Flight and fight in a brave new world
From the badlands of Leitrim to the rings of Philly, the Meehans gave their lives in service of others
Five years after her husband was shot dead during a confrontation between tenant farmers and a landlord, Bridget Meehan set off with her three children from their cottage on the Leitrim/Cavan border, bound for America.
It was April 1885. John Meehan, 10 going on 11, was the eldest of the children; Susan was nine, Annie was five. Their father, Philip, had been killed on June 14, 1880, in the townland of Clogher, in the parish of Lower Drumreilly, about four and a half miles from the town of Ballinamore.
The family set sail from Queenstown (Cobh) on a vessel owned by the Cunard Line shipping company. To get to the southern tip of Ireland from the Ulster border in those days would have been a gruelling journey in itself. They landed in New York and made their way to Philadelphia where Bridget had two sisters waiting for them.
Almost on the seventh anniversary of his arrival in America, John Meehan stepped between the ropes for a four-round bout in the fight town that was Philly. He did not box under his birth name. He fought as Jack Randall, a homage to the original Jack Randall, an English fighter of Irish ancestry known as ‘The Nonpareil’ for his feats in the bareknuckle game between 1815 and 1822. The Irish boy was sometimes referred to as ‘Young Jack Randall’ to distinguish between the two.
His first recorded fight was against a Tom McCarthy in April 1892 at the Ariel Club, aged 17. Bareknuckle boxing was still the norm, albeit that the death in 1876 of Billy Walker from injuries sustained in the ring led to reforms and regulations that became known as the ‘Philadelphia Rules’. It was under these rules that Young Jack Randall fought the estimated 154 bouts of his prizefighting career, a majority of them not officially recorded.
The fights were usually four-rounders for cash. They were generally part of a night’s entertainment that might also have included wrestling and a variety show. Young Meehan was small, fast and tough. He quickly developed a crowd-pleasing reputation around town. He became a regular on the fight scene for the next five years.
“There was a big and excellent bill,” reported The Philadelphia Times in November 1892, “at the Nonpareil Athletic Club, Kensington Avenue and Cumberland Street, last night. Boxing, wrestling and high kicking opened the performance followed by a grand double wind-up between Jack Randall of Port Richmond, and Lee Damro, of Washington, and Denny Kelleher, the heavyweight of Philadelphia, and Pat Scullion, of the Seventeenth ward, before whom so many of the boxing fraternity have gone down. Every feature of the programme was satisfactorily gone through with and the efforts of those who participated were applauded without stint.”
Jack got busy between the ropes in 1893, beginning with a bout in April against Larry McGee. “Randall did most of the work in the opening rounds,” reported the same newspaper, “and when time was called at the end of the fourth round had McGee all but out.”
Eight days later he was back in the ring again as part of what The Philadelphia Inquirer called a “boxing carnival, which was successful from both an entertaining and financial standpoint.” There were six four-round bouts “with leather mitts” — a detail that confirmed the bareknuckle era was coming to an end. The opener on the night was an exhibition, “followed by the special bout at 122 pounds, in which Billy Springfield and Jack Randall were the contestants. These men made a clever showing and at the call of time Referee McDonald awarded the bout to Randall.”
In June of 1893 he faced Isadore ‘Izzy’ Strauss, who would go on to have a 12-year career that included big-time fights against famed exponents such as ‘Philadelphia’ Jack O’Brien and future Hall of Famer, Joe Gans.
Strauss vs Randall was fought at the Winter Circus venue, again with leather mitts. According to the Inquirer, a large crowd had turned up for the night’s entertainment which, between the fights, featured male and female singers and dancers. Said crowd, it reported, “was uproarious in its demonstrations, so much so that the referee was totally unable to control it. His attempts to speak were drowned in jeers, in hisses and manager Pincus had to come to the rescue. Mr Pincus said that unless order was preserved the show would not be allowed to go on.”
But the show did go on, as the Inquirer also reported. “The wind-up was between hard-hitting Isadore Strauss and Jack Randall, of Port Richmond. The first round was tame, but the second round was the hardest fought round that ever took place in the building. Randall forced Strauss over the ropes, and after that they fought like tigers in the centre of the ring. Randall again forced [him] over the ropes, and Strauss was only saved from going out by the bell. In the final round Randall again fought Strauss to the ropes, but Strauss rallied and landed some telling blows ... and both men were fighting hard when the round ended. Randall had the best of it, although Referee Schlichter said it was a draw.”
Randall’s profile was rising now and accordingly he was getting matched against better-known fighters in a city that was teeming with contenders, many of them Irish or Irish-American. His next three bouts were against noted scrappers: ‘Little’ Johnny van Heest, Walter Edgerton aka ‘The Kentucky Rosebud’, and Owen Ziegler, who would have a long and occasionally controversial career thereafter.
One of Randall’s most famous opponents was the Australian, Albert Griffiths, who traded under the name Young Griffo and had won a world featherweight title in Sydney in 1890. Famous for his evasion skills, according to the International Boxing Hall of Fame website, Albert liked to boast that he “could stand on a handkerchief and dodge punches without taking a step in any direction.”
Unfortunately, he could not dodge the bottle or the tavern quite as easily. He was said to have taken to the ring on many occasions either drunk or hungover, or both. It was perhaps not a great surprise in hindsight that Young Griffo’s tangle with Young Randall, in November 1895, was “a very tame bout, no hard blows being struck,” according to the Inquirer.
Randall made up for it a month later when he almost put George Stanton Abbott out through the ropes at the Nonpareil AC. London-born Abbott had brought a big reputation with him from England and travelled the USA for years picking up fights all over the country, including against Ziegler and Gans. No decision was apparently awarded on the night but, according to The Philadelphia Times at any rate, “Randall was the aggressor all the way through and ... clearly bested Abbott.”
The fight had been “a fitting windup to a good evening’s festival of fistic powers.” The reporter added that the “large and motley throng found much to satisfy them, no matter what they wanted.” Albeit he did concede that what some of them would have wanted was a few fellas being stretched on the canvas. “Good boxing there was a plenty, and if that was not satisfactory to the more bloodthirsty, gore ran in unstinted quantities in some of the bouts, thus appeasing their appetites. True, there were no knockouts, but on more than one occasion the referee, Jack McDonald, prevented it by his interference. One bout he stopped entirely in the fourth round with the remark that while all liked a little blood he did not think there was any so much in love with it as to desire a bath in the claret-colored fluid.”
And maybe John Meehan too was having a few second thoughts himself about the claret game and the mob that was baying for it. One wonders if it was dawning on him that there was maybe just a bit too little prize, and a bit too much fighting, in this racket. Indeed, on the very same night that he fought Stanton Abbott, another bout on the card was abandoned because one of the pugilists, a black man, decided his purse wasn’t worth the candle. He was supposed to fight another Philly boxer, Al O’Brien. “When it came time for them to go, however,” reported The Philadelphia Times, “the colored man or his manager made objections to the amount of money his protégé was about to receive, and after a lengthy war of words with Manager McHale, the bout was declared off.”
Anyhow, Randall fought sparingly in 1896 and when he turned up against Martin Judge in April of that year, his weight had ballooned to 150 pounds. Judge was some 15 pounds lighter and, reported The Philadelphia Inquirer, “played all around his man in the second, planting his left repeatedly in Randall’s countenance.” It didn’t help that this was a six-rounder, demanding higher fitness levels than perhaps Randall was able to offer. Jack had been “pitted against men with better reputation than Martin Judge but he got more than he could conveniently handle in those six rounds. Randall has seldom met such a Tartar and he looked as though he wanted to be at home.”
This last observation may have been truer than our ringside correspondent knew. For, as Fr Liam Kelly writes, John Meehan “had by then fallen in love with Anna Louise Flynn and they were married in 1897.”
Fr Kelly is a former Leitrim footballer of distinction and currently the parish priest of Kildallan/ Ballyconnell in the diocese of Kilmore. Philip Meehan was his great grand-uncle. Kelly tells the family’s
story in his book The First Fatality of the Land War: Philip Meehan (1845-1880). Originally published in 2021, a revised and updated second edition, now in handsome hardback, has just been released. The new edition features added information about Jack Randall’s life and times.
Kelly was a child when he first heard about the tragic story from his grandmother, Philip’s niece, Susan Meehan. (John Meehan/Jack Randall was Susan’s first cousin.) An historian of four decades standing, this was a personal project which, if anything, made Fr Kelly even more conscious of his obligations to the record.
“The fact that Philip Meehan was an impoverished tenant farmer and Henry B Acheson a landlord meant that it would have been very easy to slip into the trap of writing a black and white account of what happened,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “depicting both men in broad strokes as good and bad, hero and villain. I have tried to avoid these broad strokes and instead have striven to place his death against the background of the Land War and have tried to capture some of the complexities of the time.”
It is a point reiterated at a macro level by the RTÉ broadMyles caster Dungan in Land Is All That Matters, his magisterial history of this epic 400-year saga, published a few months ago. The saga has far more complications and contradictions than the traditional ‘David versus Goliath’ narrative could ever convey, advises Dungan. “Even the description ‘tenant’ signally fails to cover the range of disparate interests and social sub-categories in rural Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ... Sometimes it was a bareknuckle fight between tenants of all classes and their landlords. At other times, the lowest of the low — landless labourers and cottiers — combined to take on all comers, [including] the wealthier tenant farmers who exploited them to a far greater extent than did any landlord.”
That being said, rural Leitrim was inordinately afflicted by bad land and worse landlords. Families subsisting on tiny holdings were perennially vulnerable to the whims of weather, harvest, agent and owner. Hunger and the fear of it were real and terrifying banshees.
Philip Meehan and his wife Bridget (née McAveety) farmed 12 acres of poor land in Corraleehanbeg owned by Lord Charles Beresford. Corraleehanbeg is a townland also in the parish of Lower Drumreilly. Beresford was an MP for Waterford and a decorated officer of the Royal Navy. “He was a landlord,” writes Kelly, “who empathised with his tenants and refused to raise rents even when the value of a holding increased due to improvements made by the tenant farmer.” And not just that but in 1914, reveals Kelly, Beresford admitted in his own memoir that “the monstrous land system in Ireland naturally caused the tenants to feel distrust and enmity towards the landlords.”
But as ill luck would have it, the farm in a neighbouring townland, Drumcroman, was owned not by Beresford but by the aforementioned Henry B Acheson. Aged 20, Acheson resided in the proverbial Big House, albeit a modest one, near Croghan in north Roscommon. The Acheson family had evicted the McTague family from their holding in Drumcroman in April 1879. William Acheson, the patriarch, died a few weeks later. Henry B duly inherited the estate. The eviction deepened the already deep enmity. Long-standing residual hostility was intensified by three horrendous harvests in succession, leaving many families once more on the verge of hunger and destitution.
The landlord tried to find another family for the Drumcroman property but threats and intimidations dissuaded any replacement tenant from moving in; the land remained idle; neighbours began to use the vacant farm as commonage.
So on June 1, 1880 Acheson came from Croghan to fence in the farm, accompanied by a workman. They were surrounded and menaced by over 300 men; a few of them were armed and fired shots; Acheson took shelter in a cottage and the crowd eventually dispersed. A few days later he bought a revolver in Boyle. And on June 14 he returned with six of his own labourers and a large escort of police men, at least 16 and maybe more.
As they began the fencing work, a massive crowd was mustering in surrounding lanes and fields and bogs. An estimated 1400 people closed in on the police and Acheson and the labourers. Stones started flying; pitchforks and graips were brandished; threats and oaths were shouted. Acheson panicked and fled, followed by the police men. Members of the crowd pursued them, Philip Meehan towards the front because of natural speed and fitness and courage. At some point in the chase, which lasted for maybe a mile, Acheson turned and fired three shots from his revolver. “My brother fell after the third shot into a ditch,” recalled John Meehan Snr at the inquest. “I ran down and said ‘Oh Phil, you are dead’ and he made a motion to me. I then ran away and got a priest and a doctor.”
Acheson and his party of men made it back to their waiting horses and escaped. Philip Meehan was waked in his cottage that night. The Sligo Champion reported: “At this house a sad sight was witnessed. His little homestead was crowded by his friends, mostly women, who were weeping bitterly ... He was married and leaves a wife and three children.”
On April 25, 1885, Bridget, John, Susie and Annie boarded the Cunard flagship Etruria: £3 or £4 in steerage for adults — children under 12, 30 shillings. They arrived in New York on May 4 “with just two pieces of luggage,” writes Kelly. Two years later, Bridget married Edward Murphy and they had one son. Edward died when their son was an infant. “In 1891 Bridget married her third husband, Peter Tracey. She outlived him too.” She died in December 1923, aged approximately 67.
Susie and Annie became weavers. For the last 15 years of his life, John Meehan worked for Koppers Coke, a company involved in the industrial production of coal, gas and coke. John and Anna Louise had nine children. According to Boxrec.com, he wasn’t active in 1896 and 1897, albeit that he may have partook in low-level scraps that went unrecorded by local newspapers. But he came back for three quick bouts in the summer of 1898, possibly because he needed a few quick bucks. Jack Randall’s last recorded fight was in a venue called Colt’s Hall in Niagara Falls, upstate New York, in August 1898. His final opponent was a chap by the name of ‘Touch’ Gilhooly.
“John Meehan,” writes Kelly, “seems to have had much in common with his father. He seems to have inherited his athleticism, bravery and fighting spirit. He may have inherited other qualities too. Philip Meehan had given his life for the sake of the tenant farmers of his home place who were being harshly treated by landlords. His son gave his life caring for others too.”
On September 6, 1943 a train bound from Washington for New York crashed at a junction in Philadelphia. The Inquirer described it as “one of the nation’s worst disasters.” Seventy-five people were killed and more than 120 injured. John Meehan, then aged 69, rushed to the scene along with hundreds of other volunteers to lend a hand. He “spent hours,” writes Kelly, “trying to help the many injured people who were strewn along the track and trying to recover the bodies from the train wreckage. He died the following day from a heart attack, brought on, according to his family, by the trauma and physical exertions of the night before.”
Rural Leitrim was inordinately afflicted by bad land and worse landlords.