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MANCHESTER, 16 AUGUST 1918
On a hot late summer’s day, a crowd of 60,000 gathered in St Peter’s Field. They came from all over Lancashire – ordinary working-class men, women and children – walking to the sound of hymns and folk songs, wearing their best clothes and holding silk banners aloft. Their mood was happy, their purpose wholly serious: to demand fundamental reform of a corrupt electoral system.
By the end of the day fifteen people, including two women and a child, were dead or dying and 650 injured, hacked down by drunken yeomanry after local magistrates panicked at the size of the crowd. Four years after defeating the ‘tyrant’ Bonaparte at Waterloo, the British state had turned its forces against its own people as they peaceably exercised their time-honoured liberties. As well as describing the events of 16 August in shattering detail, Jacqueline Riding evokes the febrile state of England in the late 1810s, paints a memorable portrait of the reform movement and its charismatic leaders, and assesses the political legacy of the massacre to the present day.
As fast-paced and powerful as it is rigorously researched, Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre adds significantly to our understanding of a tragic staging-post on Britain’s journey to full democracy.
Welcome Page
About Peterloo
Dedication
Epigraph
Frontispiece
Foreword by Mike Leigh
Prelude: Two Fields
Chapter 1: Manchester
Chapter 2: The New Bailey
Chapter 3: Dorset House
Chapter 4: Westminster
Chapter 5: Bibby’s Rooms
Chapter 6: Cold Bath Fields
Chapter 7: Dewsbury
Chapter 8: Covent Garden
Chapter 9: The Spread Eagle
Chapter 10: Campsmount
Chapter 11: The Union Rooms
Chapter 12: Smedley Cottage
Chapter 13: Middleton
Chapter 14: St Peter’s Field
Chapter 15: New Cross
Chapter 16: HMY Royal George
Chapter 17: Oldham
Chapter 18: House of Commons
Endpapers
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes
Index
About Jacqueline Riding
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
For Lancashire Witches,
past, present and future
‘At Waterloo there was man to man, but at Manchester it was downright murder.’
Victory at Peterloo by George Cruikshank, from William Hone’s A Slap at Slop and the Bridge-Street Gang, 1822.
(The John Rylands Library, Manchester)
by Mike Leigh
As we worked on the film Peterloo, all of us, on both sides of the camera, were continually struck by the ever-increasing contemporary relevance of the story. Despite the spread of universal suffrage across large parts of the globe – poverty, inequality, suppression of press freedom, indiscriminate surveillance and attacks on legitimate protest by brutal regimes are all on the rise.
Peterloo is of seminal importance, yet many people have never heard of it, including, curiously, generations of native Mancunians and Lancastrians. I myself grew up in Salford. As a boy, I trod the streets that stand where St Peter’s Field once was. The Midland Hotel occupies the site of Buxton’s house, from where the misguided magistrates watched the massacre unfold. Next door is the Central Library, where I received my early theatrical education at the tiny Library Theatre, the local professional repertory company. As a teenager, I attended meetings of the Manchester Branch of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, which took place at the (Quaker) Friends’ Meeting House, dating from 1795, which played such a critical role at Peterloo.
And then there was the Free Trade Hall, now the Radisson Hotel, which these days boasts a newish red plaque commemorating Peterloo. It was here that I attended Hallé Orchestra, jazz and folk concerts, heard Bertrand Russell address CND rallies and delighted to see Tom Lehrer perform, and where I directed Big Basil, an early play of mine, for the Manchester Youth Theatre in 1968.
Early in our research, when Jacqueline Riding and I walked the Peterloo site with expert Robert Poole, I was shocked to realise how ignorant I had once been about the bloody events that had taken place on that very spot less than a century before my parents were born.
My primary school was next to Cromwell Bridge, which crosses the River Irwell. There, we were repeatedly told about the Siege of Manchester in 1642, during the Civil War – but Peterloo was never mentioned. Why, during our educational visits to cotton mills and soapworks and bread factories, were we never marched around the Peter Street area, and made to picture and re-live what was the most important event – apart from the Blitz – ever to take place in these streets? And why, in ‘O’ Level History, was Peterloo dismissed as a mere footnote?
A lifetime later, as we approach its bicentenary, the whole world can now learn the truth about Peterloo. This splendid book will bring a new freshness and clarity to the story; and so too, I hope, will Peterloo the movie, albeit in a different way. Jacqueline’s book is a comprehensive, detailed and accurate history, whereas my film is a dramatic distillation – not a documentary, but nonetheless, I hope, true to the spirit of Peterloo.
The film and the book complement each other. Please enjoy them, but do be sure to be both moved and horrified by them, too.
‘The scene of misery’
On Sunday 18 June 1815, two armies, numbering 140,000 men and boys, faced each other across open fields and low-rising arable land, fourteen miles south of Brussels in the Kingdom of the Netherlands (now Belgium).1 They would decide, once and for all, Europe’s fate after twenty-two years of catastrophic war. The rain had been pouring down for several days, making a swamp of the terrain that the Commander-in-Chief of the combined British, Dutch and Hanoverian (or ‘Allied’) army, Field Marshal His Grace the Duke of Wellington, had selected as the field of battle.
Among those waiting in tense anticipation for his commanding officer’s signal was John Lees, a cotton factory owner’s son from Oldham in the northern English county of Lancashire.2 John was five feet four inches in height with a ‘fresh’ complexion, grey eyes and brown hair. He had enlisted into the British army at Manchester, one of the country’s major textile-producing towns, on 23 September 1812 aged fourteen.3 What possessed him to take such a step is not known. 1812 was the year when Great Britain commenced war with the United States of America and when Napoleon Bonaparte’s hubristic decision to march on Moscow turned into a decimating retreat through a bitter Russian winter. In faraway Lancashire, the weavers were experiencing mass unemployment and terrible deprivation. There were some in Britain, landowners and farmers for example, who profited from the war, but many more who had been and continued to be brought to their knees by it. Taxation was one burden from which no one was immune, regardless of how small or irregular their wages, whether direct (via property or earnings) or indirect (via goods). Income tax had been devised in 1798 by William Pitt the Younger to finance the ongoing war effort. At the resumption of the war after the short peace between 1802 and 1803, the then prime minister, Henry Addington (in office until 1806, afterwards elevated to the peerage as Lord Sidmouth), revised the system, doubling those liable to pay it while significantly reducing evasion through collection at source. For the majority of Britons, who had no vote in national parliamentary elections, this was taxation without representation. And as national government did little beyond fighting wars – no poor relief, policing, medical care, schooling – for most citizens the return on decades of taxation, beyond more war and deeper national debt, was negligible.
1812 was also infamous for the assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval – shot in the lobby of the House of Commons by a disgruntled merchant, John Bellingham – and for the violent Luddite Revolt, when handloom weavers vented their frustration and despair, exaggerated by wartime hardships, on the water and steam-powered machines that were transforming textile production, uprooting thousands of the working and labouring class from individual cottage industries to the vast weaving and spinning sheds of the cotton mills that have come to symbolize the ‘Industrial Revolution’ of England’s Midlands and North. Both events appeared to signal that a general rising against the government was about to break out, or even revolution against the state itself, as in the American colonies in 1776 and then, more terrifyingly, France in 1789. Fears that enduring revolutionary zeal was spreading to the United Kingdom, fuelled by the writings of the English republican radical Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776, and The Rights of Man, 1791), left the longstanding Tory government, in power since 1783, on constant alert. Paine’s message of liberty, equality and the potential of a government based on a true representation of the people, rather than the Old European systems founded on hereditary privilege and monarchical rule – as Paine himself put it, ‘to begin the world over again’4 – seemed to be moving from theory to reality.5
Initially the Whig opposition in Parliament, led in the House of Commons until his death in 1806 by Charles James Fox, delighted in the political transformations across the Channel. But on the commencement of the Reign of Terror and the trial and execution of King Louis XVI and then his queen in 1793, at the instigation of Maximilien Robespierre and his fellow militant revolutionaries or Jacobins, many British radicals rejected the direction in which France’s new republican government was heading. The constant threat of invasion from France, which turned into an imminent danger in the years 1798 and 1803, was finally allayed by Lord Nelson’s decisive victory at Trafalgar in 1805, establishing the Royal Navy’s dominance of the seas. However, reports of the blood-stained guillotine and rampaging working-class ‘sans culottes’ mobs, women and men, provided fresh impetus to the propaganda of the government and its supporters. The term ‘Jacobin’ was levelled at anyone who advocated even modest reformation in the British Parliament while their national leadership, particularly Fox and the playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, were portrayed in the popular caricatures of James Gillray as bloodthirsty, regicidal nihilists in revolutionary garb, including red Caps of Liberty – originally the symbol of freedom for former slaves in ancient Rome, now used to signify a French-style febrile republican spirit. The result was a polarization the length and breadth of Great Britain into two distinct political parties representing irreconcilable stances.
The British government’s response to the immediate crisis commencing in 1812 was to pass the Frame Breaking Act, making machine breaking a capital crime, then to round up as many Luddites as possible, to try them and, if found guilty, to hang them.
The Corn Laws introduced by Lord Liverpool (prime minister on Perceval’s death), which passed through Parliament in early 1815, were designed to maintain artificially high profits on grain by banning cheaper imports from North America, in order, it was generally understood, to pay off the monumental national debt accrued by years of military and naval conflict. One result was the inflation of prices for basic foodstuffs like bread, while, at the same time, the wages of the labouring man and woman fell. Thus, their means of survival doubly and devastatingly assaulted, they prayed that with Peace would come Plenty, whilst rallying increasingly behind the constitutionally-based parliamentary reform movement for redress, led predominantly by the middle classes. This shift in attitude and behaviour within the labouring class – from illegal, indiscriminate violent action against the symptom of their troubles, easily condemned and dealt with by the authorities as with the Luddites, to (largely) legal, disciplined and peaceable methods to address the source, i.e. the absence of representation in parliament – was barely acknowledged by the government. Lord Liverpool’s Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, judged that, whatever the appearance and method used, nothing short of revolution and constitutional devastation was intended.6
Sidmouth believed, fundamentally, in the vesting of political power in landownership and property, as well as the existing balance between Crown, Church and Parliament. The apparently tempered and constitutional behaviour of the lower orders in the cause of social change that must, inevitably, come with political enfranchisement, with the encouragement of those from the middling sort, like the political pamphleteer and agricultural reformer William Cobbett, who sought to harness their collective strength, was simply a front for more nefarious activity, in Sidmouth’s opinion, and would always be treated with suspicion and, when necessary, crushed. A steady flow of intelligence, gleaned by spies and agents of varying credibility from all quarters of the country, but all supporting the accuracy of this presumption, was collated and then circulated by Sidmouth’s increasingly pressurized Whitehall department, the Home Office.
Paranoia undoubtedly played a part, but Sidmouth’s perception that a shift to violence was only a matter of time was not wholly inaccurate. For although it is generally the case that old-style rioting had been replaced by peaceful political agitation, at the same time the pressure to resort to such measures continued, repression from the Home Office and local magistrates notwithstanding. During the post-war years, radicals utilized a repertoire of agitation, validated by notions of popular constitutionalism and a commonly-held understanding of English and British history, to mount a display of ever greater numbers demanding parliamentary reform. This included the process of mass petitioning and, more powerful still, the concept of ‘monster’ meetings (what we would now call mass demonstrations). There were strains and disagreements among reformers about when and how agitation could be moved to the next level, or even into physical force. It would take a deft and charismatic leader to manipulate the threat posed by a multitude of the people collectively demanding an end to the corruption and incompetence of the old order, while maintaining a tempering influence over them. Hopelessness could so easily turn into violence.7
Perhaps desperation, allied to the certainty of a regular wage and employment, had driven John Lees to enlist, like so many of his comrades-in-arms. Or perhaps he yearned for adventure, fearing he might miss out on the Europe-wide military struggle, the great crisis of the Age, which had dominated the whole of his young life. Whatever his reasons, on joining up he was posted to Major Robert Bull’s ‘I’ troop of the Royal Horse Artillery and, three years later, found himself on a battlefield named after the nearby village of Waterloo.8 Once the definitive nature of this battle had become clear, the British nation – and particularly its military power, regardless of the successes of the earlier Peninsular War (1807–14) – would be divided between those who were at the battle of Waterloo, and those who were not: as Captain Thomas Dyneley, also of the Royal Horse Artillery, later observed, ‘John Bull is always pleased with his last toy.’9
On that June day, John Lees, with his troop, was in the heat of the combat, as they fired their guns above the large and strategically important farmhouse of Hougoumont.10 Below them was Major-General Sir John Byng, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st (or Guards) Division who were defending the farmhouse against relentless enemy attack: the desperate struggle over Hougoumont is often described as a battle within the battle. Byng, now in his early forties, had been commander of the Southern Irish District during the suppression of the 1798 uprising, inspired by the revolutions in America and France, and had then served with great distinction under Wellington in the Peninsular War, becoming, as a result, a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. In the event, Waterloo and its immediate aftermath would be the last period of active military service for this seasoned soldier. He aimed to live out his days in uneventful semi-retirement, leaving ample time for his first love, horse racing, as commander of England’s Northern District. Located in the heart of this district was Manchester.
Captain Dyneley’s Royal Horse Artillery ‘E’ troop was attached to Lieutenant General Sir Hussey Vivian’s cavalry brigade. Dyneley, a veteran of the battles of Salamanca and Vitoria and the sieges of Burgos and Ciudad Rodrigo (he was wounded at the latter), had been part of the force covering the retreat from Quatre Bras two days earlier, during which his brigade had been attacked by French cuirassiers, lancers and artillery. He later wrote, with classic British officer sang-froid, ‘Vivian sent me in advance with a couple of guns and I blazed away at them furiously; the practice was good, but they dashed on with as much unconcern as if I had only been pointing my finger at them.’11 On 18 June, Captain Dyneley’s troop was located at the extreme left of the Allied line, with the order not to engage until the arrival of the Prussian army under Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher.
Earlier that morning, the 5th Brigade of Cavalry, including the 15th The King’s Regiment of Light Dragoons (Hussars), had formed up less than half a mile to the rear of Hougoumont, tasked with protecting the Allied army’s right wing, while one and a half squadrons were watching the valley leading from Braine-L’Alleud.12 The entire cavalry was under the command of Henry William Paget, Earl of Uxbridge, who was famously injured, losing a leg, while at Wellington’s side. Major-General Colquhoun Grant was at the head of the 5th Brigade, with the 15th Hussars under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Leighton Cathcart Dalrymple and Major Edwin Griffiths, ‘officers’, according to the regiment’s medical officer, William Gibney, ‘who had distinguished themselves at Vittoria [sic], Tarbes and Toulouse, and had for commanders of troops, officers second to none in the service’, including Captains Joseph Thackwell, Skinner Hancox and Lieutenant John Whiteford.13 Despite being considered, most notably amongst themselves, as the elite of the British cavalry, the 15th had had a few rough nights in advance of the battle. The day before, according to Captain Thackwell, as the rain thundered down, his regiment was ‘bivouacked in a field of rye on the right of the village of Mont St Jean’, which they endured as best they could, despite having ‘No rations or supplies of any description’.14
The battle commenced with a bombardment from the French artillery just before midday, Captain Dyneley observing that ‘the rascals did this beautifully’.15 The 15th Hussars immediately suffered casualties. Major-General Grant had no fewer than five horses shot from under him during the course of the battle. One was killed by a cannon ball that had just passed through Lieutenant Colonel Dalrymple’s left leg, as described by Dr Gibney, leaving the limb ‘only suspended by a few muscles and the bone in splinters’.16 Dalrymple was quickly patched up on the battlefield by Gibney and then carried, on a plank, the few miles to Waterloo village for the necessary amputation. As the lieutenant colonel wrote in his journal, ‘I was placed in a room with an officer of the 33rd desperately’ – as it turned out, mortally – ‘hurt in the neck… his groans were most melancholy. Particularly to a person in my situation.’17
Meanwhile, as the battle raged on, Major Griffiths, commanding officer in Dalrymple’s place, was killed, leaving Captain Thackwell to lead the final charges. He was shot through the bridle hand, but, having placed the reins in his teeth, was then shot in the left arm, the bone shattered between the elbow and shoulder. He would remain on the battlefield, in agony, for some time. His wounded arm was later amputated to the shoulder. This left Captain Hancox to take over command and lead the 15th out of action.18 Captain Dyneley recalled that some Royal Horse Artillery troops had ‘suffered most dreadfully in men and horses’ and although his troop had lost one sergeant, around twelve other men dead or wounded plus about fifteen horses killed, he considered them fortunate to have had ‘not an officer touched’.19 Describing the battlefield, he continues: ‘The slaughter throughout the day had been dreadful and the ground was so completely covered with killed and wounded that it was with great difficulty we could pick our way so as to prevent driving over them, and I saw hundreds of poor fellows ridden over.’20
Lieutenant Colonel Dalrymple was transported to Brussels with Dr Gibney, who wrote in his journal that ‘we quitted the scene of misery together. The road was rough and terribly monotonous, cut up by artillery, waggons, carts, and everything with wheels on which wounded men could be conveyed. Much of it lay in the forest of Soignies, which was in many parts yet thickly strewn with dead horses and dead soldiers, lying unburied.’21 The rank and file, like John Lees, who were not required as part of the army of occupation, were left to shift for themselves, many making the long and arduous journey home on foot. This rapid influx into Great Britain of thousands of disbanded veterans aggravated an already strained labour market. John Lees, at least, had a family in Oldham and the prospect of employment in his father’s factory.22
Captain Dyneley was promoted to the rank of major and, after the battle, joked to a friend, ‘I remember being laughed at… and told I had better remain a Captain, as being called a Major would make me look old; now I beg leave to state that it has had quite the contrary effect and that I look 20 years younger and am on uncommonly good terms with myself.’23 He was posted to near Beauvais, where ‘we have excellent shooting’, an ‘abundance of hares, partridges and quails’, although, he concludes, ‘It seems quite uncertain how long we are to be kept in this country.’24 The 15th Hussars returned to Canterbury and, as no war was in the offing, they remained in England, moving between the new barracks that were springing up all over the country, while undertaking tedious but necessary domestic duties, quelling riots and breaking up political meetings, in support of the Civil Powers. The Duke of Wellington as ‘the valiant leader of such a signal victory’ was voted in parliament a sum of £200,000, in addition to the £500,000 already granted to him, as ‘farther proof of the opinion entertained by Parliament of his transcendent services, and of the gratitude of the British nation’.25
*
Less than two years after Waterloo, the twenty-nine-year-old silk weaver, poet and champion of radical parliamentary reform, Samuel Bamford, in the company of his like-minded friend Joseph Healey, a quack doctor, was hastening across the Lancashire moors, ‘this wild region’ as he later described it, from his native Middleton, a small township six miles north of Manchester. Samuel was five feet ten inches tall, strong, with brown hair, grey eyes that were, in his own words, ‘lively, and observant’, nose ‘rather snubby’, his profile ‘of rude good nature, with some intelligence’.26 The ‘Doctor’, as he liked to be addressed, was a few years older and a little shorter, with dark hair and whiskers, and ‘an air of bravado that was richly grotesque’.27 Like his devout Methodist father before him, Dr Healey was ‘a firm believer in witches and witchcraft’, for which the county of Lancashire, scene of the Pendle witch trials of 1612, was famed.28 Both men had been forced to leave their homes to avoid arbitrary arrest on suspicion of high treason. Such was the life of a radical in these skittish post-war times: branded, by those who sought to undermine their cause, as being hell-bent on transplanting the mob-rule terrors of republican France to the United Kingdom and destroying the current balanced perfection (as some, like Lord Sidmouth, saw it) of the British constitution. The post-war period was made more volatile still when, in 1815, Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) erupted, causing extreme weather conditions across Europe. This single natural disaster devastated the harvest the following year, known as the ‘Year without a Summer’, causing mass starvation and food riots in Great Britain. That same black summer, in a villa near Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was born.
Bamford later humorously compared his and the doctor’s immediate travails in the March of 1817 to the progress of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim, ‘Christian and Faithful, at the hill, Difficulty’, but after ascending Knowe (or ‘Knowl’) Hill, the two friends surveyed, with silent delight, the vista that stretched out before them.
In his autobiography, published twenty-five years later, Bamford refers to the ancient and mythical as well as modern features within this rugged landscape.29 In the distance were the moors towards Todmorden and Walsden. Then ‘following the horizon, we next saw the ridge of Blackstone-edge, streaked with sungleams and dark shadows; then the moors of Saddleworth, particularly Oaphin with his white drifts still lingering, and Odermon with his venerable relics of druidism, his “Pots an’ Pons”.’ To the east and south respectively, the hills of the adjoining counties of Derbyshire and Cheshire ‘rose like a region of congealed waves’, whilst the countryside towards Lancashire’s great trading seaport, Liverpool, ‘was bounded by a bright streak, probably the Irish sea’. A ‘dim white vapour’ rising into the clear blue sky ‘indicated the site of Preston or Blackburn’. The towns of Bolton and Bury seemed very close by, while ‘Manchester, Stockport, Ashton, Oldham, and Rochdale, were distinctly visible’. Finally, ‘neither last nor least’, Bamford and Healey spied ‘one small speck – it was the white end of a house at Heabers, which directed our looks to the misty vapour of Middleton, rising beside dark woods from the vale in which the town is situated’.30
Thoughts of the family he had left behind, of hearth and home, triggered a pang of melancholy and the two men were left ‘feeling we were cut off and outcast’. But they endeavoured to take solace in the glorious prospect of their homeland and their faith in the tender care of ‘a bounteous Creator’. At this moment, Bamford recalled, a ‘beautiful spring of water, pure as a cup from heaven’s banquet, was gently brimming over a bason [sic] of white sand and pebbles into which it arose. A sward of sweet green grass lined the margin of a silvery band that lay glimmering and trickling on the sunny side of the hill; whilst here and there were tufts or rushes, glistering with liquid pearls.’31 Taking this sacred water in their cupped hands, they drank to family and friends; to their brethren who suffered, whoever and wherever they might be; to the imminent downfall of tyranny, and, above all, to Liberty. On these toasts, they gave three energetic ‘Huzzas!’ at which an ‘old black-faced tup’, gently grazing nearby, ‘lifted his horns from the heather, looked gravely at us, and giving a significant bleat, scampered off, followed by such of his acquaintance as were browsing near’.32
Bamford’s reminiscences might seem whimsically bucolic at best, at worst mawkishly sentimental to a cynical modern ear. But here – in language and rhythms inspired by Bunyan, Alexander Pope and John Milton, ‘my old Homeric Pope, and my divine Milton’,33 brought to vivid life by the communal theatre of the Protestant pulpit – Bamford is setting out his personal suffering and sacrifice, as well as the impact on his loved ones and community, in his determined pursuit of the cause for parliamentary reform: demands that, to us, seem so straightforward. One man, one vote; secret ballots; equal representation; regular parliaments. Yet, at this present time, the situation, from the perspective of a modern democracy, was very far from balanced perfection. The entire county of Lancashire was represented by only two Members of Parliament; Manchester had none. Borough-mongering, the buying and selling of parliamentary seats, continued unabated alongside the representational perversion of ‘rotten boroughs’, constituencies with few voters and where, invariably, the choice of representative was in the hands of a single family. The most infamous example was Old Sarum in Wiltshire, a hill with no inhabitants, which had, like Lancashire, two Members of Parliament. If all adult male Britons – those who were neither criminals nor insane – had the vote, then the nation’s families too would have a voice in Parliament. And further, if the constituencies of the United Kingdom were equally apportioned according to size and population, then all parts of the nation would have a say over who could speak for them and how. Then, and only then, would the common man be truly represented by the House of Commons within the national parliament. (It would take another century before the common woman joining him in the vote became a serious proposition.)
The agitation for parliamentary reform was a nationwide movement, encompassing the whole of Great Britain and Ireland. The emphasis here is events local to Lancashire and, particularly, Manchester, but the significance was national. What follows is the story of how, on 16 August 1819, the lives of Samuel Bamford and Joseph Healey, in pursuit of their vision for themselves and their country, would become inextricably linked with those of John Lees, Major Thomas Dyneley, Major-General Sir John Byng and Lieutenant Colonel Leighton Dalrymple. It is a sequence of events that culminated, on that day, in the death of at least fifteen people and the injury of hundreds more, some at the hands of Waterloo heroes, during an immense but peaceful gathering of men, women and children on open ground in Manchester, known as St Peter’s Field. This mass meeting was intended as the glorious regional climax of a national mobilization or ‘union’ of underrepresented people. It ended in carnage and national shame. It is also the story of how another veteran of Waterloo, John Lees, would survive a bloody battle fought on a foreign field, only to face greater peril at this pro-democracy meeting on home soil: what was quickly and strikingly branded the massacre not on St Peter’s Field, but on the field of Peterloo.
‘The second town in the kingdom’
The town of Manchester is in the southern district of the Palatine County of Lancaster, or Lancashire, 185 miles northwest of London. It sits at the confluence of the Rivers Irk, Medlock and Irwell. Local historians writing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries believed that this site was first occupied by the Ancient Britons, five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, but that the foundations of a settlement could be dated to the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43, during which, to defend themselves, the Britons came together and formed ‘a place of tents’ or ‘Mancenion’. The name changed to ‘Mancunium’ at the time of Agricola in AD 79, then, by the medieval period, to ‘Mancestre’, from which, these local sages conclude, the town’s modern name springs.1
Except to the south, where peat or turf can be found, early-nineteenth-century Manchester was surrounded by coal mines, some of them worked since the seventeenth century, on the estates of, among others, the Dukes and Earls of Bridgewater and Balcarres (Haigh Hall) and the Hultons of Hulton Park. The Old Bridge to the northwest of the town, spanning the River Irwell, was the ancient link between Manchester and her sister township of Salford. The nearby River Mersey was one route connecting the citizens and trades of these towns to Liverpool. The Medlock, running into the Irwell to the south, supplied water to the Bridgewater Canal, a superb example of eighteenth-century civil engineering created to ship Lancastrian coal to the remainder of the county and around Great Britain. The Bridgewater Canal had then been extended, by the ‘Ship Canal’, to connect Manchester and its surrounding areas directly to the Irish Sea to the west. By such means, the cotton bales on which the town and county’s textile industry relied, arriving at Liverpool from the plantations of North America, were then delivered to Manchester’s cotton-spinning mills and, beyond, to the factories of Cheshire, Derbyshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 made participating in the trade illegal in the United Kingdom and its colonies, but Britain continued to import the American cotton picked by the descendants of enslaved Africans for decades to come.
Lithograph of Blackfriars Bridge, Manchester, by Henry Gould, 1821.
(Chetham’s Library, Manchester)
In 1801 the combined population of Manchester and Salford, including the conjoined townships of Hulme, Chorlton Row, Ardwick and Cheetham, was calculated as 108,460. Ten years later it was thought that this number had increased by at least twenty thousand, allowing locals to consider Manchester, in population alone, as ‘the second town in the Kingdom’.2 At this time, according to the Manchester historian and journalist Joseph Aston, ‘between one third and one half of the adult population were not native to the town and the whole parish of Manchester by 1811 contained 22,759 inhabited houses, occupied by 28,282 families, of whom 1,110 families are employed in agriculture, the vast majority, that is 25,338 families, in trade, manufactures and commerce, and a final 1,834, Aston declares, ‘not appertaining to an industrious employment’.3 Aston observes that an Act of Parliament, dated 1791, ‘was obtained for the purpose of lighting, watching, and cleaning the town’.4 The first gas lamp was introduced in 1807. By 1816, the town was lit in the winter months by 2,758 lamps while the streets were swept and ‘the soil carried off’ twice a week.
The growth in population can be explained by the expansion of the textile industry. Through the technological innovations of Richard Arkwright, James Hargreaves and Samuel Crompton, the processes of spinning and weaving were centralized within large factories, with an associated expansion of supporting trades such as machine component manufacture. This brought an influx of workers from the outlying areas of Lancashire and the North, and, further still, from Ireland (via Liverpool). In the second half of the eighteenth century, water-powered factories sprang up along the river banks and canal sides of Manchester, such as Thackeray & Whitehead’s Garratt Mill (1760) and David Holt’s works (1785) on the Medlock, and Bank Mill (1782) on the Irwell. However, the irregular nature of water power in Manchester encouraged the mill owners to experiment with a new concept: steam power. The enthusiastic adoption of this technology was the basis of Manchester’s dominance, signalling the step change required for the full transition from market town to industrial capital of ‘Cottonopolis’.5
In 1816, the district of Ancoats, four hundred acres lying within the northeastern region of the town, reflected this significant change in the townscape. One of the oldest and most distinguished buildings in Manchester was Ancoats Hall, a house of late Tudor vintage set within a sizable plot beside the River Medlock, with formal gardens rolling down to the water’s edge. It was described in 1795 as ‘a very ancient building of wood and plaister, but in some parts re-built with brick and stone’.6 By this date the hall, once the residence of the Mosley Lords of the Manor, was occupied by William Rawlinson, ‘an eminent merchant in Manchester’, one of the new-breed citizens of wealth and influence. The hall no doubt maintained an elegant air of antiquity and even tranquillity, in dramatic contrast to the area lying to the west. As described by The Times, the Ancoats district ‘consists of four great streets, Oldham-street, Great Ancoat-street, Great Newton-street, and Swan-street, from which innumerable narrow streets or lanes branch off’.7 Small mills already existed here by the 1790s, including Shooters Brook Mill, Ancoats Lane Mill and Salvin’s Factory, but by 1816 the sheer number, scale and proximity of the new steam-powered mills that were being built here made the area distinctive, even within a rapidly industrializing town like Manchester.8 The network of canals, including the Ashton and Rochdale canals (completed in 1796 and 1804 respectively) with additional smaller offshoots, and the presence of Shooters Brook – a tributary of the Medlock – made it an attractive area for investment and expansion. In the late 1790s two major spinning mills were built near the then incomplete Rochdale canal by Scotsmen James McConnel, John Kennedy and brothers Adam and George Murray. The seven-storey McConnel & Kennedy Mill on Union Street, known as the Old Mill, contained two steam engines of forty and sixty horse-power.9 The partners then built Long Mill next door, completed in 1806, with a forty-five-horse-power steam engine.10 Murrays’ Mill, also on Union Street, was a monumental eight storeys high.
Although the power from water was limited and had, in any case, been usurped by steam, the waterways in Ancoats facilitated the delivery of coal (which powered the engines) and the movement of finished goods. Two of the many coal mines encircling Manchester were located on the northern edge of this area, including the Bradford Colliery. The presence of the factories encouraged the building of associated businesses, workshops and warehouses. The Canal Street Dye Works was built on a branch of the Ashton Canal, while the Soho Foundry (Peel, Williams & Co.), making components for steam engines and boilers amongst other things, was established on Pollard Street, adjoining the Ashton Canal, in about 1810.
According to Joseph Aston, by 1816 Salford and Manchester had, collectively, eighty-two steam-powered spinning factories, mainly found in the Ancoats, Oxford Street, New Cross and Beswick areas.11 These ‘astonishing monuments of human industry’ were so famous that, as Aston continues, ‘it is become a fashion for strangers to visit’.12
The temporary peace in 1814 (prior to Bonaparte’s escape from the island of Elba, which led to the Waterloo campaign) encouraged visitors from mainland Europe to travel to Great Britain to inspect the recent technological developments. Several arrived in Manchester, noting down their impressions of the town in letters, journals and official reports. Johann Georg May, a factory commissioner from Prussia, described England as ‘this land of efficiency’ where ‘there is a superfluity of interesting things to be seen. There is something new to catch the eye in every step that one takes.’13 Manchester, he noted, is ‘known throughout the world as the centre of the cotton industry’. Adjoining each factory, which, by this date, were usually of at least five storeys, ‘there is a great chimney which belches forth black smoke and indicates the presence of the powerful steam engines. The smoke from the chimneys forms a great cloud which can be seen for miles around the town’ and, as a result, the ‘houses have become black’. May also recalled that one of the rivers ‘upon which Manchester stands is so tainted with colouring matter that the water resembles the contents of a dye vat’.14
The Swiss industrialist Hans Caspar Escher, in August 1814, also observed the effects of the pollution created by the textile industry: ‘In Manchester there is no sun and no dust. Here there is always a dense cloud of smoke to cover the sun while the light rain – which seldom lasts all day – turns the dust into a fine paste which makes it unnecessary to polish one’s shoes.’ That aside, he marvelled at the fact that, within a fifteen-minute walk, he had counted over sixty spinning mills. ‘I might have arrived in Egypt since so many factory chimneys… stretched upwards towards the sky like great obelisks.’15 He also noted the tremendous speed at which new factories were being built, observing the construction of one power loom factory measuring about 130 feet in length and fifty feet in width, with a total of six floors. ‘Not a stick of wood’, he declared in awe, ‘is being used in the whole building. All the beams and girders are made of cast iron and are joined together. The pillars are hollow iron columns which can be heated by steam. There are 270 such pillars in this factory.’16
Johann Conrad Fischer, a Swiss inventor and steel manufacturer, first visited Manchester and Salford in the September of 1814. He described the Philips and Lee spinning mill on Chapel Street in Salford as ‘so large that there can be few to equal it in size’.17 Built between 1799 and 1801, the mill was seven storeys high, employed over nine hundred operatives, and was one of the first factories to be heated by steam and lit by gas, the latter installed in 1805.18 The co-owner, George Augustus Lee, had been the manager of Peter Drinkwater’s relatively modest four-storey spinning mill in Auburn Street, Piccadilly (founded in 1789), the first such mill to be built in the centre of Manchester.
Hans Escher, meanwhile, recalled a factory where the manager speaks to his colleagues throughout the site, while sitting in his private office, ‘by means of tubes and he hears their replies by the same means’.19 He continues: ‘The spinning mills are now working until 8 p.m. by (gas)light. Unless one has seen it for oneself it is impossible to imagine how grand is the sight of a big cotton mill when a facade of 256 windows is lit as if the brightest sunshine were streaming through the windows. The light comes from a sort of inflammable air which is conducted all over the building by means of pipes.’20 Further, ‘the Manchester manufacturers are much more advanced than their Glasgow rivals. To reach Manchester standards of efficiency in Swiss factories we should have to sack all our operatives and train up a new generation of apprentices.’21 Escher reflects on the awesome power created by such machines: ‘One shudders when one sees the piston of an engine going up and one realises that a force of 60 to 80 horse power is being generated… A single steam engine frequently operates 40,000 to 50,000 spindles in a mill which has eight or nine floors and 30 windows. In a single street in Manchester there are more spindles than in the whole of Switzerland.’22
The visitors also made observations about the man, woman and even child power that was required to work the machines. Johann May visited Chadwick, Clegg & Co. (two establishments on Oxford Road and 10 Marsden Square) and in one mill he observed a ‘14 horse power steam engine which drove 240 looms, two shearing machines and six sizing machines. One adult worker operated each shearing and sizing machine.’23 May also recorded that to save wages ‘mule jennies have actually been built so that no less than 600 spindles can be operated by one adult and two children. Two mules, each with 300 spindles, face each other. The carriages of these machines are moved in one direction by steam and in the other direction by hand. This is done by an adult worker who stands in between the two mules. Broken threads are repaired by children (piecers) who stand at either end of the mules.’24
The events around 1812, known as the Luddite Revolt, were clearly still uppermost in people’s minds, as Johann Fischer recalled while visiting one mechanical spinning and weaving shed: ‘when one sees these power looms for oneself it is easy to appreciate the bitter feelings of the men who have been thrown out of work (by them). Fifty of these looms – operated by one and the same steam engine – stood in a medium-sized room. Each was no more than about four feet in height, length and width. They were operated by fifteen artisans and one foreman.’25 He recalled that the movement of the shuttle and the passing of the thread into the machine was executed much faster than could be done by hand, therefore improving output. Moreover, as the foreman observed to Fischer, power looms do not get tired in the same way that a handloom weaver does. ‘Consequently the cloth produced by the power loom is more uniform – and therefore of higher quality – than the cloth made by hand.’26 Fischer left Manchester ‘delighted with the new and remarkable things that I had seen’.27
In a report submitted to the House of Commons to support a petition ‘praying for a limitation of the hours of labour in Cotton Mills’ and signed by six thousand factory workers from Manchester and its environs, many of them parents of child workers, the authors draw attention to the fact that by the mid-1810s children of six and seven years of age, and sometimes even as young as five, were employed in the mills. A working day at this time was around fourteen hours, often without a break. In some factories the temperatures reached an unbearable seventy-eight or eighty degrees. In July 1816 John Mitchell, a physician, visited the Methodist Sunday School in Brawley Street, Bank Top, to assess the number of students that were employed in mill work and the state of their health. Of the 818 children present, almost equal numbers of girls and boys, 269 were factory workers and 116 of those were sickly. The general appearance of the factory children was ‘pale and inanimate… There is a very peculiar hoarseness and hollowness of voice… which seems to indicate that the lungs are affected.’28 Thomas Bellot, a Manchester surgeon, attested that it was not uncommon for factory children ‘to be checked in their growth, to become lame and deformed in their legs… and eventually to die of consumption’ as a result of ‘their long confinement in heated and ill-ventilated rooms, and of their being constantly on their legs during their long hours of labour’.29 He also describes the factory workers among the Sunday School children of St John’s district as ‘for the most part, low, slender, and in general much emaciated’.30 All the medical men commenting on the health and appearance of the factory children were struck and, in many cases, openly distressed by the dramatic contrast in the condition of these children and those who worked in other trades. If the children survived, they would continue in the factories as adult workers.
Lithograph of Market Street, Manchester, by Henry Gould, 1821.
(Chetham’s Library, Manchester)
With the factories and associated services came housing.31 The Ancoats area quickly achieved equal distinction, alongside the density and scale of its factories, for its large expanses of terraced houses for the workers. Factory owners tended to house only their key employees, while the average worker lived in housing built by speculators. There were two typical designs. The first model involved two rows of housing back to back, as seen on Portugal Street and Silk Street, and the second consisted of one-up, one-down terraces, literally houses of two storeys with a single room on each. With the back-to-backs, windows and doors were in the front facade, while the rear shared wall was solid, allowing only limited natural light to enter the rooms. Ancoats housing usually had two main floors, although attic workshops also existed. The rapid rise in rents between 1807 and 1815 meant that basements were often let to separate families. To help make ends meet, families or couples often took in lodgers. Housing was, therefore, cheek by jowl, with individual properties crammed with family and strangers. One small benefit of a concentration of workers’ housing within a small area was that the watchmen who patrolled the streets of Manchester at night, would, for a small fee, wake the workers for their daily shifts with a call or a tap on the window.32
The contemporary report in The Times (quoted earlier) also states that Ancoats, ‘created by the success of the cotton-trade’, ‘swarms with inhabitants, who all share its vicissitudes. It is occupied chiefly by spinners, weavers, and Irish of the lowest description, and may be called the St Giles’s of Manchester,’ the last a reference to the notorious slum area in London made famous by William Hogarth’s image of urban horror, Gin Lane (1751). The Times3334