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Ned was born in Beveridge, Victoria just north of Melbourne, probably in December, 1854. The eldest son and third of eight children born to Irish Catholic parents John Kelly and Ellen Quinn, the latter was a member of the notorious Quinn extended family, or "clan". As a boy he attended school and risked his life to save another boy who was drowning. As a reward he was given a green sash, which he would wear under his armour during his final show down with police.
Ned's father died when Ned was only 12, and according to custom he was forced to leave school to become head of the family. It was at this time that the Kelly family moved to the Glenrowan area of Victoria, which to this day is known as Kelly Country. Ned grew up in poverty in some of the harshest conditions in Australia, and folk tales tell of his sleeping on the ground in the bush during the Victorian winter.
It should be noted, that in all, 18 charges were brought against members of Ned's immediate family before he was declared an outlaw, while only half that number resulted in guilty verdicts. This is a highly unusal statistic for the time, and is one of the reasons that has caused many to posit that Ned's family was unfairly targeted from the time they moved to North-East Victoria due to Ellen Quinn's bad family name. Indeed, Ellen was eventually wrongfully convicted of attempted murder, and died in custody.
In 1869, when he was 14, Ned was arrested for assaulting a Chinese pig farmer named Ah Fook and for being an accomplice of bushranger Harry Power . He was found not guilty for both charges, but in 1870 he was arrested again for assault and sentenced to six months of hard labour. Three weeks after his release, he was arrested again for being in possession of what was, unbeknown to him, a stolen horse. After attempting to flee, 16-year-old Ned was held down and pistol-whipped rather brutally by a Senior Constable Hall, and later sentenced to three years hard labour.
After his release he became involved in a cattle rustling operation with his brother Dan, which attracted the attention of the local police. Ned's sister Ellen also attracted the attention of Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick, who assaulted her on a visit to the Kelly home in 1878. Fitzpatrick accused Ned of attempted murder, and Ned went into hiding; in October, when the police eventually found him, he and his accomplices killed three of the policemen and escaped once more.
He robbed two banks at Euroa and Jerilderie in February, 1879, as he needed money to make suits of armour which he believed would protect him from the police.
At this time, he dictated a lengthy letter for publication describing his view of his activities and the treatment of his family and, more generally, the treatment of Irish Catholics by English and Irish Protestant police. The Jerilderie Letter, as it is called, discusses the possibility of an uprising, not only in Australia but in the United States and Ireland itself, against what he regarded as a gross injustice. Some accounts of the Kelly story see Ned as ultimately planning armed rebellion (some even assert that he aimed to declare the north-east of Victoria an independent republic), but his actions give little indication of such a role.
The police caught onto his trail again in June, 1880. The Kelly Gang arrived in Glenrowan on June 27 and held about 60 hostages at the Glenrowan Inn, owned by the Jones family. The gang members brought with them armour that they had made themselves from the stolen iron mould boards of ploughs, earlier that year in a hideout in the Greta Swamps. Each man's armour weighed about 80 pounds; all four had helmets, and Joe Byrne was said to be the most well done, which the brow reaching down to the nose piece, forming two eye slits.
While holed up in the Glenrowan Inn, Ned and his gang's attempt to derail a special police train from Melbourne failed when a released hostage, schoolmaster Thomas Curnow, gave the alert, at great risk to his own life, by standing on the railway line near sunrise, waving a red scarf illuminated by a candle.
At about dawn on Monday, June 28Some entries on this page have been duplicated on August 1. The correct dates for such events need to be determined. June 28 is the 179th day of the year (180th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 186 days remaining. Events 1243 Innocent IV bec in the subsequent shootout with the police, Ned Kelly was shot twenty-eight times in the legs (sources vary, some saying six times), as his limbs were left unprotected by his armour. The other Kelly Gang members also died in the hotel, Joe Byrne allegedly by loss of blood due to a gunshot wound that severed his femoral artery, and Dan Kelly and Steve Hart by self-ingestion of poison (autopsies were not performed).
Ned Kelly survived to stand trial, and was sentenced to death by Judge Redmond BarrySir Redmond Barry ( 1813 November 23, 1880) was a British colonial judge. The son of Major-General H. Barry, of Ballyclough, Co. Cork, he was educated at a military school in Kent, and at Trinity College, Dublin, and was called to the Irish bar in 1838. who had tried him on previous occasions for lesser crimes. When the judge uttered the customary words "may God have mercy on your soul", Ned is reported to have replied "I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go". He was hangedHanging is a form of capital punishment / execution, or a method for suicide. Hanging may involve breaking of the neck (drop-hanging; causing instant unconsciousness without breathing, and quick death), or one or more of the following: closing the airway on November 11 at the Melbourne Gaol, his last words being "Ah well I suppose it has come to this... Such is life".
Stories abounded of Ned's alturistic and gentlemanly behavior, casting him as a modern-day Robin Hood. More than thirty-two thousand Victorians signed a petition against Kelly's sentencing, and an inquiry was held in which all the policeFor the band, see The Police. For the Polish town, see Police, Poland. Police forces are government organisations ostensibly charged with the responsibility of maintaining law and order. The word comes from the French, and less directly from the Greek pol officers involved in Ned's exploits were either removed from employment or demoted.