Critical massacre
TED VALLANCE applauds a gripping account of Peterloo, the peaceful protest gone wrong that transformed politics in Britain
Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre Jacqueline Riding Head of Zeus, 386 pages, £25
This year marks the bicentenary of the Peterloo massacre, when a peaceful mass protest in support of political reform held on Manchester’s St Peter’s Field was charged by cavalry, resulting in at least 15 deaths, with hundreds more left injured. Awareness of the anniversary has been heightened by the recent release of Mike Leigh’s feature film Peterloo. Jacqueline Riding acted as historical consultant to Leigh, and in this book provides a vivid, engrossing and well-researched narrative to accompany the film.
Riding begins by setting out the immediate historical context: the aftermath of Waterloo and the nature of Manchester at this time – its government and the networks of spies and informers that were employed to keep local reformers under surveillance. This scrutiny was not unwarranted. As Riding notes, though the movement was dominated by gentlemen such as Sir Francis Burdett and Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, who focused on using constitutional measures to achieve their goals, English radicalism also contained violent and republican elements.
This was revealed in the failed Pentrich Rising of 1817, a rebellion led by the unemployed stocking weaver Jeremiah Brandreth, encouraged but not fashioned by a government agent provocateur known as ‘Oliver the Spy’. One consequence of the uncovering of the conspiracy was the creation of citizen regiments to preserve law and order. These included the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, a cavalry unit that would go on to intervene with such disastrous effect in August 1819.
The tragedy of Peterloo was therefore the product of a confluence of different factors. Namely, the authorities’ belief in the threat of popular insurrection, the creation of ill-disciplined irregular forces to counter this threat, and the channelling of reform efforts into large demonstrations as a result of the failure of other strategies (petitioning movements such as the Blanketeers march and radical electioneering in open boroughs such as Westminster). Consequently, the authorities were predisposed to see preparations for the Manchester meeting, which in fact owed much to the Lancashire folk-tradition of ‘rushbearing’, as evidence of militaristic drilling and marching.
Riding delivers an evocative account of the unfolding massacre, from the orderly assembly of the crowd in the morning to the bloody slaughter that ensued as first the Yeomanry and then the Hussars used sabres to disperse the crowd.
The book makes effective use of original sources and recent scholarship to produce a history of the massacre that is both gripping and intellectually robust. While Leigh’s claim (repeated here in the book’s foreword) that Peterloo has been neglected as a historical event has occasioned debate – the massacre is already taught in schools – the film and Riding’s excellent accompanying book will rightly heighten public awareness of the events of 16 August 1819.
Bloody slaughter ensued as the Hussars used sabres to disperse the crowd