Michael Wood on a personal connection to Peterloo
On 16 August it will be the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, when a 60,000-strong demonstration for parliamentary reform, which had gathered in a holiday atmosphere in St Peter’s Field in Manchester, was attacked by troops and local yeomanry. Eighteen were killed and 700 injured, with women – depicted in contemporary illustrations in their Sunday-best white dresses and wide-brimmed hats – figuring disproportionately in the casualty lists. New research into Home Office records and letters in Robert Poole’s book Peterloo: The English Uprising shows that the authorities had decided in advance to use force to disperse the crowd.
Such shocking violence caused widespread anger, and the outpouring of songs and poetry included Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, surely the greatest political poem in English (“I met Murder on the way – / He had a mask like Castlereagh”). Many radical newspapers sprang up; the Manchester Guardian was founded in the aftermath.
On my first day at Manchester Grammar School, aged 11, our history teacher reminded us that our hometown was the city of the industrial revolution, and the Chartists, but also “of the heroes and heroines of Peterloo – and, boys, don’t you forget it!” But to my shame, I never closely asked my dad about our family history, even though he came from Failsworth, near Oldham, from which a sizeable contingent went to Peterloo. But recently my sister started doing the family tree, and traced our Failsworth family back in an unbroken line to the 18th century. Dad’s great-grandfather Jim had agitated for the vote, and raised money for victims of the 1860s Cotton Famine.
Then, after my mum died three years ago aged nearly 97, while clearing out her house we opened a box of my dad’s things, including his microscope and slides, and his Pharmaceutical Society certificate (he had been a dispensing chemist). There, also, was a bundle of photos, postcards and books about his native place: a guide to Failsworth; a pamphlet by the local poet Ben Brierley; and a tatty booklet about the famous Failsworth Pole, which was erected in 1793 by the village ‘Tories’ against the ‘Jacobins’ and radicals who were fighting for the people’s rights. It was here that the demonstrators had gathered before Peterloo, crowning their leaders with the French ‘Cap of Liberty’. The place, it turned out, had been violently split: the librarian of the radical library on the green was attacked for having copy of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.
After Peterloo, people raised a fund for Robert Carlile, the radical publisher then in Dorchester Gaol. Their letter was signed by 50 Failsworth men and women – readers of Paine, freethinkers, atheists and republicans, an extraordinary insight into the culture of these mill towns.
In some of these books was an extraordinary photograph, which in this anniversary year has taken on an entirely new meaning to me. It was taken on 27 September 1884, 65 years after the massacre, and shows 11 Failsworth Peterloo veterans, most now in their eighties, still fighting for the franchise, with a tattered banner that they had carried that day in 1819. Some of them – the Schofields, Whitakers, Chaddertons and Ogdens – were old Failsworth families who went back to the 17th century (my ancestors, the Woods, were linked to some by marriage). Others were Irish, like Mary Collins and Catherine McMurdo. All were hale and hearty as they posed by a loom shed near the Anglers Arms – where my great-greatgrandma Hannah, a former bobbin winder, was landlady.
That day in 1884, they told stories, Mary sang a 15-verse Peterloo ballad by an Ashton weaver, John Stafford, who had been at the massacre, and their stories vividly brought back the horror and shock of that sparkling blue summer day in St Peter’s Field.
As a glimpse of that extraordinary event, 65 years on – and as an insight into a forgotten family history – I find this an incredibly moving image. Which just goes to show that, often unbeknown to its members, any family, no matter how ordinary, has its tales – you just have to ask the old folks before it’s too late. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t: I assumed our story was just too ordinary. Now I know better. It’s taken a long time, but this late in life I now have a better idea of where I come from – which I guess is the point of history?