The Peterloo massacre
Today – 187 years ago – 60,000 workers, artisans, journeymen and radicals congregated on St Peter’s Fields on the edges of Manchester to demand adult male suffrage and a repeal of the Corn Law price-fixing cartel. Workers had realised that without political power they would never reap the riches of industrialisation.
When the crowd failed to respond to the reading of the Riot Act, local officers tried to arrest the lead speakers and called in assistance from the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry along with the 15th Hussars. Inexperienced, scared, possibly drunk, the armed cavalrymen turned their sabres on the crowd, killing 11 and maiming hundreds.
In mocking reference to the Battle of Waterloo four years earlier, the massacre soon gained the name “Peterloo”. The event galvanised support for parliamentary reform as well as leading to a consolidation of progressive working-class and middle-class opinion against the ruling aristocracy.
The Free Trade Hall was later built on the site of the massacre and today the place is the Edwardian Radisson Hotel. I was brought up and went to school in Manchester and gave a speech at the Free Trade Hall when I was just 17 in my capacity as School Captain at Xaverian College when I addressed the Speech Day in 1966. Later I spent lots of time as a UMIST university student studying in the Central Library located in St Peter’s Square just round the corner from the site.
August 16th, 2006 at 11:29 am
Some years ago the Mikron Theatre Company brought to wider audiences the events leading up to the Peterloo Massacre and its aftermath in a production called “The Spirit of the Age”. One particularly haunting song highlighted the fact that of the 11 killed, most were women and one was a child.