On the case – Tim Fanning on Armagh detective James McParland and his battles with the Molly Maguires

Among the late raconteur, publican and memoirist Malachy McCourt’s acting credits was a minor role, as a barkeep, aptly enough, in The Molly Maguires, starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris. Released in 1970 – back when Harris and the McCourt brothers were still drinking buddies in New York – the film is based on the true story of the eponymous group of Irish miners which stood up to Big Coal in 19th-century Pennsylvania.

Despite the presence of Connery and Harris – the former plays Jack Kehoe, the Molly Maguires’ leader; the latter James McParlan, a detective employed by the Pinkerton agency to infiltrate the Mollies – the film flopped at the box office, perhaps as a result of the moral ambiguity at the heart of the story.

Harris’s character, an Irish emigrant to the United States himself, begins to ask himself whether the miners may be justified in employing violent methods to stand up to the ruthless mineowners and their lackeys in the local police force.

The real McParland (multiple spellings appeared in the press) seems to have had no such regrets. Born into a Catholic family in Mullaghbrack in Co Armagh in 1844, James McParland emigrated first to England and then, in 1863, to the United States.

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By the late 1860s he had settled in Chicago where he was running a liquor store. Losing his business in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 – which famously began in Irish emigrants Patrick and Catherine O’Leary’s barn – McParland found employment in the Pinkerton detective agency.

Established in 1850 by Glaswegian Allan Pinkerton, the agency drew much of its income from industrialists keen to disrupt organised labour. To this end, Pinkerton was more than happy to employ emigrants who were willing to spy on their compatriots.

When Franklin B Gowen, the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, which had been secretly buying up coalfields in eastern Pennsylvania, asked Pinkerton to infiltrate the mining communities of Schuylkill County, the Scot turned to McParland.

In the 1870s, Irish miners were engaged in a violent struggle with mine-owners over wages and conditions in Schuylkill County. Both sides committed murders.

However, the existence of a secret society called the Molly Maguires remains open to doubt. McParland certainly claimed that such an organisation existed, insisting that he joined the Mollies in 1874, and that it possessed 30,000 members who were spread throughout the Pennsylvania coal districts, using passwords and masonic-like grips and signs to protect their secrecy.

In his reports to Pinkerton, McParland speciously connected the Molly Maguires directly to agrarian unrest in Ireland. Growing up in Armagh in the 1840s and 1850s, McParland would have been familiar with Ribbonism and claimed that the Pennsylvania Molly Maguires were directly linked to an agrarian organisation of the same name in Ireland. He further affirmed that the Molly Maguires had existed among the mining communities of Tyneside where he had worked as a boy in the 1850s.

Of course, it suited the mine-owners to depict miners engaged in a long campaign to secure better pay and conditions as sinister revolutionaries.

When interviewed by the Washington Herald in 1911, McParland described the Molly Maguires as the “boldest band of murderers and dangerous men that ever infected this country”. Due to McParland’s testimony, 11 alleged ringleaders were convicted of murder and sentenced to hang.

Curiously, however, in the same interview McParland acknowledged the inequities that had given rise to the appearance of agrarian secret societies in Ireland. “The Molly Maguires of Ireland crept into being to contest the rights, or so-called rights, of the non-resident landlords of Ireland,” he asserted, adding that the land agents who were attacked by the Irish Molly Maguires were collecting “unjust taxes”.

In the decades following the trials, McParland became, in the words of one reporter, “one of the world’s most famous detectives”.

In an era in which Arthur Conan Doyle, drawing on the earlier Dupin stories of Edgar Allan Poe, was popularising the image of the sleuth as a man of science, the avuncular McParland, besuited, mustachioed and bespectacled, fit the part perfectly. Even if he and his fellow Pinkerton operatives were more concerned with strike-breaking and union-busting than genteel manor-house murders.

Indeed, such was the Armagh detective’s renown in the early part of the 20th century that Conan Doyle based the story of his last Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, upon McParland and his battles with the Molly Maguires. It was published in 1915, four years before McParland’s death.

McParland was little inclined to attribute success in detection to mesmerising feats of deduction, telling a reporter: “The public thinks the average detective is some strange wizard, when as a matter of fact he must have good common sense – just plenty of that.”