A ‘Very British’ Working Class Massacre

Across the history timeline, class warfare has been one of humanity’s main issues. Conflicts across socio-economic classes occur everyday, but more specifically during which, the world suffers from severe widespread famine, wars, and prevalent harvest failure due to natural disasters and/or a pandemic.

On 16 August 1819, up to 60,000 working class people from the towns and villages of what is now Greater Manchester marched to St Peter’s Field in central Manchester, the United Kingdom of GB to demand political representation at a time when only wealthy landowners could vote. This was a result rapid spread of radical political ideas across the country, ubiquitous economic depression and growing suffrage movements that occurred during the first years of the 19th century.

But heir peaceful protest turned bloody when Manchester magistrates ordered a private militia paid for by rich locals to storm the crowd with sabres, with an estimated 18 people died and more than 650 were injured in the chaos.

The event was first labelled the “Peterloo massacre” by the radical Manchester Observer newspaper in a bitterly ironic reference to the bloody Battle of Waterloo which had taken place four years earlier.

Many of those present at the massacre, including local masters, employers and owners, were horrified by the carnage. One of the casualties, Oldham cloth-worker and ex-soldier John Lees, who died from his wounds on 9 September, had been present at the Battle of Waterloo.

Shortly before his death, John Lees said to a friend that he had never been in such danger as at Peterloo: “At Waterloo there was man to man but there it was downright murder.”

Exactly. The event took place on the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 where there was an acute economic slump, accompanied by chronic unemployment and harvest failure due to the Year Without a Summer, and worsened by the Corn Laws, which kept the price of bread high.

At that time only around 11% of adult males had the vote, very few of them in the industrial north, which was worst hit. Reformers identified parliamentary reform as the solution and a mass campaign to petition parliament for manhood suffrage gained three-quarters of a million signatures in 1817 but was flatly rejected by the House of Commons.

When a second economic slump occurred in early 1819, radical reformers sought to mobilise huge crowds to force the government to back down. The movement was particularly strong in the north-west of England, where the Manchester Patriotic Union organised a mass rally in August 1819, addressed by well-known radical orator Henry Hunt.

Shortly after a meeting began, local magistrates called on the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to arrest Hunt and several others on the platform with him. The Yeomanry charged into the crowd, knocking down a woman and killing a child, and finally apprehended Hunt.

At first, William Hulton, the chairman of the magistrates watching from the house on the edge of St Peter’s Field, saw the enthusiastic reception that Hunt received on his arrival at the assembly, and it encouraged him to action.

He issued an arrest warrant for Henry Hunt, Joseph Johnson, John Knight, and James Moorhouse. On being handed the warrant the Constable, Jonathan Andrews, offered his opinion that the press of the crowd surrounding the hustings would make military assistance necessary for its execution.

Cheshire Magistrates’ chairman William Hulton then summoned the 15th Hussars to disperse the crowd right away. They charged with sabres drawn, and between nine and seventeen people were killed and four to seven hundred injured in the ensuing confusion.

With no doubt, Peterloo became the first ever public meeting at which journalists from important, distant newspapers were present and within a day or so of the event, accounts were published in London, Leeds and Liverpool.

Historian Robert Poole has even called the Peterloo Massacre “the bloodiest political event of the 19th century in English soil”, and “a political earthquake in the northern powerhouse of the industrial revolution”.

The protest was indeed so violent and worth remembrance, as we never really know the exact number of those killed and/or injured. Until today, no official death toll has ever been established with certainty, for there was no official count or inquiry.

There is, at least, an estimation on the victim of the massacre. The Manchester Relief Committee, a body set up to provide relief for the victims of Peterloo, gave the number of injured as 420, while Radical sources listed 500.

A particular feature of the meeting at Peterloo was the number of women present. Female reform societies had been formed in North West England during June and July 1819, the first in Britain. Many of the women were dressed distinctively in white, and some formed all-female contingents, carrying their own flags.

Of the 654 recorded casualties, at least 168 were women, four of whom died either at St Peter’s Field or later as a result of their wounds. It has been estimated that less than 12 per cent of the crowd was made up of women, suggesting that they were at significantly greater risk of injury than men by a factor of almost 3:1. due to, what Richard Carlile claimed as selective targeting, where women protesters were especially targeted.

The event is widely memorable both in the UK and internationally, with a memorial especially built for the remembrance of the victims being built in Manchester, as well its adoption onto the world of modern pop culture.

Sources:

• McPhillips (1977).
• Poole, Robert (2019). Peterloo: the English uprising (First ed.). Oxford. ISBN 978–0–19–878346–6. OCLC 1083597363.
• Hernon, Ian (2006), Riot!: Civil Insurrection from Peterloo to the Present Day, Pluto Press, ISBN 978–0–7453–2538–5.
• “Petition of the Manchester Reformers”. Chester Courant. 25 March 1817.
• Reid, Robert (1989), The Peterloo Massacre, William Heinemann, ISBN 978–0–434–62901–5.
• Marlow (1969).
• Bush (2005).
• Pidd, Helen; The Peterloo massacre: what was it and what did it mean (2019).