Glenrowan : Part Two : “this bloody armour"

In Part One I argued that the abject and humiliating failure of Ned Kellys grand plan for Glenrowan proved that he would  never have made a great General in an Army, as Kelly mythmakers like to claim.  In fact Glenrowan was Ned Kellys Little Big Horn, a place where, like General Custers Last Stand at Little Big Horn Ned Kellys last stand resulted in the total destruction of the gang and their deaths at a tragically young age, and all without achieving a single one of their objectives. A total failure of strategy and tactics in the planning, and a fatally rigid and maladaptive response to what actually unfolded on the Battle scene are not the hallmarks of a great General. It would be truer to say they are the hallmarks of overconfidence, perhaps of a delusional fixation on armour as a total solution, of a desire for revenge that clouded all better judgment and a lack of imagination and of an ability to focus on the detail.

Ned Kellys plan went wrong right from the very first Act, the killing of Aaron Sherritt.  Kelly correctly guessed that on hearing of his murder by the Kelly Gang, the Police would rush from Melbourne in a special train, so his plan was to set a trap for them at Glenrowan. What Kelly forgot to do was ensure the news of Aarons murder got back to Police HQ quickly, by having Aarons killers and Kelly sympathisers abandon Aarons hut once he had been shot, leaving the Police in the hut free to get to nearby Beechworth and break the news. Instead the killers remained outside for a couple of hours daring the Police to come out, which sensibly they didnt do. After they departed, sympathisers continued the harassment and only when they left at dawn did the Police finally emerge.  Little did Joe and Dan and the sympathizers realize, but their time-wasting indulgent taunts and  sneering intimidation of the Police in Aarons hut had just doomed the whole of the rest of the plan to failure.

The news didn’t reach Melbourne till that afternoon, some 20 or more hours after Aaron had been killed, and it was another 15 or so before the train finally reached Glenrowan, a full day later than Neds plan had demanded.  During this long wait, to prevent news escaping of what lay in store for the Police train, the gang were forced to take hostage just about everyone in the town. However,  the prolonged delay provided sufficient time for some of the hostages to plan and execute an escape and for  Thomas Curnow to successfully trick Ned into letting him go, not realizing that Curnow had learned of the Gangs plan and was determined to thwart it. Curnow stopped the train before it reached the broken track and saved everyone on board. The Police then surrounded the Inn where the Gang was, and essentially, apart from a lot of shooting it was Game Over!

But failing to ensure the news quickly reached Melbourne wasn’t the only blunder that Ned Kelly made in his Grand Plan. For a start,  while Aaron was being killed,  Ned Kelly and Steve Hart were supposed to be secretly ripping up a section of railway track in the dark at Glenrowan, but having brought with them “neither the  skills nor the tools to do the job”  (Peter Fitzsimons words) they found it impossible. Suddenly this crucial element of Neds plan, so poorly thought through, was in jeopardy; their only hope was to abandon the plan to do it secretly and force someone else to do it. So they woke at gunpoint six railway workers they expected would be able to do the work for them : wrong again – they were gravel carriers. Next Ned woke the Stationmaster and his entire family, thinking Stanistreet the Stationmaster would know what to do : wrong yet again! Finally, at gunpoint, Ned forced the Stationmaster  to take them to two platelayers who lived further down the line and at last Kelly had the line ripped up. But now, the secret was out and he had 14 hostages to deal with. And as the day wore on the number kept increasing.The whole thing was descending into chaos.

And then there was the Armour! Famous, iconic and terrifying as it looks, the armour, Ned Kellys singular innovation, and the thing that he is most famous for proved to be useless in the field. Ned wanted to attack but with the armour on all the Gang could do was defend. Ned Kelly ignored Joe Byrnes complaint  that “this bloody armour will bring us to grief” – but Joe was right.

The armour was a failure, not least because for some inexplicable reason its design left the wearers legs exposed. But it was also incredibly heavy and cumbersome, it restricted not just the wearers ability to move but to see and to hear, and the bolts and sharp edges on the inside of the helmet cut into the face and nose every time a bullet hit it and sent it lurching back against the wearers head. So, as Ned staggered about in it confronting the Police cordon alone in the early morning, and already wounded in the arm and leg, not even one of his shots found its mark. Not one! Joe was killed by a bullet that went between the plates, and once it was realized that under his coat Ned Kellys legs were vulnerable, it was only a matter of minutes before he was brought down too. Under his helmet the skull cap he wore to protect his head from the helmet was soaked in blood.

If you believe the stories, there was a gathering of Sympathisers waiting in the dark beyond police lines, many more sympathisers than Police, who could have been quite quickly overwhelmed if the Sympathisers had acted soon enough. Two signal rockets were let off for reasons nobody seems to be sure of, but nothing changed as a result, the sympathiser participation failed to materialise, and yet another component of Neds  grand plan failed before it had even begun.... Ian MacFarlane reasonably proposes that the numbers have been greatly exaggerated, and these shadowy figures may just have been “rubber neckers” ....we will never know.

Fortunately for the dozens on the train, and the horses, Ned Kellys plan for Glenrowan failed completely, but not before two more innocent lives had been taken. John Jones and Martin Cherry, two of the Kelly Gangs 63 human shields at the Ann Jones Inn were killed by Police crossfire in the dark of the night. Modern day Kelly Sympathisers, forever looking for reasons to attack the Police, claim the Police are to blame for these deaths and relentlessly excoriate the Police for them. However I reject this view completely -  the fault and the responsibility for these two deaths lies fairly and squarely on Ned Kellys shoulders because he was the one who masterminded the entire debacle.  It was Ned Kelly who imprisoned these innocent people at Gunpoint in a flimsy building that offered them almost no protection- while he himself was encased in armour. It was Ned Kelly who chose  NOT to surrender and let them all go at the very beginning when challenged, but instead commenced a furious gun battle with Police. It was Ned Kelly who commenced a furious gun battle with Police even though by then his Grand Plan was almost completely undone - there was no train crash, no Police slaughter, no Sympathiser support, only the prospect of either capture or death.  At that point Kelly KNEW Johnny Jones and Martin Cherry and all the others were in the Inn behind him, he KNEW the risk that he was taking with their lives, that innocent people could be killed - but that didnt concern him. The concern he huffed and puffed about in the Jerilderie Letter for the "suffering innocents” is here revealed as hypocrisy - his quest was for revenge at any cost. All he wanted to do, realising that he was going to go down was take as many of the bastards with him and to hell with the collateral damage. To hell with John Jones and Martin Cherry. 

In contrast, the Police at that moment, in the dead of night did NOT know exactly who was in the Inn, whether there were many or a few people there, if they were sympathisers or hostages and if they were protected or not. I am not attempting to say the Police were exemplary in every way at Glenrowan - they were not -  but to claim the Police were responsible for the deaths of two innocent hostages at Glenrowan is quite wrong. Did Ned Kelly think that by imprisoning innocent men women and children as human shields, the Gang was going to be able to stand there in armour, shoot at the Police and not receive fire in return? This was yet another Kelly miscalculation that had tragic consequences, this time for young Johnny Jones and Martin Cherry.

Glenrowan was a massive criminal debacle from start to finish. And it was all of Ned Kellys making.