Shot fanned flames of fear

The
Catholic Weekly
Online

Sydney
22 February 2004

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Shot fanned flames of fear

CAPTURED: Men and boys surrounded O’Farrell fter his attempt to kill the Duke of Edinburgh

Dr Joe Morley

The sectarianism that plagued the young settlement of New South Wales burst into bitter animosity on March 12, 1868, when a deranged Irish Catholic, Henry James O’Farrell, attempted to assassinate Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh.

The prince, Queen Victoria’s second son and favourite, was shot in the back while at a fundraising picnic at the Middle Harbour beach suburb of Clontarf.

Sectarianism – engendered by fear of Irish Catholics – had broken out periodically since the early days of settlement.

When large numbers of Irish convicts were transported here (for actual or suspected participation in the 1798 and 1803 rebellions in Ireland), the fear escalated.

The last upsurge of sectarian bitterness before the Clontarf incident was in 1867 when Catholics opposed the Martin Government’s enactment of the Public Schools Act, sponsored by Colonial Secretary Henry Parkes, because it interfered with the running of their schools.

Bishops Matthew Quinn and James Murray, both recently arrived from Ireland, were at the forefront of Catholic criticism of the Government, in the absence overseas of Archbishop John Bede Polding.

They were countered by secularists, members of the Loyal Orange lodges and – especially – the Presbyterian leader, the Rev John Dunmore Lang.

The simmering ill feeling against Irish Catholics and Catholicism reached white heat when O’Farrell fired his gun.

A large crowd was at Clontarf for the picnic, to raise funds for a sailors’ home. It was on the itinerary for Prince Alfred in the final stage of the first Royal visit to the Australian colonies.

After lunch in a large pavilion, he and the president of the sailors’ home, Sir William Manning, set off towards the beach, intending to go to the next bay where hundreds of Aboriginals were staging a corroboree.

O’Farrell walked swiftly up behind them and, drawing a revolver, fired a shot at close range into Prince Alfred’s back. The prince’s thick braces deflected the bullet away from his spine.

He fell forwards, exclaiming: “God. My back’s broken.”

Sir William Manning grappled with O’Farrell but when O’Farrell pointed the gun at him and pulled the trigger, he dropped to his knees to avoid the bullet. The gun misfired.

The next shot was deflected and entered the foot of a bystander.

A mob of men and boys surrounded the would-be assailant, screaming: “Lynch him. String him up.”

O’Farrell was dragged towards trees where ropes were ready for a lynching, but he was saved by the arrival of the Chief Justice Sir Alfred Stephen, Police Superintendent JV Orridge, some constables and sailors from the Royal Yacht Galatea.

Bleeding from wounds to his face and head, O’Farrell was taken by ship across Sydney Harbour and escorted to Darlinghurst Jail.

The prince was put on another ship and taken to Government House where he recovered about a week later.

Parliament was sitting when news of the shooting was received. Henry Parkes, who was responsible for the police force, seized the opportunity to make political capital by blaming it on the Fenians (a society fighting for Irish Home Rule, whose members had carried out terrorist attacks in Ireland, England and Canada, from their base in the US).

He had a series of interviews with O’Farrell.

Hidden from the prisoner’s view, a shorthand expert recorded their conversations, in which O’Farrell made statements that Parkes used to bolster his Fenian conspiracy scare.

Parkes took a team of detectives to the Clarendon Hotel in downtown Sydney where O’Farrell had stayed before the shooting. They found a number of religious items and leaves of a pocket diary on which O’Farrell had written rambling notes, such as: “There was a Judas in the twelve – in our band there was a

No 3 as bad, but his horrible death will, I trust, be a warning to traitors.”

Parkes kept the diary and the records of his conversations with O’Farrell, as well as information from police in Melbourne and Ballarat that O’Farrell had studied for the priesthood but left the seminary and had been a drunkard who was admitted to hospital when suffering delirium tremens.

He was also told things that pointed to a disturbed mind bordering on insanity.

Parkes posted a government reward of £1000 ($2000) for any information about any accomplices O’Farrell had. No one came forward.

To counter the ‘Fenian conspiracy’, the Martin-Parkes Government rushed through a Treason Felony Bill based on a draft of a Bill sent to all the colonies by the British Government, except that Parkes and Martin added an infamous draconian clause, making it a crime to refuse to respond to a toast to the Queen.

British officials refused to present the Bill to Queen Victoria for Royal assent.

Archbishop Polding and Archdeacon McEncroe visited O’Farrell twice in the jail. The Sisters of Charity also visited him.

Jail chaplain Fr Michael Joseph Dwyer (known as ‘Fr John’), a grandson of Michael Dwyer, ‘the Wicklow Chief’ (Tribute to ‘the Chief’, CW 8/2), visited O’Farrell throughout his imprisonment and was with him at the end.

Archbishop Polding and the priests strove to demonstrate the loyalty of Catholics as the tide of sectarianism swelled.

The archbishop met Prince Alfred at Government House and sat next to him at a farewell luncheon.

O’Farrell was tried at the Central Criminal Court on March 30–31 “with shooting with intent to murder”.

He made statements that were construed by the prosecution to mean that he was a Fenian and had accomplices. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

On the day before he was hanged, O’Farrell asked for Parkes to visit his cell.

He asked Parkes to take a piece of paper he had written on, but he declined, asking the jail magistrate to take it.

The magistrate took it, attested O’Farrell’s signature on it and sealed it in an envelope addressed to Parkes with an inscription telling him to open it after O’Farrell’s execution. Fr Dwyer had made a copy of the document. It was O’Farrell’s final confession.

O’Farrell was hanged at Darlinghurst jail at 9am on April 21 – 40 days after the shooting. And, to heighten fears about the Fenians, Parkes had the jail surrounded by armed police and soldiers on the pretext that Fenians would attempt to rescue O’Farrell.

William Macleay, a non-Catholic opponent of Parkes and Martin, asked Parkes in the Legislative

Assembly that afternoon if he had received O’Farrell’s confession and, if so, would he table it. Parkes admitted having it but refused to table it on the ground that Cabinet had not yet seen it.

On the next day, Macleay again asked Parkes to table the document and again he refused, saying he and Martin had received “evidence of a new kind of crime” which proved O’Farrell was involved in a Fenian conspiracy.

Macleay then stunned the House by producing and reading Fr Dwyer’s copy of O’Farrell’s confession.

O’Farrell denied being involved in any conspiracy.

“I was never connected with any man or body of men who had for their object the taking of the life of the Duke of Edinburgh,” he said in his final confession.

“Never was I in any other than an indirect manner connected with that organisation in Ireland and elsewhere which is known by the name of the Fenian organisation.

“I wish moreover distinctly to assert that there was not a human being in existence who had the slightest idea of the object I had in view when carrying into effect the death of the Duke of Edinburgh.

“I had no foundation for saying there was a Fenian association in NSW. From continually thinking and talking of what I may still be allowed to call the wrongs of Ireland, I became excited and filled with enthusiasm on the subject.

“And it was when under the influence of those feelings that I attempted to perpetrate the deed for which I am most justly called upon to suffer.”

A committee was set up to investigate the matter.

Parkes was forced to disclose all the information he had gathered and it became obvious that O’Farrell had been bordering on insanity. Government members filibustered until 4am when many of the Opposition had gone home. The vote was taken and the Government won. Parkes’ supporters in the chamber cheered him as did a large crowd still waiting in Macquarie St.

Parkes was determined to keep sectarianism alive.

At a meeting in Kiama in his South Coast electorate, he said: “I can produce evidence, attested by affidavit, which leaves no doubt in my mind that not only was the murder of the prince planned, but that some person who was in the secret, and whose fidelity was suspected, was foully murdered before the attack was finally made upon the prince.”

Despite a search by police, no body was found. The press became sceptical.

And when Phil McCarroll, a Victorian butcher who frequently published satirical political poems, dubbed Sir Henry’s Kiama allegation ‘the Kiama ghost’, the tag was taken up by the media and used to taunt him.

It was to haunt Parkes for the rest of his life.