CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Imperial Eye Averted
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND
— 1895–1896 —
The worse the passage the more welcome the port.
Even hardened old shipping correspondents, men long past their prime and reduced to reporting ‘arrivals and departures’, were impressed by the new cargo steamer. Perched on bar-stools around the south-western rim of the Pacific, the hacks were full of praise for a vessel still acquiring its primary layer of salted skin. ‘A fine specimen of the modern cargo steamer,’ they opined. The 4 000 ton Mount Sirion had been laid down in the yards of Workman, Clarke & Co in Belfast, for the firm of Smith & Savage of Glasgow, and launched in March 1895.1 Fitted with retractable masts that allowed for easy passage along the Manchester Canal, the vessel was set to follow an everyday tramping circuit around the margins of the Irish and North Seas. But then, quite unexpectedly, it was chartered by the Union Steamship Company which, in turn, was responding to the needs of Scottish merchants on the banks of the Hooghly.
With warehouses the size of castles – several of which still grace what is now the Kolkota waterfront – the Scots and Union Company sensed an opportunity for extending trade between India and the antipodes. Any ship bringing horses into the country for the army, from ports in Australasia, could turn under-utilised space on the outward run to profit by hauling south bulk cargoes of castor oil, jute bags and tea. The Mount Sirion was bound for Singapore, Auckland and Lyttelton, in New Zealand, and then onward to Melbourne and Sydney to collect Walers for the round voyage back to India when the police eased McLoughlin aboard the vessel in bustling Calcutta.
Under the command of Captain CJ Richardson, the ship set a south-easterly course for its maiden voyage into Indian and Pacific waters. Although it was in no hurry, McLoughlin was impressed by a state-of-the-art steamer that consumed 18 tons of coal a day and was capable of maintaining a speed that, even in heavy going, seldom fell below 10 knots. Enjoying reasonably good but far from outstanding weather, the Mount Sirion was made to huff and puff her way across the Bay of Bengal before heading due south to make port in a bit less than a week.
The vessel was unknown in Singapore, on an unfamiliar run, and its imminent arrival failed to raise eyebrows among the city’s larger and most successful wholesalers. Alarmed by the lack of interest, the ship’s agents had, just days before, rushed to place an advertisement in the newspaper in the hope of drumming up business.2 The response was disappointing. ‘Mr Kenny’, wary of getting into trouble in the port where he had jumped a naval ship more than a decade earlier, disembarked for a short tour through the city’s demi-monde as three more passengers joined the ship. The hoped-for bulk cargo, however, failed to materialise, contributing to a surprisingly short turnaround.3
He avoided the devil that had tempted him since his youth and made it back to the quayside with time to spare. It was a relief to be back on board and know that he had evaded police attention. It was probably as well that he did not know it but, on 8 August, the same day that the Mount Sirion slipped out of Singapore for Auckland, Jack McCann – arrested in Salisbury, Rhodesia – was moved to the border town of Palaype under armed escort to be handed over to Kruger’s police, who wanted him to stand trial for his part in the Champ D’Or robbery.4 The Imperial Eye might not have caught sight of McLoughlin in the Straits Settlement underworld, but it was out there, always scanning the wider world for him.
He was pleased to be back at sea and beyond the immediate reach of the law; Captain Richardson and his senior officer were less enthused with the return to open waters. Within hours of entering the Java Sea and setting course for Thursday Island, at the northern tip of Australia, the ship encountered more of the same ‘strong winds and adverse currents’ that had been hampering her progress ever since clearing the Sundarbans. The steamer took a full 11 days to reach the Island and two more to draw abreast of Cooktown on the tropical coast of north-eastern Queensland. ‘Kenny’ took it all in from the deck, not knowing that, years later, it would become the shoreline that he hated more than any other he had encountered.5 It truly was a Fatal Shore.
Beyond Cooktown, the Mount Sirion veered south south-east, insisting on the direct route to Auckland. But not even the change in course could shake off the conditions hampering the steamer’s progress. The ship’s wide-open furnace door – like the mouth of a schoolboy in a pantry stuffing his mouth at half-term – gobbled coal in embarrassing quantities as the vessel battled the wind and swell. Richardson hoped that the Pacific would live up to its name as they drew closer to New Zealand’s North Island but, instead of abating, the weather grew worse after they rounded Cape Brett on 29 August. The closing stages of the 7 000-mile run south were marked by a strong north-easterly gale with driving rain reducing visibility in notoriously treacherous coastal waters.6
The Mount Sirion was not the only vessel struggling to find her way to the safety of Auckland through stormy weather. Some way off, to the north-east, making its way down from Portland and San Diego, another steamer, the SS Rathdown, began listing when her cargo shifted.7 It was one of the hazards of life at sea and, back on the Mount Sirion, ‘Kenny’ again made sure that the small canvas bag containing his detonators and five packets of dynamite was properly secured. Even hardened old salts like him found the storms in the Pacific sufficiently menacing and unpleasant to contemplate anew the meaning of life.
After a voyage that had taken him half-way around the world – albeit in two stages separated by several months – he had had enough. The prospect of several more weeks at sea before he could unpack the tools of his trade and resume something like the life he had grown used to was unthinkable. The closer the ship got to port, the more Auckland appealed to him as a staging post on the longer journey Down Under. A stop-over could do no harm. On the Rathdown another sailor of Irish extraction, Butler Norris Wilkinson, was doing the same sum. With some back-pay due to him, Wilkinson resolved to enter Auckland with an open mind and see what happened. Busy ports made for easy onward berths.
In retrospect a few extraordinary things, things that usually rotated around the separate axes of chance and design, were about to happen. They are worth a moment’s reflection. Chance, although not a frequent caller, is no stranger at the house of history. When it does call, it often walks through the door unannounced and in disguise. To bend a better-known phrase to our needs, somewhere out in the Pacific, a cormorant flapped its wings and set in motion a sequence of events that culminated in a gale blowing two refugees into the same small corner of the globe.
But precisely because it is uncertain as to how it will be received, chance often spreads its visits over years, if not decades. In Jack McLoughlin’s case, however, it visited him on four separate occasions within just 24 months. Three times it brought with it misfortune in the unfamiliar guise of a gale, a blackbird and a newspaper posted to an unlikely recipient in a far-off country. Then, sensing that it may have overplayed its hand, it again intervened, this time to save his life when, amidst a fit of political petulance in Britain, it averted the Imperial Eye.
The Mount Sirion docked in Auckland at first light on 30 August and minutes later, ‘Thomas Kenny’ – the first name of his alias a nod in the direction of his antipodean brother – made his way carefully down the gangway clutching a few worldly possessions in his one natural hand.8 Dragging the assumed moniker along behind him, he set about rediscovering as much of his identity as possible by orientating himself amidst the harbour-side cluster of bars, boarding houses, chop shops, and missions-to-seamen fishing for the souls of any drunks drifting by.
He reclaimed part of his self by presenting himself as ‘John Dell’. It was, like everything in his life now, a messy part of a shrunken universe. It did, however, offer more than psychological balm; it had a few useful applications. If someone from his past suddenly popped up in the local underworld, recognised him and blurted out ‘Hello John’, he wouldn’t have to feign ignorance. ‘John’ sat easily with him and it would buy him time enough to come up with a suitable response. In his own mind, however, he would always be ‘Jack’ to the select few he trusted.
Reassuming part of his identity was only one of the challenges confronting him. Concealed snares, things known intuitively by insiders but hidden from the view of casual visitors, immigrants, or outsiders constituted a far more serious hazard. He had come of age in large and complex societies marked by significant differences in class, colour and cultural composition – variations that he learned to read and to shape to his own needs. Countries with diversified economies experiencing rapid growth offered professional thieves their best chances of success. India seemed as if it might meet the economic demands for organised crime but, in the end, had failed to meet some of the social requirements. New Zealand’s agricultural economy, with modest commercial and industrial sectors in small towns that were largely culturally homogeneous, fell far short of what was required in almost all respects, including the social.
* * *
The uncovering of a few gold deposits in the mid-1850s had done little to stimulate New Zealand’s pastoral economy, but in the 1860s more substantial finds triggered significant rushes in Otago and on the west coast of South Island. Partially primed, but hardly dependent on mineral discoveries for economic progress, a decade of prosperity had followed.9 The 1870s saw the development and consolidation of an overwhelmingly Anglophone and youthful immigrant community intent on avoiding most of the pitfalls of the old world and building what it saw as a ‘Better Britain’. Amidst the spectacular natural beauty of an earthly paradise, a society characterised by easy friendships, communal cohesion, group solidarity and egalitarian values quickly took shape.10 But these social virtues came under strain when the economy experienced a downturn in the late 1880s and struggled to recover momentum in the mid-1890s.11
The gold rushes unleashed drunkenness and violence on a scale that resonated with most frontier societies. But the far broader contours of an agricultural economy and rural society meant that the overall crime rate in the nineteenth century remained relatively low in a state that was also tightly policed. And yet, as has been argued by one scholar, there was a ‘dark side’ to this new ‘paradise’. The relentless pursuit of communal cohesion and social conformity made for a disproportionately high rate of incarceration for those perceived as being alien or antisocial, those found to be out of place without good reason, or those indulging in petty crimes.12 Vagrancy accounted for a third of all crime in New Zealand in the 1870s, and although conviction rates fell thereafter, they remained unusually high through most of the 1890s.13 Drunkenness accounted for a third of ‘crime’ in the 1880s, and rose after 1893 as the island settlers toyed with the idea of prohibition. By the end of the 1890s, public intoxication accounted for almost half of a very small country’s prison population.14
When McLoughlin got to the North Island, in 1895, social intolerance was no longer confined to drunkenness and vagrancy as manifested in the behaviour of eccentrics or itinerants of both sexes. More generalised concerns were being expressed about the need to improve ‘social hygiene’ and to expel that which was ‘alien and unwanted’. Christians in New Zealand, like others spread across the English-speaking world, displayed increasing hostility to minority groups, including those few ‘heathen’ Chinese still to be found working on the older gold diggings.15
It was within these thickets of fear and prejudice that ‘John Dell’ was most likely to encounter the hidden dangers that the society posed for an impecunious one-armed man. It was not that the police were unconcerned about burglars, safe-lifters or fugitives, but that they were even more attuned to looking for drunks, hobos, tramps, itinerant labourers or ‘swaggers’, and vagrants. It was what was manifest about his appearance, prosthesis, dress, demeanour and the fact that he was of no fixed abode that was more likely to get the attention of the constabulary than what was hidden – his criminal record, expertise and the tools of his trade.16 It is chance that nudges the fly towards the spider, but it is the design of the web that snares the prey.
Below 35 degrees south, spring is in no hurry to appear. He spent September and much of October drifting, cadging drinks, living from hand to mouth and seeing off the last of winter’s chill. He waited for the sun’s strength to return before exploring inner Auckland for suitable targets and the cover of cold dark nights to stage a few burglaries and thefts capable of keeping body and soul together. It took time but, by early November, he had assembled his kit for everyday work – seven skeleton keys, nine wire picklocks, a ‘warding file’ for shaping new keys, and several shirts and singlets that matched a pair of dark trousers. But the items he prized most remained stowed away in his canvas bag – a coil fuse, nine dynamite caps and the five packages of dynamite.17 Burglary barely kept a man alive, safe-blasting allowed him to live.
He had identified a business with a large safe and been monitoring the premises over several weekends, but lacked a handyman partner to offset his physical disadvantage. It was frustrating but no candidate presented himself. Then, on the afternoon of 17 October, the Rathdown, in distress for weeks, eventually limped into port. The ship, bound for Liverpool when the cargo had shifted, was bound to have an Irishman aboard, some Lancastrians, possibly even a Mancunian or two.
He met an adventurous but naïve Irishman in a pub close by the Salvation Army Barracks, where he was dossing. It did not take long to discover that Butler Wilkinson could not help with a major job – that would require more time and planning if success was to be guaranteed. The Rathdown’s master, Captain Morrissey, was of the opinion that all that was needed was a brief stopover in Auckland. His ship could be reloaded, the cargo properly secured and the voyage resumed. But, wary of losing his crew to the delights of port after a troubled voyage, he took the precaution of making certain that any back-pay due to them was released in dribs and drabs. An unexpected shortage of cash left Wilkinson open to suggestions as to how to raise funds, but any good it did was negated by his belief that the Rathdown was about to sail.18
But the captain was wrong. To his dismay, Morrissey discovered that the damage was more extensive than initially surmised. Much of his cargo had been ruined by an inrush of seawater when the ship began listing, and the hull needed repairs that would keep the vessel in port for weeks. McLoughlin watched as the Rathdown was dragged into a dry dock and cash-strapped seamen left marooned on the dockside. Each day Wilkinson became more inclined to get involved in a big job. The charismatic ‘John Dell’, confiding that his ‘real name’ was ‘Tom Kenny’, slowly reeled the sailor into his confidence.
Without the revolver that was de rigueur on the mining frontier, and keen to avoid unnecessary confrontations, McLoughlin decided that the project was best undertaken over a weekend night. A few days before it he went to Reynold’s Cycle Shop and bought a few of the items he would need – a small lamp, a bottle of oil and a chisel for removing unwelcome bolts or locks encountered on any interleading doors. Around sunset on Saturday, 9 November, he left the docks and strolled up to Albert Park, which commanded an elevated view of the city and the harbour below it.
He entered the park on Bowen Street, near the synagogue, and made his way to a small building behind the shrubbery and iron fence that housed the public toilets. In the lavatory stall, he lifted a panel in the wooden floor to reveal a cavity beneath. He placed the skeleton keys and picklocks in the hole, along with the items bought at the bicycle shop, and replaced the panel. On the way out, he hid the canvas bag with the dynamite and its accessories in dense bush. He removed his prosthesis – the hand still covered by a glove – and stuffed it into a sack containing the rest of his paraphernalia along with a rug that could be used to drag a small safe. That bag, too, was stowed in the bushes. Back at the docks, he told Wilkinson what he had done and instructed him to appear at the toilets at half-past nine on the following evening.
Sunday morning saw a bright summer’s day across the North Island – any boy’s delight. Martin Grace and a few friends ran to the park where they were messing about without purpose when they chanced upon a sluggish-looking blackbird. They chased the bird but it proved to be less vulnerable than they had imagined and it remained out of reach until Grace spotted it taking refuge in an opening beneath the flooring of the public toilets. Flattening himself against the earth, he eased his hand into the mouth of the cavity and, to his surprise, hauled out some keys and wires. Thinking that the keys, if not the wires, might have been lost, and hoping to collect a reward, the lads went to the nearby police barracks where they were directed to the officers on duty. Detectives Bailey and Quirke appeared appreciative and polite but, in truth, were not much interested in the find, and the boys scampered back to the park.
Knowing that he had only explored the mouth of the opening and hoping to find more hidden treasure, perhaps even a few coins, Grace went back to the toilets. Stretching in, at armpit’s length, he retrieved a lamp, a bottle of oil and a chisel. These finds, again handed to the police, shook the detectives out of their Sunday torpor. They decided that the collection might belong to a burglar who could return to collect his tools before setting out on a night’s work. Around dusk Grace accompanied the policemen to the park and replaced the items, as found. The plain-clothes men hid themselves, waiting to see what would transpire.
At around half-past nine there was the sound of whistling, and a man entered the enclosure surrounding the toilets, disappearing into the surrounding bushes. Watching from their hiding place, the detectives gave him a minute or two to settle and then, abandoning their cover, confronted a one-armed man clutching a rug, with a canvas bag and a sack at his feet. The man, who could have been a vagrant, or any itinerant worker picking up his swag before setting off on an inter-city tramp, was unable to come up with an explanation for his presence other than that he was about to doss down there for the night. The detectives conferred and decided that Detective Bailey would accompany the prisoner – taken in on a charge of vagrancy – to the police barracks and search his possessions. But Quirke, still in disguise, would resume his position and watch to see if the armless loiterer had an accomplice.19
Wilkinson was tardy. He eventually materialised out of the gloom at around 10.30 pm, fully an hour late for his rendezvous with McLoughlin. He, too, ventured into the bushes, gave a distinctive whistle and, when the signal was not answered, called out ‘Tom’ in a low voice. The detective approached him and engaged him in small talk. Wilkinson responded by asking whether Quirke had perhaps seen his one-armed mate hanging around the premises, at which point they were joined by Bailey, who had made his way back to the park. Making use of the hold-all clauses in the Vagrancy Act, they took Wilkinson, too, into custody and marched him down to the police station to join ‘Tom Kenny’.
Asked to account for their movements, Kenny stated that he had entered the country two months earlier. But in order to be able to account for his association with Wilkinson and place as much distance as possible between himself, India and South Africa, he claimed that he had come from America. Wilkinson, realising that his partnership with Kenny was likely to become problematic, immediately said that he was a member of the Rathdown’s crew – a fine counter to a charge of vagrancy in a city that never wanted for wandering sailors. It was the contents of Kenny’s canvas bag and sack, however, that were most difficult to explain away.
The detectives had little, if any, experience of dealing with safe-blasters. In a country more famous for its care of cattle and sheep than its prowess at excavation or mining, the possession of dynamite was not an offence.20 Laws, like criminals and those of other persuasions who choose to challenge them, follow the contours of political economy and colour the initial perceptions of both the police and the populace at large.
In New Zealand and India an Irishman carrying around explosives at this time was likely to be perceived as something of a curiosity rather than a serious long-term menace to society. On the lookout for itinerants and petty thieves rather than peripatetic professional criminals with global experience, the police did not know what to make of ‘Kenny’.21 His arrest triggered no detailed questions about his origins, his possible criminal antecedents, or what precisely he was doing in the country. Even the range and sophistication of his equipment left his interrogators bemused rather than puzzled. After his arrest police told an Auckland journalist that his burglar’s kit was ‘the most complete of the kind they have seen in a considerable time’; perhaps ever, one is inclined to think. The thought that Kenny might be a master blaster, let alone a man wanted for murder, never crossed the official mind. In keeping with time and place, Kenny and Wilkinson were charged with ‘vagrancy’ and of being ‘in possession of burglars’ implements’. Both men were remanded for eight days while the police continued looking just straight ahead.22
But the Imperial Eye, looking towards Dunedin, had already latched onto an incontrovertible detail that placed McLoughlin’s life in jeopardy from the moment he set foot in New Zealand. On 14 November, just four days after ‘Kenny’s’ arrest, the Otago Witness – which circulated freely across the South Island – ran an item lifted from the Auckland Star entitled ‘Arrest of Supposed Burglars’. Relaying the bizarre tale of a blackbird that had pointed the way to a cache of burglars’ tools, the report also drew attention to the fact that ‘Kenny had his right hand off at the wrist, and in one of the bags was found a dummy hand with a white glove on’.
A gloved prosthesis found in a park in Auckland was probably of only passing interest to readers in Dunedin. But those same readers’ networks were becoming rapidly globalised as they benefited from the cheap and expanding imperial postal system.23 At the far end of the southern hemisphere there were others who had reason to remember that a reward of £100 had been offered for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of a one-armed ‘outlaw’. On the South Island, somebody with family or friends in the Cape Colony who had an on-going interest in antipodean affairs, but whose name has been lost to history, was, quite unintentionally, about to activate an extraordinary connection between New Zealand and southern Africa.
A week or so after that edition of the Otago Witness had appeared a copy was rolled up, addressed to ‘Mr R Grieve, Dutoitspan Road, Kimberley’, stamped, and popped into the ‘overseas mail’.24 A trans-oceanic steamer lugged it to Cape Town, 6 000 miles away, from where, three weeks later, it was transported to the diamond fields by the overnight train. Mr Grieve was a careful reader who paid considerable attention to crime stories. He also knew, better than most, how to capture the undivided attention of the Imperial Eye.
Once of Durban, Grieve was a retired policeman. And like other former policemen, he was on the lookout for ways of supplementing a meagre pension. The item on ‘Kenny’ rang a bell. He thought about it for some time and then wrote a letter to the Commissioner of Police, Kimberley.25 It was a bit of a lottery, but he had reason to believe that, should he be proved correct, he would be in line for the reward. If ‘Tom Kenny’ was ‘One-armed Jack’ McLoughlin, he was also a fugitive, a Lancastrian who had murdered two British subjects in cold blood; one of whom – Mustaffa Hadji – also hailed from the Cape Colony. The Cape government, Secretary of State for the Colonies and the Imperial authorities would all have more than enough reason to pursue enquiries.
Back in Auckland, on 19 November 1895, eight weeks before Grieve approached the Commissioner of Police in Kimberley, ‘Kenny’ and Wilkinson were arraigned in the Police Court. The Stipendiary Magistrate, in his mid-forties, was HW Northcroft, who hailed from Essex, England, and who had been a ship’s captain before turning his attention to law and order. He knew how criminals functioned, and how ships and seamen operated whilst in port – the latter being most fortunate for Wilkinson.
The prosecutor had done his homework and called two locksmiths to provide expert opinion as to the nature of the tools found in ‘Kenny’s’ bags. But given nothing to work on by the detectives, he failed to lead any evidence about the explosives. McLoughlin, sensing a tough legal battle ahead, ‘reserved his defence’. Wilkinson, on the other hand, felt that the Magistrate was a man he could reason with. He went to great pains to explain the unusual situation that he had found himself in when the Rathdown had been hauled in for repairs, his difficulty in securing any back pay, and stressed how slight his acquaintance with ‘Kenny’ was.26
Northcroft had already formed an opinion about ‘Mr Kenny’, and was inclined to believe Wilkinson’s story. But he wanted more time to work through various depositions before pronouncing on the nature of Wilkinson’s relationship with the one-armed man. The hearing was adjourned until the following morning. On 20 November, the Magistrate found that there was insufficient evidence to proceed against Wilkinson and the prisoner was discharged. The case of ‘Tom Kenny’, however, would be placed on the roll for the next sitting of the Supreme Court.27
For all his experience, the Stipendiary Magistrate probably got Wilkinson wrong. Powerfully built, with a scar on his upper lip that spoke of a violent past, and a tattooed crucifix on each of his upper arms, Wilkinson may have been of Irish extraction, but he was born in India and grew up as a ‘mean white’ before going to sea. Like McLoughlin, he was just another bit of the human flotsam and jetsam of empire floating around the Pacific Rim – a man of the type that Joseph Conrad could conjure up in a few easy sentences. Only three weeks later Wilkinson was again arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment. Upon his release, in February 1896, the police remained sufficiently convinced of his potential to do serious harm to society to take the precaution of having him photographed, and when he eventually left the North Island by ship, had him tracked to Melbourne.28
During the eight weeks he spent in prison in Auckland, Butler Wilkinson did not want for company. He arrived at the prison, in Lauder Road, to find ‘Tom Kenny’ already there. Only days after Northcroft had referred his own case, ‘Kenny’ had appeared before Justice ET Conolly and a jury in the Supreme Court. On 3 December 1895, after conducting his own defence, ‘Kenny’ was found guilty of possessing ‘housebreaking instruments’ and sentenced to ‘twelve calendar months imprisonment, with hard labour at the common gaol’.29
* * *
McLoughlin looked back on the time spent at Mount Eden as a mere interruption of the sort a gentleman might encounter while travelling abroad. He was, he said many years later – avoiding the words ‘imprisoned’ or ‘jailed’ – ‘detained’ while passing through the country, on his way to Australia.30 The truth of the matter was that his detour through ‘paradise’ had turned sour and was set to get worse. At the far end of the Indian Ocean two more, seemingly unrelated, developments were about to unleash forces that would draw the attention of the Imperial Eye and drag his fate in directly opposing directions. In the enforced silence of Mount Eden Prison, part of which was still under construction and coming to fruition along Benthamite lines, it took time for him to learn about struggles that owed their momentum to a report in the Otago Witness on the one hand, and a short doctor with overblown imperial ambitions on the other.
On 29 January 1896, the Attorney-General of the Cape Colony, Thomas Upington, acting on the suggestion forwarded to him two weeks earlier by the Commissioner of Police, Kimberley, penned a short note to his counterpart in the South African Republic, HJ Coster. In keeping with the emerging spirit of regional solidarity among southern African states, Upington alerted the State Attorney in Pretoria to the report in the Witness, suggesting that the one-armed man might be McLoughlin.31 It took the Kruger government the better part of six months before it was in a position to respond officially to this collegial nudge from the south.32
There were good reasons for the delay in getting back to Thomas Upington – not least that between 29 December 1895 and 2 January 1896, the Kruger government had had to see off an armed invasion. Mounted forces led by Dr LS Jameson had attempted to connect with a failed popular uprising in Johannesburg contrived by a ‘Reform Committee’ controlled by the mine owners.33 Behind Jameson, however, lay the arch-imperialist and Cape Premier, Cecil Rhodes, and beyond him, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain. The repercussions of a failed coup d´état were felt throughout the region and in Whitehall. Under the circumstances the Kruger administration did well to respond to Upington at all. When it did do so, it retained its focus on the need for justice in a case that revolved around the murder of two British subjects by a third, and at a time when diplomatic relations between the countries were under severe strain.
As part of an attempt to persuade Upington to use his good offices with the imperial government to get the suspect extradited and tried, the republican authorities obtained a new sworn statement from one of the witnesses to the shootings at the Red Lion. They also reissued a warrant for McLoughlin’s arrest. The fact that the prima facie case they presented focused on the murder of a coloured man, Hadji Mustaffa, rather than that of George Stevenson, may not have been devoid of political purpose. It nevertheless testified to the seriousness of the Boer government’s intent. Moreover, in arguments made via the Cape Attorney-General and the British Agent, Kruger’s law officers reminded imperial authorities that, despite the absence of a formal extradition treaty between the South African Republic and the United Kingdom, Pretoria had, in the recent past, not only handed over two suspects wanted for ordinary common law offences to the British, but had allowed Jameson to proceed to London so that he might stand trial there.34
Persuaded by the pertinence of these arguments, Upington convinced his cabinet colleagues to take up the cudgels on Pretoria’s behalf. The Cape government, despite Rhodes’s resignation, may still have been sufficiently embarrassed by his involvement in the Jameson Raid to consider it its duty to be as helpful as possible. But, because Kruger went through State Attorneys at the same speed as he did pipe tobacco, Upington warned the Acting State Attorney that while he was supportive, there was no telling what the attitude of the Imperial Government might be.35
This promising development, late in May 1895, when McLoughlin had already served half his sentence, triggered a round of petty bureaucratic haggling. At issue was who exactly should bear the cost of sending a telegram to New Zealand. The Imperial Budget, it seemed, had to be sure to balance before the Imperial Eye could be induced to scan the wider world in pursuit of justice for two dead men. Two months later, Kruger’s cabinet – steadfast in its unwillingness to be deflected by red tape – agreed to cover any costs that might be incurred as a result of McLoughlin being extradited from the antipodes.36
Imperial protocol ensured that it was early August before the High Commissioner in South Africa got around to sending a coded telegram to the Governor of New Zealand, Lord Glasgow. Glasgow was asked to determine whether ‘Kenny’ was McLoughlin, and to confirm the latter’s presence in Auckland. But much to Governor Glasgow’s annoyance, the telegram used two words – ‘coralfish’ and ‘hamites’ – the former being a reference to the Kruger government, and the latter the South African Republic, that did not appear in his current copy of the code. He nevertheless managed to make sense of the communication reasonably easily and then proceeded to make a few discreet official enquiries.37
A few weeks later McLoughlin – by then with only 10 weeks of his sentence left to run – learned that his presence in New Zealand was known in Pretoria. Prison authorities quizzed him about his past and he suddenly realised that there was a possibility that he might be extradited to stand trial for murder. He refused to answer to the name McLoughlin and spun them a tale about his being a miner – his missing hand testifying to an accident – and a ‘native of Ireland’. But they were only half taken in. On 16 September, they suddenly re-classified him as ‘a dangerous criminal’, made a note of tattoos on his upper arms, and had him photographed.38 All of this impressed upon him the need for sticking to the name ‘Dell’ or ‘Kenny’, and making certain that he got out of the country as soon as possible after his scheduled release in December.
But, unbeknownst to him, ‘McLoughlin’ was about to be let off the hook. Joseph Chamberlain, personally implicated in the Raid, was in no mood to accommodate a Kruger government that had left its British counterpart – and him in particular – embarrassed if not humiliated. When the Governor of New Zealand, having solicited the advice of local legal practitioners as to whether or not ‘Kenny alias McLoughlin’ (not ‘McLoughlin alias Kenny’) might be legally extradited, passed on the wisdom of the wigged-ones to the Secretary for the Colonies, Chamberlain, with access to an office budget that did cover the cost of telegraphing, instantly wired the response: ‘Her Majesty’s Government do not desire the Government of New Zealand to act contrary to the opinion of their legal advisers.’39
On 20 November 1896, Glasgow responded to the High Commissioner in Cape Town, informing him of Chamberlain’s response, and he, in turn, passed on copies of the correspondence to the long-suffering Kruger administration. The Governor of New Zealand was of the view that, since ‘Kenny’ was already being held for another offence, ‘the law of this Colony would not sanction the arrest or surrender of the criminal McLoughlin or Kenny as requested by His Honour, the President of the Transvaal Republic’ (sic).
In his earlier correspondence with Chamberlain, however, Glasgow had gone even further and advised the Secretary for the Colonies that ‘Kenny’, who at that time was still in prison, ‘should now be discharged therefrom as I understand he has earned remission of sentence for which he was convicted at Auckland’. On 26 November, two weeks earlier than the previously scheduled date for his release from Mount Eden Prison, and with his status as a ‘dangerous criminal’ newly confirmed, a bemused ‘Kenny’ was suddenly set free.40
A fit of political petulance, occasioned by the far-off misadventures of mining capitalists set on extending the indirect control of the British empire in an independent Boer republic, had caused the Imperial Eye to be averted. But it had done so at the cost of pursuing justice – not only for victims supposedly under the protection of Westminster-Whitehall, but also for the one-armed man accused of murdering them. Between the capriciousness of international law and politics on the one hand, and the careers of great men who had gambled on their reputations on the other, was a half-broken man reduced to scurrying around the outer margins of the empire under an assumed identity, uncertain as to whether or not he was wanted on a charge of murder. Chamberlain and Glasgow, adducing high principle while ostensibly serving justice, had taken it upon themselves to inflict an indeterminate sentence of banishment on a fugitive so as to ensure that their imperial enemies, intent only on seeing due process in a case that involved no subjects of their own, were denied the smallest measure of satisfaction in a deadly political contest.