Captain Shannon

The year 18— will be memorable for the perpetration in England and in Ireland of a series of infamously diabolical outrages. On the scene of each crime was found—sometimes scrawled in plain rough capitals upon a piece of paper which was pinned to the body of a victim, sometimes rudely chalked in the same lettering upon a door or wall—this inscription—“By order.—Captain Shannon.”

Who Captain Shannon was the police failed entirely to discover, although the counties in which the crimes occurred were scoured from end to end, and every person who was known to have been in the neighbourhood was subjected to the severest examination. That some who were so examined knew more than they would tell, there was reason to believe; but so dreaded was the miscreant’s name, and so swift and terrible had been the fate of those who in the past had incurred his vengeance, that neither offers of reward nor threats of punishment could elicit anything but dogged denials.

But when the conspirators carried the war into the enemy’s country, and successfully accomplished the peculiarly daring crime which wrecked the police headquarters at New Scotland Yard, the indignation of the public knew no bounds. If the emissaries of Captain Shannon could succeed in conveying an infernal machine into New Scotland Yard itself, the whole community was—so it was argued—at the mercy of a band of murderers.

The scene in the House of Commons on the night following the outrage was one of great excitement. The Chief Secretary for Ireland declared, in a memorable speech, that the purpose of the crime was to terrorise and to intimidate. No loyal English or Irish citizen would, he was sure, be deterred from doing his duty by such infamous acts; but that they had to deal with murderers of the most determined type could not be doubted. The whole conspiracy was, in his opinion, the work of some half dozen assassins, who were probably the tools of the monster calling himself “Captain Shannon,” in whose too fertile brain the crimes had, he believed, originated, and under whose devilishly planned directions they had been carried out.

The police had reason to suppose that the headquarters of the conspirators were in Ireland, in which country the majority of the crimes—at all events of the earlier crimes—had been committed.

He regretted to say, but it was his duty to say, that but for the disloyal attitude of a section of the Irish people—who, from dastardly and contemptible cowardice, or from sympathy with the assassins, had not only withheld the evidence, without which it was impossible to trace the various outrages to their cause, but had on more than one occasion actually sought to hinder the police in the execution of their duty—the conspirators would long since have been brought to book.

The Secretary then went on to denounce in the strongest language what he called the infamous conduct of the disloyal Irish. He declared, amid ringing cheers, that the man or woman who sought to shield such a monster as Captain Shannon, or to protect him and his confederates from justice, was nothing less than a murderer in the eyes of God and of man. He informed the House that although the Government had actually framed several important measures which would go far to remove the grievances of which Irishmen were complaining, he for one would, in view of what had taken place, strenuously oppose the consideration at that moment of any measures which had even the appearance of a concession to Irish demands. It was repression, not concession, which must be meted out to traitors and murderers.

Within a month after the delivery of this speech all England was horrified by the news of a crime more wantonly wicked than any outrage which had preceded it, a crime which resulted—as its perpetrators must have known it would result—in the wholesale murder of hundreds of inoffensive people against whom—excepting for the fact that they happened to be law-abiding citizens—the followers of Captain Shannon could have no grievance.

All that was known was that a respectably dressed young man, carrying what appeared to be about a dozen well-worn volumes from Mudie’s, or some other circulating library, had entered an empty first-class carriage at Aldgate station. These books were held together by a strap—as is usual when sending or taking volumes for exchange to the libraries—and it had occurred to no one to ask to examine them, although the officials at all railway stations had, in view of the recent outrages, been instructed to challenge every passenger carrying a suspicious-looking parcel.

The theory which was afterwards put forward was that what appeared to be a parcel of volumes from a circulating library was in reality a case cunningly covered with the backs, bindings, and edges of books, and that this case contained an infernal machine of the most deadly description. It was supposed that the wretch in charge of it had purposely entered an empty carriage that he might the better carry out his infamous plan, and that after setting fire to the fuse he had left the train at the next station.

That this theory afforded the most likely explanation of what subsequently took place was generally agreed, although one well-known authority on explosives expressed himself as of opinion that no infernal machine capable of causing what had happened could be concealed in so small a compass as that suggested. But it was pointed out in reply that from arrests and discoveries which had been made in America and on the Continent, it was evident that the manufacture of infernal machines and investigations into the qualities of explosives were being scientifically and systematically carried on.

Though no connection had as yet been traced between the persons who had been arrested and the perpetrators of the recent outrages, the probabilities were that such connection existed, and it was asked whether it might not be possible that some one who was thus engaged in experimenting with explosives had discovered a new explosive, or a new combination of explosives, which was different from and more deadly than anything known to the authorities.

Into the probability or improbability of this and other theories which were put forward it would be idle here to enter. All that is known is that the train had only just entered the tunnel immediately to the west of Blackfriars station when there occurred the most awful explosion of the sort within the memory of man. The passengers, as well as the guard, driver, and stoker, not only of the train in which the explosion took place, but also of a train which was proceeding in the opposite direction and happened to be passing at the time, were killed to a man, and with the exception of one of Smith’s bookstall boys, whose escape seemed almost miraculous, every soul in the station—ticket-collectors, porters, station-master, and the unfortunate people who were waiting on the platform—shared the same fate.

Nor was this all, for at the moment when the outrage occurred the train was passing under one of the busiest crossings in London—that where New Bridge Street, Blackfriars Bridge, Queen Victoria Street, and the Thames Embankment converge—and so terrific was the explosion that the space between these converging thoroughfares was blown away as a man’s hand is blown away by the bursting of a gun.

The buildings in the immediate neighbourhood, including parts of St. Paul’s station on the London, Chatham, and Dover railway, the offices over Blackfriars station, and De Keyser’s Hotel on the opposite side of the way, were wrecked, and the long arm of Blackfriars Bridge lay idle across the river like a limb which has been rudely hacked from a body.

But it is not my intention to attempt any realistic description of the scene, or of the awful sights which were witnessed when, after the first paralysing moment of panic was over, the search for the injured, the dying, and the dead was commenced. The number of lives lost, including those who perished in Blackfriars station, in the two trains, in the street, and in the surrounding buildings, was enormous. Several columns of the papers next morning were filled with lists of the missing and the dead. One name on the list had a terrible significance. It was the name of the man to achieve whose murder the lives of so many innocent men and women had been ruthlessly sacrificed; the name of a man whose remains were never found, but whose funeral pyre was built of the broken bodies of hundreds of his fellow creatures,—the name of the Chief Secretary for Ireland.