Manchester Martyrs

Police Sergeant Charles Brett, travelling inside with the keys, was shot and killed while looking through the keyhole of the van as the attackers attempted to force the door open by shooting the lock.

Kelly and Deasy were released after another prisoner in the van took the keys from Brett's body and passed them to the group outside through a ventilation grill; the pair were never recaptured, despite an extensive search.

Allen, Larkin and O'Brien were publicly hanged on a temporary structure built on the wall of Salford Gaol, on 23 November 1867, in front of a crowd of 8,000–10,000.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) was founded on 17 March 1858 by James Stephens, with the aim of establishing an independent democratic republic in Ireland.

The IRB was a revolutionary fraternal organisation, rather than an insurrectionary conspiracy; Stephens believed that a "thorough social revolution" was required in Ireland before the people could become republicans.

[11] In 1867 the Fenians were preparing to launch an armed uprising against British rule, but their plans became known to the authorities, and several key members of the movement's leadership were arrested and convicted.

Two succeeded in evading the police, Thomas J. Kelly and Timothy Deasy, and travelled from Ireland to Britain to reorganise and raise the morale of the Fenian groups there in the wake of the failed uprising.

[13] During the early hours of 11 September 1867, police arrested two men found loitering in Oak Street, Shudehill, suspecting them of planning to rob a shop.

The door was opened when one of the women prisoners took the keys from Brett's pocket, and passed them through a ventilator to the Fenians outside,[20] allowing Kelly and Deasy to escape.

Anonymous letters alleged that the pair were being sheltered in a house on Every Street, but the 50 armed police who raided the premises found no signs of the fugitives.

The defence argued that "the rescue was not illegal as the prisoners [Kelly and Deasy] were wrongly imprisoned", and that there was no intention of "sacrificing human life", as evidenced by only a single fatality despite the presence of so many guns and so many shots being fired.

Twenty-six appeared in court on the first day in front of a grand jury, which found that there was a prima facie case against all of the defendants for murder, felony, and misdemeanour.

[3] More recently, the events have been described as "accidental murder, public panic and rumour-mongering, elaborate trial...and lingering doubts about a miscarriage of justice.

Allen stated his innocence, and that he regretted the death of Sergeant Brett, but that he was prepared to "die proudly and triumphantly in defence of republican principles and the liberty of an oppressed and enslaved people".

He then went on at length to condemn the British government, the "imbecile and tyrannical rulers" of Ireland, until he was interrupted by the judge, who appealed to him to cease his remarks: "The only effect of your observations must be to tell against you with those who have to consider the sentence.

[citation needed] A crowd estimated at 8,000–10,000[39] gathered outside the walls of Salford Gaol on the evening of 22 November 1867 to witness the public execution of the three convicted men the following morning.

[40] According to Father Gadd, one of the three Catholic priests who attended to the men: A crowd of inhuman ghouls from the purlieus of Deansgate and the slums of the City ... made the night and early morning hideous with the raucous bacchanalian strains of "Champagne Charlie", "John Brown", and "Rule Britannia".

Throughout Manchester and Salford, silent congregations with tear-stained faces ... assembled for a celebration of early Mass for the eternal welfare of the young Irishmen doomed to die a dreadful death that morning.

Over 2,500 regular and special police were deployed in and around the prison, augmented by a military presence which included a detachment of the 72nd Highlanders and a squadron of the Eighth Hussars.

He was also "particularly incompetent", and was "notoriously unable to calculate the correct length of rope required for each individual hanging; he frequently had to rush below the scaffold to pull on his victim's legs to hasten death".

Father Gadd reported that: The other two ropes, stretched taut and tense by their breathing twitching burdens, were in ominous and distracting movement.

These demonstrations of support for the three Fenians further outraged British public opinion, and "reinforced the prevailing sentiment that the Irish moral compass was somehow off-center".

[51] In New Zealand, for instance, seven men were convicted of unlawful assembly in a high-profile trial following a mock funeral to Hokitika cemetery; two of the seven, a newspaper editor and a priest, pleaded guilty to seditious libel, having published "a succession of very rabid articles about the Queen's Government.

[53] The day after the executions, Frederick Engels wrote to Karl Marx: So yesterday morning the Tories, by the hand of Mr Calcraft, accomplished the final act of separation between England and Ireland.

[55]Annual commemorations, often involving mock funerals and stirring speeches, continued to be held in many towns in Ireland into the twentieth century.

[60] To commemorate the centenary of the men's execution, the Manchester Connolly Association commissioned the artist Arthur Dooley to produce a memorial sculpture to stand on the site of New Bailey prison in Salford.

[61] Dooley did however produce a foot-high maquette (a small concept sculpture) which now forms part of the collection of the Working Class Movement Library in Manchester.

The maquette suggests that the memorial was to consist of a Wicklow granite base with three standing steel pillars with attached Celtic shields each bearing a martyr's name and some detail of the event's significance.