The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective (18 page)

When did this being commence his career of traitorism? Before or after his arrest? I now think it was before his arrest, for in his preliminary tour over the island he had taken care to disorganise and derange all our plans, he had given orders directly opposite to his line of instructions, and it must have been for the sole purpose of making the assurance of our discomfiture, and of his own security in his treachery, doubly sure.
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Hearing about the betrayal of the plans, Fariola hastily left his Cork hotel, leaving behind his revolver and an unpaid bill, and undertook an eventful journey via Limerick to Dublin, London and Paris.
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Others were unaware of the disaster that had overtaken the Fenian high command, and the Irish Republican Army was on the march in Dublin, Drogheda, Cork, Tipperary, Clare and Limerick. Discipline and morale do not appear to have been high in some areas; lack of orders and senior commanders also led to men dispersing. Although there were clashes and some modest successes for the Fenians, the last significant action took place on 31 March by which time mopping-up operations by the army and police were essentially completed. Apart from an abortive attempt to ship in additional arms and men from America, these events ended the long-awaited Fenian rising in Ireland, undermined by informers, internal conflicts and inadequate preparation.
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Arrests, Escapes, Trials and Promotion

July 1867 – November 1867

While the Irish police forces had arrested large numbers of the rank-and-file Fenians during March, many of the leaders had escaped. Apart from Fariola, these included Gustave Cluseret, Ricard Burke, Thomas Kelly and William Halpin – amongst others. Warrants were soon issued by Dublin Castle for their arrest, and these individuals must have been high up the list of the ‘wanted men’ at Scotland Yard. However, in June and July 1867 Clarke had to fit in his court appearance in the Lilley
v
. Earl of Cardigan action, and also an investigation into a series of robberies of banknotes, gold watches and rings in the officers’ quarters at the Tower of London. These enquiries during June led to his arrest of Charles Stuart, a corporal in the 1st Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, who was tried and found guilty at the Old Bailey on 8 July.
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Soon thereafter, Clarke was back on Fenian duties and, together with ‘Dolly’ Williamson, made a breakthrough by arresting Fariola. The young chief of staff had returned from Paris in May and was now living in London under the name of Eugene Liebehrt. Fariola subsequently published his own account of the arrest on Saturday 13 July 1867 in Regent Street, facilitated by yet another informer:

We walked along in the twilight, chatting on the approaching meeting, when suddenly I felt conscious of a tap on my shoulder.

‘I arrest you in the Queen’s name!’

‘What d’ye mean? Show me your warrant.’

‘Come, come, none of that. How do you call yourself?’

‘Eugene Liebehrt.’

And then the Inspector turned to Mr. Frawley.

‘Who are you?’

‘No necessity to tell you. Look at my number, I’m a commissionaire.’

‘And who’s that with you?’

‘Why – why that’s General Fariola!’

Now, it’s just within the range of possibility that the Inspector came upon me by hap-hazard; but it does strike me as suspicious that Mr. Frawley was so pat with my name, and that his explanation had been so readily accepted, and also that a thick posse [sic] of well-armed constables was at hand to the Inspector’s call, as if in preparation for possible resistance to capture.
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The arrest was at a rather inconvenient time as Clarke and the three inspectors, Tanner, Thomson and Williamson (who had recently been promoted to chief inspector), were busy with police arrangements for the State visit of His Imperial Majesty the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire Abdülaziz I, who had arrived in London only the day before.
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Although the Ottoman Empire was in decline, this first visit of a sultan to Britain was of considerable importance politically and as a public event.
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Despite the State visit, someone at Scotland Yard had the job to transfer Fariola to Kilmainham Prison, Dublin, and that task fell to Inspector Thomson who, according to Fariola, ‘was as kind to me as his duties permitted’.
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In gaol, Fariola joined William Halpin who had been arrested by the Irish police earlier in July on board the
City of Paris
in Queenstown harbour where he was en route to New York from Liverpool. Tipped off by a Liverpool source, the police had been accompanied by the informer, Corydon, who had pointed out Halpin to the arresting officer. To add further substance to Halpin’s identity, Clarke later visited Dublin, together with at least one witness, Emma Muntz, who had lived in the lodgings occupied by Halpin and Kelly in February; Muntz identified Halpin in prison as the man she had known as ‘Mr Fletcher’.
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Fariola appeared in front of magistrates at Castle Yard, Dublin, on several occasions in July. Clarke gave evidence that he had ‘arrested the prisoner in Regent-street, when he denied he had ever been in the American army, and said he had only just arrived from Paris’.
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The fact that Clarke gave evidence of the arrest rather than Williamson suggests that he, rather than Williamson, was the ‘inspector’ referred to in Fariola’s description of the arrest. Mayne, sensitive to concerns that Fariola’s trial might make public the fact that the Metropolitan Police had detectives on covert surveillance duties in Paris, wrote to Lord Naas that he didn’t want Sergeant Manners (one of the detectives based in Paris) used as an identification witness in Fariola’s case, and that he had therefore asked the lodging-house keeper at Great Portland Street to be sent to Dublin for this purpose.
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When Fariola was finally arraigned before the Special Commission Court in Dublin in November he had decided to plead guilty. Not surprisingly, in his own account in
The Irishman
, Fariola strongly rebuts the idea that he acted as an informer or gave useful information to his captors, and it does seem that most of the information presented in his confession is likely to have been known to the Irish and English authorities. Even so, the confession was regarded as ‘extremely interesting’ by Samuel Anderson, Ireland’s Crown solicitor, and in Benjamin Disraeli’s words was ‘the only complete account of the plans and resources of the Fenian Conspiracy’.
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Indeed, Fariola’s confession and his articles in
The Irishman
remain fascinating and unputdownable first-hand accounts of the Fenian rising, as fresh today as when they were written.

In early 1868, Fariola’s confession delivered what he desired, an early release and a passage for Fariola, his wife and child to Australia. In contrast, his former colleague William Halpin, who was put on trial immediately after Fariola, pleaded ‘not guilty’ and was rewarded with a sentence of fifteen years’ penal servitude for his part in the conspiracy.
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After Fariola’s release, his engagement with revolutionary republicanism appears to have ceased. His experiences with the Fenians probably provided enough politics, economic hardship and in-fighting for a lifetime. He stayed in Australia for about twenty-six years, working as a planter and later as an engineer. By 1894 he was living in Siam and, just before his death, in Sicily. As a former officer and wounded American Civil War veteran (he had received a bayonet wound in his foot) he was eligible for an invalidity pension, and he was finally buried at Arlington Military Cemetery, Virginia, in 1914.
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Soon after Fariola’s arrest, Clarke’s help on Fenian matters was requested by the Irish police:

SI [Sub Inspector] Rodolphus Harvey proceeds this evening to London for the purposes of procuring evidence respecting the case of William Harbuison [sic] and others charged with complicity in the Fenian conspiracy and to request that you will formally authorize Sergeant George Clarke of the Detective Department of the London Police, who on a former occasion assisted SI Hamilton in his enquiry respecting this case, to give his assistance to SI Harvey in endeavouring to obtain such further evidence as may be possible with reference to it.
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Harbison was one of four Fenian representatives of the four provinces of Ireland, who had been sent to London to confer with the Fenian leader, Thomas Kelly, at a meeting that had taken place earlier in the year, probably on 10 February in Kelly’s lodgings. The meeting had constituted its participants as a Provisional Government for Ireland, and Harbison had been arrested after the failed rising. The request for help indicates that Clarke had also co-operated with Irish police on previous occasions. The date of the Fenian meeting that involved Harbison is also close to the time when Clarke had been making enquiries at residences in London where the Fenian leaders had rented rooms. As it turned out, whatever help Clarke gave to the Irish police, the investigations of Harbison were probably wasted; he never came to trial as he died beforehand in a Belfast prison cell on 9 September from an aortic aneurysm. However, there was some public suspicion that Harbison had been murdered in prison, and his funeral procession was reported as one of the largest demonstrations that had ever taken place in Belfast.
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It seems that this case was only the tip of the iceberg in the co-operation between Scotland Yard and the Irish police. Something of the scale of assistance given at this time (but sadly, nothing of the detail), can be measured by the Irish Government’s payment of £1,060 16
s
3
d
(equivalent to
c
. £48,000 today) in September 1867 ‘for expenses incurred by the Metropolitan Detective Police in connection with the Fenian Conspiracy’.
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In the same month, the government’s hopes for further Fenian arrests and convictions were raised and then dashed again over a few days. Following increased Fenian activity in Manchester, police vigilance was heightened there in early September. In the early hours of the morning of 11 September, a policeman patrolling near the Smithfield Market area of the city centre spotted four suspicious characters of whom two were arrested. One of these proved to be the Fenian leader Colonel Thomas Kelly; his companion was identified as another Fenian, Captain Timothy Deasy. Williamson was sent up to Manchester to keep an eye on proceedings, and was probably accompanied by Clarke. When Kelly and Deasy were brought before magistrates on 18 September, Williamson confirmed the men’s identities and they were remanded in custody. As Kelly and Deasy travelled back to prison, the ‘Black Maria’ in which they were travelling was ambushed by about three-dozen Fenians, several armed with revolvers, in a rescue attempt planned by, amongst others, Ricard Burke. In the process of freeing Kelly and Deasy, the officer in charge of the van, Sergeant Charles Brett, was shot and killed. Several of the rescuers were arrested immediately, at or near the scene, but Kelly and Deasy successfully disappeared.
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Their escape was promptly followed the next day by the issue of a reward notice and description of the two men. The section relevant to Kelly was as follows:

THREE HUNDRED POUNDS REWARD – Whereas two prisoners, who were charged at Manchester with being concerned in the Fenian conspiracy, were this day violently rescued from custody by an armed mob and escaped. Description of the prisoners:- Colonel Thomas J. Kelly, age 36, height 5 feet 6 inches, hair (cropped close), whiskers and beard brown, eyes hazel, flat nose, large nostrils, stout build, one tooth deficient next to double one on right top side, scar over right temple, small scar inside of right arm, large scar on inside of belly from an ulcerated wound; dress, brown mixture suit, coat (with pockets at sides), deerstalker hat…
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The telegraph wires must have been red hot between Manchester and Scotland Yard, as the cost of telegraphic messages flying backwards and forwards in the first few days after the rescue amounted to £123 17
s
.
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With no immediate sightings of the two men, the rescue prompted widespread criticism that was not only directed at the Manchester Police. The Irish authorities, encouraged by Robert Anderson, had apparently sent a telegram to the Home Office, before the rescue, warning that an attempt might be made to free Kelly and Deasy, but the telegram was not addressed appropriately and was only received by the relevant Home Office official after Kelly and Deasy had been rescued. Scotland Yard’s Detective Department also did not escape the flak as the Home Office felt that the men on the spot, including Williamson, should have reinforced the guard on the prison van on their own initiative.
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