We continue to wait for Jack Peterson to keep his promise, and explain why he has rejected a view based on a mountain of evidence and accepted for 146 years about Kellys intent at Glenrowan, in favour of a claim based on just one thing: an 1800-word letter written by Kelly on November 5th 1880, 6 days before he was to be hanged. Peterson and his mentor Rowsell have built their entire ‘stop the train’ narrative on this one letter, so it makes sense that we have a closer look at it, the Condemned Cell letter from November 5th 1880.
As Phoebe pointed out the other day, if that letter hadn’t been written, this conversation wouldn’t be happening because other than this letter there is nothing that we know of anywhere else in the entire Kelly universe that would have made anyone think that Ned Kellys plan for Glenrowan in June 1880 was something other than wrecking the train and killing or capturing survivors. Everything Ned Kelly is reported to have said, everything he wrote apart from what is in this one letter, everything he actually did, everything that numerous people reported seeing him do and say, and the narratives pieced together since then by countless historians and enthusiasts all point to the same thing: Kellys plan for Glenrowan was to wreck the train and thereby commit what Ian Jones described as a ‘criminal atrocity’.
To overturn all that, Peterson is going to have to front up with something very compelling, and it will need to be a lot more than just a letter written only 6 days before Kellys appointment with the hangman, or a feeling based on wishful thinking.
This letter reveals a desperate Ned Kelly offering a confused and despairing attempt to rewrite the debacle at Glenrowan. Was he hoping that if he read it, Victoria’s Governor the Marquis of Normanby, to whom the letter was addressed, would offer him a reprieve? Or was he just trying to moderate the violent tone of what would be remembered about him? Nobody knows. However, a special note for Kelly fanatics who still cling to Ian Jones discredited idea that the central focus of the Kelly outbreak was a Republic: this letter makes no reference to a Republic or any other political ideas or ambitions.
The letter begins with Kelly telling a lie about what he did after the 9pm train had gone through, which was to secretly attempt, but fail, to rip up the rail line. Instead he conceals his failure up the line and says after the train had gone through “I then bailed up a lot of men in tents around the stationmaster’s house as I suspected there were detectives amongst them..” His memory of where the tents were is wrong – they weren’t at the Stationmasters house, they were between the Station and Ann Jones Inn as photos taken at the time show. The quarrymen didn’t ever report being asked if they were detectives: that’s another Kelly lie. 
Next he says “I then bailed up Mrs Jones’ Hotel, then Mr Stanistreet the stationmaster, and asked him if he could stop a special train with police and black trackers on. He said he could stop a passenger train, but would not guarantee to stop a special train with police and blacktrackers exactly where I wanted it.”
Kelly then pretends he only decided to pull the rails up after he learned Stanistreet couldn’t promise to stop the train using signals :
“So then I bailed up the platelayers and overseer and ordered them to pull up the line a quarter of a mile past the station, so as the train could not go any further. My intention was to have the stationmaster to flash the danger light on the platform so as the stop the train, and he was to tell the police to leave their firearms and horses in the train and walk out with their hands over their heads, and their lives would be spared.
Also, to inform them that it was useless them fighting as me and my companions were in full armour and we could take the train and everyone in it; that the line was pulled up in front of them and I had a tin of powder behind them. So that if they attempted to return I would have blown the line up there as well”
Notice that he thinks the train will be taken over by himself and his mates “in full armour” – no mention of a sympathiser army! Wow!
Rowsell and Peterson and others believe that this claim about stopping and not wrecking the train was Kellys true agenda, even though it is the opposite of what Kelly told his prisoners at the Inn in June. Reardon reported that Kelly told him the purpose of removing rails was to make the train crash, and that’s why Kelly ordered that the removed rails and their sleepers be thrown down the embankment. Stanistreet reported that after asking how the signalling worked, Kelly told him not to use it when the special train arrived, and warned him that he would be shot if he did. Stanistreet never reported anything about Kelly telling him that it was going to be his job “to tell the police to leave their firearms and horses in the train and walk out with their hands over their heads”.…that’s another Kelly lie, as was Kellys claim that a tin of (gun) powder had been positioned ‘behind them’ so that the line could be blown up if Police tried to return in the train to Benalla. When the siege was over, the ‘tin of powder’ was found at the back of McDonells Hotel, a long way from the train track. Several other people, including Curnow and a priest provided similar testimony about Kelly vowing to wreck the train.
When Stuart Rowsell was first developing his ‘stop the train’ argument, he dismissed all those reports of Kelly telling his prisoners at Glenrowan that he was going to wreck the train as worthless ‘hearsay’ :
“All there is are a few newspaper articles with supposed quotes from Ned Kelly directly after the Glenrowan siege when Dr Nicolson had declared him near death and Father Gibney had given him last rites … “
“What actual evidence do they have for the ‘derail and murder scenario’ – assumption and some boasts by Ned Kelly under the duress of concussion and his anti-authoritarian larrikin humour is all …”
And this:
“This whole narrative exposes the ‘doom train’ theory for what it is – just a mumble of words and hearsay that the reporter ‘claims were said’ …!!!
However in recent months Rowsell has changed his tune ; he seems to have realised the absurdity of dismissing all that eye-witness testimony as ‘hearsay’, and has accepted that Kelly really did make those statements about wrecking the train. However, he has invented a new way to dismisses them, by calling them ‘robber talk’, meaning deliberate lies and exaggerations designed to conceal what the real plan was, and to frighten everyone into doing what they were told. The ‘robber talk’ explanation for Kellys rhetoric about wrecking the train is even more ridiculous than Rowsell’s earlier ‘hearsay’ dismissal. Yes, robbers gain control over people by threatening harm, but the people they threaten are the people in front of them, not some other group, such as police on a train that is yet to arrive ! In any case, Kellys experiences with Harry Power and at SBC, Euroa and Jerilderie had taught him perfectly well that to control people all he needed to do was identify himself as Ned Kelly the triple police killer and wave a gun around. There was no need for him to concoct an elaborate hoax about wrecking a train. Another reality that ruins the ‘robber talk’ excuse is that the Gangs behaviour was only consistent with the idea that they were NOT going to stop the train: they told Stanistreet NOT to signal the train and made no other preparations to just stop it, they did NOT position the gunpowder on the track, they did NOT wait beside the line, they simply waited inside the Inn for the train to go past. And third, why would Kelly need to have started the ‘robber talk’ eighteen months early, in the Jerilderie letter where he warned about the railroads and promised “If I hear any more of it I will not exactly show them what cold blooded murder is but wholesale and retail slaughter, something different to shooting three troopers in self defence and robbing a bank”. Who couldnt agree that those words are a chilling prophecy about Glenrowan?
Kelly then writes in the Condemned Cell letter that the point of it all was to capture “the leaders of the police” and hold them hostage until his mother, Skillion and Williamson were released. No mention of a Republic, a sympathiser army or any kind of political objective.
The letter then takes a very surprising and peculiar turn, with Kelly declaring that he had a complete change of plan, and now, instead of having the Stationmaster stop the train by flashing the danger light he says “I let a man go to stop the train about a mile below the railway station and opposite the police barracks and to tell them that they were in the barracks.”
Later Kelly says he changed his plan because “I wanted the man that stopped the train to have the reward, as I heard it was to be done away with in three days.” Here, Kelly is trying to claim credit for Curnows heroic act in escaping the Inn and stopping the train, an act that humiliated Kelly and which he was obviously keen to subvert. These were such obvious lies that even Jack Peterson has said he doesn’t believe them. They speak to Kelly being so desperate and so out of touch that he no longer cared that what he was writing could be so easily exposed as lies.
Kelly wrote that he expected the police would leave the train voluntarily and surround the barracks, and then he would be free to carry out his new plan: “It was my intention then to take possession of the train, horses and everything and return along the line, leaving the police surrounding the barracks and Glenrowan, while I had the train and robbed the bank along the line….”. Still nothing about a Republic, a sympathiser army or any kind of political objectives, and what happened to the plan to take hostages and free his mother from prison? She doesn’t get a mention in the new plan.
The idea that police would all walk off the train when asked to do so by Curnow, and then be so preoccupied with surrounding the barracks that they wouldn’t notice the Gang taking off in the train is just mad. How long does he think it would take Police to realize the barracks were empty? Two minutes? Did he imagine that Curnow wouldnt tell them exactly what was going on? This whole thing is nuts.
The rest of the letter is a jumbled and at times wildly inaccurate account of what happened after the train arrived, and much of it is either deliberate but easily provable lies or else evidence that Kellys memory is faulty and he is very confused.
So, while all the eyewitnesses reported that when the train arrived at the station Kelly was inside with the Gang, and when the shooting started the Gang were all in armour on the veranda, in this letter Kelly says when the train arrived at the Station he was “opposite on horseback”. He writes that he was unable to go and take possession of the train becasue when he jumped off the horse “a bolt broke in my armour” and he had to fix it. He says when the police first fired, and he was shot in the foot and the arm, he wasn’t on the veranda with the others but halfway between the Inn and the Stanistreet house. He says the police fired off three volleys before either he or the other gang members fired their first “which can be proved by 40 witnesses”. In the letter he wrote two days earlier he said he had many witnesses that could prove he was many miles away when Fitzpatrick called at his mothers place in April 1878 : he seemed to be fond of claiming he had witnesses who could prove him right but in fact no witnesses were ever called to prove either of these two things. However in Judith Douthies book “I was at the Kelly Gang roundup” the testimony is recorded of the many witnesses who saw Ned Kelly inside the Inn when the police arrived, and he was identified on the veranda by Hare when he arrived. All those claims are out and out, easily provable lies.
Kelly also makes a big deal out of losing his watch, claiming that both Steele and Sgt Kelly reported they had it. To be honest I don’t recall either of them making such a claim, but to me what was interesting about this comment from Kelly is that it reveals an interest in certain of his possessions….but for those who still think a green and gold sash was his most prized possession, not mentioning it but talking about a watch surely says something!
In summary, careful assessment of this letter reveals it to be a desperate shambolic, and completely unreliable document in which Kelly tries to rewrite the history of the debacle at Glenrowan, and soften his public image . The problem is that there were many witnesses whose recollections contradicted his statements, there was extensive documentation of exactly what happened and even photographs. There are so many inaccuracies and so many provable lies, and so much rambling incoherent nonsense in Kellys letter that as evidence for anything other than Kellys state of mind its worse than useless.
By using such a flawed document as a basis for claiming Kelly wasn’t planning to wreck the train at Glenrowan but just to stop it, Rowsell and Peterson have revealed that they have either never read it properly and carefully, or else they did but dont understand it, or else they’re in wilful denial of the facts. Whatever it is, if they persist with this claim based on this sad document they’ll drag the status of self-proclaimed Kelly historians even deeper into the swamp and deservedly continue to be laughing stock .