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Inspector Littlechild said that on Saturday 7 April he and Sergeant Melville and other police officers took Curtin into custody (without explanation) in Euston Square as he made his way towards the station. They all took a four-wheeler to Scotland Yard.

When they got there Superintendent Williamson asked Curtin for his story. He claimed to be living at 11 Upper Woburn Place, and to have come from New York where he lived at 301 East 59th Street. He had crossed the Atlantic to Queenstown, then travelled to Glasgow where he had worked at a shipyard; he had arrived in London the Thursday before.

He was taken to Bow Street and charged, and proved to have money in pounds and dollars. He denied knowing any of the others. He was shown a letter with his signature on it addressed to one of the Gallagher brothers; the letter had been taken from Gallagher's room at the Charing Cross Hotel. (Littlechild asserted that when they met, Curtin and Gallagher shook hands in mutual recognition.) While Curtin was interviewed at Scotland Yard Melville returned to the hotel in Upper Woburn Place and searched Curtin's room. In a portmanteau he found a couple of shirts labelled ‘Kent'.

The case continued at the Old Bailey in June. All the big guns were there: the Lord Chief Justice, the Attorney General, Colonel Majendie (‘Her Majesty's Inspector of Explosives') and representatives of the Royal Irish Constabulary, among others. The prisoners were ‘taken from and brought to the court under a strong guard of mounted police'. The stage was set. Against this sombre background, it would have been hard to convince a jury of their innocence.

A man Curtin had worked with in Glasgow confirmed the story that he had worked there in a shipyard.

Ansburgh was brought before the court and Littlechild described his arrest at Savage's Hotel, 38 Blackfriars Road. The accused – Ansburgh – cross-examined Melville. Hadn't Melville told him (Ansburgh) that if he turned Queen's evidence he would get off, and pick up a £500 reward into the bargain? Melville denied it strongly. It would never occur to him to say such a thing. Ansburgh said ‘You are a notorious liar.'

Melville was making a reputation, of a kind. All the same, Ansburgh was acquitted and so was Gallagher's brother.

Within a few weeks Melville and Kate would suffer a tragedy all too common in late Victorian England.

They had moved to Brixton. It was a more convenient commute than the house in Liverpool Street, Walworth. They were living – with a toddler of three, a one-year-old baby and another due at the end of June – in Tunstall Road. It was only a hundred yards from the railway station and a good train service to Victoria and Scotland Yard, and conveniently for Kate it was next door to the Bon Marché, another South London emporium.

When Kate Melville was due to have her baby they arranged for Margaret Gertie, who was nearly four, to go and stay with relatives in East London near the Royal Victoria Docks. Whether, as seems likely, they made this decision because with two tiny children at home already Kate would otherwise have too many to handle, or whether it was because Margaret Gertie had suspected scarlet fever and must be removed on medical advice, is unknown. But by the end of June scarlet fever had taken hold and the little girl was living at 31 Barnwood Road, Plaistow, in the O'Halloran household. Mr O'Halloran was her uncle, presumably the husband of Kate's sister.
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Scarlet fever is an infection which was in those days untreatable, although most children recovered from it. It usually meant a throat infection, and always a fever and a nasty skin rash. It could take hold and reach a peak within a week. In Brixton on 3 July, Kate gave birth to William John, and Margaret died on the same day.

In the spring, Edward Jenkinson had been brought to London for a short stay to co-ordinate anti-Fenian activities from a temporary office in the Admiralty. He kept one eye on his key informer from New York, a binge drinker called ‘Red Jim' McDermott, whose cover would be blown in the course of the summer and who would narrowly escape being shot by an Irish assassin. McDermott had been sent to England to initiate bogus bomb plots financed by money from Earl Spencer's fund, administered by Jenkinson.
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Jenkinson was never happier than when dreaming up entrapment operations of this kind. He was not impressed by the Yard men and still less by Anderson, and treated all of them with disdain. He profited from his moment of glory following the Dynamite Conspiracy arrests to insist that Fenian intelligence could not be adequately handled by disparate agencies. It needed one man (himself) to whom all would report, and who would have full control.

Harcourt knew that it would be politically unacceptable to put an official secret police chief in charge. Instead, by the end of the summer Jenkinson had become controller of Irish counter-terrorism in America, Ireland and continental Europe. On his recommendation Major Nicholas Gosselin looked after the same thing in cities like Birmingham and Manchester.

Jenkinson was a figure from an earlier age; a Machiavellian courtier, loyal mainly to Earl Spencer but essentially unsubtle. From his arrival in London onwards, Spencer and Harcourt received conspiratorial memos, often along lines suggesting that Jenkinson knew even more than he could possibly say but to reveal it just yet would mean certain death to his agents. Typical is this, to Spencer about P. J. Sheridan: ‘as Y.E. [Your Excellency] knows I have a little game going on with him in America and any false step here might spoil the game…'
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In Glasgow, where six months before, bombs had been left at a station and an aqueduct and a large gas-holder dynamited, Jenkinson urged Harcourt (in July 1883) that Gosselin be dissuaded from making a move until Jenkinson's own scheme for trapping the culprits had come to fruition. Everything depended on his personal retention of ‘the threads', as he called them, of Fenian plotting.

In London, Superintendent Williamson was supposed – in Jenkinson's view – to report to Major Gosselin. He seems to have kept on talking to Vincent, though. Jenkinson despaired of this unwillingness to sideline Scotland Yard, although thanks to Jenkinson's sniping and manoeuvring Anderson, at least, was fast fading out of the picture. The former spymaster was still working at the Home Office, but with less and less to do. His only advantage was Le Caron in America. Just as Jenkinson refused to reveal who his sources were, so did Anderson.

Jenkinson returned to Ireland late in the year. He had given Harcourt to understand that while Anderson had one source in America who might occasionally come up with the goods, he had few agents of value in England. Harcourt grew impatient and Anderson often had to submit to his ‘dynamite moods'. He would be summoned to visit the Home Secretary at 7 Grafton Street only to be confronted with an outburst of frustration.
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Intelligence was still unreliable. At the end of October 1883 a bomb on a London Underground train at Paddington injured seventy-two people. This was followed by an explosion in a tunnel on the District Line at Westminster. Jenkinson was convinced that he had uncovered a plot to attack the Houses of Parliament. Nobody knew who or what to believe. Typical of this time is a note from Harcourt to Sir Henry Ponsonby, the Queen's Private Secretary, who had just accompanied Her Majesty safely to Windsor by royal train:

I had one of the usual scares last night about your journey. Williamson at 12.30 a.m. came in with a letter fresh from the US describing the machine with which and the manner in which you were to be blown up on your way from Balmoral. As Hartington and the Attorney General were sitting with me we consulted what to do on this agreeable intelligence but as you were already supposed to be half way through your journey it was not easy to know what course to take…
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In February of 1884 a series of railway-station bombs in London proved only too real. Out of office hours, telegrams like this one from Colonel Pearson came straight to Harcourt's home:

A serious explosion took place at nine this morning at the parcels office Victoria Station [–] porters injured. Cause at present unknown. [I cannot] say, but from what I can see I do not think gas is the cause. I have posted police all round until the arrival of Colonel Majendie to whom I have telegraphed. Nothing will be touched. Ticket office, parcels office and waiting room of the Brighton Line completely destroyed.
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In March the British Consul in Philadelphia wrote to the Foreign Office that his agent had it on excellent authority that this summer, unprecedented violence would be visited upon the English. O'Donovan Rossa himself, the voice of
United Irishman,
had read from a letter stamped and sent to New York by Royal Mail. He managed later to copy some choice extracts:

Can not give you the whole of it but if we had not been disturbed Birdcage Walk would have echoed and more than one stone would have tumbled... Pall Mall would have been shaken up more than Charles Street was. The fuse got detached from the cap and before we could make connection again we were spotted. You can look for something soon in either of these places…
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Sure enough, it would not be long before a bomb went off outside the Junior Carlton Club, just off Pall Mall. There were well-financed Irishmen in Antwerp, Bremen and London ready to dynamite the Queen, the Prime Minister, various other notables and all the bridges of London.
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HM Consul in Florence communicated intelligence about American Fenians living in Old Compton Street and the Consul in Philadelphia spent some time chasing around American chemical works on Col. Majendie's instructions investigating the substance sold as ‘Atlas Powder' he had found in a bomb.
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Vernon Harcourt was overwhelmed by reports on ‘Irish matters'. He recalled Jenkinson to London. Jenkinson arrived, still arguing about his terms and conditions of service, in March.

In April a man called Daly was arrested with bombs in Liverpool. Daly had been fitted up, although nobody knew that at the time. On 12 April Jenkinson wrote from England to Spencer about

…three hand bombs which came over about three days ago in the
City of Chester
…Our difficulty was to get the things passed to Daly and then to arrest him, with the things on him, without throwing suspicion on our own informant.
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But that was secret intelligence. For everyone else, the threat averted made the blood curdle just to think of it; and as if to prove the point, in May a police constable discovered dynamite at the base of Nelson's Column.

And then the Special Irish Branch blew up. When it happened, on 30 May, Jenkinson had settled to work permanently out of Room 56 at the Home Office. He had insisted at first that the visit must be on his own terms.

The work in the ‘ordinary' Crime Branch is now so entirely distinct and separate from that in the ‘special' Crime Branch that without any confusion, or the necessity for any special arrangements, the work in the former Branch could be carried on by Mr Anderson while all papers belonging to the latter could be sent to me daily in London… Mr Anderson… dealing with all papers belonging to the Ordinary Branch. All reports either from Mr Anderson, Major Gosselin, Mr Williamson or from any of the local police authorities in Great Britain, all information and all despatches from the Foreign or other offices relating to Fenian organisations or the operations or movements of dynamiters would be sent to me…
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The man had no life. Besides retaining his current position in Ireland he still wanted ‘a recognised official position in the Home Office'.
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Harcourt had impressed Spencer that the English administration could not defend itself without him. Spencer sent him over but they remained in constant touch.

The Scotland Yard bomb went off at 8.40 p.m. in a cast-iron urinal beneath the Special Irish Branch's first-floor offices, on the corner opposite the Rising Sun. It blew the corner off the building: the corner office vacated at 8.00 p.m. by Chief Inspector Littlechild.
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As the dust and paper settled it would have been out of character for Jenkinson to resist
Schadenfreude.
He wrote to Harcourt two days after the explosion:

I did not find out till Saturday that there was a public urinal in Scotland Yard
under
the room in which the detectives sat. And the dynamite was no doubt placed in that urinal. Fancy their allowing the public to go in there at night, or indeed at any time, after the warnings they have received!
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This was accompanied by a helpful diagram of the office, the urinal, and the pub, in which a bullseye marked the spot where the constable on watch
should
have been stationed, and X marked the spot where he actually was.

In the weeks that followed, heads rolled. Superintendent Williamson (‘very slow and old-fashioned', according to Jenkinson in a note to Spencer
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) was replaced by Chief Inspector Littlechild, whom Jenkinson knew from Dublin. The Assistant Commissioner in charge of CID, Howard Vincent, resigned. He had married a rich wife in 1882, and had since moved from Ebury Street (and his salon of notabilities
du jour
such as Charles Dilke) to the grandeur of Grosvenor Square and membership, sponsored by the Prince of Wales, of the Marlborough Club. Rightly anxious to protect the great and good, Vincent had of recent years initiated security arrangements that could seem intrusive. His biography, conceding this, quotes a fuming diary entry of Gladstone's from 1882 that describes the invasion of Hawarden by royal protection officers – ‘Vincent's men', blundering oafs disguised as flunkeys, who lurked behind every bush in his garden, broke his china and mistook tea urns for bombs. While Vincent considered himself responsible for security in England (Sir Edward Henderson was not a hard-working Commissioner) and Anderson considered himself responsible for avoiding threats to that security from the Irish, everything passed off well enough – even though Anderson was always tight with information and Sir Edward showed no sign of making way for a younger man. But matters got a lot more complicated in 1883, the summer when Jenkinson blew into town for the first time. According to Vincent's biography he was ready to resign at the end of the year but ‘on Home Office request' remained. In July of 1884, after the Scotland Yard blast, he left amid good humour from his officers and a strained relationship with Jenkinson. His position as Director of Criminal Intelligence was abolished in favour of a new job – the same job, working out of the same office in Scotland Yard, which by Act of Parliament would have a new title: Assistant Commissioner in charge of the CID. The post was offered to James Monro, a devout Christian with twenty years of service in Indian courts, where he had been a barrister, a magistrate and a District Judge. Jenkinson, in his arrogance seriously underestimating the newcomer, condescendingly remarked of Monro that he was ‘a good man in his way'.
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