The story of John Lynch, a long forgotten Fenian, is redolent of Wordsworth's "still sad music of humanity".
Lynch died of consumption in Woking Invalid Prison on June 2nd, 1866, aged 34, and was buried in a pauper's plot in Brookwood Cemetery nearby.
Assisted by the Brookwood Cemetery Society, in a spirit of Anglo-Irish rapprochement, the National Graves Association is about to erect a memorial plaque.
Eva Ó Cathaoir (this diarist's wife) discovered Lynch by accident while busy with other research in the British Public Record Office at Kew. Inadvertently, she was given a file entitled "Deaths of Prisoners". An expert on Fenianism, she sensed Lynch might be of Irish interest. A search in the National Archives in Dublin confirmed he had been a leading Cork Fenian.
Charlie McLauchlan went from Manchester to London and, acting on Eva's hunch, found Lynch's grave. The Brookwood Cemetery Society joined enthusiastically in the search, on being reassured that he had not been involved in the kind of activities that made Fenianism the bugbear of mid-Victorian Britain.
Lynch's illegal pursuits consisted mainly of taking part in drills in Cork city. A former publican who had become a law clerk, he was known "to entertain disloyal principles". An ex-militia sergeant drilled the Fenians, who met in Geary's pub, North Main Street.
Following widespread arrests at the end of 1865, the sergeant turned informer. He described Lynch as an "A" or colonel in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who was present when 400 Fenians were inspected by an Irish-American officer, Thomas Kelly.
Lynch's letters to his girlfriend, a domestic servant in Wales, were used also to convict him. A widower without children, he told Bridget Noonan: "Gladly indeed would I perish, could I only die in the arms of victory, with the green flag flowing proudly in the breeze and England's hated, accursed felon rag going down into the nearest dunghill. Should we fail, the scaffold and the convict ship will make short work of us. What of that? The consciousness of suffering in a great and noble cause, to which every age has given its heroes, its martyrs and its saints . . . will console all true Irishmen in the hour of trial."
He was convicted of treason felony and sentenced to 10 years' penal servitude by the notorious Judge William Keogh.
In Pentonville Prison a few months later, Lynch whispered to O'Donovan Rossa that the cold was killing him. "And it did kill the poor fellow" Rossa recorded in Irish Rebels in English Prisons.
Fenianism influenced the political thinking of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels during their exile in Britain. Engels lived with an Irishwoman, Mary Burns, and after she died he married her sister Lizzie. Both women were strong republicans. Engels was cremated in Brookwood.
Marx's three daughters sympathised with the Fenian prisoners. Jenny reproduced a letter by John Sarsfield Casey about Lynch for a French newspaper, La Marseillaise:
"Whatever may be the cause to which the jury has attributed his death, I confirm that his death was accelerated by the cruelty of the prison warders. To be imprisoned in the heart of winter in a cold cell for 23 hours out of 24, insufficiently clad, sleeping on a hard board with a log of wood as a pillow and two worn blankets weighing barely 10 lb as one's only protection against the excessive cold, deprived through an inexpressibly fine stroke of cruelty of even covering our frozen limbs with our clothes which we were forced to put outside our cell door, given unhealthy meagre nourishment, having no exercise apart from a daily walk lasting three-quarters of an hour in a cage about 20 ft long by 6 ft wide designed for the worst type of criminals: such privation and suffering would break even an iron constitution. So it is not surprising that a person as delicate as Lynch should succumb to it almost immediately. . .
"At the beginning of March \, I noticed that my friend was looking very ill and one day I took advantage of the jailer's brief absence to ask him about his health. He replied that he was dying, that he had consulted the doctor several times, but that the latter had not paid the slightest attention to his complaints. His cough was so violent that, although my cell was a long distance from his, I could hear it day and night resounding along the empty corridors . . .
"One day in April, I looked out of my cell and saw a skeleton-like figure dragging itself along with difficulty and leaning on the bars for support, with a deathly pale face, glazed eyes and hollow cheeks. It was Lynch. I could not believe it was him until he looked at me, smiled and pointed to the ground as if to say: 'I'm finished.' This was the last time I saw Lynch . . . "
Charles Kickham recalled lying, during his incarceration, on the bed "in which John Lynch had died for Ireland".
The treatment of Fenian prisoners became the subject of a commission of inquiry. Its findings led to a conditional amnesty in 1871, whereby O'Donovan Rossa, John Devoy and other leading prisoners went into exile in the United States.
Brookwood Cemetery was established because London had run out of space for its dead by the mid-19th century. The cemetery opened in 1854, and up to 35 trains carrying funeral parties ran daily from a terminus near Waterloo. "The Necropolis Railway" operated until the terminus was bombed in 1941.
In this 440-acre necropolis, outside Woking in Surrey, rest the mortal remains of a fascinating range of people. Brookwood also contains military cemeteries of several nations, including Canada, the US and Poland. An Irish rebel now joins the pantheon.
As the paupers' section is overgrown, the Lynch plaque of Cork limestone will be inserted into a wall of the Catholic chapel.