Episode 19: Charles Brett and the Fenian Arch

On 18 September 1867, Sergeant Charles Brett became the first officer of the Manchester City Police to be killed on duty. He was inside a prison van on Hyde Road when a group of armed Fenians ambushed it, attempting to free two leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. A shot was fired through the keyhole. Brett died instantly. The two prisoners walked free and were never recaptured. Three men were hanged for his murder two months later — the last public executions in the Manchester area. None of them had fired the shot. The man who had almost certainly fired it escaped to America. The three men hanged became the Manchester Martyrs. Monuments stand to them across Ireland. The song their defiance inspired became, for a time, the unofficial national anthem of a nation. Charles Brett lies in Harpurhey, his headstone fallen and cracked, largely forgotten by the city he served. This episode tells the story of a September afternoon on Hyde Road, the trial that followed, and what the law decided — and what it got wrong.