On the afternoon of 14 January 1881, a seven-year-old boy named Richard Clark and his nanny, Mary Ann Nadin, were walking along Tatton Street in Salford, heading towards Oldfield Road to meet the boy's father at his place of business. Passing by the Infantry Barracks, Richard and his companion were suddenly propelled violently by the force of a sharp blaze that pierced through the sullen fog, sending off bits of debris in every direction. After the dirt and snow had settled, an elderly man who had also been walking in the vicinity of the Barracks prior to the explosion, but had luckily escaped unscathed, could see the injured Mrs Nadin wailing over the motionless body of her young ward; Richard had suffered a major head wound and despite the forthcoming medical efforts to revive him, was bleeding to death. A woman later recalled before an inquest that shortly before the explosion she had seen ‘two men [stopping] on the footpath next the barrack wall, and one of them struck a match. They then stood for a few minutes with their faces to the wall, and afterwards walked off… after [which] she saw a light against the wall, and sparks falling from it.’

The two men were never found or even properly identified (a local publican had told police he had encountered two suspicious ‘Yankee-Irishmen’ carrying equally suspicious packages only hours before the explosion), but in Salford and Westminster alike little doubt remained as to who was responsible for the outrage. Only ten days prior, the War Office had issued orders to volunteer regiments in Liverpool and Manchester to deposit their armaments in ‘a place of safety’ as information deemed credible suggested ‘an organised attempt would be made by some disaffected portion of the population to seize the arms stored… in the district’. That ‘disaffected portion’ was a euphemism for the sympathizers and agents of the umbrella organization known as the Fenians, which at the time comprised the Irish-based Irish Republican Brotherhood, its American offshoots, viz. the Fenian Brotherhood and the Clan na Gael, as well as satellite groupuscules like the United Irishmen of America.