The First War on Terror? Irish Dynamiters and the Bombing of Victorian Britain

Long before The Troubles, 7/7 and other modern terrorism, Britain faced a wave of bombings that shocked the Victorian world.

Step into one of the most overlooked chapters of British history in this gripping episode on the "Dynamite War" of the 1880s - often described as the first “war on terror.”  Joined by Gillian O'Brien (author of The Darkness Echoing: Ireland's Places of Famine, Death and Rebellion), James explains how Irish republican groups like the Clan Na Gael and Irish Republican Brotherhood carried out bombing campaigns in Britain, bringing political violence to the heart of the London.

Learn how advances in explosives like dynamite - invented by Alfred Nobel of peace prize fame - changed the nature of asymmetrical warfare and terrorism, creating fear, media frenzy, and new policing tactics. We break down key events, targets, and the debates within the Irish independence movement over the morality of terrorism.

This episode also examines how the British government responded with informers, spies and the development of the world's first bomb squad! 

Perfect for listeners interested in history podcasts, Irish history, terrorism studies, political violence, and Victorian Britain, this episode provides deep insight into a forgotten conflict that helped shape modern ideas of terrorism and state response.

Thanks to SOULFULJAMTRACKS for their tune "Dark Halloween"

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History's Devils is a history podcast exploring the lives of murderers, charlatans, psychopaths, dictators, war criminals, tyrants, demagogues, revolutionaries, cult leaders, conquerors, fraudsters, and other controversial figures.

History's Devils is hosted by James Crossland, professor of international history and author of:

Rogue Agent: From Secret Plots to Psychological Warfare, the Untold Story of Robert Bruce Lockhart

The Rise of Devils: Fear and the Origins of Modern Terrorism...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Dynamite, gunpowder, spies, informers, media hysteria, and things exploding across Victorian Britain. Those are just some of the topics we are talking about on this week's episode of History's Devils, a podcast journey through the lives of murderers, charlatans, psychopaths, and shithels, all of which are represented in the story we are telling today, the story of the first ever terrorist campaign conducted on British soil, which didn't happen in the 1920s, didn't happen in the 1970s. Actually, it happened all the way back in the eighteen eighties. My name is James Crossland, and joining me to explain this little-known tale of dynamite insurrection and plot, I have with me the author of The Darkness Echoing, Exploring Ireland's places of famine, death, and rebellion, Gillian O'Brien. Gillian, welcome to History's Devils.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Thanks, James. Nice to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

So on a previous episode of History's Devils, I discussed the origins of modern terrorism, placing it back in 1858 on the streets of Paris when an Italian nationalist named Felici Orsini tried to kill Emperor Napoleon III of France. For those who have not checked it out, I think it's like episode eight or something, the man who invented terrorism. I gave it a deliberately provocative name. Check it out if you can. But this week we're picking up the story of the history of terrorism by looking at how that form of political violence first manifested in Britain, authored not by an Italian looking to kill an emperor, but by Irish Republicans who wanted to free their country of British political control. So the through line of this episode is as follows. Irish terrorism didn't start in the 1920s when the Irish Republican Army is first established and comes to prominence. Didn't start with the era of bombings that historians refer to as the Troubles, which begins in the 1960s and goes through some decades till the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. That's the rough chronology. Moreover, the concept of a war on terrorism didn't start on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Both the idea of Irish Republicans using terrorism to further the cause of independence and the British state's fight back against that form of political violence can in fact be traced to the final decades of Queen Victoria's reign, specifically the period from 1881 to 1885. During these years, just to uh give a description of what we're dealing with here, we got about 15 bombings, I think. That seems like the right number by Irish Republicans that take place across the country in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Chester, uh, London itself gets hit quite a few times. Uh government buildings, national monuments, tower bridge. They try to blow up Nelson's Column. That doesn't work particularly well. The officers of the Times, Scotland Yard's headquarters, a pretty ballsy move to attack the police head on. Houses of Parliament are bombed. So too are tube stations. So these are all the kind of targets you would think would be targeted today. Most uh, but not all, as we'll get into of these bombings, are the result of dynamite, and hence this campaign from 1881 to 1885 is tend to be referred to as the dynamite war, all very dramatic stuff. But this campaign does not come out of nowhere. And before we get to dissecting the dynamite war and and how it goes, we need a bit of context. So, Jillian, you know a thing or two about Irish history, damn sight more than I do. The Irish struggle for independence, what's that looking like before the 1880s? Who are the people involved? What are some of the key events? What's what's going on there?

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Oh, start with an easy question. I don't think. Yeah, yeah, no, nice and nice and concise. Nice and concise. Well, I guess from 1800, when you've got the act of union that formally unites Britain and Ireland, you and gets rid of the Irish Parliament. Really, from that point onwards, there are consistent efforts to break that connection and to re-establish an Irish Parliament, whether that's to be an Irish Republic or to be sort of associated with Britain but independent of, is debated and it goes through ebbs and flows. By the time you get to the mid-19th century, you have a group called the United Ireland, or not the United Irish Fund, called the Young Irelanders, and they have a very small attempt at a rebellion in 1848. It really very much is sort of well, it's a gesture. Partly that's because we're in the middle of the famine. So, you know, people's focus is on having food and staying alive and not some ideological fight for a republic or indeed a parliament. So the young Irlanders are much more influential and they they remain influential right through the 19th century, to the second half of the 19th century, in terms of ideology, not because of what they did, but just sort of this idea of what it is to be Irish. And they're followed by a group that become much more dominant in the period we're going to talk about, um, who are known kind of collectively as the Fenians. And you'll see in all sorts of books and articles people talk about the Fenians. The Fenians are a particular group set up in the 1860s, but it's also an umbrella term that people at the time and later use to refer to a number of different groups in North America, also a number of groups in Ireland and in Britain, most notably the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland is very often also to call the Fenians. So they are quite distinct groups at different times.

unknown 5:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

And it's the Irish Republican Brotherhood who are uh, if I remember correctly, they're one of the key groups that are behind one of the more interesting attempts at rebellion in this period, which are the so-called Fenian raids, which occur in 1866 in Canada. Um, quite a story with this. Do you want to tell it?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Yeah, I mean, there's a they're they're a mixed bunch. So a lot of what was been was happening in Irish America was became distracted by the American Civil War. And a lot of the Irish who were in the United States really from the 1840s, 50s, in the 1860s, they join uh and take part in the American Civil War. Now, on both sides, we very often forget that the Irish also joined the Confederacy. From an Irish Republican perspective, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter which side you join on because you're getting militarily trained, and that military training can then be used to achieve Irish freedom. So, in some ways, it doesn't matter what your political sense was in North America. What matters is your devotion to your home country. So, post the Civil War, the Irish Republicans in the United States think, well, this is a great idea. Why don't we invade sort of British Canada? Take that over because of all of our training that we've had in the Civil War, and we'll swap it for Irish freedom.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Simple.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Simple.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

It doesn't work. I mean, it's easy done.

SPEAKER_01 7:11

Easy. They start with uh a small island called Campobello, which was actually off the coast of Maine, um, and they start off with that, that's a complete disaster. And then they start, they have over the course of several years from the mid eight to late 1860s into the early 1870s, they try several times to invade Canada. The very first time they do it, the Canadian authorities um just send the men back. I mean, that's how little how how unworried they were about this invasion attempt. Now, there are some paintings that show what looks like sort of a set battle scene that is not representative of what actually happened.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

And for the folks watching on YouTube, I'm gonna put up the I know the painting you are talking about. I'm gonna put that up because it is it is cracking.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

It's a great propaganda piece. And what I really like about it is that you have the Canadians all in red, you have the Irish all in their green, and they're sort of facing off on each other. But the Irish weren't wearing green. They were wearing some some of them were wearing Confederate uniforms, some of them were wearing green, some of them were wearing Union uniforms. I mean, it this does not represent what happened at all. But it's taught in Canadian schools for one reason, not because it was a sterling sort of defense of Canada, but it's the first time that sort of a Canadian force, not led by anyone else, not by the French, not by the British, actually fights itself. And so it's a seminal moment in some ways for Canadian history.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

And it's not a coincidence that 1867 is the year that Canada becomes country, basically, because off the back of that. And that that's so the Vinians achieve something there, they help out the Canadians in terms of national identity, not so much themselves.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Well, the other interesting thing about the Canadians is that one of their sort of great sort of founding members is uh Dar Darcy McGee. And Darcy McGee had been um a young uh young Irelander. So you have a man who began his life as an Irish radical, ends up in Canada and being kind of one of the fathers of the Canadian, the Foundation of Canada. Um so they're they get everywhere, the Irish.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

They get everywhere, and and they're and they're helping out the Canadians, but their own cause is is really quite damaged by the by the Canadian raids because from from the British perspective and some of the press coverage, the way it's coverage, they basically are derided as you look at these guys, they can't organise a piss-up in a brewery, basically. And that's re-emphasized by the fact there's meant to be a rising, a Fenian rising in in Ireland and in northern England principally uh in 1867, I think it is, 1860 seven. That doesn't work either. That's a complete disaster, mainly because that there are informers in the ranks who tip the authorities off to what's happening. A lot of um members of of uh the Irish Republican Brotherhood are arrested. But there are there are some really interesting consequences from what happens in 1867. Uh the the most notable of which for the development of of uh terrorism coming into the the Irish Republican thought is what happens on the 18th of September 1867, when uh a group of Athenians try to liberate people who have been arrested during the rising. This is just outside Manchester, and in the process, accidentally, they shoot uh a Manchester police officer, the first uh officer of the Manchester police to actually die on active duty, a man by the name of Sergeant Charles Brett. They shoot him when they're they're trying to open the the back of the the wagon that the the guys are in, and they they shoot the lock off and the bullet goes through the lock and into Brett's head, and that's the end of him. And even though that's an accident, it is presented as if, oh, look at these, look at these guys, they're shooting cops now. And then off the back of that, you also get uh another attempt at liberation, trying to blow up or bl blow up the wall of a prison, Clarkwell prison in in London in in December of 1867, which is uh again by accident, they end up because they're they're using a big barrel of gunpowder, they have no idea how big a bang this is going to make, they don't understand how explosives work. This thing goes off, it kills 12 people, it wounds over a hundred people, does uh half a million pounds worth of damage to buildings in the surrounding streets, doesn't get the prisoners freed because they're in their cells, they're not in the yard. Again, it's a complete fiasco. But there's now from from the from the point of view of how the press are covering and how sort of uh government perceptions even of the Irish struggle are, they've now gone from these hapless uh people who are stumbling over themselves trying to invade Canada to people who are killing cops and and and making massive explosions in central London. And that's really significant because there are some key figures within the Irish Republican movement who notice this. They notice that the Clarkenwell bombing in particular makes uh their movement seem scary rather than tragic comic. And they start to understand that they can use the fear that is engendered by these acts of violence to actually bring attention to to the Irish cause. And that idea develops in the 1870s. And there's two figures I want to talk about here who are, to my mind, the people who really take that idea of using political violence and using the fear of it to uh a terroristic effect, and they are Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa and Patrick Ford. Now, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rosser, I'll put a picture of him up here because you kind of need to see this guy. He's he yeah, he's beard. He's got that image of of what you would expect of this hard-bitten career revolutionary. He's in jail, is it 1865 he's put in inside? I think it's 1865 during one of the many roundups of Finians during this period.

SPEAKER_01 12:53

Yeah, I mean, you're you're right about the fact that in the the 18 before 1867 they do round up uh quite a lot, particularly those who had been writing, um, because they're more easily identifiable. So O'Donovan Rossa wrote um four radical papers, so too did John DeVoy. They all end up kind of arrested and sentenced to kind of long sentences before the 1867 sort of incidents. So you have a lot of that leadership in prison. Um Rossa is one of those who's particularly badly treated in prison. At one point, he spends 35 days uh with his hands handcuffed behind his back. And you know, there is quite a lot of what we would regard as torture of some of these prisoners who were not convicted of very significant crimes. I think it should be borne in mind. So these are not the people involved in the shootings. I mean, one of the things where you mentioned Sergeant Brett, who was shot through the head, they didn't intend to kill him, but I think if you shoot a gun in through a lock of a prison van, you're likely to kill someone, possibly the people you're also trying to free. So I think it speaks a lot to the fact that they were, you know, foolhardy if sometimes in what they did. I mean, what they do there is they create three martyrs because men are executed because of the killing of Sergeant Brett, who become known as the Manchester Martyrs, and they fill they fill a space in that pantheon of kind of the Irish Republican dead, which begins in 1798 and goes right through to the troubles. So you have that, and then you have, as you say, this the other explosions. Um, and I think Odona van Rossa, who's not involved but is watching, um, particularly the one outside Clark and Will Jail, that loses a lot of support because they kill working class people. Um, and that's where the support had been. So there's that mix between we can spread terror, but also this might be a disastrous thing. Now, the important point there is that that does mark kind of a difference, a split within the movement as to whether or not one outrides the other, the danger of killing innocent people versus the spreading of fear without killing innocent people. And that ultimately in the states, you see it particularly manifest itself because of people like John DeVoy and O'Donnell Rossa, who are imprisoned in Britain, but ultimately find kind of their way to the states.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Yeah. And and you you're right to highlight the importance of the United States here, because this is really where this all starts. O'Donovan Rossa is released on a on an amnesty in 1871. He's told by the British government, please leave, you you must go forever, never come back to these shores, basically. And and so he he does what what most Irish people would do in this uh situation, goes across the pond to join the Irish diaspora in the New World. And it's there that he hooks up with this guy, Patrick Ford, who is the publisher and editor of The Irish World, which is the number one newspaper for uh Irish, Irish people of a radical bent in particular, who are part of that diaspora, which is in New York, Boston, Chicago, but it's published in New York. And on the 5th of December, 1875, um, with with our Donovan Ross's backing, Patrick Ford puts the the following call in the Irish world: a call for a little band of heroes who will initiate and keep up without intermission a guerrilla war against England with the aim to force uh the the government to the negotiating table over the Irish question. Now, uh it only really dawned on me the other day when I was going back and having a read over something I wrote about this in my book about that quote, a little band of heroes, and it struck me. Is that a reference to the the original the origins of the word Fenian is the Fianna, isn't it? The the band of mythical Irish heroes, little band of heroes that can never be defeated. This kind of evocative language that that Ford is using to really stir the spirit is is quite notable. Again, he's he's a newspaper guy, so he knows how to use hyperbole. But the the devil is in the detail there of a little band of heroes who will who will fight a guerrilla war. They are they are basically trying to crowdsource and get people to donate to something they call the skirmishing fund. And uh that term skirmisher is interesting because uh, you know, obviously you're not going to say, hey, we want to recruit terrorists. So you go with this this phrase of skirmisher being uh a small force that can harry the British Empire around the edges without that that sort of pitched battle that they tried to wage and and and dismally failed at doing in Canada. So the point is that this idea of the formation of this little band of heroes making a public appeal, this is this is Patrick Ford uh laying the foundations for what is going to be this this uh this movement to try and mobilize the the Irish diaspora and get it on board for a campaign wherein people will be trained to attack Britain in ways many and varied and then be shipped back across the pond to do so on English soil. And this is all gonna happen in the United States. What's the significance of them planning this in America? Why why is America the optimal place for them to do this?

SPEAKER_01 18:07

Well, it wasn't over the original. The original plan was that you have the Fenians in America and you have the sister or brother organization of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland. And the original setup is that in America they do the fundraising because they can. So they get the money and they give that money to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who are based primarily in Ireland, and that they lead the campaigns because they're on the ground and they know what's happening. Now that's the original sort of setup. What happens is by the time you get to the late 1860s, because no kind of rebellion of any note had taken place, those in America in the Fenians begin to get sort of fed up of this and think, well, actually, we should be making these decisions. The leadership back in Ireland is too slow, it's too timid, it's been you know infiltrated. So now maybe we should start calling the shots, uh, literally in some ways. But that they then want to kind of go, right, well, we'll raise the money, but also we'll spend the money, and then we have complete control over it. The other thing is, I guess, that makes America attractive is this is the you know, the era of big building, it's the era of sending railroads right across the states, it's the era of using a lot of explosives. So there are a lot of Irish men on building sites and working on the rails who are beginning to become very familiar with explosives, far more than you would find in Ireland, which is you know, doesn't have an industrial revolution, is a largely um agricultural society. So you're also targeting a lot of young men, particularly men who will have either left Ireland as very young kids during the famine, will have had that bitterness of you know being told that they were forced off the land, forced out of their own country, you know, who want to kind of redeem that story. So America makes a lot of sense in that in that way. And also the just the narrative and the language that's used in America, which is you know about everything being possible, about all of that, that suits people like um Patrick Ford. It suits people like Udullivan Rossa to be kind of bigging themselves up and bigging the project up. And they're also open to all sorts of ideas. So it isn't just they talk about thunderbolts from the sky. So at one point they want to, you know, send up hot air balloons that will drop bombs all over the place. You know, they want to develop submarines, they want to do this skirmishing. So they're they're very open to how can we do this? I think you know, we're looking at late 19th century, so a lot of this, there's all sorts of magic in the air. Look at the fiction that's been written. It's all about you know what you can do and all sorts of this speculative fantasy stuff. And you know, they're in a way trying to do that, but in real life, it's not quite as romantic or as glamorous in real life as it might be in the world in fictional worlds.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

No, and it does it does lead to some again that there's that promise of the fact that they are in the you know, land of opportunity, land of free speech as well. So a lot of a lot of the stuff in the Irish world is is you know incendiary to be polite, but they're allowed to do that in America uh without without fear of persecution. You've also got the fact that yeah, I mean, that the the British government struggles throughout this period to get the American authorities to do anything about these guys because an American politician is not going to do anything to upset the Irish vote, is is another key part of this. So they've got they've got a great base from which to plan this sort of stuff, but that imagination flights of fancy that you mentioned, it does lead to some tragic comic moments in planning. And I want to talk about a couple in particular because we're all about tragic comedy on History's Devil. So what the the story that I Love in the planning for the dynamite war is that O'Donovan Rotter hires a man by the name of Professor Mazerov to train his skirmishers. Now, this Professor Mazerov is a guy who is very notorious in New York. He claims that he can take stuff that's under your kitchen sink and turn it into a bomb. You know, anything he can turn into a bomb. He's a a guy with a Russian name, which he uses to trade off this idea that he is part of a group called Narod Navolya, which is uh a Russian terrorist group that is kind of like the Al-Qaeda of this period. They are they are notorious um and they're going to become incredibly notorious in 1881 when they when they use a suicide bomber to to kill czar Alexander II. But they're already quite notorious in in the late late 1870s for for being the sort of the world's premier terrorist organization. So Mesorov is alluding to the fact that he is somehow affiliated with Narod Novolia, and that gives him cred. O'Donovan Rossa hires Meserov for I think it's about $400 he pays him to establish something called the Brooklyn Dynamite School, where he's going to train these bombers to ship them off across the Atlantic. Here's the problem. Well, there's a couple of problems actually. First of all, Meserov is not Russian, and he's not connected in any way, shape, or form to Narod Navolya. He is a bartender from Chicago called Richard Rogers, who is of Scottish extraction. He has just adopted the persona of a Russian bomb expert. That's problem number one. Problem number two, related to this, is that his bombs don't tend to explode. They are basically lumps of gunpowder with fuses in them and they don't really work. Third problem, he rips off the Fenians by having a side hustle in terrorism lecturing where he charges 35 cents per lecture to anyone who wants to learn how to build bombs. So he's he's both he's both extorting money out of O'Donovan Rossa and having his little side hustle. And in addition to this, it also appears that he was an informer who was taking money from the NYPD to provide information on what O'Donovan Rossa and friends were planning. And in 1883, in fact, uh one of Meseroff's students tweaks to this and turns up on his front doorstep and beats the ever-loving hell out of him with a slapjack. So he was not, he was not a sound investment by Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. He's one example of how that flights of fancy gets out of control. But then there's another one which is also a fantastic story: the Fenian Ram, the submarine that they develop. Tell us the story of this ill-fated submarine.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Well, it's ill-fated, depending on how you look at it, it's always how you tell them. I mean, the Fenian Ram is a great story, and it's born out of a great escape story. So you get to the mid-17, 1870s, you have all these exiled Irishmen over in New York or Boston or Chicago. There's a lot of discussion, but there's not a lot happening, or there's things like the Meserov disaster. So they need a they need a feel-good story. Um, and the feel-good story comes in the form of the catalpa rescue. So the catalpa rescue is just a completely bonkers story that works. So there are a number of Fenians who were had been sent off to Tasmania and to various parts of Australia and were imprisoned there. There were a number of them in Fremantle prison. A letter got out to the United to New York to John DeVoy from one of those there saying, Please can you rescue us? Wasn't the first time John Boyle O'Reilly had escaped from Australia, got to Boston, opened up his own newspaper called the Boston Pilot. So this had been done before. What DeVoy does is he gets uh an old whaling bark, fits it out, sends it off to Australia to rescue these prisoners. It takes them a year. There's a mutiny on board the whaling bark at the Azores. So basically, by the time they get to the Azores, they have to get a whole new crew and off they go. And you know, months pass, nothing happens. They eventually find themselves off the coast near Fremantle. 40 kilometers have to be covered by the prisoners from Fremantle prison to the coast. They manage somehow to do this undetected, they are rowed out to the boat. The boat is then chased by um a naval vessel until it gets into neutral waters where it raises an American flag and is then not shot at. Now that American flag went on display a couple of weeks ago for the first time in many, many years in the Irish National Museum, and it was on display for only two days because it's in such sort of such a state, but it got a huge amount of publicity because that story really grasps people's interests even now. So, anyway, they get across, they go to New York, and when they land in New York, there was everyone wants to greet them with enthusiasm from where from American politicians to all sorts of Irish ragtag organizations, and they are greeted with huge festivities. This is a great triumph, everyone is delighted. This is an amazing escape story. And one of those who turns up to one of these events is a man called John P. Holland. John P. Holland came from Liscanner in County Clare in Ireland. He had trained and worked as a Christian brother for some time, but ends up leaving Christian brothers, going to the United States, where he works as a teacher. But he's really his secret interest, not so much a secret, but his real interest is as an inventor. And he wants to invent a submarine. And he initially goes to the American Navy with his plan to invent a submarine, and they laugh at him and say, This, yeah, this is a nonsense idea. What an earthy.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

It'll never go anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

A ship underwater. Yeah. Starting with a sunken ship. We have plenty of those. We don't need you. And he is then told that maybe the Fenians who are interested in sort of innovative things might be interested in his plan to have kind of torpedoes under the sea. So he then approaches members of the Fenians, says, Look, this is my idea. I've been working with this for a while. This would be you'd be able to take out basically the British Navy and their merchant ships. Fenians are absolutely on a high, they're getting in loads of money because of the Catalpa rescue, and they go, Well, that sounds like a great idea. So they pour money into what becomes known as the Fenian Ram. And Holland gets to the point where he makes a number of prototypes and he ends up with a model ship and also his own, what becomes known as Fenian Ram, which you can still see today on display. But you know, it it goes on display first in 1916, but it's stolen from him by the Fenians who start to get antsy about the return on their investment. And so they decide they will go and steal it from the shipyard he's working on, and they tow it back down to New York, where they hide it. So they actually they lose, they sink by accident the model, uh, but they take the main one and they hide it. And so they've poured like what would be now millions of dollars into this and it just and it just rots in a boat shed, doesn't it? It stays there, nobody knows where it is until 1916, and then it's put on display to raise money for the 1916.

SPEAKER_00 29:32

It's a funny thing, it's like you know, look at look at this inspiring disaster, all this money that we put into this thing that we never used and that and that we ended up just leaving to to rust away.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

But it's Holland who was never really committed. He was an inventor. The sort of the idea of Irish Republicanism is sort of a that's an aside to him. Um, it's the process of the inventing that's really key. They should have stuck with it because ultimately he has the last laugh because he does ultimately sell his invention of a submarine to the United States Navy, and they use his invention. So had they kept faith in their inventor, but they didn't, they couldn't hold their nerve. Um, and so they they stole essentially what kind of did belong to them, but they did it too soon.

SPEAKER_00 30:16

But for the sake of the record books, the first people to have a submarine is not the US Navy, it's not the it's not the Royal Navy, it's the Fenians.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

It's the Fenians.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

Crazy, absolutely crazy. But um that aside, so so the submarine doesn't really work. Meserov sure as hell doesn't work. One thing that does work though, and and it's worth mentioning because we are going into some depth because we have mentioned it a few times, and that is dynamite. And this is significant because I mentioned that the Meserov's bombs are made of gunpowder for the most part, and gunpowder, as mentioned in the Clarkwell bombing, is uh it is not an exact science, gunpowder explosive. Um, it's certainly not uh particularly stable. It's easy for a lit match nearby to make everything fall apart and in a in a disastrous way. But this invention, patented by Alfred Nobel in 1867, he of Nobel Peace Prize fame, reputed to have invented the Peace Prize or founder of the Peace Prize out of a sense of guilt in some respects over what happened to his invention of dynamite, which as you mentioned is this thing that is being used to blast railroads and and tunnels and things like that as a construction material, but it's being lifted off construction sites by workers, many of whom are Irish, and it's it's a stable, uh portable, easy to use form of explosive which packs a hell of a lot more punch than gunpowder. And it becomes this this cherished symbol of struggle for a number of radical groups in this period. One Finian of the era described it as the thing that makes the weak equal to the strong. Johann Most, who is one of the more preeminent anarchists of this period and a big advocate of terrorist uh activity, he calls it the proletariat's artillery, which I think is a great way to sum up the feelings people have about dynamite. It's the great leveler, uh, where states have standing armies and cannon, the rebels of the world have dynamite. And that's a very evocative idea that O'Donovan Rossa and Ford tap into um when they're trying to recruit soldiers for for this dynamite war as it's going to become known. So let's just run down some of the some of the stuff that happens with this war. It officially begins on the 18th of January, 1881, uh in Salford, outside Manchester, when a barracks is bombed. And uh this is a kind of unique bombing because it does actually kill someone, it kills a boy who's like kicking a football around nearby. And uh that's unique because most of these bombs, uh we'll get into the the the whys and wherefores of this, but most of most of these bombs are not aimed at killing people, they're about grabbing attention and they're about attacking symbols, basically. There are a few more bombings that occur in March and June 1881. Uh the mansion house in London, that's a gunpowder bomb that uh a passing policeman sees and and stamps out with his foot. Very brave sash stupid, depending on how you want to see it. Chester Barracks, there's an attempt to bomb that. Again, it kind of fizzles out. The Liverpool Town Hall is targeted by two guys who who throw a gunpowder bomb uh at its at its steps at about 4 a.m. in the morning. But as they're doing this, two cops just happen to come around the corner and see them. And again, uh, you know, uh brave slash stupid police run in, one of them grabs it, drags it into the middle of the street where it detonates safely without damaging anything. So again, the the these are not these attacks are not uh working particularly well, but they are increasing in in in in in you know frequency. And then the really big turning point that really grabs a lot of attention is in June 1881 when a ship called the the SS Malta, which has come from New York, I think, is seized at uh Liverpool docks and in the hold, the authorities find a bunch of uh clockwork uh timed uh dynamite bombs. So not these crudely made gunpowder bombs, but but dynamite explosive that has um clockwork timers on it. So they're basically time bombs. And uh the purpose of this is right that they're gonna set bombs in places where they can go off at times when people are not around. And this goes back to what you were saying before about this debate within the movement over the validity of terrorism. I mean, I mean, this is always the terrorist conundrum. If you make yourself uh someone who is who is uh uh wantonly killing innocent people, then you may well discredit your cause, right? So the compromise is to use these timed IEDs to detonate at times when in public places, at times when people are not around, you still get the fear, but you don't get the blowback from from killing people. That's the theory, at least. And this is used to great effect in Glasgow, where three bombs go off at multiple sites almost simultaneously because they're able to time them. That's in January 1883. The headquarters of the Times has mentioned that is bombed, Parliament is bombed. There are bombs that go off in October 1883 uh in a number of tube stations, Paddington Station, I think. That one's kind of heinous, though. I think that wounds about 50 people. Um I mean it's hard to bomb a tube station without people in it. You know, that's at that point, you are gonna get some some casualties. Similar results with an attack on the Westminster tube station. The most brazen attack to my mind, and I'm gonna put a picture up of it here, because it is, I think, the first picture ever taken of the aftermath of a terrorist attack is uh the what remains of Scotland Yard's HQ. When that is bombed in uh 1884, I think it is. They put a bomb in the public urinal that's across the square from there, and it goes off at like 2 a.m. There's like one staff sergeant there, you know, shuffling papers. Doesn't hurt anyone, but it does send a very clear message, you know, we can bomb Scotland Yard. We, you know, we we don't fear the people who are meant to be tracking us. And this is an example of how the Dynamite War gets more brazen as it goes on. In 1884, a Conservative MP's house is bombed. That same year they try to blow up London Bridge. Nelson's Column is mentioned. There's an attempt to to bomb that. I'm I'm never quite sure what goes wrong there. Why is do you do you know what the story is with why they didn't manage would did the bomb fizzle out or were they thwarted?

SPEAKER_01 36:36

Um in most cases, well, most cases they're thwar they're thwarted, and they're yeah, there's always the the the issue of spies. But the other thing that there is is that there are all of those bombs are organized by two separate groups, though, and that makes a difference as to how they function. So the very first ones that you're talking about there, they're under the auspices of Patrick Ford and yeah, that skirmishing campaign that Ford was leading the collecting of money for through the Irish world and John Devoy, and not John Devoy and O'Donovan Rossa. And O'Donovan Rossa has a lot of credit, you know, particularly because of how badly he was treated uh in prison. But as he's increasingly in America, he starts to be regarded as a loose canon. I should probably should use a different term when talking about someone involved in bombing, but he's regarded more and more as a loose canon because he drinks very heavily, um, and his status drops considerably.

SPEAKER_00 37:36

And he boasts a lot as well.

SPEAKER_01 37:37

Like he's very yes, yeah, absolutely. So it he it's funny because his reputation post-death is very different to his reputation at different points in his life. So by the time you get to the mid-1880s, so his skirmishing campaign, you know, has not been terribly effective, and it and it has killed a young boy, and that's problematic. But that his leadership and his importance has dissipated, and in his place, he's largely been replaced in terms of wanting to bomb places by a man called Alexander Sullivan. But Alexander Sullivan is not part of the phoenix, just you know, the thing that they always talk about in Irish Republican history is the very first thing on any agenda with a new group is the split. So, you know, I at many points in in doing the research, I give up on trying to work out who is talking to whom, at what point, uh when will they get back together and be in the same, and then when will they split again?

SPEAKER_00 38:32

Yeah, it's like watching a soap opera, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:35

Yes, yeah, yeah, it's yeah, you you just and and so much of what's involved is to do with individuals and their egos, as well as having a focus on you know the larger political picture. But I don't think we can underestimate the sort of personal egos associated with a lot of the men involved here, and so at one point what you have is the Fenians and the Cl and Clanegale split are are now two separate organizations.

SPEAKER_00 39:02

Just to just to clarify there, Clanigale, um, that's Sullivan, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:07

Clanegale is Sullivan.

SPEAKER_00 39:08

Yeah, and they are they mainly are the ones who bring the dynamite bombs to bear, from what I can remember. They're they're like the the good bombs are Clan Nigel bombs.

SPEAKER_01 39:18

But the yeah, the ones from sort of 1884-85, they're clannegale got bombs. At that point, the Fenians and Clanegale, who also operate, and I'm not even gonna get into this, they operate under different names that they're publicly known as. So there's United Brotherhood, United Irishmen, all yeah. So we'll just stick with Clanegale and Fenians. Yeah. So by the mid-1880s, Clanigale is the more dominant group in Irish America, and leadership has switched from largely being based around Ford and New York, and it's moved to Chicago. And it's moved to Chicago for a couple of reasons, partly because there's an increasing number of Irish in Chicago, a lot to do with the rail rail lines and um the stockyards there, the cat the um stockyards which are operating because of the railroads. Um, but it's also moved there because um by the mid-1880s, the Catholic Church there and the bishop who's there is less anti-the-Fenians than other Catholic bishops, Irish Catholic bishops, because the Fenians are not fond of God. And so various points, if you remember the Fenians, you'd be excommunicated by the Catholic Church, but they find a sort of safe haven in Chicago, and so it flourishes in Chicago. And so this guy, Alexander Sullivan, who is a sort of up-and-coming lawyer, he takes over Clonegale in Chicago, and he is really keen on the dynamite war. He calls it the dynamite war as in moving on from the skirmishing. Now that creates all sorts of other problems because a lot of people who are now in Clonegale, including John Devoy, are opposed to this idea. They think you know what you need to also know at the same time is that there's an a group called or a movement called New Departure. New Departure is essentially a coming together of the Irish parliamentary party, so the constitutional argument for why Ireland should have its own parliament. It's also bringing together agrarian issues, so anything to do with land, and land will always get a lot of attention, fair rent, free trade, fixity of tenure, all of those things in Ireland. And then it's also allying itself with the secret organizations. So they come together and think, well, actually, if we brought with our powers combined, like a superhero unit, like a Marvel series, with our powers combined, we might achieve something.

SPEAKER_00 41:48

Republicans assemble.

SPEAKER_01 41:49

Well, exactly. And how will they do that? Now, one thing that Devoy, who's very much involved in this new departure, is we while the constitutional movement is making progress, and it was in the 1880s, then we should not be bombing places. Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the parliamentary movement, is making speeches in parliament. It's not a great look to have the people that he's sort of speaking on behalf of also bombing that parliament. So this becomes a really heated and ideal and ideological, real ideological issue. But Sullivan is, we will plow on, and this is what I want to do. And he starts to take money that's been earmarked for more you know constitutional funds and place that into a dynamite campaign fund. About $100,000.

SPEAKER_00 42:38

Now fair chunk of change.

SPEAKER_01 42:40

It's quite a lot of money that doesn't all go into his bombing campaign.

SPEAKER_00 42:45

Does it go into new suits, cigars?

SPEAKER_01 42:48

Yes, it might well go. He lives in a very fancy house.

SPEAKER_00 42:51

Nice whiskey.

SPEAKER_01 42:52

Um, he claims that he invested it in the Board of Trade and stocks in Chicago, and they they all failed.

unknown 43:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:00

But his lifestyle did not fail. So while some money certainly went into dynamite, a lot of money ends up in the pockets of Alexander Sullivan, who I think Duy described him wonderfully as a professional patriot.

SPEAKER_00 43:13

That's a recognizable type in these movements, to be honest, irrespective of their cause. These people always turn up. So we've got we've got a bit of embezzlement, we've got uh factional disputes, we've got layers of uh public-facing voices and more secretive people. And we've still got bombs going off. And you can understand that from the British government's point of view, they're looking at this and going, Well, Jesus Christ, we haven't dealt with anything like this before. This is this is this is literally new. And I I think this can't be understated, is that I mean, today we know what terrorism is, we know what it feels like, we know what the idea of back in the eighteen eighties, this is new. They're living under a state where there's constant bombings. This is this is very new, and and the British police force is not at all equipped for. This. And so the way they go about fighting this war on terror as it's going to become is in a very uh interesting way in that for for one thing, they don't come out and go, we are now fighting a war on terror. In fact, in contrast to the modern day war on terror, the British government actually plays this, and this is, you know, delightfully British approach, they just kind of do this, well, you know, it'll be fine. We'll just we'll just model through. This will be fine. And there is some logic to that in that they want to damp down on hysteria, and there is a lot of hysteria. When those first bombs start, the sulford bombing in March 1881 is happening. I forget if it's if it's a week or two after, or a week or two before the aforementioned death of Tsar Alexander II in Russia at the hands of of Norod Novolia. And that is that is a major terrorist event. Like that that gets worldwide press coverage that. And so when these bombs start going off, these bombs that don't really work, like the one at the mansion house, initially the press go, well, this must be Russians. Because this is the 1880s, and you've got you've got a large Russian and Polish Poland being part of the Russian Empire at this time, diaspora, in the east end of London. And a lot of them are radicals, socialists, anarchists, and this and the like. So the the first the first instinct is, well, it can't be these Fenians. These are the guys who tried to invade Canada. They're not serious. It must be the Russians, they're serious. And uh when the well, by the time the British government gets disabused of that notion, you've already got this growing groundswell of people signing up as special constables to police their districts, which leads to a lot of innocent people with Irish accents getting beaten up, getting reported on, getting denounced. There's a guy, I I forget it's in some Welsh town, these Irish fellow walking around and he's got a box, like a gift box that he's taking to a friend or something, and he's collared by the police because they and and they they take this box from him and they put it in a field and they're like, you know, with a with a with a very long stick kind of point poking at it, going, you know, is this thing gonna go off? And it turns out, you know, it's ticking, right? It's a clock, it's a goddamn clock. It's a gift for like his ma'am or something. But yeah, right. That's the level of silliness. And so the British government are actually trying to say, look, you know, just chill, like everything's fine. And quietly in the background, they are establishing what is going to become Britain's first counter-terrorist unit, the special branch, uh, is born in 1883. They use uh informers. One person I I I think is worth mentioning is a guy called Red Jim McDermott, uh, who is uh a Fenian, uh sort of lifelong Fenian uh and a lifelong rebel, fought in the Italian War of Independence. He was there during the the Fenian raids in Canada. He's a lifer, but actually he'd been working as an informer for the British since I think the 1860s. And he's uh there's an argument to be made that he's actually a guy who is uh egging on a lot of the the bombings. He's kind of an agent provocateur, sort of saying, look, you know, we need to do more violence so that the police can apprehend people. His involvement is kind of unclear how how far he gets in terms of actually being responsible for some of these attacks, but there there is this murky area where it does seem that he is at least, if if not instigating, he is encouraging these attacks until he's eventually found out as an informer and he has to flee for his life to the United States. So he's one spy that the British have, another who uh it is is valuable for just giving them the architecture of the Irish Republican movement, writ large, and that's a guy um called Thomas Miller Beach. Do you want to talk about him?

SPEAKER_01 47:32

Yeah, um Thomas Miller Beach, who is better known as Henri Le Caron, is quite the spy. Um and is he's got many claims to fame, but one of his great claims to fame is that he was a spy who was unmasked but was not then killed, because in almost every case where a spy is unmasked in Irish Republican movements, they do not live a long and healthy life thereafter. But Beach, um who was from Colchester in Essex, uh ran away from home as a sort of 16-year-old, ends up in Paris. He's working for an American bank in Paris when the American Civil War breaks out, and he decides to leave Paris with a bunch of other young, with the other with young Americans who are going back to fight in civil war, and he decides, well, why not? So he goes off and then he enlists in the Union Army. And he enlists weirdly in the Union Army as a Frenchman, and he has abandoned his Thomas Beach uh persona and he becomes Henri Le Coron. And presumably it was a bet on board the ship or some sort of there's no reason.

SPEAKER_00 48:35

Oh see, I I always thought it was to protect his family. That was the story I thought.

SPEAKER_01 48:41

Yeah, but that doesn't make any sense because his family, I think it could have been to stay hidden from his family, but certainly wasn't to protect them. Not really. Anyway, but and also what also doesn't make sense is he remains in touch with his family because it's through being in touch with his father that he becomes a spy. So he joins the army, becomes friends with a number of Irish men who are also in the army, then joins the Phoenians, writes home to his dad and says, Oh, I've joined the Phoenians, that secret organization you're not meant to talk about. And his father goes to the local MP and says, My son, who's pretending to be French, has joined the Fenians. Would you like information? And the local MP says, I don't know anything about this, but put you in touch with some people. And he ends up in touch with uh Robert Anderson, who is kind of one of the most well-known kind of spy masters.

SPEAKER_00 49:29

I mean he he is the he's the main anti-Fenian spy master that Britain has at this time, a kind of floating, floating between the home office and Dublin Castle and various other organisations. Because just for context here, for people that aren't aware, I mean, there is no British intelligence infrastructure at this time. MI5 will not be invented until 1909. So what you've got is this very ad hoc arrangement. And Anderson, as you say, is this kind of uh roving spy master.

SPEAKER_01 49:53

And he's really good at his job. Um, and then he's also put in touch with a guy called Gilbert McMicon, who is essentially Anderson's counterpart in Canada. So LeCron spends the rest of his working life sending missives to Canada, saying the Fenias are going to invade Canada, sending missives to Anderson, saying, Yeah, telling him all sorts of things. At the same time, he has a family. He works as a uh he works as a pharmacist, but he also works as a grave robber, um, robbing graves of people, not of things, and selling them to medical schools. Um, he ends up in Chicago, where he's a very close ally of Alexander Sullivan. He has his finger in many pies, and it throughout all of this is sending missive after missive for not a huge amount of money to uh to Anderson in London.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

I always got the sense he's he's an adventurous soul.

SPEAKER_01 50:49

I think he is an adventurous soul. Um you know, he comes to the point where at a certain point there is a significant case, special commission is established in London to um basically prove that Charles Stuart Parnell, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, was up to his neck in associations with those who were behind the bombing campaigns and the dynamite campaigns. And they can prove that he went on fundraising trips to America in the mid-1880s, that was largely funded and organized by Alexander Sullivan. They can show that 10,000 people turned up to Parnell giving a talk and getting the freedom of the city of Chicago. So there's a lot of evidence there that would show that he was associated with them. What they have difficulty proving is that Parnell would have known that these men had secret other lives because they have official lives. Why shouldn't he meet a lawyer in Chicago? But he shouldn't meet a lawyer who's also in charge of Clam Nigale. And so Le Caron has sent all of these letters saying, you know, proving that Parnell knew who Sullivan was. But in order to make the case stronger against Parnell, the British establishment forged some letters, and the forgery was exposed. And once the forgery was exposed, the whole case fell apart. And so the fact that Le Caron was actually telling the truth, and he could have brought Parnell down, gets ignored because the much bigger story is the forgery. Um, so I always find it fascinating that that ends up being a postscript in when it could have been one of the most sensational developments in kind of Irish-British history. So he's outed at that point. Nobody had guessed he was a spy until he just stands up and says, actually, I am a spy. I and I'm not French, I've never really spoken French. But I've had you should see the images of him that they have from that. He's got a little twirly moustache, yeah, he's got the slicked hair. I mean, and then he goes on to remain living in London until he dies and is buried in London. Interestingly, under his assumed name, he's not buried under beach, he's buried as as La Caron. And his family keep this as their name, which I think is also interesting because they don't have an association with Ireland, they've got they're not Irish American, they've got no Irish connection at all. Uh, but he is hugely influential in passing along information both to the Canadian authorities and to the British authorities around this period.

SPEAKER_00 53:23

And he's exemplar of the the level of informer that that they have. Fascinating guy. You should write a book about him.

SPEAKER_01 53:29

I should and I will.

SPEAKER_00 53:33

So we have these informers, but then there's another another fellow who who bears mentioning in terms of the war on on terror aspect, and he's a guy I find quite fascinating, who is again if we want to talk about outcomes of this dynamite war. This is the man who is going to become the founder of for forensics, explosives forensics. A man by the name of Colonel Vivian Deering Majendi, fantastic British imperial name. Um, and he's a loyal servant of empire. He was there in India during the the mutiny in 1857. He is fascinated by things that go bang. He becomes the His Majesty or Her Majesty's inspector of explosives at some point in the 1870s, can't remember precisely when. And he leaps on the idea during the dynamite war that, you know, we need to go to these places where these bombings have happened. We need to actually see what the blast looks like, uh, what the detritus looks like, you know, where these shradnol is, all this kind of stuff, and and figure out and analyze the explosives. And in the process, he he establishes what is is going to become today's Metropolitan Police Bomb Squad. And he pioneers the idea of of figuring out how bombs work, how to diffuse them. He does uh reputedly diffuse one or two during the dynamite war in quite daring fashion. He's he's he's a hell of a figure, and again, he's someone who is is prompted by what happens during this period of of terrorist crisis to to uh innovate and to and to develop what is going to become a good a great legacy in terms of counter-terrorism. But by the time Magendi's getting this all together, the war is really starting to to wind up. It it's officially called off in 1885. It's going quite well by now, though. We've got we've got the the Clan Nigel involved, we've got uh dynamite uh good bombs that work well. There's certainly plenty of fear around. Why do they call it off? Why does this dynamite war come to a close? Because Ireland is a spoiler, spoiler, Ireland not independent after 1885. Doesn't no doesn't work like that.

SPEAKER_01 55:37

It's not effective. Um I mean, but I mean you can still they put on display about 10 years ago that one of those bombs that he diffused not diffused, but that they collected, which was then used in as a teaching tool. Um, and the um the Museum of London had it on display, which was kind of remarkable, and you can see the inner workings of it, um, which is a very rare kind of piece of of that sort of evidence from that period, because mostly they just didn't explode.

SPEAKER_00 56:08

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:09

Yeah, um, but it well, it's called off, it's partly to it's mostly to do with internal problems. There's a huge problem with the relationship between Britain and the United States at this point, because a lot of those bombers who are arrested, and a lot of them are arrested because of the spies and reformers, they've taken out American citizenship. And there is a huge sort of diplomatic campaign around that these people are only taking out their citizenship because they can be repatriated to America, and they're not actually loyal Americans. And America starts to take that seriously. Another big problem for the bombing campaign is what happens um in Chicago on the 1st of May 1886, which is the Haymarket bombing. And so the Haymarket had been a labor dispute. Um, a bomb ultimately gets thrown into a crowd, a number of police die, a number of anarchists, nihilists, all anyone who could they can put an ist on the end of gets arrested, a number of men are executed. This sort of terrorism being brought to America.

SPEAKER_00 57:17

It's it's the first proper bombing attack that happens in America, like the first significant terrorism attack in America.

SPEAKER_01 57:24

That ruins it for the Irish, essentially, and particularly because Chicago had been the place where the bombings were being organized. You can't underestimate the damage done to the Irish cause by haymarkers. There was a great cartoon published in a paper uh afterwards, which was called the Triangle, and it was three pieces of dynamite, and it had kind of anarchist, the Irish, and the Italian mob. Um, and the the triangle was the secret name of those leading the Clan of Gael. So they knew like that was anyone who knew knew exactly what was being said in that cartoon.

SPEAKER_00 58:00

It was it was another one of those sort of inner inner organizations, wasn't it? The Bushka doll.

SPEAKER_01 58:06

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But but clearly well known enough that you could put it in a large-scale paper, and people would go, ah, we know what they're talking about. Yeah, and that was partly to do with the falling apart of Clonegale in Chicago and the rise of Patrick's uh Henry Cronin, who was the whistleblower there who was shouting about how Sullivan had stolen that hundred thousand. That's not great, that doesn't help his cause. Then you've got Haymarket, and then ultimately you have the murder of Cronin in order to silence him. And once the Irish start to kill the Irish on American soil, well, that's it's all well and good for them to take their fight elsewhere, but once you're starting to kill people in American cities, that changes everything. That's all of those things kind of combined to have you know straightforward Americans going, hang on a second. You know, we don't mind it if they're going to talk about it and do things elsewhere. We really do mind it if it's now at our doorstep.

SPEAKER_00 59:06

NIMBYism, basically. NIMBYism brings an end to the dynamite war.

SPEAKER_01 59:12

And to the Power Clan again, you know, has a huge, huge impact.

SPEAKER_00 59:16

Yeah. It's I mean, it's implosion that ends this thing, but as proof of concept, it is obviously something that is going to get picked up later in the 20th century. And I think that's the the important legacy of this. Here is that it it doesn't achieve its political goals, gets a discussion happening. I mean, the the the idea of of an Irish free state was presented by uh Prime Minister Gladstone in Parliament, or it's it's raised and it's immediately shat on, obviously. Everyone's like, Well, that's purely ridiculous. But it is raised in Parliament, and so that's claimed. Uh I think it's Devoy or someone claims it and goes, Oh, yeah, look, you know, we achieved something, da-da-da. Which, yeah, yeah, sort of kind of not really, but but it it does something. The point is, though, that the idea that they could use a string of bombings to create this tsunami of fear, highlight the cause and rally troops to the cause as well. And for that brief hot minute, you know, trying to get everyone, all these different factions on the same page, that is something that is going to become a a part of the thinking of the Irish struggle into the 20th century. So, in that respect, the dynamite war is this foundational thing, which in terms of British history, I think just doesn't get talked about enough, even though it is kind of the the origin story of the troubles and and and the like, this is really where it starts.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:36

Yeah, and I think that whole debate about whether or not that sort of procedure ought to be used. I think one of the people to that's worth having a think about is a guy called William Mackey Lomesney. And he, I think, in many ways embodies the problems that people who are thinking about this have to kind of deal with. So he was known as the little captain. He was very uh well-liked and very well got within kind of the Fenians and then later Clonegale, he does time, he ends up in in America. And when he he's opposed to the skirmishing, he's absolutely opposed to it. But when it comes to the later dynamite war, he says he's going to get involved. And Devoy and he have this sort of to and fro over you know the legitimacy of this and why or why not should not happen. And Lomusny says he wants to get involved because by being involved, he can ensure that innocent people are not killed, and that he doesn't necessarily trust the reasoning for other for some of the others who want to get involved, and that innocent people will get killed. Now he is involved in the bombing of um London Bridge. He's one of the three men who go out and they place it really late at night very consciously not to kill or injure anyone. That bomb goes off prematurely and kills the three men, including Lomusny, who was setting it. And so he he sort of embodies all of the debate over sort of why you should do it, why you shouldn't do it, what happens, what you can't plan for. So whenever you plant a bomb, you are likely to either kill yourself or someone else. And it it in some ways his story encapsulates that debate that was being had then, which I think people often forget about. Um, and obviously is had is had within all sorts of groups and has you know a relevance to the time in which we live in now.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:29

Yeah, it's it's a poetic end for him in that respect because it does, yeah, he's his point is proven by his own demise. And uh that seems like a fitting point to uh end this discussion of the dynamite war. Thank you so much, Gillian, for joining me for this uh for this journey. Do you have anything to plug? Where can people find you on the line?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:52

They can find me at my website, which I think is JulianO'Brien.net, um, or they can read Blood Runs Green, which is the book about this whole period and particularly about the Cronin murder, which you know contextualises all of that. And at some point there will be that book about Henri Le Coran.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:11

Yeah, damn well better be.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:12

When I can find the time to write it. When you can find the time, need to get that, yes. Time. That's what I need. But thank you, thank you. I've always always a joy to kind of re-retalk about these things, which will prompt me to go back to the writing.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:24

That's that's the hope that it that it will prompt. And uh thank you, dear listener, for tuning into History's Devils. Remember to like, subscribe, mash buttons, do that kind of stuff, share this, put it around, whether you're listening on the on the Apple or Spotify or whether you're watching us on the YouTube, whichever way you are consuming this content, I believe that's what the kids say. Get it out there, support us, and we will see you next time for another edition of History Devil.