CHAPTER NINE
The Frontiers of Gold and Beyond
EUREKA CITY AND DELAGOA BAY
— 1861–1887 —
Men have a touchstone whereby to try gold, but gold is the touchstone whereby to try men.
By 1886, Barberton was briefly resurgent, lifted by income derived from properties owned by the Sheba Reef Gold Mining Company. A reef mine, as opposed to the older alluvial workings in the northern and eastern parts of the South African Republic, offered some hope of permanency. Just 12 months later, however, the town’s fortunes started taking a turn for the worse and some journalists were already looking back on the good old days with nostalgia. Back then, one scribbler noted, the hills around the town:
… were alive with noise and industry. Sunday was no day of rest, the nights were simply a period of darkness, not a season for repose. Day and night there was one continuous volley of blasting. If a man wanted employment there it was at hand and he could fix his own remuneration.1
In 1886, the town still had 1 000 white residents, mostly miners, while twice that number of blacks laboured in its sole industry. Pioneering entrepreneurs destined to leave their mark on South African history, including Abe Bailey, Percy Fitzpatrick and Sammy Marks, took a close interest in the town’s small stock exchange and possibly big future.
Not all newcomers had an interest in securing long-term employment, however. John O’Brien, who had arrived early, had talked his way into the police. During his off-duty hours, he took up positions along the surrounding migrant labour routes, intercepting black workers making their way back to Mozambique or Swaziland. He demanded to see their passes before relieving them of their savings. McLoughlin later claimed that this shoddy trick earned O’Brien as much as £30 a day.2
WJ Kelly, John Wiggins and McLoughlin were soon employed on the mines. There they served the informal apprenticeships that later provided them with plausible cover as ‘miners’ during criminal careers on the Highveld. More importantly, they learned how to handle, store and use dynamite. McLoughlin posed as a ‘riveter’; Wiggins eventually moved to Kimberley where he worked briefly on the diamond fields, and WJ Kelly for a time even managed a small gold mine on the Witwatersrand.3
Barberton, for all its bars and a few famous prostitutes such as ‘Cockney Liz’, was of interest to the deserters only over the weekend, or when they had acquired money through other means.4 Most of their day-to-day activities were focused around the Sheba Mine, 10 miles beyond Barberton, which could only be reached by passing through the thickly wooded Elephant’s Kloof. There, at the top of a hill, away from the fevers that raged in the valley below, and in true ‘Wild West’ fashion, a classic frontier settlement had sprung up from nothing late in 1885.5
Eureka City reached its peak in 1886, the same year that the wild men from Fort Napier materialised out of the bush. By then it boasted three shops, a bakery, a chemist, a dairy, and a European population of more than 500.6 For a moment, it looked as if it might come to rival state-favoured Barberton in importance. More importantly for those who had been raised in working-class cities back in England, Eureka also housed three hotels, several bars, a music hall and a racecourse serving a new community intent, in large part, on denying that it was in, or of, Africa. On Saturday nights, once the miners had poured out of the surrounding hills, there were often 1 000 men and a few women out on the streets of Eureka.7
Frontier justice and racial segregation were easier to enforce in small ‘mining camps’ dominated by English-speakers such as those at Eureka City or in nearby Steynsdorp, in the Komati Valley, than in established centres such as Johannesburg or Kimberley. Thomas Neale, a prominent storekeeper and Justice of the Peace in Eureka, sentenced a black labourer found guilty of desertion from a mining company to 25 lashes. The whipping was to be administered by a ‘kafir servant’ using a ‘substantial sjambok’, the victim ‘laid upon a barrel for the purpose’. ‘This sort of justice,’ a correspondent for the Gold Fields Times opined, ‘is the very thing required in such a place.’8 Eureka City’s residents, however, were not always content to wait on the Justice of the Peace.
Over a few months, in 1887, African miners started congregating at a few makeshift huts in the bushes half-way down the hill from Eureka to enjoy home-brewed beer and the sexual services of a half-dozen black women. The resulting debauchery, mirroring in part what was occurring on the ridge above, outraged sufficient whites to raise a party of vigilantes that burnt down the offending huts and ‘gave those occupants they could catch a good basting’.9 When two black domestic workers murdered their employers in Steynsdorp, in 1888, the underlying logic was taken to a classic, albeit unusual, conclusion. A party of English-speakers worked itself up into a full-frontier lather, invaded the jail and then lynched the alleged offenders even before they could be tried.10
The Fort Napier Irish, deserters-turned-miners, both informed and reflected the lawless and murderous behaviour of a frontier setting where there was often very little to distinguish law enforcers from law breakers.11 For several weeks they dominated the less salubrious drinking dens during their off-duty hours. For those with a passion for fighting, gambling and the horses – which was most of them – race days held an irresistible attraction. The Victoria Hotel, half-way along the three-furlong racecourse, became an obvious meeting place for the Irish.
It was also in Eureka City, where the ex-Fort Napier men constituted an ethnically distinct, highly disruptive and very visible element, that the deserters were first characterised as being members of an ‘Irish Brigade’. Whether the designation was partly self-generated, in tribute to the 64th Lancashire Rifle Volunteers, a regiment which back home was notorious for its Fenian sympathies, is unknown. It was more likely that the name was pinned on them by resentful Englishmen smarting from political barbs emanating from Irishmen with republican sympathies.12
What is clearer in retrospect, however, is that the Irish Brigade was almost always viewed as being antisocial and criminal while it was based in the countryside, in smaller communities, where the class structure was ‘flat’ and no great distance separated the richest from the poorest. It was only later, once the Brigade relocated to the Witwatersrand, where collective action was circumscribed and its membership exposed to the alienation associated with urbanisation, that the behaviour of its leaders became more difficult to characterise. In Johannesburg, where an economic abyss separated a few dozen ‘Randlords’ from thousands of ordinary white miners, it was much easier for McLoughlin and one or two others to emerge as men with more complex identities – including characteristics that are now associated with ‘social bandits’.13
There was a shallow crossing at Fever Creek that flowed through the lowest reaches of Elephant’s Kloof, marking the start of the road climbing its way up to Eureka City and the Queen of Sheba Hotel above. It offered highwaymen an ideal point at which to mount ambushes. In late 1886 through to early 1887 several men – black and white – were held up at gunpoint and robbed of their possessions.14 The men of the Irish Brigade were probably not the first or the last to sense that, on the frontier, the worlds of fiction and fact could be brought into closer alignment. ‘Masculinities,’ it has rightly been suggested, ‘are lived out in the flesh, but fashioned in the imagination.’15 Ned Kelly himself said that his favourite book was Blackmoore’s Lorna Doone, a novel set in seventeenth-century Exmoor, replete with tales of deep family rivalries and outlaws.16
A fertile imagination and ability to link theory to practice distinguished the leader of the Irish Brigade from lesser mortals. Hutchings, preferring the name Hutchinson, already had ambitions beyond the roadside lottery of casual hold-ups. Two smoothly executed coach robberies in the De Kaap Valley were attributed to him and armed accomplices. On each occasion £1 000 in cash and bullion belonging to the bank and mining companies was removed from horse-drawn coaches operated by Gibson Brothers. Here, too, the tales were perhaps re-fashioned so as to fit more readily with the romanticised images of Dick Turpin executing eighteenth-century highway robberies. The De Kaap Valley robbers, it was later claimed, displayed the utmost courtesy while fleecing the passengers and were particularly respectful of the ladies.17
This sentimentalised view of the Fort Napier highwaymen probably tells us more about Anglophone cultures, the coding of historical memory and story-telling than it does about the Irish Brigade. It is at variance with what we know about their behaviour as recorded elsewhere, which was almost always boorish, drunken and destructive. Indeed, it was their propensity to behave badly in a small industrial community – unlike ‘social bandits’ who retreated back into the countryside to find refuge among the peasants they were drawn from – that proved their undoing.
In late February 1887, some of the more restless elements in the Brigade, chafing beneath the weak bonds of the calendar and industrial discipline, abandoned what was threatening to become a humdrum existence. After the usual weekend drinking at Sherwood’s ‘Queen of Sheba’ and neighbouring public houses they were too bored, drunk, or exhausted by Sunday night to crawl back to the surrounding mines. To the dismay of the inhabitants, they stayed on in un-policed Eureka City and a week’s mayhem ensued.
Thomas Neale, the only man with the power to recruit and swear in special constables, was unable or unwilling to enforce order in or around the hotels and shops worst affected by the drunken rioting. Seen from one angle, the Brigade members were just like redcoats who, on their return from bush patrol, had collected their back-pay and gone on the spree in Pietermaritzburg. Seen from another, they were an occupying force of Irish renegades who, although lacking the discipline and purpose of Ned Kelly and his gang, had seized control of a hamlet which in their drunken imaginations may have equated to Euroa, Jerilderie or Glenrowan. But in truth, they were more like bandit-raiders in the old Wild West who had suddenly taken occupation of a small frontier town. There were assaults, bar-room brawls, damage to property, thefts and threats made to vulnerable retailers who refused to provide the brigands with the credit or goods they demanded. All three wood-and-iron hotels were wrecked.18
The fact that several of the businesses were Jewish-owned may not have helped. Although their status as ‘Irishmen’, ‘Catholics’ or ‘Nationalists’ may all have been open to question, members of the Brigade, like others on the goldfields, were unlikely to have resisted an undercurrent of anti-Semitism flowing through the new mining centres.
Neale watched and waited. Only towards the week’s end, on Sunday morning, when he discovered that the shutters to his own shop had been removed in an interrupted attempt at store-breaking, did he act. He saddled his horse and rode across to Barberton to summon the help of the ZAR mounted police. McLoughlin and the raiders saw him depart and realised that he would be returning to the one-horse town with the republican police. The Irish then did as most bandits do when given the opportunity of avoiding a direct engagement with the law.19
The Brigade withdrew, making its way down the hill through dense bush and invading the first encampment it encountered. It was a classic military retreat. There, they forced their company on reluctant white miners for the night. But, even before they settled down for some sleep, a gold watch went missing, further alienating the Irish from their reluctant hosts.
An uncomfortable night on the ground, without beds, after an alcohol-ravaged week, left Brigade members disgruntled and resentful. The following morning, unable to return to their own camps for fear of betrayal and arrest, the full extent of a self-created predicament slowly dawned on them. They were on their own, marooned among the English, without friends or social cover. They were also broke, tired and exceptionally hungry. There was nothing to lose. It was a situation that a well-trained British officer recognised all too readily. Leading from the front, Hutchings rallied his troops, preparing them for a frontal attack.
They forced their way into the kitchen, seized the breakfast prepared for miners going on shift and scoffed it. When challenged by some brave soul intent on resisting, the deserters reverted to the feral behaviour of ‘scuttlers’ and ‘almost smashed his head in’. ‘Not satisfied with hammering him with their fists,’ they ‘threw him down and jumped on his head, and other parts of his body.’ It was a murderous assault. Mission accomplished and hunger satisfied, the Brigade then withdrew.20
Outrage in the mining camp spurred on Neale and the mounted Zarps, who redoubled their efforts to capture the elusive renegades. Looking back, the situation was replete with the type of insanity characteristic of a frontier zone in the Age of Empire. Neale, an unlovable English Justice of the Peace presiding over a one-street village grandiosely named ‘Eureka City’ was in command of the Afrikaner troops of a Boer Republic. Together, they were pursuing a band of second-generation, low-life, would-be ‘Irish’ nationalists who had been raised in the far-off industrial world and deserted from the British Army. And the entire episode played itself out in part of what was a former African domain. The world was being turned upside down.
Showing the stubbornness success is born of, Neale’s posse pursued the deserters who, adopting guerrilla-like tactics, retreated ever further into the surrounding hills and bush. Neale never stopped tracking them, but by the time he caught up with them Hutchings and most of his fellow deserters had, like men born to brigandage, slipped across the border. The South African Republic’s back door to Delagoa Bay was, as ever, wide open. The lesson was not lost on Jack McLoughlin and the three other stragglers that Neale did manage to arrest – John Carroll (under the alias ‘John Berry’), Dwyer (‘John Jones’) and one ‘William Smith’ (probably William Hankins or Henkins).21
The four appeared before the Landdrost in Barberton a few days later. They were charged with contravening Article 69 of the Constitution of the Republic – rather than more prosaic criminal charges that would have required considerable prosecutorial resources if they were to be pursued in the presence of witnesses likely to be suborned. McLoughlin and Dwyer, the supposed ringleaders in the absence of Hutchings, were found guilty and each sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour. But the Magistrate, aware that he was dealing with cross-border bandits and a potential menace to the country, added a rider to the sentence to the effect that: ‘upon expiry of their sentence [the convicts were] to be sent back to their respective corps, from which they are believed to have deserted’. This provision, perhaps unenforceable, was never implemented. It was an omission that the ZAR was later to rue. Dwyer, unable to resist a parting shot drawn from an Irish, scuttling, Manchester working-class repertoire, ‘directed an insulting expression’ at the Magistrate ‘for which he was brought back and sentenced to some days’ spare diet and solitary confinement’.22
Once the Irish horses had bolted for Delagoa Bay the ZAR government acted to ensure that the stable door remained shut. Neale, who had pleaded unsuccessfully for additional police protection over several months, was the moving force behind the formation of the new ‘Eureka Mounted Rifles’.23 It was to be the first, but not the last time in southern Africa that the arrival of the Irish Brigade in town necessitated an augmented police force or heralded a radical reorganisation of the old.
The Barberton jail, constructed on frugal lines as specified by a government that believed the future of the republic lay on the land rather than beneath it, was a ramshackle affair. It already housed one or two other Fort Napier graduates and was unlikely to have won the respect of McLoughlin, who had experience of one of the most modern prisons in the world.24 He and Dwyer, high-risk convicts, would have been kept under lock and key, unlike petty offenders who were allowed out during the day and often slept on the veranda at night. At a time when Brigade members considered attempting to escape to be de rigueur, the two paid the authorities the unintended compliment of serving out their full sentences. In McLoughlin’s case, however, this may have come at a price, because he set his mind against further incarceration. When he and Dwyer were eventually set free, in September 1887, they made their way out through the back door and headed for Delagoa Bay, where Hutchings – styling himself ‘Muldoon’ – was transforming the South Lancashire deserters into railway navvies.
* * *
Contrary to those propagandists of empire who by the mid-1890s were encouraging Britain to appropriate southern Africa’s mineral-rich plateau, governments in Pretoria had never set their minds against industrialisation. Indeed, as the same ante bellum critics never tired of pointing out, members of the Boer elite were never averse to the acquisition of personal wealth. Pretoria’s Protestants had never rejected capitalism – what they did reject was the development of a form of capitalism in which an unregulated primary industry became paramount. What the Kruger government feared was that the state, rooted in the land, would be overwhelmed by a foreign-owned mining industry served by a numerically preponderant semi-skilled, immigrant European labour force backed by tens of thousands of urban black workers. What the Boer elite wished for was a balanced economy, one in which commercial agriculture profited directly from new, urban, industrial markets in ways that did not unnecessarily jeopardise their own historically privileged access to the unlimited supplies of cheap, black, rurally based labour.25
The basis of this economic policy was laid in the 1860s; that is, after the discovery of diamonds and the initial development of inland markets, but before the unearthing of the major gold deposits beyond the Vaal in the 1880s. An early indication of Boer enterprise and the elite’s fear of imperial encroachment came in the 1870s when President Burgers set about trying to construct a railway line linking Pretoria to Delagoa Bay. But the project, lacking the catalytic input of mineral wealth, had floundered and the imported rails were left to rust in far-off places as the ZAR slouched toward de facto, if not de jure bankruptcy in the 1870s.
The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 changed all that. Gold was to become the Bank of England’s guarantor of the last resort for Britain’s growing international trade. Westminster realised that southern Africa would never be the same after the emergence of Johannesburg, but it was the City that acted on the promise. In 1887, Colonel Edward McMurdo, an American who had acquired a concession to operate a railway between Lourenço Marques and Komatipoort on the eastern border of the ZAR, sold his rights to the London-based, grandiosely named Delagoa Bay and East African Railway Company.26
The company, working in the tightly networked City, awarded the contract to construct the line to Pauling Brothers, who appointed Sir Thomas Tancred as their chief engineer. It was a pleasantly English arrangement, but out in Africa, Sir Thomas discovered that he had to make do with such raw talent as could be recruited locally. Among those appointed to look after the administrative and clerical staff that serviced the projects was a curious ex-Dubliner, journalist and soldier, Barry Roonan, who took a close interest in the lives of the navvies and black workers.
The aim of the subcontractor was to get the unskilled work done as cheaply as possible using locally recruited African labour. But black workers, for the most part, lacked experience of industrial labour. When called upon to undertake demanding manual labour in a notoriously unhealthy environment at low wages, Africans proved to be ‘unreliable’ or of ‘limited use’. Pauling Brothers knew that much of the infrastructure for the Industrial Revolution – bridges, canals and railways – had been laid down by Irishmen with strong bodies and a poor education.27 Irish navvies enjoyed an unsurpassed reputation when it came to rail construction and Tancred must have longed for their services. Then, not long after the fracas at Eureka City, in walked between 20 and 50 deserters from the South Lancashire and other regiments. They were soon followed by more white flotsam and jetsam drawn from the mines up-country.28 A more cost-effective plan was quickly formulated and the ratio of white to black labour employed on the project suddenly changed.
Most of the Irish Brigade, still under the unofficial command of Hutchings (who was by now calling himself ‘Muldoon’) was absorbed into a labour force presided over by an unnamed revolver-toting ‘brute’. McLoughlin, stronger in mind and muscle after labour on public works at Barberton, joined his comrades in September, just as the white workers were being re-organised. In a move designed to minimise conflict but that may unintentionally have strengthened old ‘tribal’ animosities, Muldoon was put in charge of the ‘Irish’ navvies. A Christian innocent by the name of Buck Williams headed up a small contingent of American workers, while another murderous brute, remembered only as ‘Kentish Jack’, took charge of the English, who, on the day, could be as savage as the next.29
The importance of harnessing ethnic solidarities to working parties as the line of rail crept across the lowlands of Delagoa Bay and then inland towards the hills of Komatipoort impressed itself on McLoughlin’s mind. It was later claimed that a workman who had died of malaria or some other cause lay buried beneath every sleeper along the line. The querulous Irish appear to have retained their social cohesiveness during the coastal sojourn. They may have fought with others, but among them, a truce reigned. At a practical level, McLoughlin extended his skills as a metal worker and ‘riveter’; thereafter it became his chosen profession whenever asked by police in southern Africa to state his ‘occupation’.
Two further skills acquired during four months of railway construction may have been even more important for his subsequent career. First, mastering lifting techniques that allowed for the moving of exceptionally heavy objects, such as rails, proved most useful. Second, he became even more accustomed to handling explosives.
This familiarity with dynamite came at a time when Irish nationalists in England were exploiting the destructive power of explosives to deadly effect. In Salford, in 1881, and in London, in 1885, the Irish Republican Army had used dynamite as their weapon of choice in a campaign of terror. In southern Africa, a mining-dynamite heaven, members of the Brigade were equally excited about the destructive power of explosives. But alienation and lower levels of consciousness meant that they were more interested in harnessing its potential to criminal than to political projects. All that was necessary for them to close the gap between criminal and political activities, however, and be seen as ‘social bandits’, was ‘English’ targets. Only a few months later, the Witwatersrand would provide them with the ideal setting to effect precisely such a transition.
In Delagoa Bay, informal on-the-job training for those with criminal inclinations was supplemented by off-the-job experiences that shored up developing attitudes and behaviour. Free transport up and down the line on working days, and back into Lourenço Marques on paydays at the end of the working week, facilitated unexpected outcomes. Brigade members became increasingly familiar with trains and later demonstrated a robust contempt for any officials tasked with charging for or examining tickets.
Paydays saw a marked increase in social tension in the port. Navvies returned to town, celebrating the end of the working week, and spent, if not all, then most of their wages. As already noted, Lourenço Marques offered an emergency exit for criminals from across the region trying to make their way to Europe or, when all was lost, to Australia, India or the Far East. WJ Kelly, who went on to become a bank robber on the Witwatersrand, was just one of those who learnt which shady dealers were willing to exchange or export illegally acquired cash or gemstones.
* * *
In Lourenço Marques, nothing was as it seemed. The town was a mess of ambiguities, contradictions and paradoxes that fed into a climate of uncertainty. Quotidian realities were compounded and re-shaped by political undercurrents sweeping the shoreline. Although the Portuguese were officially in control of the bay and harbour facilities, everyone knew that the most powerful influence at work in the port was the British Consul. Britain was taking an increasing interest in the southern African interior and Delagoa Bay. The Portuguese authorities began to fear that if Lourenço Marques was not to be sold outright, it might be annexed by imperial force despite the fact that Portugal was Britain’s oldest ally.30
Portugal responded by maintaining a naval presence in the Bay. It also bolstered the police force in an attempt to exercise more control over 200 unruly navvies whose sympathies could be guessed at. Additional, untrained, African police were brought in from West African outposts and commanded by a few junior officers sent from Lisbon. With international tension mounting, a few Irish nationalists in the Brigade saw the chance to embarrass the English and humiliate the Portuguese.
The arrival of a Portuguese gunboat in the bay presented Hutchings, the most politically conscious member of the Brigade, with the opportunity he was looking for. Despite its still metamorphosing half-Australian, half-Irish provenance, Hutchings took on the name ‘Captain Moonlight’ as his nom de guerre. Setting aside the sexual undertones of a name that McLoughlin, WJ Kelly and others would have been familiar with, Hutchings laid down his challenge to the Portuguese authorities. ‘In eccentric English on beer-stained paper,’ he crafted a hand-written challenge to the Governor. ‘The Hirish savages up the Line,’ he wrote, will bust your fort and your tin-pot gunboat tomorrer Nite. Lock up your greasy reis [milreis being the local currency] and keep away from our headquarters at Berg’s Hotell. Capt. Moonlight.’31 The Governor and the military, sensing payday mayhem in the making, took it in, hook, line and sinker.
Every policeman, soldier and sailor in Lourenço Marques – including most of those on the gunboat – was placed on alert. Specially designated platoons were instructed to stake out the Hotel Allemande. The authorities believed that, in the face of overwhelming numbers, the Irish would be intercepted and arrested long before they could undertake any drunken midnight mission in town, or worse, out in the bay. But the Governor had done precisely what the opposing Captain by Moonlight had warned him not to do and deployed all his forces around the hotel.
As night fell, Hutchings’ troops entered the Hotel Allemande through the front door. But inside, all but three, who were left to stage a drunken diversion in the pub, clambered out of a rear window, split up, made their way back down to the harbour and regrouped. They commandeered a few boats and rowed out to the under-manned Portuguese gunboat where they easily overpowered a few hapless guards. They then systematically worked their way through the ship’s wine locker. Back at Hotel Hollow, the Portuguese waited for the navvies, suitably fortified, to emerge. Out in the bay, the wine locker had done its work. By the time the Irish abandoned the gunboat, it ‘wore an unkempt look, the flag of Portugal was reversed from the bowsprit to the stays, and diverse articles were protruding from the muzzles of the guns, from which the tompions had been removed’.32 The mortifying rout was completed when the Governor’s armed forced belatedly entered the hotel only to discover that they had been decoyed by just three drunken Irishmen.
A torrent of diplomatic notes between Lisbon and London ensued. But in a word-war where neither of the principal parties could exercise control over wild Irish nationalists working on a project that had been sanctioned in the City, it eventually blew over. ‘Captain Moonlight’, however, emerged with his reputation enhanced and boasted that, on the night in question, he could have taken the entire city if he chose to.33
The failure of the port authorities to discipline or prosecute the Irish only encouraged Moonlight and his troops to look around for other ways of inflicting damage on the hated English and ineffectual Portuguese. The time was ripe for a new outrage because members of the Brigade were preparing for demobilisation as their contracts ended, and getting ready to leave Mozambique and move back up-county. They got their chance in early December 1887, when the ever-alert Hutchings overheard a conversation in which the catering arrangements for the handing-over ceremony of the line at the border town of Komatipoort were discussed.
On 13 December, a day set aside for a three-way international celebration that included officials from the ZAR, the train carrying Sir Thomas Tancred up to Komatipoort was unexpectedly flagged down. It was boarded by an Irish Brigade contingent and a hogshead of beer commandeered. By the time that the next train came through – the one carrying the bulk of the food and drink destined for the official opening – the beer was gone. The second train, too, was looted and limped into Komatipoort without sustenance for the waiting guests. Tancred, livid, sent a telegram to Lourenço Marques demanding the arrest of the banditti.34 But the port authorities, who suspected that the same Brigade members were responsible for the murder of two West African policemen only weeks earlier, thought better of it. The navvies were allowed to leave as and when they chose. It took them a month – and their departure from Mozambique, while welcome, was not pretty.
Roonan, who entertained the lowest opinion of the Irish-Lancastrians, portrayed them as irredeemably antisocial. They were men, he wrote, who were capable of ‘anything from robbing a church to manslaughter without provocation’.35 These were telling examples. On their way to the Witwatersrand – armed and mounted as befitted brigands on the move – the Irish held up travellers and storekeepers at will.
On 23 January 1888, Jack McLoughlin celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday on the road to Johannesburg. Barring bouts of heavy drinking, he was a man at the peak of his mental and physical powers. Short and stout, the quintessential hard man, his sexual preference was difficult to determine but he steered clear of white working-class women, preferring the company of prostitutes. He was more assertive and confident than he had been as a younger man and had developed an even greater contempt for cowards and informers. Freed from the influence of Hutchings, who had peeled-off from the Brigade to resume life in Barberton, McLoughlin was left with more room to demonstrate his own abilities as a possible Irish Brigade leader.
The army, mines and railways had not only trained him how to use guns and dynamite more intelligently, but also how to work heavy metal – and, from experience gained first in Ancoats and then in Australia, he already knew how to mount modest criminal operations. He had served his apprenticeship and was ready to assume his position as a gang leader in a frontier town overcome with gold fever. It seemed clear that he was more than ready for Johannesburg. Question was, was it ready for him?