Peterloo E-Book

Graham Phythian

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 420

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

On 16 August 1819 on St Peter's Field, Manchester, a peaceful demonstration of some 60,000 workers and reformers was brutally dispersed by sabrewielding cavalry, resulting in at least fifteen dead and over 600 injured. Within days the slaughter was named 'Peter-loo', as an ironic reference to the battleground of Waterloo. Now the subject of a major film, this highly detailed yet readable narrative, based almost entirely on eyewitness reports and contemporary documents, brings the events of that terrible day vividly to life. In a world in which the legitimacy of facts is in constant jeopardy from media and authoritarian bias, the lessons to be learned from the bloodshed and the tyrannical aftermath are as pertinent today as they were 200 years ago. Film director Mike Leigh has defined Peterloo as 'the event that becomes more relevant with every new episode of our crazy times'.

Leseprobe

First published 2018

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Graham Phythian, 2018

The right of Graham Phythian to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-75098-951-0

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed in Great Britain

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART ONE: FOREWARNINGS

1 The Janus Country

2 Law and Order

3 Of Machines and Mammon

4 Voices of Dissent

5 ‘Make Way for the Female Reformers!’

6 Manoeuvres

PART TWO: FLASHPOINT (16 August 1819)

1 On the Roads to Manchester (7 a.m.–1 p.m.

2 Powder Keg (1 p.m.–1.30 p.m.)

3 ‘That Horrid Confusion’ (1.30 p.m.– 1.45 p.m.)

4 Gauntlet (1.45 p.m.–3 p.m.)

5 Nightfall (3 p.m. onwards)

PART THREE: AFTERMATH

1 War of Words and Silence

2 Inquests

3 For King and Constitution

4 A Gallery of Pictures

5 Reflections

Epilogue

Appendices

Comments on the Notes

Endnotes

Bibliography and Sources

You will meet on Monday next my friends, and by your steady, firm and temperate deportment, you will convince all your enemies, you feel that you have an important and an imperious public duty to perform, and that you will not suffer any private consideration on earth, to deter you from exerting every nerve, to carry your praiseworthy and patriotic intentions into effect.1

From Henry Hunt’s message to the peopleof Manchester, the week before Peterloo

The people shouted, and then the soldiers shouted, waving their swords. Then they rode amongst the people, and there was a great outcry, and a moment after, a man passed without a hat, and wiping the blood off his head with his hand, and it ran down his arm in a great stream. The meeting was all in a tumult; there were dreadful cries; the soldiers kept riding amongst the people, and striking with their swords.2

Jemima Bamford, eyewitness at Peterloo

This can be for no good purpose; it is a mere wanton attack from first to last, the motive of which [is] … to agitate the feeble mind, and keep alive animosities at a time when it is advisable that every thing connected with the late events should be buried in oblivion, and all effervescence subside.3

Mr Ashworth, barrister, in response to evidence given about the Yeomanry’s cutting at the people with sabres (at the Coroner’s inquest on John Lees, September 1819)

The soldiers were not attacked…some little resistance, too faint indeed and ineffectual, was made after the slaughter began.

…the Yeomanry attacked the people without warning, without provocation. I will take this opportunity to observe that the abettors of this outrage (for so I must call it) have not replied to this charge.4

John Cam Hobhouse, speech in House of Commons, 15 May 1821

The site of St Peter’s Fields where on 16 August 1819 Henry Hunt radical orator addressed an assembly of about 60,000 people. Their subsequent dispersal by the military is remembered as ‘PETERLOO’.

The first Manchester plaque commemorating Peterloo, until replaced with a less equivocal version in 2007

Preface

The story has been told dozens of times already, from many different standpoints. So why another book about Peterloo?

Firstly, the bicentenary in 2019 will see the pinnacle of the steadily growing wave of interest in the events of St Peter’s Field on 16 August 1819, and Mike Leigh’s eagerly awaited film will no doubt reinforce this. Students of the incident and its Regency context will be familiar with most (but possibly not all) of the details narrated herein; however, it was more for those with only a sketchy idea of what the day entailed that this book was conceived.

‘But everybody knows about Peterloo!’ you might say. I beg to differ: some A-Level nineteenth-century history courses scarcely mention the episode – an inexcusable gloss – and I won’t dwell on the library locum who responded to my enquiry with ‘Peter who? I’ve not heard of him.’

At the risk of preaching to the choir, then, this book aims to look again at the background, explosion of violence, and far-reaching consequences of the episode, sticking as closely as possible to primary sources and eyewitness reports. I have no particular political axe to grind, so material that is too obviously swayed by ideology or self-interest will be taken with a pinch of salt (or in some cases, a large tin of Saxa).

I would imagine many people’s first port of call in discovering Peterloo will be Wikipedia, which, as often, supplies a sound enough launchpad for those interested in the topic. The Wiki entry, though – at least at the time of writing – is over-reliant on the standard secondary sources, apparently without checking with the contemporary evidence. Obviously, primary sources have to be sifted too, because of political and personal bias, but a comparative study of this material ultimately renders a richer and more convincing narrative than by simply quoting from the late twentieth-century works of, say, Walmsley, Marlow and Read, as significant as these undoubtedly are. Mostly, I have used these and other secondary sources only as a link to the original newspaper reports, letters, and official documents. More recent scholarly work, for example by Michael Bush, Robert Poole and Katrina Navickas, has given the previously received wisdom a thorough overhaul, and has been instrumental in the recent rekindling of interest in Peterloo.

No current book on the topic should be without a mention of the annual memorial organised by the indefatigable Paul Fitzgerald (aka Polyp the political cartoonist) and his equally dedicated team. There is a well-supported Facebook page which is constantly updated, and if the reader is within 100 miles of Manchester on any 16 August (or the nearest Sunday) they should make a point of getting to the area around the northern side of Manchester Central and the Midland Hotel. The 2019 event promises to be something special, and the plans for the memorial monument are well under way (see Appendix 17).

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of thanks to the following: Robert Poole, for advice and access to invaluable material; Stewart and Elizabeth Bailey of the Friends’ Meeting House on Mount Street, who have supplied me with documents, and useful and fascinating information; Debbie Rose, for the story of her ancestor, Mary Ward; Clare Hamer of the Greater Manchester Police, for information on equine training; Fergus Wilkie, for access to Chetham’s Library documents; Geoff Higginbottom, Bob Ashworth and Martin Gittins – The Free Radicals – for ‘Soldiers on the Rampage’; Mikaela Sitford-Howarth, for her review of Maxine Peake’s recital of The Masque of Anarchy; Rosie Gnatiuk of the Platt Hall Gallery of Costume, for access to the original J. Slack calico handkerchief print; Paul Fitzgerald, for access to visuals; Ed Glinert, for his instructive ‘Peterloo Walk’; Trevor Fisher, for his lecture on the Blanketeers; Oliver Lomax, for permission to quote from his poem ‘Peterloo’; Sean Hannan, for loan of Steeleye Span’s Peterloo the Day; John Howarth of the Oldham Tinkers, for permission to quote from Harvey Kershaw’s lyrics to ‘Peterloo’; Dorothy Topping, for information on the Ashton contingent; Kevin Parslow, great-great-great-great-grandson of James Moorhouse, for information on the Moorhouse family; Colin Smith, for his Living History performance of ‘Peterloo’; Neil Wishart, for information on the 15th Hussars, and allowing me the opportunity to handle a Regency regimental sabre; James Hobson, for pointing out some newspaper sources; Phil Blinston and Rob Hall, for art work and calligraphy.

The staff of the following libraries and collections: The National Archives, Kew; Manchester Central Archives+; John Rylands, Manchester; Chetham’s School, Manchester; Working Class Movement Library, Salford; People’s History Museum, Spinningfields, Manchester; Trafford Archives; Tameside Local History and Archives; Stockport Local Heritage; Oldham Local Studies and Archives; Middleton Local History Resources; Greater Manchester Police Museum; Saddleworth Museum; Rochdale Touchstones Local History; Failsworth Local History; Sheffield Archives; Lancaster Local Studies; Leeds Local and Family History; Liverpool Record Office; The Portico, Manchester; Cheshire Archives and Local Studies.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to trace copyright owners of the images used in this book. Any oversights or omissions should be communicated in writing to the author, c/o the publishers.

Introduction

From the outset, before we get side-tracked into questions of semantics, ideology, apologetics, cover-ups, or whether or not stones were thrown, we should hold fast to one unassailable truth: St Peter’s Field Manchester on the early afternoon of Monday, 16 August 1819 was a killing field. Directly or indirectly due to the uneven conflict, there were at least fifteen mostly well-documented fatalities:

John Ashton: sabred and trampled by crowd

John Ashworth (Special Constable): sabred and trampled

Thomas Buckley (died 1 November): sabred and stabbed by bayonet

James Crompton: trampled on by the cavalry

Edmund Dawson (died 31 August): sabre wounds

William Dawson: sabred and crushed

Margaret Downes: sabred

William Evans (Special Constable): trampled by cavalry

William Fildes (aged 2): knocked to the ground by cavalry

Mary Heys (died 17 December): injuries sustained at Peterloo resulted in premature birth of her child, and her subsequent death

Sarah Jones: beaten on head by Constable’s truncheon

John Lees (died 7 September): sabred and truncheoned. The subsequent inquest was halted without a verdict being reached

Arthur Neil/O’Neil: internal injuries caused by beating

Martha Partington: forced or thrown into cellar

John Rhodes (died 18 November): sabre wound to the head. The coroner’s verdict was that he had died of natural causes5

Sometimes included among the deaths is John Hulme of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, who, according to some accounts, was struck by a stone and then fell or was pulled from his horse, being trampled by his own cavalry and suffering a fractured skull. William Bradshaw of Whitefield was shot and killed by the militia during the New Cross riots on the evening of Peterloo, as was 17-year-old Joshua Whitworth of Hyde. Special Constable Robert Campbell of Millers Lane was beaten to death by a vengeful mob near his house two days later. This would bring the total of Peterloo-related fatalities to an admittedly disputable nineteen.

A list of those known to be wounded or killed is first given in Wroe’s pamphlets of December 1819,5 and in his 2005 book Casualties of Peterloo Michael Bush cross-checks his added details from several contemporary sources, so we may assume that the above record, which is based on the information from Casualties, is a fair reflection of what happened on that day.

Other details are harder to pin down. There has been some difference of opinion as to the size of the crowd, but I have my own twopennorth to add to that one, if I may. James Wroe6 estimated 150,000, but I think he bases his calculations on two erroneous assumptions. Firstly, he uses ‘nine people per square yard’ as a starting point. As an experiment, I measured out a square yard on the floor of the playing room of Chorlton Chess Club and asked nine svelte members of the club to occupy the space. It was just possible, but with an uncomfortably tight squeeze, and most of the guinea pigs agreed that six or seven per square yard would seem a more feasible number. However, as one participant pointed out, close to the stage at a rock concert fans would be jam-packed, so shoe-horning nine people into the space, especially close to the hustings, might have been a reasonable supposition. But we now come to Wroe’s second basis for calculation, easier to disprove: the 150,000 assumes that pretty much the whole space of St Peter’s Field (around 20,000 square yards – the size of four full-size football pitches) was covered with such a uniform crowd density. But the multitude would no doubt have thinned out towards the edges, and the Reverend Stanley, watching from an upstairs room overlooking the field, describes a comparatively sparsely populated space at the periphery of the field, crossed by stragglers and the odd latecomer.7 It was into a part of this space that the squadron of Manchester and Salford Yeomanry rode into view, by the corner of the garden wall of Cooper’s Cottage. All things considered, then, I would concur with the figure currently given: 50,000–60,000 were on the field that day.

There are many other details on which to some extent the jury is still out. What was the real purpose of the military-style drilling on the moors? Was the 16 August meeting illegal? Was the Riot Act read and, if so, when and by whom? Why were the hustings carts moved? Had the Manchester Yeomanry been drinking before they arrived on the field? Were Hulton’s two messages to the cavalry detachments deliberately vague and provocative? Why didn’t Assistant Chief Constable Nadin make his arrests before the militia arrived? Was there a defensive circle around the hustings, made up of men with arms linked? Why was there such a high proportion of women amongst the casualties? Were gunshots fired at any time during the dispersal, and if so, from where, by whom, and at whom? Were stones thrown by the crowd at the military, and were any members of the crowd armed in any way? Were the people’s ‘heavy cudgels’ really just walking sticks? Was the whole affair a deliberately laid trap? Is ‘massacre’ a justifiable description of Peterloo?

Subsequent literature and lampoons have in many cases only added to the confusion. At one extreme are the loyalist accounts which minimised the number and gravity of the casualties, whilst seeking to badmouth Hunt and the ‘rebelly crew’ by harping on – or inventing – their personal shortcomings, and insisting that the crowd were the first to resort to premeditated violence; at the other the well-known satirical cartoons and the garish, nightmare carnival of Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy: justifiable caricature or unfair distortions?

It doesn’t take a lot of study to realise that Peterloo is still a cause célèbre. Echoes reverberate until this day, and no doubt the arguments, trailed by their attendant issues, will volley back and forth for a long time yet. At the very least, I’m hoping that this narrative of the ‘tragedy’, ‘massacre’, ‘incident’ – the reader is at liberty to choose their own caption – will furnish a comprehensive and accessible re-examination of the events and questions of that day of two centuries ago. No history is a fossilised phenomenon, and this one is alive and kicking.

Graham Phythian, 2018

PART ONEForewarnings

1

The Janus Country

Viewed from certain angles, Regency Britain was a glorious era, and a cause for national pride.

It was a cultural high-water mark: Jane Austen was reinventing the novel and fine-tuning the English language; Keats, Byron, Blake, Shelley and the Lake Poets were pushing back the boundaries of verse; Sir Walter Scott breathed new life into the historical yarn, and Mary Shelley hit a nerve with Frankenstein. Edmund Kean was enthralling theatre audiences with his Shakespearean roles. In the visual arts, Constable, Turner and Sir David Wilkie were at their most prolific. John Nash’s London and Brighton architecture and the innovative and neo-Gothic designs of Sir John Soane and James Wyatt shouted the nation’s confidence to the world.

The glow of military glory had been assured after Trafalgar and Waterloo. The taming of the Corsican anti-Christ, the quelling of the extreme experiment of republicanism in France, and the restoration to the throne of the Bourbon dynasty with Louis XVIII (who had spent his years of exile in England) had re-established political stability in a near neighbour, thus, it was hoped, greatly reducing the threat of insurrection on home soil.

In technology, the power of steam was transforming travel and commerce. The first steamship crossing of the Atlantic took place, and the new age of the train had been ushered in with Trevithick’s ‘Puffing Billy’ prototype. Innovative steam-powered machines increased textiles output phenomenally. Humphry Davy added the introduction of the miners’ safety lamp to his list of scientific achievements. Davy’s understudy, Michael Faraday, was on the verge of constructing the first electric motor. Gas street lamps were erected in Piccadilly, London, and John Macadam’s new road surface heralded the end of the bone-shaker stagecoach journeys.

And financing the military and technological triumphs was the greatest trading Empire the world had ever seen.

Beneath this dazzling armada of achievements, however, there ran a dark and toxic undertow.

There occurred a number of conspicuous symptoms of the unease and discontent. The 1812 assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval – in the lobby of the House of Commons, no less – had sent shock waves around the world. Britain was nominally ruled by a mad Hanoverian king, and in practice by his obese and profligate son the Prince Regent, whose general unpopularity was expressed by the missile thrown at him through the window of the royal coach in the Mall. A telling detail points to the underlying feeling of insecurity in the weeks immediately following Waterloo: when HMS Bellerophon dropped anchor in Plymouth Sound in late July 1815 one of its passengers was Napoleon, en route to his exile on St Helena. After being relieved of 4,000 gold coins, the ex-Emperor was transferred to the HMS Northumberland for the long voyage to the South Atlantic. He had remained seven days on the water in Plymouth Sound, the docksides and estuary heaving with sightseers, but was prevented from setting foot on English soil, such was the Establishment’s fear of the people being seduced by a dangerously charismatic demagogue.1

Some of the Regency success stories had brought with them a severe downside. The end of the Napoleonic Wars meant the return to civilian life of thousands of working-class soldiers, thus swelling the agricultural and urban labour markets which were already suffering major problems. Irish immigrant workers, and the introduction of low-waged child labour, increased the number of unemployed. The new machines that were bringing such profits to the textiles mill-owners were the source of much of the deprivation. Among the most cruelly hit were the weavers.2

Samuel Bamford, the radical weaver-poet who would march to Peterloo at the head of the Middleton contingent, paints a vivid, if slightly idealised, picture of the skilled handloom weaver’s existence in pre-industrial times. It is easy to over-gild the ‘golden age’ of the cottage industry, when it seemed that every village artisan had a market garden to supplement his income in times of recession, and the country or semi-rural life was beneficial to body and soul. Even allowing for the rose-tinted spectacles, there was still much to recommend the Old Way. The sought-after skills of the small-scale craftsman attracted a degree of respect, and the largely self-sufficient village community benefited in turn.

Bamford’s father Daniel – a muslin weaver by trade – was no stranger to the odd season of poverty, but the many traditions and observances recorded by Samuel reflect a vibrant and fairly affluent society. There was the custom of dealing out work to the younger apprentices, which had to be completed before Christmas treats – ‘spiced bread, ale, or some good old cheese’ – could be enjoyed. There was the Shrove Tuesday race to finish eating a pancake before the second serving, with the forfeit of a dump in the midden for slowcoaches. Easter was an extended holiday, involving peace-egging, gallons of mulled ale, and various forms of dressing up. The major summer festival was based on the August tradition of rush-bearing, with the Morris dancers, musicians, and procession of extravagantly decorated and garlanded rush-carts. This announced the beginning of the Wakes, when all work stopped for a week or so, and the holiday was celebrated with much feasting and consumption of ale. For these traditions to be properly observed there had to be at least an adequate supply of work, and a plenty of basic foodstuffs supplemented by the occasional more exotic addition. Sadly, with the coming of the factory machinery and the population shift to the towns, the rural version of these customs was virtually to disappear within a generation.3

The new textiles machines could produce the high quality finished article far faster, and in much greater quantities, than could the solo worker. Cotton exports from the north-west of England in the twenty years before Peterloo multiplied by seventy-five,4 which led to a five-fold increase in Manchester’s population, as former villagers and a fair number of Irish immigrants flooded into town to work the machines. Within the same period the upland settlements of Oldham, Middleton, Bolton, Ashton and Rochdale grew apace. With the overcrowding, and the economy still jittery nationally following the war years, came widespread poverty.

The Corn Law of 1815 (or as Henry Hunt termed it, ‘that infamous starvation law’),5 which banned the importation of cheap corn from abroad, was obviously unjust, favouring the rich man’s profits over the poor family’s basic needs. But the wildly fluctuating price of corn (which the Corn Law was an unsuccessful attempt to remedy), and the resultant periodic difficulty in affording a loaf of bread, was not the major ongoing cause of distress. For one thing, the Irish influx in the early years of the century had helped to popularise the potato as a cheap and nutritious alternative staple, at least for those town dwellers who could grow or obtain them.6 The most ruinous long-term effect on workers’ living standards was caused not so much by the Corn Law, as pernicious as this undoubtedly was, as by the creeping reduction in wages.

Once more, the weavers were hardest hit. A typical daily average wage in 1805 was 2s 4½d (12p), which had dwindled by January 1808 to 10½d (4½p).7 An attempt to create a legal minimum wage was defeated in the House of Commons in April of that year, and as a result on two successive days at the end of May there took place, on St George’s Field, Manchester, a demonstration by some 15,000 weavers. In some ways it was a grim rehearsal for Peterloo, since although the demonstrators were ‘patient and passive, and their hands unaided by any thing like a weapon of hostility’,8 the Riot Act was read, the military was called in, and the dispersal resulted in one weaver killed and several injured. Manchester manufacturer Colonel Joseph Hanson was imprisoned for supporting the demonstration with ‘malicious and inflammatory words’.9 One detail mentioned by the Gazette’s leader column would have surprising and far-reaching repercussions in later years: the ‘woe-worn and altogether wretched appearance’ of the weavers.

When the deputation of the Committee for the Relief of the Peterloo wounded and bereaved travelled to Manchester and the surrounding towns in January 1820, the shock felt by the Londoners when discovering the families’ living conditions fairly leaps off the page in the Report. The people they visited were found to be,

…almost generally clothed in rags, and the hovels and cellars which they inhabit nearly stripped of every article of furniture, which have been sold to satisfy the cravings of hunger of themselves and children.10

As James Cooper, an Oldham man and veteran of Peterloo, was to reminisce many years later: ‘There was a universal state of starvation; children crying for bread, and their parents unable to give it to them’.11

The prime motive of the vast majority of mill and factory owners being profit, justifications were sought for reducing wages and implementing other methods of cutting corners on expenses. Not only sought, but openly expressed, as according to the employers wage reductions and induced poverty in the working class was beneficial not only for the economics of business, but also for the labourers’ soul: ‘It is a fact well known…that scarcity…promotes industry.’12 It was a belief generally held amongst the better-off classes (and that included the clergy) that weavers especially, not so long before, had enjoyed such prosperity that they could work just three or four days a week and still afford lashings of ale and the weekly bottle of rum.13 Clearly, the threat of poverty and starvation kept the workers on the straight and narrow.

Justification for child labour, which of course helped to keep wages down, was forthcoming via a dose of eyewash on the front page of a Manchester newspaper. The claim that including a child in a household’s factory workforce actually strengthened family ties was the gist of the following, supposedly written by a weaver:

To ‘Fellow Weavers’ –

Spinners and weavers, are ye injured [by Machinery]? Least of all persons are ye entitled to complain. For four times your number are employed since the invention of machinery: and why? Because your little children, by the help of machinery, can earn their own livelihood, and it is easier to rear a family.14

The timing of publication is important: this item appeared the week after the Luddite attack on Burton’s mill and house at Middleton, and the destruction of the Westhoughton mill, both described below. E.P. Thompson delivers the merited raspberry in response to the views expressed in the Gazette article: ‘The family was roughly torn apart each morning by the factory bell.’15

Robert Southey, Lake Poet, historian and critic – and, incidentally, the first one to christen Henry Hunt with the sobriquet ‘Orator’ – assumed the persona of a visiting Spanish nobleman in delivering a scathing view of child labour in a Manchester cotton mill:

[We were conducted] to one of the great cotton manufactories [and shown] the number of children who were at work there, and [the guide] dwelt with delight on the infinite good which resulted from employing them at so early an age. I listened without contradicting him…

[The guide] remarked… ‘You see these children, Sir… they get their bread almost as soon as they can run about, and by the time they are seven or eight years old they bring in money. There is no idleness among us: they come at five in the morning; we allow them half an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner; they leave work at six, and another set relieves them for the night; the wheels never stand still.’

…I thought that if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment.16

The 1808 literary disguise of Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella was no doubt Southey’s means of avoiding any accusation of his sowing seeds of insurrection. Some ten years later the left-wing publication Black Dwarf would hammer home the details about the working conditions in the mills and factories:

The workmen…are trained to work from six years old, from five in a morning to eight and nine at night…

…the squalid appearance of the little infants and their parents taken from their beds at so early an hour in all kinds of weather…the miserable pittance of food, chiefly composed of water gruel and oatcake broken into it, a little salt, and sometimes coloured with a little milk, together with a few potatoes, and a bit of bacon or fat for dinner…

There they are (and if late a few minutes, a quarter of a day is stopped in wages) locked up until night…and allowed no time, except three-quarters of an hour at dinner in the whole day.17

A typical cotton mill – this one is in Ancoats, east Manchester. (McConnell and Co.)

Children, with their frailer constitutions and more malleable bones, were especially susceptible to industrial injuries. A typical example was Robert Blincoe, who worked for fourteen years as a child and young man in a cotton mill, as he testified later in life: ‘I got deformed there; my knees began to bend in when I was fifteen…I have not the strength of those who are straight.’ He mentioned the heat, the dust, the cruelly long hours, the possibility of losing a finger in the works, and related the horrendous tale of a 10-year-old girl who was caught up and crushed to death in a drawing frame machine.18

Poor harvests and the near-collapse of the agrarian economy accelerated the mass migration to the towns, further increasing the problems of overcrowding in the poorer areas. It was the living conditions of Manchester’s factory workers that came under Engels’s appalled scrutiny:

I may mention just here that the mills almost all adjoin the rivers or the different canals that ramify throughout the city, before I proceed at once to describe the labouring quarters. First of all, there is the Old Town of Manchester… Here the streets…are narrow and winding, like Todd Street, Long Millgate, Withy Grove, and Shude Hill, the houses dirty, old, and tumble-down, and the construction of the side streets utterly horrible. Right and left a multitude of covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts…which contain unqualifiedly the most horrible dwellings which I have yet beheld. In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance…a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement.19

This was written some twenty years after Peterloo, but the depiction of extreme deprivation is of course still relevant. Also significant is Engels’s list of Manchester’s satellite towns, which ‘vary little from the central city’: Bolton, Wigan, Bury, Rochdale, Middleton, Oldham, Ashton, and Stockport. These towns are among those generically described as ‘badly and irregularly built with foul courts, lanes, and back alleys, reeking of coal smoke, and especially dingy from the originally bright red brick, turned black with time’.20 He also mentions Salford’s ‘filth and wretchedness’.21 Unsurprisingly, Engels’s list tallies almost exactly with that of the towns which sent marchers to St Peter’s Field.

In such appalling living conditions, disease was rife. Writing in 1832, Dr Kay noted the prevalence of diarrhoea, typhus and cholera.22 Child mortality rate was shockingly high. Where figures exist for Manchester workers, the news is invariably bad. In 1833 almost one half of the children born to a mill’s spinners had died at birth or in early infancy.23 Nine years later the following figures emerged regarding average age at death in Manchester:

View of the Collegiate Church from the poorer dwellings along the River Irk. (Stockport Local Heritage)

Gentry

38

Tradesmen

20

Labourers

1724

The physical stresses of the labour, poor diet, overcrowding and woefully inadequate sanitation were responsible not only for malnutrition and chronic disease but also, as we have seen, occupational deformities.25

To add to the financial burden, a succession of taxes was imposed on the populace. A Failsworth man and veteran of Peterloo would bitterly recall some sixty-five years later: ‘Everything you touched was taxed. They could scarcely stir without being taxed. If they washed their faces the soap was taxed. When they went to the looking-glass that was taxed, too. If they even put a clean collar on the very starch that had stiffened it was taxed.’26 The most hated of these taxes, understandably, was the bread tax (closely followed by the malt tax, which added to the price of beer.) At the same time it was no longer thought necessary, by 1816, to continue to burden the wealthy with the Property Tax which had helped finance the wars.

Moreover, the vast majority of the population, male as well as female, had no right to vote, nor had they any established way of getting their voices heard by the powers in the land. The rallying cry ‘TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION IS UNJUST AND TYRANNICAL’ was displayed on one of the Saddleworth banners at Peterloo, echoing the 1776 American Colonies’ slogan: ‘No Taxation without Representation’. One of the initial purposes of the St Peter’s Field meeting was to examine ways of legally putting forward a House of Commons representative who could speak for the great numbers of citizens – 98 per cent of the population, most of whom were working class – who were unable to vote. Prentice expressed ‘the grossly defective state of the representation’ in the clearest of terms:

They saw Manchester, Salford, Bolton, Blackburn, Rochdale, Bury, Ashton-under Lyne, Oldham, and Stockport without [Parliamentary] members, whilst Old Sarum – a mound of earth without inhabitants – and a host of villages, decayed and rotten, each sent two.27

The small number of voters in this ‘host of villages’ (popularly dubbed ‘rotten boroughs’) meant that it was relatively easy, if one had the wherewithal, to bribe one’s way into House of Commons membership. Bribery was a proven fact in the politics of the village of Ilchester in Somerset, and it was widely believed that the Ilchester MP Sir William Manners (later Lord Huntingtower) was guilty of demolishing the houses of his rivals, since one had to have property to be able to vote.28 The Peterloo banner ‘NO BOROUGH-MONGERING’ – the practice of buying and selling of constituency seats – was a protest against the corrupt, venal network that typified much of the country’s approach to Parliamentary representation.

Detail from an 1819 map of the town of Manchester. (Manchester Central Library Archives+ (historical map collection))

This, then, was Regency England: the Janus country with the split personality, in which, despite the surface glories, injustice and gross inequality were legitimised and perpetuated by the powers in the land. The legal, civil and military machinery formed a daunting united front, whose sole object was to maintain the status quo, to the lasting benefit of the privileged few.

2

Law and Order

Everyday policing of Manchester and Salford in the early nineteenth century had a threadbare look. With a more than six-fold increase in the population between 1770 and 1830, the basic forces of law and order had not fully developed to keep pace with the numbers. In August 1819 the higher echelons of the Manchester and Salford policing system comprised:

Boroughreeve Edward Clayton, by trade a calico printer: the position of Boroughreeve was somewhere between Lord Mayor and Chief of Police, the first citizen and principal municipal officer of a town; two Chief Constables, each elected for twelve months by the Court Leet: Jonathan Andrew from Harpurhey, and John Moore from Sale Moor; around 60 magistrates, all well-off men of property, a powerful oligarchy described by Chief Constable Moore as ‘persons of the first consequence and character’,1 and whose word, quite literally, was law; assorted beadles who had minor peacekeeping functions, and the Deputy Chief Constable, the notorious Joseph Nadin, the enforcer: ‘a famous local character of sombre repute.’2

With Henry Hunt we’ll go, we’ll go,

With Henry Hunt we’ll go,

We’ll raise the cap of liberty,

In spite of Nadin Joe.3

A jobsworth with a warrant, a truncheon and (sometimes) a blunderbuss, Joseph Nadin, a former cotton spinner, was Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester for nearly twenty years (1803–1821). Nadin will bulk large – in more ways than one – in our story. Samuel Bamford, who was to have several run-ins with the official over the years, described him thus:

Joseph Nadin was about 6 feet 1 inch in height, with an uncommon breadth and solidity of frame. His head was full sized, his complexion sallow, his hair dark and slightly grey; his features were broad and non-intellectual, his voice loud, his language coarse and illiterate, and his manner rude and overbearing to equals or inferiors.4

Although Manchester’s two Chief Constables worked on a voluntary basis, their Deputy received a wage of £350 a year, which was supplemented by a ‘payment by results’ system. Successful charges were rewarded with a £2 bonus, plus a valuable Tyburn ticket. This ticket was a much sought-after document which exempted the possessor from police or legal duties and changed hands on the black market for anything up to £20.5 This lucrative arrangement would give rise to the very strong suspicion that Nadin was engineering arrests, either by setting up a situation that could be interpreted as seditious or criminal, or by having one or more of his spies infiltrate a radicals’ meeting. According to E.P. Thompson, ‘Nadin…would stop short at no violence or trick to secure a conviction.’ The Habeas Corpus Suspension Act in February 1817 virtually gave him a free hand. A letter from ‘A Constant Reader’ in the Manchester Observer in April 1818 accused Nadin of arranging for an accomplice to plant some stolen material in a milliner’s on Market Street. The Deputy Constable promptly arrived and arrested the shopkeeper.6

Deputy Chief Constable Joseph Nadin, ‘a man of more bluster than courage’. (Stockport Local Heritage)

Nadin certainly showed a sadistic tendency. He appeared to relish his position of power over the arrested man: one of his quips was to promise the prisoner an increase in height before he got back home, as a result of his being hanged. When Bamford and his fellow radicals were apprehended in March 1817, Nadin, after chaining the detainees together by the feet, gave the order that neck irons be fitted too. This was overruled by the accompanying King’s Messengers, however.7 After the arrest of one John Royle, during which Nadin broke the detainee’s nose with a truncheon blow, the prisoner protested his innocence so persistently that the Deputy Constable gagged him by buckling a bridle – a medieval instrument used to silence nagging wives – into his mouth!8 Prentice, in his Historical Sketches, described Nadin as ‘a man of more bluster than courage’.9

It was in Nadin’s interest to keep the Establishment’s apprehension about the Reform movement simmering; not that it would have taken much effort on his part. On 26 March 1814 he wrote to the Home Office, essentially to claim some expenses, as hiring spies did not come cheap, but the letter also contained the following:

I think it my duty to apprise you that all Trades in the Manufactory of this neighbourhood again meet in different Societys [sic]. But I believe they are forming Combinations against their Masters to raise their wages, the weavers met about 500 last Tuesday evening at Shaw Brow near this town.10

One revealing detail about Nadin, which at this distance in time has attained the tone of low farce, emerged from his cross-examination at the John Lees inquest in October 1819. Perhaps it was the unseasonably hot day, or the cramped and uncomfortable conditions in the makeshift courtroom in the Star Inn on Deansgate, Manchester; or it could have been due to Nadin’s feeling that he had lost face during the questioning (one of his more unconvincing responses had provoked scornful laughter in the public gallery). Whatever the reason, as the red-faced Deputy Constable left the room, he gave vent to the bruiser streak which he often displayed when dealing with those he felt were his inferior:

[Here the witness retired, and in quitting the court, with the assistance of his constables, he forced many auditors from the further end of the room, with the most brutal violence.]

Mr. Harmer: Mr. Nadin, you ought not to use such violence; and I do not know what business you have to turn anyone out who is not misbehaving.11

In making his arrests it was Nadin’s style to display excessive force: brandishing truncheon or blunderbuss, he would swoop, backed up by a considerable armed military or police presence. At the Prince Regent’s Arms reform meeting in June 1812, he was accompanied by around thirty of the Royal Scots Greys Regiment, all of whom were carrying muskets with fixed bayonets.12 When he arrested Bamford (not for the last time) and charged him with high treason in Middleton in March 1817, he had his blunderbuss again, and six armed officers were supporting him.13

From these incidents (and there were many more similar) it will be seen that any threat of unrest could be held in check by a formidable concatenation of civil and military power. The government could call on troops of regular soldiers, which resource was of course more readily available once the Napoleonic Wars were over.

Besides the professional soldiery (cavalry and field cannon as well as infantry), the authorities could call upon help from the civil ranks. Special Constables from the mercantile and property-owning classes could be sworn in at a few hours’ notice. From the same social strata came the volunteer Yeomanry.

The Cheshire Yeomanry – who were to play a peripheral role at Peterloo – were formed in 1797, in response to fears that England was about to be invaded by the French: so in conception a sort of Dad’s Army on horseback, albeit with potentially much greater capacity for damage. In 1817 they were instrumental in dispersing the Blanketeers’ March (see pp. 46–8). Not to be outdone by their generally more affluent neighbours, the shopkeepers, inn landlords and small businessmen of Manchester and Salford decided to form their own mounted militia later that year. They would receive a government grant for uniform and sabre, but had to supply that most visible of status symbols: their own horse. (Since the cost of a horse at the time was between £200 and £270, this was an excellent way of keeping out undesirables.) No svelte Arabian racing steeds these, but more akin to lumbering half-ton English shire horses, but still capable of a fearsome turn of speed, the combat descendants of the Norman and Plantagenet kings’ warhorses. The Yeomanry’s chargers were a formidable asset when under proper control, but potentially devastating to both sides if that control should be impaired. Despite their lack of experience and proper military training, the Manchester and Salford troop at least cut a dash in their uniform: bright blue clothing with white facing, and a black shako hat the shape of a truncated cone sporting a red plume. This differed from the uniform of the Hussars in that the professional soldiers wore blue with yellow facings. The general character and specific shortcomings of the volunteer cavalry will be looked at in more detail in Part Two.

The ultimate wielders of power in Manchester and the surrounding towns were the magistrates, a networking oligarchy comprising men of the cloth, landowners, and mill and factory managers. Born into, and steeped in, privilege, they were for the most part intransigently reactionary, jealously guarding their wealth and sweeping control with all the available civic and military resources. A brief biographical introduction to a few of the major incumbents will suffice.

William Hulton, chairman of the magistrates at Peterloo. (Touchstones Rochdale)

William Hulton, High Sheriff of Lancashire, Constable of Lancaster Castle, and chairman of the Manchester and Salford magistrates at Peterloo, was a member of a prosperous landowning family. The riches came principally from the coal deposits underneath their Hulton Park estate, 3 miles south-west of Bolton.

The Reverend William Hay could boast an impressive ancestry: his father had been Governor of Barbados, and his grandfather Archbishop of York. Born near Lisbon in 1761, he gained an Oxford law degree before becoming ordained as an Anglican priest. Chairman of the Salford Quarter Sessions and Steward of the Manor Court of Manchester, he had a reputation for his severity in dealing with radical dissenters.14

Despite being an Anglican minister, Hay seems not to have been above the odd excursion into fiction if it suited his purpose. At the height of the Luddite activity in Lancashire in 1812, he sent a report to the Home Office in which he told of three Luddites from Nottingham who had ridden to Manchester ‘on piebald horses’ to give orders, before immediately riding off again. No details were supplied as to who or what this involved, nor when, where or why this highly implausible episode took place.15 This would appear to be another example of the scaremongering strategy used at the time, although, as shown elsewhere, more usually by government spies and agents provocateurs. It may be worth our while to remember this communication of Hay’s when we consider his contributions to the narrative later.

Hay’s close associate the Reverend Charles Ethelston was also an Anglican minister, a Fellow of the Collegiate Church, and member of the mutual benevolence society based at the Portico16 on Mosley Street. He was to claim to have read the Riot Act before the Yeomanry’s attack at Peterloo, a claim backed up by Hay. He had been the author of some poems of dubious rectitude earlier in his career, a biographical snippet which would be gleefully seized upon by radical opponents.

Colonel John Silvester (or Sylvester), originally from Chorley, had gained his title from the formation of ‘Silvester’s Volunteers’. This paramilitary corps had been consecrated in 1802 in the Collegiate Church by the Reverend Ethelston, the chaplain of the regiment. Other such civilian troops were raised in Manchester and Salford at about the same time, and many of the members were soon to join together under the banner of the Yeomanry.17

James Norris was a lawyer, and of all the magistrates present at Peterloo he was the only one who was at the time a resident of Manchester. Since assuming the role of magistrate in March 1818, he had been assiduously communicating with the Home Office, reporting activity which he had construed as organised unrest and insurrection.18 Norris’s name appears regularly on the official documents relevant to Peterloo, and he maintains a constant presence: he gave the order for the reading of the Riot Act at New Cross, and was Chairman of the Bench at Hunt’s New Bailey hearing.

The Revd William Hay. (Touchstones Rochdale)

Another magistrate in constant communication with the Home Office was Bolton’s Colonel Ralph Fletcher. From a family whose affluence was based on the Atherton coal mines, Fletcher was a Justice of the Peace, Colonel in the Bolton Volunteers, member of the local ‘Church and King’ club, and bearer of the imposing title Deputy Grand Master of the Grand Orange Lodge of England.19 A powerful loyalist supporter, he ran a widespread network of spies, and was granted Home Office permission to open suspicious-looking mail at the Post Office. He would be in charge of the military who suppressed the riot at the Westhoughton mill.20 He was one of the magistrates who signed the arrest warrant for Hunt, and was seen by one witness to strike people with his staff at Peterloo.21

Also in a position of power, although answerable to Hulton’s magistrates, was the cotton mill owner and former Boroughreeve Hugh Hornby Birley, or Captain Birley of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, as he had styled himself. He was known to rule his workers with a rod of iron and was to dismiss three of his employees once he discovered that their father, William Marsh, had been one of the wounded demonstrators at Peterloo.22

Amongst his peers, however, Birley was well respected. In the House of Commons his character was declared to be one of ‘mildness and humanity’, and personal friend Lord Stanley repeated the assertion that at Peterloo, ‘Capt. Birley had never taken his sabre from his shoulder except once, when he was near the hustings and this was done for the purpose of directing a passage to be made for two women who wished to escape.’23 The glittering career of Birley post-Peterloo is summarised in Part Three.

A more remote, but militarily significant and influential, figure was General Sir John Byng, the supreme Commanding Officer of the military of Northern District of England. Although absent from St Peter’s Field – he was at York races on 16 August – the communications between him and the Home Office on the subject of military intervention at reformers’ assemblies make interesting reading.24

Besides the more overt displays of repression, the government also employed a widespread and secret network of spies and informers. They were generally unsavoury characters, in it blatantly for the money, or lapsed radicals who were trying to save their own skin. Many of them were recruited from word of mouth contacts in debtors’ prison.25 For a while it had been relatively easy to infiltrate the reformers’ groups: one of their number, with the rumly cognate name of John Bent, was instrumental in Nadin’s arrest of the thirty-seven supposed conspirators at the meeting at the Prince Regent’s Arms on Ancoats Lane in June 1812 (which is described in more detail in the next chapter). He had been elected the group’s treasurer. Spies also had a crucial role to play in the planned attack on the mill at Westhoughton (see pp. 35–6).

One of the more notorious of this execrated breed was one Oliver (real name William Richards), immortalised in the pages of Bamford, Prentice, and Hansard. Frank Peel described him as ‘the most wicked, unscrupulous, and infamous of the whole vile troop’.26 A plausible-looking fellow, he was involved in the organisation (and, clandestinely, in the swift termination) of the Blanketeers’ March in the spring of 1817. The following year he was described in the House of Commons as ‘guilty of frauds upon his employers for a great number of years…wholly destitute of truth and principle’. One of his misdemeanours had been to urge his daughter to commit perjury.27 By then his true role had been exposed by Edward Baines Snr of the Leeds Mercury, who described him as ‘a prototype of Lucifer’.28

The role of the informer or agent provocateur, besides keeping the Home Office up to speed about local radical developments, was to keep the pot of unease boiling. This helped justify the government’s repressive measures, and often the bigger the scare – whether fabricated or real – the more money changed hands. It was to some extent another ‘payment by results’ scam, such as the one allegedly used by Nadin. It was also a ploy to persuade the dissidents to show their hand, as is explained in the next chapter.

By 1819, with more open public rallies now very much in vogue, the spy system had mostly had its day. The main target of the informer network had been the Luddites and similar factions with their secret oaths, passwords and hand signals. Now with the more transparent approach favoured by the moderate reformers, spies had become largely redundant.