Updated 22 August 2024: Just to highlight this blog post is still a work-in-progress, published early in draft form for my MA history project assessment. The post will be completed and re-published in the coming months. Thank you for your patience. Do please get in touch via the Comments section below or Contact me directly if you have any questions or comment about this topic in the meantime.
During London’s Covid lockdowns, London Fields park in the borough of Hackney became notorious for huge crowds of people gathering there to party the pandemic away. But on 5 July 1886, London Fields was occupied by an even bigger crowd when somewhere between six and ten thousand people gathered there to support the cause of Home Rule for Ireland. The special guest speaker at that event was none other than ‘the Uncrowned King of Ireland’ Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891), MP for Cork City and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster.
I only learnt about this event as a result of some serendipitous scrolling through nineteenth-century back issues of the Hackney and Kingsland Gazette. Reading the news reports of that day set me off on a research trail which led to a decade-long tale of how the campaign for Irish Home Rule played out in East London of the 1880s.
This blog post is adapted from an article written for "The Irish Post", 13 April 2024.
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1880s: Land War in Ireland & the Irish Question in Britain
By the late nineteenth-century, the campaign of agrarian agitation in Ireland known as the Land War was at its height and Westminster politics were dominated by the question of whether Ireland was to be governed through the policies of coercion or conciliation.
This debate spilled out from the corridors of the Palace of Westminster into the streets of London where the Irish made up the city’s oldest and largest immigrant community and the Fenians of the Irish Republican Brotherhood were planting bombs.
By the end of 1885, the Liberal Party leader William Gladstone (1809-1898) had come round to the belief that Home Rule was the answer to ‘the Irish Question’ but his first Home Rule Bill was rejected by Parliament.
And so, the question of Home Rule for Ireland became the central issue in the general election of July 1886.
July 1886: Hackney Radicals and Liberals
On the day before polling day in the electoral constituencies of North, Central and South Hackney, the Hackney Radical Federation organised a Home Rule Demonstration in London Fields as a platform for the local Liberal candidates, all of whom supported Home Rule. The Federation was a group of local clubs, led by the Hackney Working Men’s Club which campaigned alongside Irish nationalists and British socialists against the Coercion Acts in Ireland and for free speech in England.
Two platforms were constructed on London Fields for the Gladstonian Liberal candidates for Shoreditch and Bethnal Green. The balcony of a house at the south corner of the park acted as a platform for the Hackney candidates. These included South Hackney's Liberal MP, Charles Russell (1832-1900), a Catholic lawyer born near Newry in Co. Down. (The precise address of that house sadly remains elusive. And a site visit provided no clues given the amount of rebuilding on the streets facing onto the the southern corner of London Fields).
Introducing Parnell to East Londoners
The local newspaper, the Hackney and Kingsland Gazette, gives us a wonderfully evocative report of the event. The weather that day was “delightful” with an “enormous attendance from all parts of East London”.
The Irish-born Liberal MP Charles Russell told the crowd “he was anxious that the people of Hackney should see Mr. Parnell face to face in order that they might find out for themselves that he did not smell of brimstone and that he had not got a tail or a cloven hoof”.
Parnell then spoke to the people of Hackney saying that he “knew that the democracy of England would not allow the democracy of Ireland to be trampled upon in a quarrel which was not their own”. He concluded by posing the question:
“were they to keep Ireland in chains or would they try the effect of love?”
A Conservative government returns
Despite the stirring words spoken in London Fields, Gladstone’s Liberal Party split over Home Rule. The Conservatives formed a minority government in 1887, propped up by the anti-Home Rule Unionist faction of the Liberals, and would go on to introduce another Coercion Act in Ireland which earned the Conservative Chief Secretary for Ireland the title ‘Bloody Balfour’.
Hackney Radicals and Liberals would continue to campaign in support of Ireland while Hackney South’s MP Charles Russell would play a historic role as Parnell’s lawyer, successfully defending him in 1888-1889 against false allegations made by The Times.
You can hear the full story of how the cause of Ireland generated passionate - and sometimes violent - expressions of solidarity and opposition in East London during the 1880s in a talk I gave at the 2024 Hackney History Festival.
Closing reflection - coming soon.
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