Irish Home Rule in Hackney: 5 July 1886, London Fields E8.
- N16Breda
- May 30
- 7 min read
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.
Updated 30 May 2025: This blog post was originally published 22 August 2024 as a work-in-progress draft , as part of my Public History MA dissertation submission.
Featured locations:
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 1880, the cause of Home Rule for Ireland had been adopted by the English and Irish membership of the Hackney Working Men’s Club - a radical, republican and secularist organisation - following a unanimous resolution to form a branch of the Home Rule Association in Hackney.
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. 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.
Parnell speaks to East London
The local newspaper, the Hackney and Kingsland Gazette, gives us a wonderfully evocative account of the event. The weather that day was “delightful” with an “enormous attendance from all parts of East London”.
The Gladstonian Liberal Party candidates standing for election included South Hackney's Liberal MP, Charles Russell (1832-1900), an Irish Catholic lawyer born in Newry, County Down. The Gazette reported that Russell declared to the cheering 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 cheering crowds, 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 his speech by posing the question:
“were they to keep Ireland in chains or would they try the effect of love?”
The failure of Home Rule for Ireland
Despite the stirring words spoken that day in London Fields, Gladstone’s Liberal Party split over Home Rule. In 1887, the Liberal Party's anti-Home Rule Unionist faction chose to prop up a Conservative minority government which would go on to introduce another Coercion Act in Ireland, earning the Conservative Chief Secretary for Ireland the title Arthur ‘Bloody' Balfour. The pro-Home Rule Gladstonian Liberals allied with Hackney's radical and socialist groups in multiple protests against coercion in Ireland.
By 1890, Parnell and his married partner Mrs. Katherine O'Shea were embroiled in a divorce scandal. Parnell was forced to step down from leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party as a result.
Allies and opponents alike were shocked one year later by the news that one of the defining political figures of the age had suddenly died.
South Hackney's Irish MP
Lawyer, Liberal MP and Home Rule champion, Sir Charles Russell QC is famed in legal history for his defence of Parnell and some 65 Irish politicians during 'The Parnell Commission' of 1888-1889. This was a judicial inquiry initiated followed allegations made by The Times that the Irish Parliamentary Party leadership was involved in murder and outrage during the Land War and that Parnell personally condoned the brutal murders in 1882 of the Chief Secretary and Permanent Under-Secretary for Ireland by 'the Invincibles'.
When news of the Parnell divorce scandal broke in 1890, the devoutly Catholic Russell reluctantly called for Parnell to do the patriotic thing and resign.
Russell would go on to become Lord Chief Justice of England in 1894 after Gladstone, with the support of the Irish Nationalists, won the General Election of 1892. His appointment was hugely significant – Russell was the first Roman Catholic to hold this position since England's sixteenth-century Reformation.
In a homage to Russell's Irish origins, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Russell of Killowen, named for his childhood home in County Down.
Should you find yourself in South Hackney near Well Street Common, a short detour will bring you to Killowen Road. This was re-named (from Bishop's Road) in 1907 in honour of Sir Charles Russell and is a fitting place to reflect on how the Irish Question came to dominate Hackney politics in the 1880s.
The chance discovery of that newspaper report about the Home Rule Demontration in London Fields in July 1886 led me down a long and winding research trail into the many and varous ways in which the Irish Question played out in Hackney, Stoke Newington and London more widely in the 1880s. The cause of Home Rule for Ireland generated passionate - and sometimes violent - reactions, from the solidarity of Hackney's Radical, Socialist and Liberal groups to the opposition of local Conservative and Unionist groups.
Learning about this has added a new local London dimension to what I previously knew about the late nineteenth-century struggle for Irish Home Rule - and reminds us that Britain and Ireland's shared histories can be deeply entangled in very unexpected ways.
Blog sources & further resources
The Irish Question in 1880s Hackney
My research into how Irish Home Rule was viewed in late nineteenth-century Hackney and Stoke Newington turned up many surprises, from reports of near riots at anti-Home Rule events in Morley Hall (today, 125-127 Mare Street, London E8) to the fact that a representative of the Hackney Workingmens' Club travelled to Ireland to observe how the state policy of coercion was being applied during the Land War of the 1880s.
You can find out much more about this tumultous decade in the talk I developed for the 2024 Hackney History Festival - "When 'the Irish Question' came to 1880s Hackney"
Hackney Workingmen's Club
You can find out more about the origins and social significance of the Hackney Workingmen's Club in the magazine of the Hackney History Society:
Charles Russell MP and QC
Although not a familiar name today, Charles Russell in his time was a high-profile national figure, famed for his prowess in court and twice painted by the celebrity portraitist John Singer Sargeant.
Not long after first becoming the MP for Dundalk in Ireland (1880-1885), Russell published "New views on Ireland" , or Irish land : grievances, remedies (1880) where he laid out his argument for why "Thinking men regard the settlement of the Land System as the foundation-stone of prosperity in Ireland".
The first seven chapters of the book provide a detailed account of Russell's investigations in County Kerry, including transcripts of what he heard from the local tenants of the major landowners.
Click this link to read Russell's book on Internet Archive.
During the Parnell Commission of 1888-1889, Russell concluded the case for the defence by delivering his closing speech over nine days.
Parnell and Russell as imagined by Hollywood
Perhaps the most unexpected research discovery was the 1937 Hollywood film Parnell , directed by John Stahl and starring a woefully miscast Clark Gable as Parnell and Myrna Loy as Katherine O'Shea. For the dramatic court scenes of the Parnell Commission, Charles Russell was played by the British actor George Zucco.
Comments