One day in June 1848, when Thomas Cooper's wife opened the door of their home in Sheffield, she found it crowded with people outside.
They had come from Ireland, each of them wearing a hungry look. The man leading them wore a military cap and a red coat. They had heard that the secretary of the "Veterans, Exiles, Orphans and Widows Fund Committee" lived here. Most of them remained outside the shops, accepting alms from the proprietors, while their leader entered Cooper's home.
He brought news that the violent faction of the Chartist movement had formed an alliance with the Irish Repealers. The Irish Repealers had already held a mass gathering at Dublin's Abbey Music Hall, where the Irish tricolor flew alongside a gigantic blade gleaming with cold light. O'Connor had also attended the pro-Charter rally held in Dublin on the Monday after Easter.
In 1845, O'Connor had tried to join forces with Thomas Cooper to promote a land movement. The Enclosure Movement, which had once deeply affected Britain, was by then nearing its end, and land could be bought relatively cheaply. If every member contributed two Pound sterling and ten Shilling, they could raise 5,000 Pound sterling—enough to purchase an estate, build houses on it, and settle fifty members there.
They could then mortgage that land, obtain 4,000 Pound sterling, and use it along with the remainder of the original capital to buy another estate and settle another fifty members. Continuing in this way, once the eighth estate had been bought, four hundred members could be settled. Those estates would more than double in value within three years and be worth at least 60,000 pounds by the fourth year. But Cooper believed O'Connor's plan could never work, so he refused to cooperate with him.
Since O'Connor had already gone