CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

Unity of the oppressed can make a difference in politically uncertain times

A peaceful protest turned tragedy; this is the true story of the working class fight for the vote.

On August 16 1819, in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, a large non-violent gathering demanding parliamentary reform turned into a massacre, leaving many dead and hundreds more injured.

This catastrophic event was one of the key moments of the age, a political awakening of the working class, and eventually led to ordinary people gaining suffrage. In this definitive account Joyce Marlow tells the stories of the real people involved and brings to life the atrocity the government attempted to cover up.

The Peterloo Massacre is soon to be the subject of a major film directed by Mike Leigh.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joyce Marlow was born and raised in Manchester in the 1930s. Soon after the Second World War she became an actress and later a full-time writer. A life-long Labour supporter and feminist, she edited anthologies such as The Virago Book of Women and the Great War, as well as Suffragettes: The Right to Vote for Women. She was also the winner of the Romantic Novelists’ Best Historical Novel Award. Married with two sons, she lived in the High Peak District in Derbyshire.

1

AGRICULTURE COULD NOT HAVE MADE SUCH A PLACE AS MANCHESTER

Among the thousands of British troops who fought at Waterloo was an eighteen-year-old named John Lees. He came from Oldham in Lancashire. Had he died at Waterloo we should never have heard of him, for the blood of such ordinary young men stained the Belgian cornfields red. But he survived the three days of bitter fighting that culminated on June 18th, 1815, in the final defeat of Napoleon and the end of twenty-odd years of war. He was discharged and returned home to follow his trade as a cotton spinner. Four years later he was dead as the result of injuries received on another field.

The ground on which John Lees sustained his mortal wounds was an area of open land near the centre of Manchester known as Saint Peter’s Field. The date was August 16th, 1819, and the occasion was a mass meeting in support of Parliamentary reform. The injuries were inflicted by fellow Lancastrians, who were members of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry, and by the 15th Hussars, ex-comrades in arms from Waterloo. Before he died John Lees said he was never in such danger at Waterloo as he was at the meeting, for at Waterloo it was man to man but at Manchester it was downright murder. He was not alone in this assessment. Other people seized upon the presence of Waterloo veterans such as himself in the unarmed crowds, and upon the actions of the 15th Hussars on the June and August days.

On the August day the savage sobriquet ‘Peterloo’ was bestowed.

John Lees lingered in agony for three weeks after Peterloo. His inquest was used as a test case to try and prove that what happened on Saint Peter’s Field had been ‘downright murder’. Thus in death his name rang round England. But if in life he was unsung he was also, by being such an ordinary young man, typical of thousands of Lancastrians. The reasons that made him attend the meeting also drove half the 60,000 present, the army of John Leeses who do not move until a situation has reached desperation point or the way has been so clearly sign-posted they cannot fail to follow. Of these reasons a few were understood by him at the time, others he was not sufficiently clever or educated to grasp, while others need a retrospective eye.

The stuff of which Peterloo was made has as many threads as a length of woven cotton, but the main ones were contained in John Lees’s brief life span. For he was a child not only of the Industrial Revolutionfn1 but of the world cradle of that revolution (or evolution). A small-time cotton manufacture had existed in south-east Lancashire since the beginning of the seventeenth century, with Manchester as its weak heart and the villages such as Oldham, Middleton, Rochdale and Royton as the anaemic arteries. In the old days a cosy structure had existed which memory made cosier as it disappeared. The merchants bought the raw cotton from the Liverpool dealers, sold it to small-time masters who in turn sold it to spinners working in their cottages. When the yarn was spun it was sold back to the masters or directly to the aristocrats of the trade, the hand-loom weavers, who duly wove the cloth and sold it to other masters. Within this structure everybody, so they imagined, was independent. That they were subject to recessions, and could be thrown out of work, either escaped them or they later forgot. What everybody did have, and certainly remembered, was the freedom to impose their own tempo on life.

In the 1770s everything changed. A burst of mechanical inventions meant that high quality cotton could be produced in hitherto unimaginable quantities. It was because the initial inventions were connected with the cotton trade that Lancashire became the world cradle of the Industrial Revolution, suffering from the incalculable pressures of being first in the field. At the start there was an insatiable market, both at home and abroad, for this splendid, cheap material. Capital poured into Manchester. Shillings turned overnight into massive fortunes. Small-time masters became manufacturers and in the process grew further and further away from the men with whom they had hitherto worked amicably. Chasing their pot of gold, or at least better wages than they could earn as joiners, hatters and locksmiths, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, the people poured in too. The stampede turned Manchester from a fair sized town to the second largest city in England. Manchester and Salford’s joint population of 40,000 in 1750 had risen to 95,000 by 1800. It turned the sleepy villages into cotton towns. Oldham with less than 4,000 inhabitants in 1750 had grown to 12,000 by 1800. The whole area resembled a new-found colony, called Eldorado.

However, by the time John Lees was born the cotton bandwagon was running off the rails. England was at war with France, and the longer the wars dragged on, the more erratic its course became. The boom days when spinning families were earning between 30s and 40s a week, and those involved in weaving averaging between 40s and 60s, became memories told by father. And grandfather started to recall the good old days before mechanization. For if wages were plunging downwards and unemployment, with the new concentration of people dependent on a single manufacture, was becoming mass, other forces could not be checked either. Industrialization had changed the structure and tempo of life irrevocably.

The two main changes were the growth of the industrial slums and the Factory System. When the hordes first poured into the area they needed housing. So a builder and a carpenter joined forces (not everybody climbed on to the cotton bandwagon but practically everybody lived off it). They bought a stretch of land as near as possible to the centre of the places where the manufacturing activity was concentrated—Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport and the rest. If the land already contained ditches, that was fine as it saved digging foundations. In the ditches cellars were constructed, forming a damp working area for the weavers. For yarn needed to be kept supple while being woven, and the only way to keep it thus was in a damp atmosphere. The houses from which the people had come had not been palatial but neither had they been built on top of sewage ditches, hundreds of rows, without gardens, without sight of a tree, without the smell of the fresh air (or freshish, remembering the sewage ditches found in every town and village). The only amenity the new houses possessed was running water, not from a tap, but rising from the rotten foundations and pouring down the walls.

While wages remained high most people accepted the conditions. Money, if not producing happiness, took the edge off unhappiness. It provided the wherewithal to buy luxuries such as best beef and butter, or to drown your sorrows in drink. While the money was coming in many people, albeit sullenly and considerably fewer in number, also accepted the Factory System. This arose initially for simple, practical reasons. The first inventions occurred in the spinning branch of the industry and soon the whole processing of cotton had become infinitely more complicated. The waste of time spent plodding between individual cottages became ridiculous, and in any case the weight of the new machines was too great for a single cottage. So they, and all the spinning processes, became concentrated in a mill. The Factory System itself, therefore, made sense. Unfortunately, the manner in which it was conducted in most mills from the very beginning was dreadful. The major impulse was profit for the master, so conditions were harsh, brutal and degrading, not only to increase profits but also to keep the workers submissive.

John Lees’s father, Robert, was among the spinners who accepted the new fact of economic life—that hand-spun yarn could not compete with machine-produced. When John was in his early teens his father opened a small mill in Oldham where John, his mother, brother and sisters and a dozen or so others worked. Most of the mills were small, though a few employed workers in their thousands. Robert Lees’s was not among the worst, but even so conditions there were of economic necessity harsh. On the whole it was in the small factories, where the masters were scrambling their way upwards or fighting to make a living, that the most brutal conditions prevailed. Spinners worked a fourteen-hour day in steaming temperatures up to 90°Fahrenheit. They were heavily fined for sending out for a drink of water, or opening a window, or whistling, or slipping with a gas lighter, or falling asleep at their machines. Spinners included men, women and children from the age of five. For most of the factory jobs were menial and tedious and could easily, and more cheaply, be performed by the women and children. The female of the spinning species was from the age of puberty regarded as anybody’s meat. Male visitors to many factories were invited to take their pick for a lusty roll.

By 1815 there were sixty factories in the Manchester area, employing some 24,000 workers. Over 90 per cent were spinning mills. However, there were still as many spinners operating from their cottages. But in and out of the factories wages had dropped to an average of 24s a week, prices had risen and the Corn Bill had been passed. The shadow of the Corn Laws hung over the whole period like a carrion crow. The Bill was passed in the phoney peace between Napoleon’s incarceration on Elba and Waterloo. As soon as its terms were made known, that foreign corn could not be imported until the price of home-grown wheat had reached 80s a quarter, there were riots and protest meetings throughout the country. It was finally passed in a House of Commons ringed by troops with bayonets fixed, for it protected the interests of an élite alone. True, the farmers it protected needed help, but passing a law which adversely affected everybody else in the country was not the best way to go about it. For the Corn Bill meant that come the next bad harvest the price of corn would rocket. It did not require a weather prophet to foretell that in England it would be sooner rather than later. Nor an economist to tell the thousands of spinners and weavers what a rise in the price of bread, their ‘staff of life’, would mean. As an added thorn for the manufacturing districts, of which Lancashire from its industrial cradling position was always in the van for good or ill, the Corn Bill also meant that their goods could not be exchanged for foreign corn as they had been in the past.

John Lees, therefore, returned home from the wars to find that both the conditions and wages of spinners had fast detenorated.fn2 The plight of the weavers, the former aristocrats of the trade, was infinitely worse. Although the first inventions had occurred in the spinning branch, the power loom had been invented in 1785, thirty years before. In that period, following the normal headlong pattern of industrialization, the power loom should have mechanized and transformed weaving. The weavers should have been in the factories in their thousands. But they weren’t. There was a bare handful of weaving mills, and over 40,000 hand-loom weavers were living and working outside the Factory System.

Why weaving remained outside the system for so many years is a point that has been argued for as many subsequent ones. Nobody has found a crystal-clear answer. Was it because the hand-loom weavers had been the aristocrats that they clung to their ‘independence’? But the people who flocked into handloom weaving in the early boom days had never been craftsmen. Did the immigrants assume the mantle of superiority due to the excellent early wages, and become loath to abandon it? Was it the ease with which you could acquire a hand-loom and set it up in your cellar and seem to be your own master? But you could acquire a spinning wheel, or even a small mechanized Spinning Jenny, just as easily. Remembering the conditions in the factories one does not blame the weavers for clinging to their independence, however illusory. But why did the spinners not cling as a mass to theirs so tenaciously? Was there something in the different branches that made the spinners accept the industrial facts while weavers did not. Or could the weavers not see why industrialization was inevitable? Could they not initially believe that the boom days had gone for ever, and later absolutely disbelieve that they could be left in such appalling conditions, to endure such extreme suffering?

For with dreadful irony, by rejecting industrialization, the weavers created for themselves conditions worse than those in the factories. Already by 1815 there were far too many of them chasing far too little work. In their struggle to earn a living they were undercutting themselves to the extent that hand-woven cloth was cheaper than machine produced. Their wages had plummeted from 40s–60s a week to an average of 12s. Over the years they had tried to redress their economic grievances by economic means, petitioning Parliament for a minimum wage, but without success. They were not well organized. The temperament which made the more educated cling so desperately to their independence was not conducive to the co-operation demanded by an effective pressure group. The illiterate swarm of migrants had either something of the same temperament or were too sunk in misery to care. Against them anyway was the power of the masters who were getting what they wanted, cheap cloth, and did not feel it was their business to inquire in what conditions the cheap cloth was being produced. If the weavers wanted to be self-employed and independent that was their privilege, as long as they did not make a fuss in the process. In 1815, vast and potentially disturbing force as the 40,000 hand-loom weavers were, they had not protested greatly. So the majority of masters were content to let the sleeping dogs lie in their damp, rotten, rat-infested, choleraprone cellars.

Physically the area was, by today’s standards, rural. The boundaries of Manchester were narrow. Hulme, Ardwick, Cheetham, Charlton Row—the essential dreary ring of the late nineteenth-century industrial city with which the twentieth century is belatedly trying to cope—were outlying districts. There were toll gates barring the entry to Manchester proper. In the heart of the town around Mosley Street the rich manufacturers and merchants lived in their large houses. The outward drift, away from the smells, the dirt and hoi polloi had not started. There were many remnants of the medieval village Manchester had been, timber houses and early eighteenth-century brick and plaster ones. Main thoroughfares such as Market Street were twisting and narrow, with pavements only eighteen inches wide. The tearing down of old Manchester to make way for the mills and warehouses and counting houses, the ugly palaces of King Cotton, had not yet begun. The concentration in rotten housing had started, but it was confined to comparatively small areas around New Cross and Newtown in Manchester, and in the centres of the old cotton villages. The River Irwell, which flows through Manchester and even in the heart of the town had not so long ago been clear and unpolluted, was already dirty and muddy, ‘the most overworked river in the world’. Of the sixty mills in the area, a considerable proportion were darkening the skyline along the Irwell’s banks. But in 1815 the first industrial city in the world was rising on hitherto derelict or open spaces, and its messy sprawl was limited.

Once out of Manchester you were in open country. The eight miles between the town and Oldham, for example, were unspoiled. After his discharge from the army John Lees walked home on rutted turnpikes, across bridle paths, down through deep wooded valleys, scrambling up mossy banks where honeysuckle and wild roses grew, stopping to slake his thirst at a clear rindle (the local word for a stream), until he hit the foothills of the Pennines, tufty, gorse-strewn moorland.

If the physical scars were minimal, the economic stresses were already heavy. The spinners on the one hand herded into the factories, the weavers on the other in their wretched cellars, all suffering from a sharp drop in wages, an equally sharp rise in prices with the black shadow of the Corn Bill looming over them. The spiritual and moral pressures emerging from the rapid change both in tempo and mode of life, and from the harsh new industrial beat, had also bitten deeply. The predominant emotion in 1815 was sullen acquiesence. The major cause for concern was economic. They wanted sufficient money to live decently, or indecently as the case might be. They were not over-interested in why they were unable to earn a living. But if wages and conditions did not improve they knew something would have to be done, either for or by them. What that something should be neither John Lees nor the anonymous thousands had any clear idea.

2

THE MOST WICKED AND SEDITIOUS PART OF THE COUNTRY

There were people who had definite views on what was necessary to combat the existing conditions and prevent their further deterioration. They were a small section of the community in comparison to that represented by John Lees, but by 1815 their efforts had already helped to earn Manchester and the surrounding area the reputation of being the most turbulent and seditious in the country. Reforming activity had gone hand-in-hand with the Industrial Revolution. Its first major outbreak was in the 1790s, inspired by the French Revolution and the works of Tom Paine.

The practical platform in those early days was the repeal of the religiously discriminating Test and Corporation Actsfn1 and a moderate reform of Parliament. But the masses in 1790 were earning high wages and were caught up in the patriotic fever of the onset of the French wars. They showed their disapproval of reform by stoning the houses of the Jacobins. The authorities, with the people behind them, acted swiftly and harshly and reforming zeal lost its impetus. The violence that erupted between 1810 and 1812, the period of the Luddite Riots, was not instigated by the reformers, and the riots in this instance did not originate in Lancashire, though they soon spread there, but in Nottingham. The mill burning, machine breaking and food rioting that occurred in these years was wholly economically inspired. However, the experience of mass unemployment and starvation swung the people away from their previous wholesale loyalty to King and Country and the established order. In 1812 it had not swung them towards anything specific, but it was in this year that political agitation reared its head again.

The doyen of the working-class reform movement in the area was John Knight. Born in 1763 he was a Yorkshireman who spent most of his life on the Lancashire side of the Pennines. Originally he was a weaver, a small-time but successful master. In early manhood he became convinced that the ills of his adopted county and the country at large stemmed from the corruption of an unrepresentative Parliament. Over the years he spent the greater part of his money in furthering the cause of Parliamentary reform. Knight had conviction and a full measure of Yorkshire determination, with an equal measure of Tyke caution. The authorities considered him wild, as they did anybody with similar ideas, but he was not by nature rash. Being convinced that he was right and holding a minority view, he had to stick his neck out sometimes but on the whole he proceeded with cautious, dogged perseverance.

In 1812 he considered the time ripe for further action. In June of that year he organized a meeting at a public house in Manchester attended by thirty-eight weavers. In a small room they hammered out a petition to the House of Commons and an address to the Prince Regent, urging the necessity of Parliamentary reform. As they were finishing they were arrested and charged with holding an unlawful meeting for a seditious purpose. At their subsequent trial the case against them was not proven. But the arrests put a further temporary stop to reforming zeal. On the release of the thirty-nine men, only the convinced, dogged Knight remained politically active. However, there was one difference between these arrests and those of the 1790s. This time the people neither stoned the houses of Knight or the other weavers, nor showed their approbation of the authorities’ actions in any way. It was a difference appreciated, literally and metaphorically, by Knight and one which encouraged him to carry on. The times were maturing with him.

Between 1812 and 1815 there was a political lull, partly because the economy picked up as the French wars entered their last phase and markets re-opened, partly from the feeling that the titanic struggle was coming to an end and the hope that peace would bring prosperity. The passing of the Corn Bill re-opened the field for the reformers. The anti-Corn Bill meetings were again economically inspired. But the emotions aroused made more converts to the theme that they would always be against us until we had a voice in the governing of our country.

That the people had no say in the election of their representatives, that England bore no relationship to the democracy she was supposed to be, was incontestable. No borough had been enfranchised since Newark in the time of Charles II. The franchise had never been arranged with equity and justice—the Tudors had been great ones for creating new boroughs wherever it suited their patronage. Since the time of Charles II the centres of population and activity had changed beyond measure. But in 1815 of 489 English seats in the House of Commons, 293 were returned by the southern and south-western counties including London. As a specific example, Cornwall with a diminishing population returned 44 members, while Lancashire whose population had leapt over the 1,000,000 mark had only 14 for the entire county. Manchester, the second largest city in England, had no member of Parliament. The same pattern existed throughout the country: long established rural areas returned umpteen members while Birmingham, Leeds and the fast rising industrial cities were unrepresented.

Manchester had been represented in Cromwell’s time as a reward for stalwart support in the Civil War. But when the sitting member died during the Restoration, Charles II declined to renew the representation as a punishment for opposition. In 1774 efforts had been made to buy a seat in Parliament so that Manchester should have a member to represent her problems. These attempts, which came to nothing, were not organized by reformers of the John Knight ilk. They were the work of the more forward looking of the reactionary élite that governed the town. Thus the people who became known first as radicals, then Radicals with a capital, were neither original nor alone in considering that not all was for the best in the best of all possible parliaments.

The younger Pitt had entered Parliament as a reformer (though he could not count upon the Manchester loyalists as his supporters; they merely wanted their city represented in the system as it stood). However, Pitt’s reforming aims had been limited to the lessening of the rottenness of the most rotten boroughs, of which the most famous was Pitt’s father’s constituency of Old Sarum which had not a single voter within its boundaries; to the curtailing of the vagaries of election date and place, which had led to the classic eighteenth-century example of two candidates postponing and removing the poll from Winchester to the Isle of Wight when they found the campaign not going to their liking; and to the curbing of the most outrageous forms of bribery and patronage—election ‘expenses’, i.e., bribing of voters, in some cases had reached £40,000.

Where the radicals differed, and why from the start they roused such Establishment opposition, not to say terror, was in the extent and scope of their aims. The earliest and most consistent of the radicals was Major John Cartwright, born in Nottinghamshire of an old-established family in 1740. Cartwright possessed the ideal temperament for the missionary or reformer: limited intelligence, no sens of humour, extreme obstinacy and great courage. It was Cartwright who first expounded the idea of the need for a completely new system based on democratic representation, rather than moderate reform of the existing one. By 1815 he was the national doyen of the radical movement, ‘the old heart in London from which the veins of sedition in this country are supplied’.

In 1812 Cartwright founded the Hampden Club in London. Qualifications for membership were the same as for the House of Commons, one had either to be the owner of or heir to £33 per annum from landed property, and the subscription was two guineas. The declared aim was to gather together rich and influential reformers to discuss future plans and to provide leadership for the rest of the country. By 1815 his dream of rich and influential leadership had come to nothing. He was, sadly, the only member to turn up at a meeting. Undeterred, he decided to establish provincial Hampden Clubs. Their object was to channel and provide with leadership the disorganized working-class unrest. There were no qualifications for membership and the subscription was reduced to one penny a week. Cartwright travelled hundreds of miles up and down the country, by coach and on horseback. He was already seventy-five years old but like John Knight, who incidentally was known as the Cartwright of the North, he had conviction and determination. The county in which he had the greatest success in establishing the clubs was Lancashire.

The first provincial Hampden Club was founded in August 1816, in Royton, a small cotton town nine miles from Manchester. Its leading figure was William Fitton, a surgeon of great physical and mental energy, a devotee of Tom Paine, with a biting line in sarcasm and an ardent belief in the rights of man. He was one of the many local figures who helped shape Peterloo. Other clubs soon mushroomed in the cotton belt, in Oldham, Rochdale, Ashton-under-Lyne, Middleton and Stockport—the latter, lying just over the Cheshire border, had a reputation second only to Manchester as a sink of seditious iniquity.

The secretary of the Middleton club was Samuel Bamford, the most human character directly connected with Peterloo if only for the reason that we know most about him. For he grew up to be a bad poet and a good prose writer who left behind several autobiographical books, notably Passages in the Life of a Radical. Bamford was born in Middleton in 1788. He came from a family of weavers who represented another thread in the working-class Lancastrian weft, literate and articulate by tradition. The young Samuel was educated at the local Methodist school and the Free Grammar School of Manchester. Free that was to children of reasonable standing (his father at the time being governor of the workhouse—he later lost the job because of his radical views) and intelligence. Bamford’s schooling was not of course full time. As all working-class children of the period, even those fortunate enough to receive schooling, he learned the family trade from babyhood, and spent half his youth weaving and half in the class-room.

Temperamentally Bamford was headstrong, romantic, idealistic, touchy and intelligent. Physically he was 5 ft. 10 in., lithe and well-proportioned. His features were irregular, he had what he called ‘a snubby nose’, but the whole made a most pleasing impression, particularly on the ladies. His early manhood was stormy. Before he was twenty Bamford had an illegitimate child by a Yorkshire lass but fortunately she did not ask him to marry her, being content with an allowance. His lusty sexual instincts, coupled with an eagerness to sample life, made him well known in the shady haunts of Manchester. With thousands of spinners escaping from the steaming oppression of the factories, and thousands of weavers emerging from their damp cellars, the shades were luridly coloured. In one short alley, alone, there were forty-seven brothels. But at the ripe old age of twenty-three, having worked on a collier in the meantime, Bamford decided it was time for him to settle down. Accordingly he married his local Middleton sweetheart Jemima, known to everybody as Mima. At the wedding feast ‘a being which was dearest to me of any in the world save my wife’ had a place of honour, his baby daughter by Mima. However, he did settle down, and even if the lusty, roaming instincts remained he enjoyed a long, happy married life.

In the Years before and after his marriage Bamford read voraciously, his reading matter including the poems of Robert Burns and Cobbett’s Political Register, both of which influenced him. Cobbett planted him firmly on the road to which his family background had guided him, by teaching him to question the causes of the current distress and to try and seek the answers. Following in Burns’s footsteps he began to write the poems in the local vernacular which were to make him Lancashire’s ‘Weaver Boy’· By 1816 he had left the security of a warehouse in Manchester and started up as a cottage weaver. Mima, in fact, seems to have done most of the weaving, and not all hand-loom weavers were destitute.

A stalwart supporter of the Hampden Club established in Oldham was Bamford’s friend, ‘Doctor’ Healey. Born at Bent in 1780, Healey was a quack doctor in the eighteenth-century sense of one who practised medicine, often very well, without being qualified. He was virtually illiterate but he possessed a great sense of justice and injustice. A diminutive fighting cock of a man, he had the strongest of Lancashire accents and the true simplicity that does not change, for better or worse, whatever the circumstances. He behaved in exactly the same, cocky, friendly manner whether he was urging workers to strike in Oldham, being questioned by Privy Councillors in Whitehall, addressing an open-air meeting, or offering snuff to a distinguished prosecution barrister at the post-Peterloo trials.

The Mancheter Hampden Club was founded, after the rapid growth of those in the cotton towns and villages, in October 1816. In the year up to Peterloo this pattern was repeated, the cotton towns remaining in the van, but Manchester gaining the plaudits or disasters by virtue of being the centre of the area. John Knight was closely associated with the foundation of the Manchester club. Among those who assisted him, or became prominent in its affairs, were John Thacker Saxton and his wife Susanna, and Joseph Johnson. Saxton, born 1776, had been connected with the cotton trade but by 1816 had found an outlet for his writing talent. He was to play an important part on the Manchester Observer, the Radical paper founded in 1818. He was a vigorous, consistent, determined Radical with the supposed journalistic weakness for the bottle. His wife Susanna shared his views and determination and later became secretary of the Manchester Female Reformers. Joseph Johnson, born 1791 and therefore the youngest of the prominent local radicals, was a brush maker. He was a vain, indecisive, romantic character who cherished a dream of building Jerusalem in Lancashire’s still green and pleasant land, with himself as a leading prophet. After Peterloo, when the dream turned to nightmare, he came down from his euphoric cloud and disintegrated. But between 1816 and 1819, and particularly from 1818 onwards when he put money into the Manchester Observer and became its part owner, he was a leading and influential figure.

The proceedings of the Hampden Clubs were similar throughout the area. Originally meetings were held in a house or cottage, say Bamford’s in Middleton, where the tougher, more idealistic, enthusiastic and lively minds would gather. 1816 produced a dreadful harvest. As predicted, the Corn Bill caused the price of bread to rocket and with it everything else, except wages. This added distress made more people turn towards the Hampden Clubs as an organization offering solutions. With increased membership chapels were rented for the meetings. These were usually held twice a week after work. When everybody was gathered the best reader would impart the news and views (mostly views) from Cobbett’s Political Register which were then discussed. A travelling delegate might appear to tell of the other Lancashire clubs or those over the border in Yorkshrre. At some point in the earnest discussions, which often lasted into the small hours, refreshment would be provided in the shape of beer and muffins.

During the endless discussions another concept was rekindled—that of universal suffrage, the right of every adult of sound mind to participate in the government of that society of which he was a member. The idea had been voiced as early as 1792 by a London shoemaker named Thomas Hardy, had flourished briefly and then been trampled on by Pitt’s ‘Gagging Acts’ as having obvious affiliations with the French Revolution, and had lain dormant ever since. But in 1816, in Hampden Clubs up and down south-east Lancashire, it was given the kiss of life. The importance of this resurgence cannot be over-emphasized. For Cartwright himself, the doyen of radicalism, did not envisage the mob, the labouring classes, or the common people as they were variously called, sharing in the election of his reformed Parliament. The mob would continue to be guided by their betters, though their betters would include a much larger and more balanced section of the community than before. In fact, although Cartwright’s demands outraged (or in some cases amused) the existing power structure, they were basically as paternalistic as that structure. But Cartwright had helped to rouse the sleeping tiger and he should not have been surprised when its brain started to tick. His conception of limited household franchise was not sufficient for the members of the Hampden Clubs for they were not householders in franchise terms. Consequently, ‘Equal Representation’ became one of their battle cries. When Bamford attended a Radical meeting in London in early 1817, it was his faction that swung the vote to acceptance of universal, not household, franchise. It was not only the first time the Northern influence made itself felt, but the first time the voice of the mob for whom the reforms were intended was clearly heard.

Every adult of sound mind did not include women, although from the start they were active in the clubs’ affairs. In 1816 and early 1817 they had not yet founded their own clubs and their efforts were devoted to furthering the aims of their menfolk. They spread the good word, cleaned the chapels and prepared refreshments. They were also frequent attenders at the open-air meetings that became another method of spreading the radical gospel. Here it must be stressed that, even at the height of their success, membership of the Hampden Clubs was limited. John Lees, for example, was not a member and probably knew only vaguely of their existence. The hard, convinced core knew they had to spread their message by wider methods. Open-air meetings were one of these.

Some of the meetings were held on the moors. People walked from the surrounding villages and towns, up the cart tracks that wind through the lumpy grey-green hills with their short stumpy trees, across the boggy springy turf where the rivers and springs flow, to the rolling high moors around Saddleworth where the black rocks jut and the wind always blows. The moorland meetings were not graced by the military’s attendance, but at those held in the towns troops were often present. On one rain-drenched occasion near Rochdale a weaver observed sardonically of the watching soldiers: ‘as the water was already running over at the muzzles of their guns, they might squirt us, but they could not shoot us’. With or without the military’s presence the crowds at these alfresco meetings increased. Some people attended because they were interested in what the Radicals had to say. They warmed to the interesting new theme that men are born free, equal and independent; that the source of all legitimate power was the people; that only through the support of the people themselves—would equality and independence be achieved; that the first step on the road lay in the reform of the corrupt Houses of Parliament. Some people attended because an outdoor meeting was an event in the dreary, oppressive round of life. Some went simply to hear the speakers. And the movement was throwing up some thumping good orators who larded in the boring facts of economic grievance and the unrepresentative state of Parliament with spice and drama, and indulged in vitriolic attacks on the Establishment, national and local.

John Lees may have attended an alfresco meeting in the early days of 1817. ‘Doctor’ Healey was operating in the Oldham area and was a big draw. If he did attend John came away no more a confirmed or convinced radical than on arrival. Neither economic distress nor Radical organization had mounted sufficiently for mass adherence to the movement, although the ripples were fast spreading.

There was another force, another ‘spirit’ at work in south-east Lancashire. This was the embryonic trade union movement. Its roots were more deeply embedded in the Industrial Revolution than the Radical movement’s. (Again it was Lancashire’s industrial cradling position, not chance, that put the county in the union vanguard and later led the first Trades Union Council to be held in Manchester in 1868.) The reasons and aims that motivated both trade union and radical movements to a great extent overlapped, but in 1817 they were pursuing different courses.

The hard core of trade unionists lay in the factories among the spinners. The majority of spinning tasks might be menial, the majority of spinners leading degrading lives, but the Industrial Revolution had created a small number of highly skilled jobs. It was the new spinning élite that led the demand for improved conditions and higher wages. Against them were the Combination Acts whose repeal the Radicals also favoured. These Acts, passed in 1799 and 1800, made illegal any combination of working men for any purpose.fn2 They were unleashed by the fear of French Revolutionary echoes in England, but the fear of working men combining had long been felt. By the end of the eighteenth century there were already forty Acts of Parliament forbidding combinations in various forms. There was, however, as always in England, a loophole in that the Benefit Societies, into which the working man could pay a subscription to cover him in times of sickness, remained legal. They thus became the cover for trade union activities.

1818 was a year of union-motivated activity and will be examined later as it was very much part of the Peterloo story. Let it suffice to say here that there were two working-class impulses. The Radical movement was convinced that all solutions lay in Parliamentary reform. The trade unionists were certain that the redress to economic grievance lay in economic weapons, and that the combined power of the masters could only be countered by the combined power of the working man. Neither group was helping the other.

Both groups would have encountered far less enthusiasm, indeed might not have come into being at all but for the influence of a third force—Methodism. The Methodists were the first to utilize the talents of the ordinary man, and the first to emphasize a respect for individual worth rather than inherited wealth. They brought Enthusiasm into the Age of Reason and, most important, they started the first Sunday Schools.

Significantly, the Lancashire radicals and reformers all came from Methodist or Nonconformist backgrounds. It was also Methodism that had made John Lees semi-literate while his father Robert could neither read nor write. As a small boy John went to a dingy little Sunday School in Oldham, a garret at the top of somebody’s house. Hundreds of little boys and girls in Manchester attended in other garrets and cellars. They were laboriously taught to read and write, albeit the word of God. But having devoured the Bible the brighter among them could, and did, pass on to other reading matter. The material most of them passed on to was radical in context. Because Methodism had imparted the revolutionary idea that Jack was as good as his master. As Bamford wrote, ‘The Sunday schools of the preceding thirty years had produced sufficient working men of sufficient talent to become readers, writers and speakers in the village meetings for parliamentary reform.’ It was on the lines established by Methodism that Major Cartwright based the structure of the Hampden Clubs.

In the Manchester area Nonconformists outnumbered Anglicans by two to one. The sect that had a particularly strong influence were the Unitarians. They were the most radical in outlook. This was partly because of their precepts, partly because they had not won their freedom of worship until 1813, and having fought this battle for so long were in good trim to take up another cause. Dissenters in general had been granted freedom of worship in 1689 as a reward for stalwart support in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that established the Protestant supremacy in England. The Dissenting tradition took the edge off the extremities of all reformers (a) because such sweeping revolutions Methodism were able to occur legally and (b) because the Establishment, however much it disliked reform, accepted the legal right to Dissent and consequently, if subconsciously, the concept of dissent.

However, over the years, and particularly in the Radical upsurge between 1816 and 1820, Dissent to the Government and loyalists equalled sedition. Dissent equalling sedition equalled Methodism.

3

THE CONSTITUTION OF ENGLAND IS THE BUSINESS OF EVERY ENGLISHMAN

To William Cobbett, unlike the Government, ‘the bitterest foes of freedom in England have been, and are, the Methodists’. It was one of his more dogmatic statements but it contained an element of truth. On the one hand Methodism had fostered the revolutionary spirit which the loyalists rightly saw as one of the root causes of the discontent in the manufacturing districts, Lancashire in particular. On the other hand, Methodism’s belief that the state is ordained of God counterbalanced the spirit it had fostered. So while Dissent equals sedition was one cry, it was also said throughout the period 1816–1820 that even in Manchester the Methodists remained loyal.

William Cobbett was not present at Peterloo. He was not even in England in 1819 but as much as any single man, as opposed to any single creed (i.e., Methodism which he so much disliked) he helped shape the August day. Cobbett was born of humble stock in Farnham, Surrey, in 1763. He grew up with a deep respect for, love of and pride in the old rural ways, the traditions of sturdy English independence, and native intelligence. But he also possessed an aggressive, curious, seeking mind and at the age of twenty he ran away from the countryside he loved so much and later enshrined in all his writings. He was successively London clerk and regular soldier. By 1792 he had clashed with army authority—though he obtained a legal discharge—and emigrated to the United States. In the land of the free he found his métier—journalism. However, by 1800 he was back in England, having clashed with American authority.

At this period he was still a staunch upholder of the status quo and in 1802 he founded the Political Register, a weekly paper supporting the current Tory Government of Henry Addington. Even as an ally Cobbett was not an unreserved joy. There was his natural aggressiveness. As he himself said, ‘I never was of an accommodating disposition in my life’. There was his genuine hatred of injustice. It was these two qualities that had thus far led to his defiance of authority. Slowly over the years they led him along the road to radicalism, though to the end of his days he remained the most conservative radical of all time.

He first fell foul of the Government in 1810 when he attacked the brutal flogging of British troops in East Anglia by German mercenaries. The Government reacted with its usual weapon, a trial for seditious libel. Cobbett was found guilty, fined £1,000 and sent to Newgate for two years. While he was there the Luddite Riots erupted. It was they that first turned his attention northwards, and roused Cobbett’s most vital quality, a feel for the pulse of England, an almost mystical identification with the soul of his native land. Once his attention was drawn to the North, Cobbett appreciated that the ‘spirit’ in the manufacturing districts, about which the Government wailed so constantly, was a new force that would repay sympathetic, rather than aggressive attention. He was one of the first major figures to do so.

Throughout the Luddite period Cobbett hammered away in the Political Register, which he continued to edit from Newgate, about the causes of the rioting. ‘Measures ought to be adopted, not so much for putting an end to riots, as to prevent the misery out of which they arise.’ He continually urged the people to stop smashing the machines and seek those causes. His weekly utterances had considerable effect in turning them from violent methods to more peaceful solutions. When he was released from prison in 1812 Cobbett had not himself arrived at Parliamentary reform as the initial and major solution, but by 1815 he had become an advocate. Having seen the light he blasted forth with the enthusiasm and conviction of the convert.

It was in 1816 that Cobbett took the decision that put him into the position of mass influencer. In that year he launched a twopenny weekly Register known to its detractors as Cobbett’s ‘Twopenny Trash’. He continued to write in, and exert his influence through the shilling Register but its price had been beyond the purse of the working classes, although they had it read to them in public houses and Hampden Clubs. The new twopenny Register