
Landdrost van den Bergh, irked by on-going problems at the prison, took a dim view of the matter when they appeared before him on 24 June. Despite some surprisingly reluctant evidence from the warders, the men’s intentions were plain enough, and, unwilling to apportion blame, the Magistrate found them both guilty. Nor was he inclined to draw any distinctions as to their well-being, and sentenced them each to three months with hard labour. It was another straw in the winds of humiliation. A one-armed man could hardly be expected to do chain-gang duty.24
Shortly after that setback, McLoughlin played one of his few remaining Ancoats cards. It illustrated how highly regarded he still was among some – and, more importantly, how seriously matters of friendship and loyalty were taken. At his request, or at Charlie Harding’s suggestion – it was never clear which – it was agreed that Harding would break into the building housing Van den Bergh and the Public Prosecutor’s records and set fire to the documents in an attempt to subvert proceedings in McLoughlin’s upcoming trial. But things went wrong almost immediately after Harding entered the Landdrost’s office and before he could set the fire properly. He was arrested, found guilty of breaking and entering and attempted arson and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment with hard labour.25
A few weeks later, on 3 September 1891, McLoughlin appeared in the Circuit Court before Justice de Korte on a charge of attempted murder. He was in better shape than he had been when he was arrested and the court reporter cast him as ‘a strongly-built young man’. The prosecutor did his job as best he could, even though Higgins was as nervous as a kitten up a gum pole. Whelan and the ‘miners’ gave evidence for the defence, standing by McLoughlin, but the effect was nullified when the prosecutor drew attention to their criminal records. McLoughlin made a final appeal to the jury, raising many of the points he had made at the preliminary examination three months earlier. His efforts were hardly in vain. Under instruction from the judge, the jury backed away from the charge of ‘attempted murder’ and instead found him guilty on the lesser charge of ‘assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm’. De Korte sentenced him to nine months with hard labour.26 It could have been much worse.
* * *
The depression, Irish gangsters and the spread of armed robbery into the countryside were taking a toll on the public mood and it had all registered in the mind of the republic’s politically ambitious, presidentially minded Chief Justice, JG Kotzé. Things took a turn for the worse when two Boers were murdered while out on the road.27 But the camel’s back broke shortly after McLoughlin’s trial ended.
In a wild, unsuccessful attempt to escape from custody, two highwaymen, Hugh McKeone – brother of the more famous Jack – and his demented partner, William Cooper, fired several shots at two mounted Zarps. The bandits, ostensibly ‘Irish’, were charged with attempted murder, but when they appeared before the Chief Justice in Pretoria, on 21 October 1891, Kotzé amazed everyone by sentencing them to death.28 The imposition of the death penalty on white men was greeted by a public outcry and led to the mass political mobilisation of the State President’s many English-speaking opponents. It precipitated a major political stand-off between Kruger and his Executive on the one hand and the calculating Chief Justice on the other.29 And it focused the attention of the old Irish Brigade, which was being put on the back foot.
With distinctions between class, colour, crime and politics becoming blurred, anger began to mount inside and outside of the republic’s larger prisons, and the government sensed that the integrity of the state itself might be challenged. Five days after the McKeone-Cooper sentence was handed down, authorities in Johannesburg, where a new gaol was already under construction, decided to move the most dangerous prisoners – the ‘chain gang’ – to Pretoria where the State Artillery was better placed to see off any attempts at escape or rescue.
Escorting 10 of the Rand’s most menacing inmates over 30 miles of open veld by coach, albeit under armed guard, was fraught with danger. More than half those moved on 26 October 1891, including McLoughlin and Harding, were notoriously ‘hard men’ – highway robbers and safe-crackers. The move was effected without incident, but it did put McLoughlin and Harding in close contact for much of 1891–92.30 More importantly, perhaps, it effectively reconstituted a fair part of the original Irish Brigade. It allowed McLoughlin to link up with some of the Rustenburg mail coach brigands who had taken to the Magaliesberg at the start of the depression, including Todd and Sutherland. And all this took place at a moment when the prison was already a powder keg of tension as McKeone and Cooper, on death row, waited on Kruger and a political campaign to determine their fate.31 The Visagie Street gaol had become a veritable Irish fort.
On the day Kotzé handed down his controversial decision, on 21 October, two detachments from the State Artillery, each eight-strong, were sent to Visagie Street to help guard the prison around the clock. McLoughlin’s reputation, too, preceded him. Within hours of his arrival on 26 October, more artillerymen were sent to the gaol.32 Four days later, on Friday, 30 October, the police learnt that ‘McKeone’s friends from Johannesburg’ – for which read members of the McLoughlin gang – were planning on storming the prison in a military-like operation to release all the inmates. The prison was linked up to the artillery barracks by telephone and the police instructed to monitor all inbound stage coaches.33
The attack commenced that same night at about 11.00, from an unexpected quarter. A barrage of stones was directed onto the prison roof from the grounds of the adjacent Loreto Convent, staffed by Irish nuns whose sympathies for 24-year-old McKeone clearly ran deep. The attackers hoped the warders would open the main gates to the gaol and let in the State Artillery men to secure the cells. The would-be invaders would then storm the gaol, overrun the hard-pressed guards, release the inmates, and amidst all the chaos, free the Irish Brigade.
But the plan failed. As the first stones rained down, the warders took up positions on top of the walls, leaving the artillery free to guard the perimeter. The gates were never opened. Instead, the officer in charge of the artillery despatched a small contingent armed with bull’s-eye lanterns to find the hidden stone-throwers. But the friends of the Brigade saw them coming and the guards could spot only two stragglers who then ran off into the dark. The size of the main assault party remained unknown.
The authorities must have thought it formidable. On Saturday morning the State Artillery contingent was doubled and placed under direct command of its senior officer. The streets around the prison were barricaded and the Veld Kornet ordered to mobilise 80 armed burghers to be kept on standby.34 On Monday, 2 November, the first day after the attack, the State President’s Executive Committee endorsed the Chief Justice’s decision to impose the death sentence. Inside the prison tensions remained at fever pitch and outside the mood among English-speakers was inflamed by uncertainty surrounding the fate of the condemned men. But, by the Friday, 6 November 1891, in the face of mounting pressure, including an appeal from the King of Portugal, Kruger had announced that the death sentence had been commuted.35 The State President was a past master of the art of political brinkmanship.
Inside the gaol the announcement only added fuel to pent-up Irish anger. Brigade members, pleased about the reprieve, resented the fact that they had been denied the opportunity to escape. Several journalists, including the Lancastrian, FR Statham, began to speculate about the size of the gang of Celtic renegades challenging the state, but many others, those with imperial sympathies, were unwilling to admit that the opposition was Irish-led.36 On Monday, 9 November, 25 hard-labour prisoners ‘mutinied’, refusing to work until the quality of their food improved. The strike, characterised by solidarity of the sort that might be associated with oath-taking, resulted in an armed stand-off and, in the end, 17 inmates were lashed in keeping with prison regulations before the situation returned to ‘normal’. The ‘mutiny’, however, fed into the growing belief in official circles about the need for new, far broader legislation that would allow for the flogging of hardened white criminals.37
What part Jack McLoughlin himself played in any or all of these events is unclear; the relevant documents cannot be recovered. But what can be inferred is deliciously ironic – that the prison authorities themselves were responsible in large measure for helping to restore his reputation as an underworld leader. When the police picked him up at the Queenstown Hotel, in May 1891, he was little more than a one-armed Irish drunk. But, by sentencing him to hard labour in the ‘chain gang’ the state helped him claw back some of his self-respect as a ‘hard man’ at a time of self-doubt. Likewise, sending him to Pretoria with the rest of the chain gang provided external validation of his status and helped him to recover some lost dignity. He may still have entertained doubts about his standing among his peers, but there was no doubting that the state saw him as a formidable man who constituted a serious menace to society. These strange psychological gains were underwritten by an improvement in his health during his incarceration and enforced sobriety.
These first signs of his self-confidence returning came from improved prison discipline. His time in Visagie Street was marked by an uptick in the quality of his relationships with those around him, including the prison guards. There was no attempt at repeating the painful experiences of Johannesburg or Potchefstroom. He also became acquainted with Matthew J de Beer, a partially anglicised member of the State Artillery who had been brought in to help control members of the Irish Brigade after the convent attack. They were never close friends, but as professionals at opposite ends of the great divide they were confident enough to swop stories about some of the characters in the gaol and note how various inmates tried to cope with institutional life.38
By summer’s end in 1892, McLoughlin had grown used to the routine and had started thinking about a return to Johannesburg. He would give Higgins and the rest of Ferguson’s underworld friends as wide a berth as possible. He also gave some thought to the possibility of extending his network beyond the obvious Ancoats-Irish one, to include the growing number of English adventurers in the Witwatersrand underworld. Things were more promising than when he had left the Reef for Kimberley; visitors reported on an upswing in gold production as the new deep-level mines started living up to expectations. The only problem was that the faster things appeared to move outside the prison, the slower they seemed inside. Autumn dragged on and then colder weather set in. It was a good sign; his release was scheduled for midwinter.
In mid-June, he took leave of some of the Irish inmates, promising to see them over drinks in Johannesburg before too long. Others, including McKeone and Cooper, and Sutherland and Todd, were in for such long stretches that he was unlikely ever to see them again. Most of the warders were decent enough, wishing him well, but it was the farewell of one man that haunted him. For two decades thereafter it crowded in on his consciousness again and again, popping up in some of the remotest places on earth and when he least expected it. It was a ghost-like voice.
Matthew de Beer took leave of him with the customary Afrikaans-Dutch farewell of totsiens. Like au revoir, its literal meaning was ‘until I next see you’, but in everyday use it simply meant ‘goodbye’ – for now. It was usually said with a hint of joy at the prospect of renewing the acquaintance sooner rather than later. But De Beer said the word so slowly and deliberately, almost breaking it into its component parts, that it left him feeling that he had removed any element of chance. It came across as a sort of guarantee that they would be meeting again; it was a question of when, rather than if. It was puzzling, because he had no intention of ever seeing the man again.