Onselen Showdown at the Red Lion

The Life and Time of Jack McLoughlin
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-86842-623-2
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

Johannesburg, South Africa, was ? and is ? the Frontier of Money. Within months of its founding, the mining camp was host to organised crime: the African 'Regiment of the Hills' and 'Irish Brigade' bandits. Bars, brothels, boarding houses and hotels oozed testosterone and violence, and the use of fists and guns was commonplace. Beyond the chaos were clear signs of another struggle, one to maintain control, honour and order within the emerging male and mining dominated culture. In the underworld, the dictum of 'honour among thieves', as well as a hatred of informers, testified to attempts at self-regulation. A 'real man' did not take advantage of an opponent by employing underhand tactics. It had to be a 'fair fight' if a man was to be respected. This was the world that 'One-armed Jack' McLoughlin - brigand, soldier, sailor, mercenary, burglar, highwayman and safe-cracker - entered in the early 1890s to become Johannesburg's most infamous 'Irish' anti-hero and social bandit. McLoughlin's infatuation with George Stevenson prompted him to recruit the young Englishman into his gang of safe-crackers but 'Stevo' was a man with a past and primed for personal and professional betrayal. It was a deadly mixture. Honour could only be retrieved through a Showdown at the Red Lion.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Onselen, Charles Van

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

Dystopia’s Militants

— c 1850–1900 —

I look to death in quest of life;

I seek health in infirmity

And freedom in captivity;

I search for rest in bitter strife

And faithfulness in treachery.

But fortune always was unkind:

I know that it was designed

By adverse fate and heaven’s decree

That, since I seek what cannot be,

What can be I shall never find.

CERVANTES

Jack Kerouac, who spent more time on the road than most, savoured the company of all the unusual characters he encountered. But his preference, like the moon on a cloudless night, was there for all to see. ‘The only people for me,’ he wrote, ‘are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.’ Every age throws up its own shower of such meteorites and the depth, nature and trajectory of every manifestation of such ‘madness’ is of enduring interest to historians. Viewed closely, through the microscope rather than the telescope, the glow of these outliers becomes simultaneously more ordinary and more wondrous still.

This is a study of a man who demanded trust from those given to betrayal. It is the story of an individual who sought satisfaction in tension, and who strived to retain his independence after he lost an arm. It is the tale of a man who glimpsed peace in confinement and flirted with – no, found – death in his search for emotional fulfilment. Born in one of the great cities of his time, he adapted to the countryside everywhere and felt most settled whilst on the move. At first by choice and later by circumstance, he pursued his paradoxical quests across half the world. To many casual observers he may indeed have seemed to be just ‘mad’.

Admiring of heroes who lived on the outer margins of society, he found the dispensation he was born into so insufferably ordered and restrictive that he slipped away through Suez in search of adventure in the new worlds of Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa. Determined to avoid the enslavement of industry, urban existence and wage labour, he also turned his back on the larger part of humanity – women. He spent most of his life on the road, on the frontiers of empire, amidst fraternal solidarities where affection, conduct and deeds were expressed through, and governed by, the codes of courage, honour and masculinity he admired.

He was an unusual man or, as used to be said, ‘quite a character’. A charismatic figure with a passion for frontier life, he was revered by many in the underworld circles he most often frequented, and feared by colonial authorities intent on developing and stabilising the modern socio-economic order he had rejected and intended subverting. At one time he was sought on two continents and it took the imperial machinery 14 years to track him down and bring him to justice. The authorities considered him responsible for a murder; but he refused to see it as a crime because it flowed from a breach of the code of manly conduct that he expected all men to run their lives by. In truth, the personal and professional reasons for committing the deed that shaped the rest of his eventful life had by then become irrevocably intertwined.

Such unconventional men or women are often dismissed as curiosities, as part of historical freak-shows, and relegated to the margins of mainstream studies. We can do this, but if we do, we do so at our peril. These people are, of course, ‘extraordinary’, ‘special’ or ‘strange’, in the same sense that all human beings are distinctive when they manifest strong or unfamiliar qualities. But our interest in those from the outer margins should lie not only with how they differed from the rest of humanity, but in the many ways in which their rarer attributes were accommodated or rejected in the sub-cultures they occupied as well as the main streams of society. When a ‘deviant’ fits into a rapidly mutating social setting, such as that found on frontiers, it often tells us as much about the roots that the new settlements have sprung from and the nature of the coming order as it does about the newly arrived stranger. With the passage of time and benefit of hindsight we can see that societies, too, can at various moments be ‘mad’.

Indeed, it is precisely because marginal figures are, by definition, ‘unusual’ that they constitute a litmus test for societal norms. Sometimes their actions tell us more about the direction, nature and pace of change of society than they do about their behaviour. We can, if we insist, see McLoughlin, too, as being ‘extraordinary’ or ‘weird’. But if we focus only on his exceptionality and the deeds that came to cost him his life, we will forfeit the fuller understanding that comes from the realisation that there were thousands of other men who, in most respects, were more like him than they were not. If we stand back and view him as a member of an awkward, disgruntled male cohort born in industrial Lancashire between 1850 and 1870 that came to engage the British colonies of the southern hemisphere in distinctive social, economic and political ways, his behaviour becomes easier to understand and significantly less unusual. The microscope is essential, but we abandon the telescope at our peril.

Every generation, only partially free to engage destiny on its own terms, stands between the one that went before it and the one that follows. Each cohort looks back to where it came from, assesses its prospects and considers where it, or its successor, will find itself over time. The answer it arrives at will in part be shaped, if not wholly determined, by the circumstances in which it finds itself. The more dire the present, the greater the propensity to look back on the past with a measure of nostalgia or to seek out new horizons; or both. Life for working men and women in industrial England in the mid-nineteenth century was grim even though, in a few of the great cities, including Manchester, the tide of urban reform was already becoming noticeable. For most of the working-class Irish, however, life in industrial Lancashire was bleak beyond reason.

For many but not all Irish peasants and rural labourers, the short journey into the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution and their emergence as incompletely moulded factory workers was brief and painful. The Great Famine of 1847–52, occasioned by the potato blight, led to a million Irish men and women starving to death. Subsequent attempts to introduce more balanced forms of agricultural production sparked the Land Wars of 1879–82, which saw another million demoralised Irish abandoning the country. With their motherland under British rule and devastated by economic disaster, small-scale Irish farmers and labourers had to endure the trauma of mass emigration to places where they were perceived as foreign and their Catholicism viewed with suspicion. The poorest, who settled on the closest shore, in Lancashire, had to endure the added shocks of industrialisation and urbanisation.1

The demands and travails occasioned by structural readjustments on so massive a scale left their mark on many ordinary Irish men and women in generational terms and exacerbated new and existing social pathologies associated with drunkenness, homelessness and unemployment. After the famine, a church-led, guilt-driven ‘Devotional Revolution’ called on young men to consider chastity and the priesthood as a way of life, and the plea may have resonated with many others for different reasons. But, whatever the causes, many in a generation of badly shaken males – acutely vulnerable in social and economic terms – chose to lead single lives: as late as 1911, over a quarter of all Irish-born men were unmarried, while many others delayed marriage until after the age of thirty.2

It was not only the Irish factory workers and small-scale traders who found the increasingly ordered life of the new industrialising society difficult or impossible to adjust to before abandoning Britain and setting out for the frontiers of the southern colonies. McLoughlin had worked briefly as a child labourer in Manchester’s notorious cotton mills in the late 1860s, but, amongst his closest Irish friends who followed him out to southern Africa were the sons of a fishmonger, a grain trader, and a pharmacist. As ‘JJ’, another of his contemporaries, who found himself in prison at Barberton, in the South African Republic, observed in 1891:

I was, at a suitable age apprenticed to a shoe-maker, but the daily routine of my life became after a time so distasteful to me, that I determined to emancipate myself from irksome drudgery and to follow a path more in accordance with my own foolish inclinations.3

There were hundreds of thousands of other men drawn from the same cohort in industrialising society, and many from less ordinary walks of life, who abandoned the northern hemisphere for the southern colonies during the Long Depression that lasted from 1873 into the mid-1890s.

But it was not just hard times, the chafing caused by industrial discipline and serious social dislocation that drove southwards the young men who came of age...