DAYS OF NED KELLY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 151, 29 June 1932, Page 7

DAYS OF NED KELLY

THE OUTLAW’S CAPTURE EX-TROOPER’S DEATH SYDNEY, June 9. Seventy-three-year-old Frederick Fanning, who had always claimed he was one of the troopers who captured Ned Kelly at Glenrowan in 1880, died in the Parramatta District Hospital last Saturday through drinking iodine in mistake for medicine. He had been an inmate of the George Street, Parramatta, Old Men’s Home since 1914. Tho Kelly affair was the only part of his early life that Mr. Fanning revealed. Because he suffered from rheumatism, which forced him to limp around with a stick, he always kept a bottle of iodine under his pillow to rub on his legs. Under the same pillow was a bottle of medicine. Early on the morning of May 28 he drank the iodine, and was immediately rushed to Parramatta Hospital, where he ling ored a week. The story of the attack on Jones’ Hotel at Glenrowan, as related by tho old man, was as follows: The special train conveying Mr. Fanning and other troopers from Melbourne came to a sudden stop a mile from Glenrowan in the early morning, when the school teacher, Mr. Curnow, stopped the pilot engine and warned the driver that the line had been pulled up. The special steamed slowly into Glenrowan station, where the troopers were informed that the Kelly gang had taken charge of Jones’ Hotel. The first move on the hotel was stopped by a volley from the ver andah. Superintendent Hare was shot in the wrist by a bullet latter found to have come from Ned Kelly’s rifle. As the troopers retired, Ned Kelly called out: “Fire away, you beggars; you can’t, hurt us.” The police poured volleys into the hotel in the darkness, and then were joined by reinforcements from Benalla and Wangaratta. Mr. Fanning added: At dawn we had the hote] surrounded, when something appeared from behind. We did not know what it was. Some said that it was a ghost, others that it was a gunyip. It was Ned Kelly in his armour. He had escaped to Morgan’s Lookout, and wag making a rear at“None of us did anything until the apparition fired at Constable Kelly; then we knew it was Ned. We fired away at him, but our bullets had no effect, and Kelly only laughed. After a while Sergeant Steele called, ‘Fire low, boys,’ and shot Kelly in the legs. Then we rushed him and stripped him of his armour.”