Families were cut down wearing their Sunday best
ON a glorious summer’s morning in happy family groups – dressed in their Sunday best on what seemed an enjoyable day’s outing – 5,000 ordinary people set out to walk from Stockport to Manchester.
The shooting of Stockport constable William Birch a few weeks before was nothing to do with them. But magistrates in Stockport and Manchester thought otherwise.
Birch had been shot after arresting the Rev Joseph Harrison, a reformist speaker and ‘chaplain to the poor and needy’.
Now many of Rev Harrison’s flock were heading for St Peter’s Fields to hear orator Henry Hunt talk about the need for reform, and votes for all.
It was August 1819 and the gaily-dressed crowds converging on Manchester from surrounding townships did not realise that 1,500 soldiers – with cannon, muskets and fixed bayonets and cavalry troopers armed with swords and pistols – lay in wait.
By midday all the local contingents had filed onto the field, bands playing and banners held high, and taken up their allotted places around the speakers in the centre. There were about 60,000 people crowded together as the speakers began.
Suddenly, special constables marched onto the field, shortly followed by volunteer Yeomanry on horseback with unsheathed swords in hands.
There was jostling as the horsemen pushed towards the platform. Brickbats were thrown and next moment cavalry bugles sounded the charge.
When the field was ‘cleared’ 15 people lay dead and over 600 injured – 46 from Stockport, including eight women, were among the wounded in what became known as the Peterloo Massacre.
Most had been slashed with sabres, trampled by horses or beaten by constables’ staves, while trying to get out of the way. Their names and their injuries are listed at Stockport Heritage Centre.
John Davenport, a weaver of Barlow Street, had part of his forehead sliced off – later shown to the House of Commons by Hunt as grisly evidence of official brutality.
The first victim was a small child, galloped over by the Yeomanry.
A weaver from Oldham, John Lees, had fought at Waterloo, but met his end in his home city. “It was plain murder,” he said as he died.
The Stockport Yeomanry congratulated themselves on ‘cutting their way through’ seizing the people’s banners and burning them in Castle Yard – led by magistrates clerk, John Lloyd, the very man who ordered Rev Harrison’s arrest and sparked the official over reaction. A grateful government hastened to congratulate magistrates ‘for keeping the peace’.
The speakers and even journalists were sentenced to imprisonment.
There would be no reform – votes for ordinary people would have to wait for another 100 years.
More in Stockport Heritage Magazine on sale in newsagents, bookshops, and online at www.stockport heritagemagazine.co.uk.