Peterloo

Voices, Sabres and Silence

Graham Phythian

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780750967495
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750989510
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

On 16 August 1819 on St Peter's Field, Manchester, a peaceful demonstration of some 60,000 workers and reformers was brutally dispersed by sabrewielding cavalry, resulting in at least fifteen dead and over 600 injured. Within days the slaughter was named ' Peter-loo', as an ironic reference to the battleground of Waterloo. Now the subject of a major film, this highly detailed yet readable narrative, based almost entirely on eyewitness reports and contemporary documents, brings the events of that terrible day vividly to life. In a world in which the legitimacy of facts is in constant jeopardy from media and authoritarian bias, the lessons to be learned from the bloodshed and the tyrannical aftermath are as pertinent today as they were 200 years ago. Film director Mike Leigh has defined Peterloo as 'the event that becomes more relevant with every new episode of our crazy times'.

PART ONE
Forewarnings

1

The Janus Country

Viewed from certain angles, Regency Britain was a glorious era, and a cause for national pride.

It was a cultural high-water mark: Jane Austen was reinventing the novel and fine-tuning the English language; Keats, Byron, Blake, Shelley and the Lake Poets were pushing back the boundaries of verse; Sir Walter Scott breathed new life into the historical yarn, and Mary Shelley hit a nerve with Frankenstein. Edmund Kean was enthralling theatre audiences with his Shakespearean roles. In the visual arts, Constable, Turner and Sir David Wilkie were at their most prolific. John Nash’s London and Brighton architecture and the innovative and neo-Gothic designs of Sir John Soane and James Wyatt shouted the nation’s confidence to the world.

The glow of military glory had been assured after Trafalgar and Waterloo. The taming of the Corsican anti-Christ, the quelling of the extreme experiment of republicanism in France, and the restoration to the throne of the Bourbon dynasty with Louis XVIII (who had spent his years of exile in England) had re-established political stability in a near neighbour, thus, it was hoped, greatly reducing the threat of insurrection on home soil.

In technology, the power of steam was transforming travel and commerce. The first steamship crossing of the Atlantic took place, and the new age of the train had been ushered in with Trevithick’s ‘Puffing Billy’ prototype. Innovative steam-powered machines increased textiles output phenomenally. Humphry Davy added the introduction of the miners’ safety lamp to his list of scientific achievements. Davy’s understudy, Michael Faraday, was on the verge of constructing the first electric motor. Gas street lamps were erected in Piccadilly, London, and John Macadam’s new road surface heralded the end of the bone-shaker stagecoach journeys.

And financing the military and technological triumphs was the greatest trading Empire the world had ever seen.

Beneath this dazzling armada of achievements, however, there ran a dark and toxic undertow.

There occurred a number of conspicuous symptoms of the unease and discontent. The 1812 assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval – in the lobby of the House of Commons, no less – had sent shock waves around the world. Britain was nominally ruled by a mad Hanoverian king, and in practice by his obese and profligate son the Prince Regent, whose general unpopularity was expressed by the missile thrown at him through the window of the royal coach in the Mall. A telling detail points to the underlying feeling of insecurity in the weeks immediately following Waterloo: when HMS Bellerophon dropped anchor in Plymouth Sound in late July 1815 one of its passengers was Napoleon, en route to his exile on St Helena. After being relieved of 4,000 gold coins, the ex-Emperor was transferred to the HMS Northumberland for the long voyage to the South Atlantic. He had remained seven days on the water in Plymouth Sound, the docksides and estuary heaving with sightseers, but was prevented from setting foot on English soil, such was the Establishment’s fear of the people being seduced by a dangerously charismatic demagogue.¹

Some of the Regency success stories had brought with them a severe downside. The end of the Napoleonic Wars meant the return to civilian life of thousands of working-class soldiers, thus swelling the agricultural and urban labour markets which were already suffering major problems. Irish immigrant workers, and the introduction of low-waged child labour, increased the number of unemployed. The new machines that were bringing such profits to the textiles mill-owners were the source of much of the deprivation. Among the most cruelly hit were the weavers.²

Samuel Bamford, the radical weaver-poet who would march to Peterloo at the head of the Middleton contingent, paints a vivid, if slightly idealised, picture of the skilled handloom weaver’s existence in pre-industrial times. It is easy to over-gild the ‘golden age’ of the cottage industry, when it seemed that every village artisan had a market garden to supplement his income in times of recession, and the country or semi-rural life was beneficial to body and soul. Even allowing for the rose-tinted spectacles, there was still much to recommend the Old Way. The sought-after skills of the small-scale craftsman attracted a degree of respect, and the largely self-sufficient village community benefited in turn.

Bamford’s father Daniel – a muslin weaver by trade – was no stranger to the odd season of poverty, but the many traditions and observances recorded by Samuel reflect a vibrant and fairly affluent society. There was the custom of dealing out work to the younger apprentices, which had to be completed before Christmas treats – ‘spiced bread, ale, or some good old cheese’ – could be enjoyed. There was the Shrove Tuesday race to finish eating a pancake before the second serving, with the forfeit of a dump in the midden for slowcoaches. Easter was an extended holiday, involving peace-egging, gallons of mulled ale, and various forms of dressing up. The major summer festival was based on the August tradition of rush-bearing, with the Morris dancers, musicians, and procession of extravagantly decorated and garlanded rush-carts. This announced the beginning of the Wakes, when all work stopped for a week or so, and the holiday was celebrated with much feasting and consumption of ale. For these traditions to be properly observed there had to be at least an adequate supply of work, and a plenty of basic foodstuffs supplemented by the occasional more exotic addition. Sadly, with the coming of the factory machinery and the population shift to the towns, the rural version of these customs was virtually to disappear within a generation.³

The new textiles machines could produce the high quality finished article far faster, and in much greater quantities, than could the solo worker. Cotton exports from the north-west of England in the twenty years before Peterloo multiplied by seventy-five,⁴ which led to a five-fold increase in Manchester’s population, as former villagers and a fair number of Irish immigrants flooded into town to work the machines. Within the same period the upland settlements of Oldham, Middleton, Bolton, Ashton and Rochdale grew apace. With the overcrowding, and the economy still jittery nationally following the war years, came widespread poverty.

The Corn Law of 1815 (or as Henry Hunt termed it, ‘that infamous starvation law’),⁵ which banned the importation of cheap corn from abroad, was obviously unjust, favouring the rich man’s profits over the poor family’s basic needs. But the wildly fluctuating price of corn (which the Corn Law was an unsuccessful attempt to remedy), and the resultant periodic difficulty in affording a loaf of bread, was not the major ongoing cause of distress. For one thing, the Irish influx in the early years of the century had helped to popularise the potato as a cheap and nutritious alternative staple, at least for those town dwellers who could grow or obtain them.⁶ The most ruinous long-term effect on workers’ living standards was caused not so much by the Corn Law, as pernicious as this undoubtedly was, as by the creeping reduction in wages.

Once more, the weavers were hardest hit. A typical daily average wage in 1805 was 2s 4½d (12p), which had dwindled by January 1808 to 10½d (4½p).⁷ An attempt to create a legal minimum wage was defeated in the House of Commons in April of that year, and as a result on two successive days at the end of May there took place, on St George’s Field, Manchester, a demonstration by some 15,000 weavers. In some ways it was a grim rehearsal for Peterloo, since although the demonstrators were ‘patient and passive, and their hands unaided by any thing like a weapon of hostility’,⁸ the Riot Act was read, the military was called in, and the dispersal resulted in one weaver killed and several injured. Manchester manufacturer Colonel Joseph Hanson was imprisoned for supporting the demonstration with ‘malicious and inflammatory words’.⁹ One detail mentioned by the Gazette’s leader column would have surprising and far-reaching repercussions in later years: the ‘woe-worn and altogether wretched appearance’ of the weavers.

When the deputation of the Committee for the Relief of the Peterloo wounded and bereaved travelled to Manchester and the surrounding towns in January 1820, the shock felt by the Londoners when discovering the families’ living conditions fairly leaps off the page in the Report. The people they visited were found to be,

…almost generally clothed in rags, and the hovels and cellars which they inhabit nearly stripped of every article of furniture, which have been sold to satisfy the cravings of hunger of themselves and children.¹⁰

As James Cooper, an Oldham man and veteran of Peterloo, was to reminisce many years later: ‘There was a universal state of starvation; children crying for bread, and their parents unable to give it to them’.¹¹

The prime motive of the vast majority of mill and factory owners being profit, justifications were sought for reducing wages and implementing other methods of cutting corners on expenses. Not only sought, but openly expressed, as according to the employers wage reductions and induced poverty in the working class was beneficial not only for the economics of business, but also for the labourers’ soul: ‘It is a fact well known…that scarcity…promotes industry.’¹² It was a belief generally held amongst the better-off classes (and that included the clergy) that weavers especially, not so long before, had enjoyed such prosperity that they could work just three or four days a week and still afford lashings of ale and the weekly bottle of rum.¹³ Clearly, the threat of poverty and starvation kept the workers on the straight and narrow.

Justification for child labour, which of course helped to keep wages down, was forthcoming via a dose of eyewash on the front page of a Manchester newspaper. The claim that including a child in a household’s factory workforce actually strengthened family ties was the gist of the following, supposedly written by a weaver:

To ‘Fellow Weavers’ –

Spinners and weavers, are ye injured [by Machinery]? Least of all persons are ye entitled to complain. For four times your number are employed since the invention of machinery: and why? Because your little children, by the help of machinery, can earn their own livelihood, and it is easier to rear a family.¹⁴

The timing of publication is important: this item appeared the week after the Luddite attack on Burton’s mill and house at Middleton, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Forewarnings
• Part Two: Flashpoint (16 August 1819)
• Part Three: Aftermath
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• Comments on the Notes
• Endnotes
• Bibliography and Sources