The Manchester Martyrs were three men executed for the murder of a police officer in Manchester, England, in 1867. The three were members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, also known as the Fenians, an organisation dedicated to ending British rule in Ireland. They were among a group of 30–40 Fenians who attacked a horse-drawn police van transporting two arrested leaders of the Brotherhood, Thomas J. Kelly and Timothy Deasy. Police Sergeant Charles Brett was shot and killed as the attackers attempted to force the van open by blowing the lock. 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
About Manchester Martyrs in brief
The Manchester Martyrs were three men executed for the murder of a police officer in Manchester, England, in 1867. The three were members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, also known as the Fenians, an organisation dedicated to ending British rule in Ireland. They were among a group of 30–40 Fenians who attacked a horse-drawn police van transporting two arrested leaders of the Brotherhood, Thomas J. Kelly and Timothy Deasy. Police Sergeant Charles Brett, travelling inside with the keys, was shot and killed as the attackers attempted to force the van open by blowing the lock. 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. Two others were also charged and found guilty of Brett’s murder, Thomas Maguire and Edward O’Meagher Condon, but their death sentences were overturned through the intercession of the U.S. government. The Fenian Brotherhood was founded in New York in 1858 by John O’Mahony, ostensibly the IRB’s American wing. The IRB had an estimated 100,000 members, and was carrying out frequent acts of violence in metropolitan Britain. In 1867 the Irish community in Manchester accounted for more than 10 per cent of the population, and one contemporary estimate put the number of Fenians and Fenian sympathisers living within 50 miles of the city at 50,000, with a population of about 10,000 in the city alone.
Two Fenians evaded the police, and travelled from Ireland to Britain to reorganise and raise the morale of the Fenian groups there in the wake of the failed uprising. The Manchester police were initially unaware of their identities, until their colleagues in the Irish police identified them as Kelly and Deasy, who had fought with distinction in the American Civil War. Both had played important roles in the abortive uprising, and both had been declared the chief executive of theIrish Republic at a secret republican convention. The pair 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. Simultaneously, a party of about 30 40 men leaped over a wall at the side of the road and seized the horses, one of which they called sledgehammers. The unarmed police were described by the police as ‘a miscellaneous lot, apparently embracing the long and short and fat and short of the Manchester Police.’ They offered little resistance and soon fled, after an unsuccessful attempt to open the van with hatchets, crowbars and crowbars, upon which they shot Sergeant Brett, calling them ‘the Manchester Police’ The Manchester Outrages became known as “the Manchester Martyr’s’ and ‘The Manchester Police Massacre’.
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This page is based on the article Manchester Martyrs published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 09, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
