a Permanent Memorial
How did the campaign for a permanent memorial to the victims of the Peterloo Massacre get started? I’m a professional political cartoonist, and was drawing a cartoon that used Tiananmen Square as a metaphor about the rise of capitalism and consumerism in China, and kept getting this weird feeling that it reminded me of something... but what?
Then the penny dropped. It’s Peterloo. I very quickly began asking why Manchester has no memorial to an event that changed the UK and the world. We know why the regime in China wouldn’t commemorate Tiananmen, but what excuse did my home city have?
About the same time some delegates at the Labour Party annual conference, which was being held very near the site of the massacre, were wandering about in a break, seeing if they could find any indicators of what happened there, and couldn’t. We ended up joining forces with them after our launch. What have been the biggest challenges to getting approval for the memorial? It was a pretty open door in terms of the basic yes to the idea. The really big challenge was to push the Council to make sure there was a genuine and of course profoundly appropriate democratic input into what the design should consist of, and that was a nightmare of anger and frustration. They exerted a really shocking level of control over it, and despite our efforts to pressure them, they revealed the design and held a token consultation in late 2018, too late for any serious objections or revisions. Since then we’ve all been drowning in bitter irony at how undemocratic the process of choosing a memorial to democracy has been. It’s all very telling, eh? How was the final design concept for the memorial decided upon? We pushed hard for an open design competition, but ultimately it would seem very few people in the Council hierarchy had a yes or no say about artist Jeremy Deller’s design. We did, however, manage to get our ‘RIP’ criteria for the memorial incorporated into the process: Respectful, Informative and Permanent/prominent, and I think those have been met. But it seemed to take a formal Freedom of Information demand to pry that inner door open. How well known are the events of Peterloo to the people of Manchester? Until recently, it was the norm not to know about it in the city. There really has been a 200year whitewashing of its memory. We hope our persistence over the years has helped combat that, and that Mike Leigh’s film does the same. You’ve just published a graphic novel about Peterloo. What can you tell us about that project? Yeah, it’s all come round in a circle regarding my ‘day job’! Myself, Eva Schlunke and historian Professor Robert Poole recently finished Peterloo: Witnesses To A Massacre. We deeply hope it’ll prove a very accessible and populist way for people to find out more. Just researching it was an amazing experience. Much of the text is actually from reporting and government correspondence from the day. Why did you choose this approach? Everything in it, in a white narrative or speech bubble, is simply 100 per cent accurate, and taken from the huge range of sources that exist; courtroom transcripts, spy’s reports, journals, diaries and so on. They alone, without the images, make for an astonishing and moving read, with deeply contrasting attitudes from the huge range of characters. We think this may be the world’s first ‘verbatim’ graphic novel!
Peterloo: Witnesses To A Massacre is available now. Visit peterloo.org for details. For more info on the under construction Peterloo memorial go to peterloomassacre.org