On a sunny Thursday afternoon in March 1868, a man walked up behind Queen Victoria's son at a charity picnic on the beach at Clontarf, put a revolver to within a few feet of his back and fired. Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, the first member of the royal family ever to visit Australia, went down shouting that his back was broken. He lived. The gunman, Henry James O'Farrell, very nearly got lynched on the sand, and six weeks later he was hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol.
It's remembered as the first attempted political assassination in Australia. What came after it is just as much of a story: a colony gripped by panic about Fenians, a law rushed through Parliament in a single day, Henry Parkes chasing a conspiracy that was never found, Sydney's first Nightingale nurse at the Prince's bedside, and in the end a great hospital in Camperdown that still carries his name.
The First Royal Tour
Alfred was born at Windsor Castle on 6 August 1844, the second son and fourth child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He joined the Royal Navy at 14 as a midshipman, and by 1866 he was a captain in command of HMS Galatea, a steam frigate that still carried a full set of sails. That same year he was made Duke of Edinburgh.
The Galatea was a 26-gun wooden screw frigate, launched at Woolwich in 1859, about 280 feet long with a crew of around 450. With the Prince in command she set out on a world cruise in 1867, calling at Rio de Janeiro, Tristan da Cunha and the Cape before crossing to Australia. The National Museum of Australia has the Prince landing at Glenelg, outside Adelaide, on 31 October 1867. It was the first royal tour this country had seen, taking in South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales and Queensland.
The crowds were huge everywhere, and things didn't always go well. In Melbourne in November 1867 a Protestant hall was decorated with a picture of William of Orange beating the Catholic armies at the Battle of the Boyne. Irish Catholics gathered outside and threw stones, shots were fired from inside the hall into the crowd, a Catholic boy was killed and a riot followed. A free public banquet a few days later turned into another riot when about 40,000 people turned up for food and wine laid on for 10,000 and the Prince cancelled. At Bendigo three boys were burnt to death inside a firework model of the Galatea.
Sydney Puts On a Show
The Galatea came into Sydney from Tasmania on 21 January 1868. The Prince was met at Circular Quay by the Colonial Secretary, Henry Parkes, and the Governor, Lord Belmore, in a pavilion built for the occasion, and was driven through the crowds to Government House. After about a month he went up to Brisbane for a week, then came back to Sydney in early March, when his staff asked for a lighter round of engagements.
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There was a man in the crowd at the Quay that first day who had come to kill him. Henry O'Farrell later said: "I had gone to Circular Quay on the day of the Prince's arrival in Sydney, and I intended to shoot him there, but the opportunity did not present itself."
Who Was Henry James O'Farrell?
O'Farrell was born about 1833 at Arran Quay in Dublin, the youngest child of William O'Farrell, a butcher, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The family moved to Liverpool and then to Melbourne, arriving early in 1841. Henry was schooled at David Boyd's school and St Francis's school, went on to St Francis's seminary and received deacon's orders. He spent 1853–54 studying in Europe, but in 1855 he fell out with Bishop Goold and was never ordained.
He tried sheep farming near Clunes, then became a grain merchant at Ballarat in partnership with his cousin Joseph Kennedy. Things went downhill from there. In 1864 his brother Peter, a leading Melbourne solicitor, lost his reputation in a libel case and fled the colony, and Kennedy soon afterwards died of delirium tremens. O'Farrell failed in speculations, fell into debt, took to drink and brooded over never becoming a priest.
In January 1867 he had a serious breakdown, with bouts of delirium tremens, talk of plots to poison him, waving pistols about and threatening to kill people. Two of his sisters took him to Melbourne. Back in Ballarat he collapsed again and had several epileptic fits. In September 1867 he went to Sydney and stayed at Tierney's Currency Lass Hotel until he was asked to leave because of his strange behaviour. From December he lived at the Clarendon Hotel on money his sister sent him, and the ADB says he became noticeably agitated whenever Fenianism came up. On 11 March 1868 he practised pistol shooting at Waverley.
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The Sailors' Home Picnic at Clontarf
Clontarf takes its name from the site of the Battle of Clontarf near Dublin. It sits on the north-eastern side of Middle Harbour with a long, sheltered beach facing west. From the early 1860s the Sydney publican Isaac Moore and his family ran pleasure grounds there, advertised in 1863 as "the oldest, largest, and most shady pleasure grounds in the harbour", with quoits, skittles and cricket bats always on hand. By the time Moore died in 1866 his sons had made it a favourite spot for holiday excursions.
The picnic on Thursday 12 March 1868 was a fundraiser for the Sydney Sailors' Home, organised by the barrister and politician William Manning, and the Prince had agreed to come. Five steamers ran people across from Circular Quay through the day. A big marquee was put up as a "luncheon saloon", a tent was pitched opposite the beach for the Prince and his party, and yachts and steamers dressed in flags lay at anchor off the beach. By midday there were somewhere between two and three thousand people on the grounds.
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Emily Nuttall Thorne was there, and her handwritten account is now in the State Library of NSW: "directly we saw the little 'Fairy' coming we ran along the beach to the little pier at which he would land. All the yachts saluted him as he passed by them." The Prince came over from the Galatea on the steam yacht Fairy and landed at the Clontarf jetty at about two o'clock. The committee met him with an address, and after lunch and a toast to the Queen he went across to his own tent at about 3.20 pm.
The Shooting
From the tent, the Prince and Sir William Manning walked over towards a clump of trees by the beach where a band was playing, and the Prince handed Manning a cheque for the Sailors' Home. O'Farrell had been standing in the shade with a group of people. He came up behind the Prince and, once he was within five or six feet, pulled out a revolver, took aim and fired.
The bullet hit the Prince in the middle of the back, about two inches to the right of the spine. He fell forward onto his hands and knees. The National Museum of Australia gives his words as "Good God, I am shot … My back is broken." Manning sprang at O'Farrell but lost his footing and fell, and O'Farrell turned the gun on him.
Who Grabbed the Gun?
This is where the accounts start to differ. Wikipedia's account, drawn from the newspapers, says a coach-maker named William Vial grabbed O'Farrell from behind and pinned his arms to his sides, the revolver went off as they struggled, and the second shot hit a bystander named George Thorne in the foot, who fainted. The National Museum of Australia says instead that "a Mr Thorne" tackled O'Farrell and wrestled the gun off him as he tried to fire again. There's more on this further down.
Whoever got to him first, plenty of others piled in, and there were shouts of "lynch him" and "hang him". Police under Superintendent Orridge took charge of O'Farrell and had the greatest trouble keeping the crowd from "tearing him limb from limb". By the time they got him to the wharf and aboard the steamer Paterson, the clothes had been ripped off his upper body and he was bruised and bleeding.
According to Wikipedia's article on Alfred, Vial was the master of a Masonic lodge and had helped organise the picnic, and the Prince presented him with a gold watch for securing his life.
The Wound and the Nightingale Nurses
Three or four men carried the Prince to his tent, where several doctors took over. They found the bullet had gone in to the right of the lower spine and run around the line of the ribs, lodging just under the skin at the front of his abdomen. He never lost consciousness. Seeing how worried everyone was, he told them: "Tell the people I am not much hurt, I shall be better presently." At about five o'clock he was carried aboard the steamer Morpeth on a litter and taken back to Sydney.
Why the wound wasn't worse depends on who you read. The Dictionary of Sydney says the bullet glanced off his ribs. Wikipedia's article on Alfred says it ricocheted off a metal clip on his trouser braces, and its Clontarf article puts it down to his India-rubber braces crossing at that spot.
Sydney had trained nurses waiting, just. Henry Parkes had asked Florence Nightingale for trained nurses for the Sydney Infirmary, and Lucy Osburn was appointed lady superintendent. The ADB says she and five trained sisters, including Haldane Turriff, reached Sydney on 5 March 1868, only a week before the picnic. Born in Leeds in 1836, she had trained at the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas's Hospital, and the ADB says she was "called on to supervise the nursing of the wounded Duke of Edinburgh" within a week of arriving. Wikipedia's Alfred article says six Nightingale-trained nurses led by Matron Osburn looked after him for the next two weeks.
He mended quickly. The doctors reported on 16 March that he could sit up, though the wound still hurt now and then, and by late March he was said to be regaining strength "as rapid as the most sanguine could expect". According to the Dictionary of Sydney and Government House, he had recovered completely by the end of March.
The Fenian Panic
Sydney's reaction was enormous. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote the next day: "One universal feeling of sorrow, shame, and rage pervades the community. The whole colony has been wounded in the person of its Royal guest." On 13 March an "indignation meeting" at the Pavilion in Hyde Park drew somewhere between seventeen and twenty thousand people. One count puts the number of indignation meetings across the colonies at 250 or more, most of them within a week of the shooting. The Dictionary of Sydney describes "an outpouring of prejudice and racism towards Catholics and Irish", and Orange lodge membership in New South Wales grew fast, peaking in 1876 at over 19,000 members in 120 lodges.
The Fenians were the Irish republican brotherhood, founded in the United States, that had carried out violent attacks in Canada, and Australians had already been reading about "Fenian terrorism" in England. When police were struggling with O'Farrell at Clontarf, several of them later testified, he claimed to be a Fenian.
Henry Parkes and the Treason Felony Act
On 18 March Parkes, as Colonial Secretary, went to see O'Farrell in gaol with the Speaker, William Arnold. According to the Herald, the prisoner was "very communicative" and claimed he had written orders from the Fenian leadership to execute the Prince. That same day the Legislative Assembly put the Treason Felony Act through every stage in one sitting, and it had vice-regal assent by evening. It allowed up to two years' jail for language "disrespectful to the Queen" or for "expressing sympathy with certain offenders", and the Dictionary of Sydney notes that it made it an offence to refuse to drink the Queen's health.
Parkes wrote to the Victorian Colonial Secretary, James McCulloch, saying his government knew O'Farrell was one of a group of Fenians, some of them in Victoria. No such group was ever found. Police and detectives turned up nothing, and Parkes came to be seen as having whipped up public hysteria and sectarian feeling for political gain. Even so, in a speech at Kiama in August 1868 he insisted the government had proof of a conspiracy. He resigned as Colonial Secretary in September 1868.
In December a select committee chaired by William Macleay was set up to look into the alleged conspiracy, and by February 1869 it had found there was no Fenian conspiracy behind the shooting. Parkes then got the Assembly to vote that the report was "made an instrument of personal hostility against a member of the House", and it was struck from the parliamentary record.
The Trial
A preliminary hearing began the day after the shooting before the magistrate Houlton Voss, held in the debtors' prison at Darlinghurst Gaol and running from 13 to 16 March. O'Farrell was arraigned on 26 March for wounding the Duke of Edinburgh with intent to murder, and pleaded not guilty. His trial opened in the Central Criminal Court on Monday 30 March before Justice Alfred Cheeke.
His barrister, Butler Aspinall, came up from Melbourne and argued he was insane, "a man whose intellect was in such a state that he could not be held to be responsible for his actions." The jury was out for about an hour and came back with a verdict of guilty, and Cheeke sentenced him to death.
The Prince Asks for Mercy
On 5 April the Prince wrote to Lord Belmore asking that O'Farrell's life be spared. His reason was that under English law attempted murder wasn't punishable by death, and he didn't want the man treated more harshly in Sydney than he would have been in England. The letter didn't become public until February 1869. O'Farrell's sister also petitioned the Governor, arguing that her brother was insane and had nothing to do with the Fenians. The Executive Council met on the evening of 6 April, the night the Prince sailed, and let the sentence stand.
The Galatea left Sydney in early April. The National Museum of Australia dates the sailing to 4 April, while Wikipedia puts the Prince's departure on 6 April. He reached Spithead on 26 June 1868, seventeen months after he'd set out.
The Hanging at Darlinghurst
O'Farrell was hanged inside Darlinghurst Gaol at nine o'clock on the morning of 21 April 1868, just forty days after the shooting. The newspapers said he met his death "with the most imperturbable nerve and firmness". He was buried in the Catholic section of Rookwood Cemetery.
Instead of a speech from the scaffold he left a written statement, and it caused a row of its own. When Parliament asked to see it, Parkes said Cabinet would have to consider it first. The next day William Macleay read out a copy in the Assembly anyway. In it O'Farrell took back his Fenian story, saying he "had not the slightest foundation" for claiming others were ready to do the deed, and that he had "no foundation for stating that there was a Fenian organisation in New South Wales." The ADB quotes his own explanation: "From continually thinking and talking of … 'the wrongs of Ireland', I became excited and filled with enthusiasm for the subject, and it was then under the influence of those feelings that I attempted to perpetrate the deed for which I am now justly called upon to suffer." Nobody ever found out how the copy got out of the gaol.
The ADB's verdict is blunt. It says the excitement around the crime "made a fair trial impossible", and that the Prince's efforts to save O'Farrell "support the view that the correct verdict would have been not guilty because of insanity." It also calls the shooting an important factor in sharpening sectarianism in the colony. The family's story had one more twist: on 21 August 1882 Henry's brother Peter shot at Archbishop Goold at Brighton in Victoria.
Royal Prince Alfred Hospital
Sydney wanted something lasting to mark the Prince's recovery. At a public meeting called by the Mayor, the city resolved to raise "a permanent and substantial monument" by public subscription, and settled on a hospital to be called Prince Alfred's Hospital. Wikipedia's O'Farrell article dates that meeting to 20 March, and its article on Alfred to 23 March. The plan was first to build it on the Sydney Infirmary site in Macquarie Street, but the Infirmary's board turned the idea down.
Parliament passed an Act incorporating Prince Alfred Hospital on 3 April 1873, and Thomas Holt was its founder and director from 1873 to 1883. The Mansfield Brothers designed the buildings, work on the Administration Building and the first pavilions started in 1876, and the hospital opened in Camperdown in 1882. The Dictionary of Sydney says the Prince allowed his coat of arms to be used as the hospital's crest. In 1903 King Edward VII granted the title "Royal", and it has been Royal Prince Alfred, or RPA, ever since. The Victoria and Albert Pavilions, designed by Walter Liberty Vernon and finished in 1904, were also built to commemorate the Prince's royal visit.
Melbourne raised money in the same way, and the National Museum of Australia notes that the Alfred Hospital there opened in 1871. In Sydney, Prince Alfred Park and a street at Circular Quay were also named after him. As for Lucy Osburn, she stayed on and, in the ADB's words, "successfully established trained nursing on Nightingale principles in New South Wales" before she resigned in 1884.
Clontarf Today
Clontarf stayed a cheap and fairly out-of-the-way spot for a long time. During the 1930s Depression a tent city of several hundred people grew up on Clontarf Reserve, in tents made of hessian coated with whitewash, lime and fat to keep the rain out. During the Second World War beachfront blocks went for £100, and people said "you couldn't even give it away". It only became easy to reach after the new Spit Bridge opened in November 1958, and in 1960 the beach was washed away by the tsunami from the Chilean earthquake.
The Dictionary of Sydney says a Norfolk Island pine, planted to mark the place where the Duke was shot, still stands in Holmes Avenue. The yachtsman Ben Lexcen, who designed the winged keel of Australia II, had premises next to the Clontarf marina. In 2021 Transport for NSW named one of its new Manly ferries Clontarf.
Timeline
- About 1833: Henry James O'Farrell is born at Arran Quay, Dublin. The family reaches Melbourne early in 1841.
- 6 August 1844: Prince Alfred is born at Windsor Castle.
- 1866: Alfred is made Duke of Edinburgh and is in command of HMS Galatea.
- January 1867: O'Farrell has a serious mental breakdown at Ballarat.
- 31 October 1867: The Prince lands at Glenelg, South Australia. It is Australia's first royal tour.
- November 1867: There is a sectarian shooting and riot during the Melbourne visit.
- 21 January 1868: The Galatea arrives in Sydney.
- 5 March 1868: Lucy Osburn and her Nightingale sisters reach Sydney (ADB date).
- 11 March 1868: O'Farrell practises pistol shooting at Waverley.
- 12 March 1868: At the Sailors' Home picnic at Clontarf, O'Farrell shoots the Prince in the back.
- 13 March 1868: An indignation meeting in Hyde Park draws up to 20,000 people, and O'Farrell's preliminary hearing begins.
- 18 March 1868: Parkes visits O'Farrell, and the Treason Felony Act passes in a single day.
- 20 or 23 March 1868: A public meeting resolves to build Prince Alfred's Hospital.
- 30 March 1868: The trial is held before Justice Cheeke, and O'Farrell is found guilty and sentenced to death.
- 5 April 1868: The Prince writes to Lord Belmore asking that O'Farrell's life be spared.
- Early April 1868: The Prince sails for England, and the Executive Council confirms the sentence.
- 21 April 1868: O'Farrell is hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol.
- 26 June 1868: The Prince reaches Spithead.
- September 1868: Parkes resigns as Colonial Secretary.
- February 1869: The Macleay committee finds no Fenian conspiracy, and its report is expunged.
- 3 April 1873: Parliament passes the Act incorporating Prince Alfred Hospital.
- 1882: Prince Alfred Hospital opens at Camperdown.
- 30 July 1900: Alfred dies at Coburg as reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
- 1903: Edward VII grants the title "Royal".
Where the Sources Disagree
- Who grabbed O'Farrell, and who was shot in the foot: Wikipedia's O'Farrell and Alfred articles say William Vial pinned O'Farrell's arms or wrested the gun away, and that George Thorne was hit in the foot by the second shot. The National Museum of Australia says "a Mr Thorne" tackled O'Farrell and wrestled the weapon off him.
- Why the wound was slight: The Dictionary of Sydney says the bullet glanced off his ribs. Wikipedia's Alfred article says it ricocheted off a metal clip on his braces, and its Clontarf article says it struck where his India-rubber braces crossed.
- Lucy Osburn's arrival: The ADB says she reached Sydney on 5 March 1868. Wikipedia's Alfred article says February 1868.
- The hospital meeting: Wikipedia's O'Farrell article dates the public meeting to 20 March, and its Alfred article to 23 March.
- When the Prince sailed: The National Museum of Australia gives 4 April. Wikipedia's O'Farrell article says the Prince left Sydney on 6 April, the evening the Executive Council met.
- The Prince's words: The National Museum of Australia gives "Good God, I am shot … My back is broken", Government House gives "Good God, my back is broken", and Wikipedia gives "My back is broken".
- The pistol: The National Museum calls it a double-barrelled pistol, and Wikipedia calls it a revolver.
- Peter O'Farrell's fall: The ADB dates his libel case and flight to 1864. Wikipedia puts the libel trial in February 1863 and has him gone from Victoria by early 1864.
My Earlier Posts
- Hangings at Darlinghurst Gaol – The Executions and Famous Prisoners
- Darlinghurst Gaol & Darlinghurst Court – Forbes Street & Taylor Square – Darlinghurst – NSW
- Darlinghurst Gaol – Taylor Square – Bourke Street – Forbes Street – Burton Street – Darlinghurst Road
- First Sydney Exhibition Building – Prince Alfred Park – Central – Sydney
- Sydney Past & Present – Chapter 16 – The Sixties & Seventies
- The Man O'War Steps – Farm Cove – The Navy's Landing at Bennelong Point
Sources
- Mark Lyons and Bede Nairn, "O'Farrell, Henry James (1833–1868)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ofarrell-henry-james-4322
- John Griffith, "Osburn, Lucy (1836–1891)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/osburn-lucy-4345
- Garry Wotherspoon, "Assassination attempt on Prince Alfred 1868", Dictionary of Sydney, dictionaryofsydney.org
- John MacRitchie, "Clontarf", Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/clontarf
- National Museum of Australia, "Defining Moments: First royal visit", nma.gov.au
- Government House Sydney, "150 Years on – The Story of Australia's First Attempted Political Assassination", governor.nsw.gov.au
- State Library of NSW, Emily Nuttall Thorne, "'Clontarf', an account of the attempted assassination of Prince Alfred", 1868, sl.nsw.gov.au
- Wikipedia, "Henry James O'Farrell", en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha", en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "HMS Galatea (1859)", en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Royal Prince Alfred Hospital", en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Clontarf, New South Wales", en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Lucy Osburn", en.wikipedia.org
- Pictures from Wikimedia Commons, with credits under each image.