The Phoenix Park Murders and the Invincibles
“The Invincibles” as they called themselves were a previously unknown Irish Nationalist group who had stabbed to death the Permanent Under-secretary for Ireland, Thomas Henry Burke and Lord Frederick Cavendish, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, as they walked through Dublin’s Phoenix Park on the evening of Saturday 6 May 1882.
This high profile case was put in the hands of Superintendent John Mallon who rounded up a number of known Fenian activists.
He persuaded “The Invincibles” leader, James Carey and Michael Kavanagh to testify against the others and in due course Joseph Brady, Thomas Caffrey, Daniel Curley, who was alleged to have masterminded the murders, Michael Fagan and Timothy Kelly were tried separately and all condemned to death.
William Marwood came to Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin to carry out the executions of the five men on a gallows set up specially for the purpose in one of the prison’s yards. These were the first private executions at Kilmainham Gaol.
In view of security concerns newspaper reporters were not allowed to witness them.
The Execution Timeline at Kilmainham Gaol
Twenty two year old Brady was the first to die on 14 May, with Curley following on the 18th.
It was a busy period for Marwood who had to return to England to carry out the hangings of Joseph Wedlake and George White at Taunton on 21 May and then travel to Glasgow to execute Henry Mullen and Martin Scott on 23 May at Duke Street prison before returning to Dublin for the executions of Fagan on 28 May and Caffrey on 2 June and finally Kelly on 9 June.
A metal plaque close to where the gallows stood bearing the names of the five “Invincibles” can still be seen in Kilmainham.
My friend Traugott Vitz has analysed the executions of these five men below.
The Execution Particulars of the Phoenix Park Murderers by Traugott Vitz
I was not looking for it. I was just reading an old British government paper, over 120 years old. It was the “Minutes of Evidence” of the “Capital Sentences Committee” (1886-1888). I needed it for my research project “British hanging technique 1868-1964”.
This Committee had been convened in 1886 by the then Home Secretary Sir Richard Assheton Cross. Sir Richard was fed up with a seemingly never ending series of botched executions and embarrassing public indiscretions of England’s hangmen. So were the members of Parliament, the newspapers and the public.
There was only one sensible thing to do: To have experts look into the matter.
The Committee very meticulously reviewed every circumstance, item of equipment, theory and person involved in the process of judicial hanging, and for that purpose heard surgeons, prison warders, aldermen, under-sheriffs, engineers, even the hangman. No stone was left unturned.
The “Minutes” made fascinating read with a wealth of details. One day I was working my way through the evidence given by one William Alexander Carte, surgeon in the Coldstream Guards, on several executions which he had witnessed.
And there I suddenly stopped. What was that?
Describing himself and his field of expertise to the Committee, Dr. Carte said that he had been “acting as Medical Officer in one of Her Majesty’s prisons” when he saw these executions.
“Acting as” – so he was not actually holding that position, was he? And why didn’t he say which prison it was? Only a few pages earlier I had read the evidence of a Dr. Gibson who had made no secret of the fact that he had been the prison surgeon of Newgate.
Slightly bemused, I read on. And then there was one more sentence which looked odd: Dr. Carte was asked by a Committee member to say, without mentioning names, whether he had seen “this case hanged”, and what his findings at the post mortem examination were.
Dr. Gibson, I remembered, had freely enumerated names and execution particulars without being restricted. What was this?
What was so frightfully secret about the “cases” Dr. Carte had seen and about the prison where he had seen them that the Committee did not want to see it in print? Not even in such an unobtrusive pamphlet as the Minutes of Evidence of a Departmental Committee?
After all, this would in all probability never be circulated outside the circle of Home Office bigwigs and their gentleman friends.
This was worth a closer look.
Investigating Dr. W. A. Carte’s Identity
I traced Dr. Carte’s military career and found that there was not one military surgeon by the name of Carte but two, both of them christened “William”. But one of them was a participant in the Crimea campaign while the other was much younger.
The older Dr. Carte was made staff surgeon of the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham (Dublin) in 1858 and remained there for the rest of his life. And the younger Dr. Carte (the one who bore the additional Christian name “Alexander”) was his son.
A military surgeon as well, his career included the Coldstream Guards and later, after promotion to surgeon-major, the Grenadier Guards.
(By the way: It all came to a sudden end in May 1896 when one day after midnight a police constable encountered him in the company of a young female, described as “flower seller”, in the shrubbery of a London park – drunk. Such behaviour was deemed inconsistent with the conduct of an officer and gentleman.)
Anyway – “Kilmainham Royal Hospital” rang a bell. There was a prison, too, in that part of Dublin. A look at Google Maps confirmed that it was perhaps 600 yards from the Royal Hospital.
It was a definite possibility that Dr. Carte senior had been saddled with the job as prison surgeon in addition to his function at the Royal Hospital.
A few internet searches later I was glaring wide-eyed at the fact that “Carte”, “Kilmainham” and “execution” made sense only in connection with five Irish radicals who had been condemned to die for the murder of Lord Cavendish and Under Secretary Burke in Phoenix Park, Dublin.
From then on, every bit of information that I gathered from newspaper reports and contemporary books on the events in Ireland pointed in the same direction: Dr. Carte senior possibly was the Medical Officer of Kilmainham prison but his son Dr. W. A. Carte had deputised for him at the execution of the Phoenix Park murderers.
The particulars which he gave in evidence to the Committee included those of the execution of these five men.
The Committee had tried to shroud in secrecy which name belonged to which execution particulars, and vice versa. Would it be possible to pull away the veil?
The names of the five men hanged at Kilmainham could easily be found:
- Joseph Brady was hanged first, on 14 May 1883.
- Four days later Daniel Curley was executed.
- On 28 May, Michael Fagan followed.
- Thomas Caffrey was hanged on 2 June.
- One week later the youngest of them, Timothy Kelly, was put to death.
At that time, executions were very often witnessed by press representatives, and their narratives were sometimes remarkably detailed. In the case of the Phoenix Park murderers, however, newspaper men were not allowed to be present in the yard of Kilmainham Gaol where the gallows was erected.
But it was possible for the reporters to attend the obligatory inquests, and they did. True, the coroner generally restricted the evidence given to a minimum, but nevertheless…
Case Analysis: The Execution of Joseph Brady
According to The Standard (15 May 1883 page 3 column E), “Dr. Carte, jun.” was present at the inquest. He asked the coroner “whether it was desired that he should make a post-mortem examination” and, after having received a positive answer, disappeared from the courtroom.
Then, says the Standard, “Frederick Searle, chief warder, gave evidence of identification.”
How long might Mr. Searle’s evidence have taken? Two minutes? Five?
This is of some importance because immediately after the sentence just quoted, the newspaper report continues:
“Dr. William Alexander Carte then returned into Court and said he had made an examination of the body; the immediate result of the hanging was complete dislocation of the cervical vertebrae, causing rupture of the chord” (sic!) “high up in the neck. Death was instantaneous.”
It seems impossible that Dr. Carte’s examination, if it had taken place during Mr. Searle’s evidence, could have been a complete autopsy – he just did not have the time. Even cutting into the neck only (plus washing his hands before returning to the courtroom…) could hardly have been done in that short space of time.
Dr. Carte’s diagnosis at the inquest was therefore in all likelihood based on manipulations of head and neck, perhaps combined with manual scanning of the vertebral column from the mouth.
That it was Dr. Carte junior who was present at the execution is further confirmed by an eyewitness quoted by Tighe Hopkins (Kilmainham Memories, p. 94f):
“The doctor was standing on a chair immediately under the drop, so as to examine the body the instant it had fallen; and he took out his watch to note how long the pulse beat after death. Dr. Carte himself was not present at this execution, and his representative was an extremely cool young fellow, who is now an army surgeon.”
I think we may assume that Dr. Carte senior, the staff surgeon at the Royal Hospital, was the “Dr. Carte” whom the eyewitness knew and expected to see – probably because he was the appointed Medical Officer. However we will see below that Dr. Carte junior, identified by his initials or full Christian names, is named in the inquest reports of all following executions. His father is meanwhile on duty as a “military magistrate” elsewhere in town.
The Standard does not give particulars such as height, weight, and length of drop. We have to look elsewhere.
The anonymous History of the Phoenix Park Patriots, allegedly by James Francis Corrigan, contains the following passage (p. 41):
“Death was instantaneous, the vertebrae of the neck being literally smashed to pieces. The length of the drop being eight feet eleven inches, the effect of this on the neck of a man who weighed fourteen stone can easily be imagined.“
(The same sentences are to be found as well in the New Zealand Herald of 7 July 1883, p. 2). Patrick Tynan adds (The Irish National Invincibles And Their Times, p. 322) the recollection of a man who knew Brady well and describes him as “about five feet ten” in height.
Now it is time to return to Dr. W. A. Carte’s evidence before the Capital Sentences Committee. He witnessed several executions but also collected recorded cases in addition to those of which he had personal knowledge. He saw three different hangmen at work (MoE [Minutes of Evidence] 410), one of whom had never hung a man before.
When asked about individual cases, Dr. Carte says that he saw a man hanged with a drop of 8 ft 11 in, weight 194 lbs, age 21 or 22.
The injuries he found were: a complete separation (by one inch) between the second and third cervical vertebrae with a complete rupture of the spinal cord – it was completely disintegrated from the medulla oblongata one inch and a half down the cord.
The axis sustained a fracture through its left pedicle at the margin of the superior articular, and through the posterior arch of the canal for the vertebral artery, accompanied by displacement down-wards on that side; the tip of the left transverse process was also broken off. On the right side there was an imperfect fracture or cracking of the pedicle at its junction with the superior articular facet (MoE 462-465).
I think this evidence refers to Joseph Brady. Drop height and weight agree with the description in the “History” and in the New Zealand Herald.
Frequently Asked Questions
What were the Phoenix Park Murders?
The Phoenix Park Murders took place on 6 May 1882 in Dublin, when members of the militant Irish republican group known as the “Irish National Invincibles” fatally ambushed and stabbed Lord Frederick Cavendish (Chief Secretary for Ireland) and Thomas Henry Burke (Permanent Under-secretary).
Who were the five men executed for the Phoenix Park Murders?
Five members of the Invincibles were convicted and hanged at Kilmainham Gaol between May and June 1883: Joseph Brady, Daniel Curley, Michael Fagan, Thomas Caffrey, and Timothy Kelly.
Who carried out the hangings at Kilmainham Gaol?
The executions were carried out by England’s premier executioner, William Marwood, who travelled between Ireland, England, and Scotland to fulfil multiple execution contracts during May and June 1883.
Why was Dr. W. A. Carte’s medical evidence kept anonymous?
Dr. William Alexander Carte gave evidence to the 1886–1888 Capital Sentences Committee detailing post-mortem cervical fractures and drops. Because the Phoenix Park case involved extreme political sensitivities and Fenian agitation, the Committee kept the names of the prisoners and the specific prison anonymous in the published Minutes of Evidence.
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