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The Crosshill Railway Murder of 1840
Author(s): Willy Maley
Source:
History Ireland,
Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 24-26
Published by: Wordwell Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27724043
Accessed: 30-09-2019 20:11 UTC
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The Crosshill
Railway Murder
0/1840 by Willy Maley
On the morning of 14 May 1841, a crowd of 50,000
gathered at Bishopbriggs Cross, north-west of
Glasgow, to witness the execution of two Irish navvies
convicted of the murder of an English ganger.
RIBBON CONSPIRACY?
First reports indicated that positive
identification of Green's assailants
was not going to be easy: 'identifica
tion of the murderers is difficult or
impossible, from the darkness which
prevailed at the time, and the similari
ty of dress worn by the labourers '
(Glasgow Herald, 11 Dec. 1841). Great
emphasis was placed on the appar
ently premeditated nature of the
crime. Although revenge was offered
as the motive, the court record sug
gests that fears of a Ribbon conspira
cy lay behind the determination of
the authorities to secure a conviction.
Ribbonism was ostensibly an Irish
secret society whose oath-bound
members wore a green ribbon as an
emblem. The Ribbon movement was a
form of popular resistance to English
landlords and employers, and, in par
ticular, to the forcible eviction of ten
ants from the land. There was proba
bly more shadow than substance to
Dennis Doolan, of King's County, and
Patrick Redding, from Tipperary,
were hung at the scene of their
alleged crime before the largest mass
of spectators ever gathered together
in the West of Scotland. The people
present were only part of the mass
who lined the road from Glasgow
Cross to the place of execution. The
procession from Jail Square to the
scaffold may have been witnessed by
around 120,000 persons.
These numbers had turned out for
the first public hanging in Glasgow
carried out 'beyond the common
place of execution' since 1769. In the
case of Doolan and Redding, the deci
sion to carry out the sentence pub
licly provoked a lively controversy in
the Scottish press. It was a major
issue in terms of public order, with
rumours abroad of 10,000 Irish
labourers ready to intervene on
behalf of their countrymen.
BACKGROUND OF
INDUSTRIAL UNREST
These controversial judicial killings
took place against a background of
industrial unrest on a key Scottish
railway construction dominated by
Irish labour. The Edinburgh and
Glasgow Railway Company had been
set up in 1838. The line was finally
completed, at a cost of 1.25 million
pounds, on 18 February 1842. On 8
December 1840, during a period of
agitation and uncertainty on the line
? with wages being cut, deadlines
delayed, and contractors failing to
honour payments to workers ? John
Green, an experienced English ganger
was placed in charge of a squad of
Irish railwaymen at the Crosshill Cut
in Bishopbriggs. All of the labourers
on this portion of the line, barring
two Englishmen, were Irish. The acci
dent rate was high, with seven fatali
ties per mile of track. Two days after
his arrival at Crosshill, on the morn
ing of 10 December, Green was
ambushed on his way to work and
beaten to death on a temporary
wooden bridge. He was the third
ganger to be murdered on the line in
three months. With the perpetrators
of these murders still at large, the
authorities were hell-bent on a hang
ing.
their purported machinations in the
West of Scotland, but the Scottish
constabulary was in many ways the
brainchild of Sir Robert Peel, who had
served as Chief Secretary in Ireland
from 1812-1822, and a central plank of
its activities was the policing of the
Irish immigrant community. Its detec
tives had to justify their existence.
Where a political conspiracy did not
exist, one could easily be invented.
A conspiracy theory was evident
from the first reports. The Glasgow
Herald of 11 December 1840, declared:
That the murder was a combined and
premeditated one admits of little
doubt. Green had only come to this
superintendency two days before, but
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24 HISTORY IRELAND Spring 1993
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a report had been spread that he was
strict and harsh in the former works
which he had overlooked; and the
determination to rid themselves thus
cruelly of one whom they might con
sider a sharp taskmaster, is the only
reason which can be given for this
heartless action.
The following Monday (14 Dec), the
paper confidently declared: 'That the
murder has been the result of a con
spiracy, organised according to the
principles of Ribbonism, is now
beyond a doubt.'
On the morning of 11 December,
Henry Bell, Sheriff-Substitute, and Mr
Salmon, the Procurator-Fiscal, had
gone to the woods near the Crosshill
Cut with a company of soldiers, and a
party of police officers. They rounded
up the majority of the Irishmen Green
had ganged over, and brought them
to the city in half a dozen omnibuses.
A total of twenty-eight Irish labourers
? all wearing teetotal medals rather
than green ribbons ? were taken into
custody. Six were detained, though
not formally committed to stand trial
for the murder. One of those ques
tioned, James Hickie, a native of
County Carlow, implicated himself
and two of his fellow workers ? who
were also fellow lodgers at a cottage
in Auchinairn ? in the murder of the
ganger. As a direct consequence of
Hickie's statement, a reward of ?100
was offered for the apprehension of
Dennis Doolan, who had been dis
charged from his employment the day
previous to Green's murder, and had
since absconded. A reward of ?50 was
subsequently offered for the arrest of
Patrick Redding.
By this time, three possible motives
for the killing of Green were in circu
lation: popular reaction to a harsh
overseer ? Green's reputation pre
ceded him; revenge on the part of an
individual ? Doolan was dismissed
the day before the murder; an Irish
political conspiracy ? rumours of
Ribbonism were played up by the
police and the press. Once Doolan
was portrayed as the ringleader of a
Ribbon gang, all three motives mani
fested themselves in one man.
By 21 December, the Glasgow
Herald had abandoned the notion that
it was too dark to see on the morning
of the murder:
It has been distinctly made out that
five persons were on the bridge at the
time, two of whom actually commit
ted the murder ... The murder was
committed by a heavy kitchen poker,
taken from Gray's house on the morn
ing the deed was committed.
These controversial
judicial killings took
place against a back
ground of industrial
unrest on a key Scottish
railway construction
dominated by Irish
labour.
Neither the missing poker, nor any
other murder weapon, was ever
found.
The police hunt for the two
Irishmen extended far and wide, with
false arrests in Portpatrick and
Dublin. A report in the Dublin Register
announced that a man was being held
there on suspicion. John Carr, a
native of Kildare answering Doolan's
description, was questioned at length
in Henry Street before being released
once his identity, and innocence,
were established.
THE ARRESTS
On 1 January 1841, the Herald told
its readers that there was:
little doubt that Doolan actually
inflicted the blows with a poker; and
there is at the same time good reason
to believe that one of the men now in
custody was the person who jumped
upon the body of Green, while he lay
under the merciless strokes of
Doolan.
Reporting Doolan's arrest on 25
January 1841, the Herald was indis
creet, to put it mildly. Doolan was
taken on the roof of a lodging-house
on the evening of Wednesday 20
January by officers of the Liverpool
constabulary acting on information
received from Michael 'Smoker'
Byrnes, an acquaintance of the fugi
tive Irishman. According to the
Herald, Doolan:
was dressed in a blue jacket, or
lumper's coat, with canvas trousers,
but it is expected that the bloody gar
ments which the accused is said to
have worn when Green was murdered
will yet be got.
The 'bloody garments' were, like the
murder weapons, never recovered.
On 1 March, the Herald reported
the arrest of the third man wanted in
connection with the Crosshill murder.
Patrick Redding was taken near the
quarry where he was employed near
Austonley, in Yorkshire. Between
Doolan's arrest and the apprehension
of Redding, legal pressure was placed
upon the Herald to refrain from
divulging details of the case or imput
ing guilt to those detained by the
police. The newspaper was conse
quently much more muted than it had
been in its account of Doolan's deten
tion:
HISTORY IRELAND Spring 1993 25
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We are in possession of the particu
lars of the apprehension, but as it is
the express desire of the gentlemen
who conduct the criminal department
in this establishment, that no detailed
statement of the circumstances infer
ring the guilt of any prisoner should
go forth, whereby his case might be
prejudged before trial, we are unable
at present to communicate the cir
cumstances involving Redding.
A watch torn from its fob at the time
of' Green's murder turned up in a
pawnshop near Huddersfield. The
pawnbroker recalled it being deposit
ed by a man with an Irish accent, but
could not identify Redding. This was
hardly conclusive evidence, since
Irish immigrants were the principal
clientele of pawnbrokers in the indus
trial areas of Scotland and England.
However, Huddersfield was consid
ered sufficiently proximate to
Austonley to incriminate Redding,
and the mere mention of an Irish
accent confirmed his guilt in the eyes
of the authorities.
THE TRIAL
Given the presumed political nature
of the crime, the crown appointed the
Solicitor-General, Mr Maitland, to con
duct the case for the prosecution.
The court heard twenty-one crown
witnesses. There was no defence. The
fifteen-man jury was composed of
small Protestant employers, unlikely
to be sympathetic to the cause of
Scottish labour, let alone Irish labour.
Despite a shortage of hard evidence,
the jury found Doolan and Redding
unanimously guilty as charged. The
verdict was reached in the face of a
clear contradiction between the
charges and the medical evidence.
The charges read out in court against
the accused stated that they did:
inflict several blows upon the head
and body of the said John Green, and
did fell him to the ground, and did
repeatedly jump upon and kick him
while he was lying on the ground, and
did otherwise abuse and maltreat
him, by all which, or part thereof, his
skull was fractured, and he was mor
tally injured, and was reduced to a
state of insensibility, and soon there
after died.
Yet the medical evidence submitted
by Dr James Corkindale maintained
that:
neither on the trunk, nor on the limbs
was there any mark of violence except
that there was an abrasion of skin on
the little finger of the left hand, and
that the large bone of the fore finger
of the same hand was fractured with
out any wound of the flesh.
In directing the jury toward a verdict,
Lord Moncrieff, the presiding judge,
emphasised the religious and national
identity of the accused: 'These men
are strangers in our country; they dif
fer from us in religion.' Once an unani
mous verdict of guilty was returned,
the Lord Justice Clerk, recommending
a public hanging ? 'that the example
may have its effect in time to come' ?
made explicit what had been implicit
throughout the trial:
It is a crime which, I am happy to say,
is of rare occurrence in this part of
the kingdom. It is a crime, however,
by no means rare in another part of
her Majesty's dominions, of which
those prisoners are natives; and I am
very much afraid that the brutal con
duct which is exhibited in so many
counties of that land, and the frequent
escapes from justice which there take
place, have not at least been the
means of deterring them from enter
ing into the case of deliberate murder
which has so long engaged the atten
tion of the court.
In passing sentence, Lord Moncrieff
again underlined the religious and
national differences between Scotland
and Ireland, reminding the Irishmen
that they were 'of a different religious
persuasion than the majority of the
people in this place.' The hidden
agenda of anti-Irish racism surfaces
not only in the conduct of the court,
but in the coverage of the case. The
illiterate Hickie in particular was held
up as the perennial 'thick paddy'.
When informed that he had been
found guilty 'art and part', and was to
be recommended to mercy, he is
reported to have asked 'who's she?'
THE EXECUTION
The Catholic hierarchy wanted to
avoid a confrontation between Irish
labourers and Scottish police at all
costs. Consequently, Bishop Murdoch
advised the Irish labour force to stay
away from the execution, and they
obeyed the church. The awful specta
cle passed without incident. The exe
cutioner, who refused an assistant in
spite of the fact that this was a double
hanging and a public one, was paid
the princely sum of ?24 for his labour.
He was reputedly later fined ?5 for an
unlawful killing, leaving him with ?19
for his morning's work. Redding died
instantaneously. Doolan took twenty
minutes to die. At one point he
brought his knees up to his chest.
Amid allegations of deliberate stran
gulation, the hangman attributed the
protracted suffering of Doolan to a
rope that was stiff and new, and
asked 'Didn't the other go down kind
ly?' The final bill for the day was ?210.
This figure must be weighed
against the sum of ?100
raised for the families of
labourers killed on the line.
The Crosshill railway mur
der was one of the biggest
Scottish stories of the last
century, bigger than Burke
and Hare, or Baird and
Hardie. In the wake of the
execution of Doolan and
Redding, the Glasgow Herald
of 17 May 1841, wished 'that
the names of Doolan and
Redding may soon be for
gotten, and no successors
revive their crime.'
Willy Maley is a lecturer in
English at Goldsmiths'
College, London.
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26 HISTORY IRELAND Spring 1993
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