Navickas, Katrina

English

University of Hertfordshire Research Archive

15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 1/14It is the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre. Howhave the events of that day been remembered?FEATUREMemories of a MassacreKatrina Navickas | Published in History Today Volume 69 Issue 8 August 2019Subscribe15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 2/14Obverse side of a medal commemorating the Peterloo Massacre, 19th century © TimothyMillett Collection/Bridgeman ImagesOn Monday 16 August 1819, 60,000 men, women and children gathered for amass rally in Manchester. They had progressed to St Peter’s Field on thesouthern edge of the town from the city’s working-class districts and thesurrounding textile weaving regions, including Rochdale, Oldham andStockport. Monday was the traditional day off for handloom weavers andother artisan workers, and the marchers wore their best clothes and symbolsto create a festive atmosphere. Samuel Bamford, leading the contingentfrom the village of Middleton, described the start of their procession:Twelve of the most decent-looking youths … were placed at the front, eachwith a branch of laurel held in his hand, as a token of peace; then thecolours [banners]: a blue one of silk, with inscriptions in golden letters,‘Unity and Strength’, ‘Liberty and Fraternity’; a green one of silk, withgolden letters, ‘Parliaments Annual’, ‘Suffrage Universal’.15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 3/14The main speaker, Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, had travelled 200 miles north fromLondon. Bamford and the other local organisers joined the charismaticspeaker on stage to campaign for universal male suffrage and the reform ofthe parliamentary system.The meeting was the culmination of several years of popular agitation afterthe end of the Napoleonic Wars. Manchester had no representation in theHouse of Commons. Neither did most of the other expanding manufacturingcentres that rapidly became the engines of the Industrial Revolution in 19th-century Britain. Only around seven per cent of the adult male populationhad the vote. Economic depression in the textile industries fuelled demandsfor political change. Such demands developed under the influence of boththe French Revolution and the radical philosophy put forward in ThomasPaine’s two-volume Rights of Man (1792-93), which interpreted the potentialfor democracy in a British setting. Paine’s work inspired the first working-class movement for parliamentary reform. Local societies sprang up acrossthe manufacturing towns and villages to debate, draw up petitions toParliament and organise mass meetings.‘By the law or by the sword’The bench of magistrates nervously observed the meeting at St Peter’s Fieldfrom an upper window of a house overlooking the site. They had beencorresponding with the Home Office for months, as Hunt addressed massplatform demonstrations in London, Birmingham and other major centres,including Manchester in January 1819. In March, the Home Secretary, LordSidmouth, had communicated that the authorities would be justified insuppressing reform meetings ‘by the law or by the sword’.The Manchester organisers had originally scheduled the rally for 9 August,but had postponed it by a week after the magistrates warned that it wasillegal. Following legal advice, the organisers carefully reworded the purpose15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 4/14of the meeting as merely to ‘consider the means of adopting the most LEGALand EFFECTUAL means of obtaining a reform in the Common House ofParliament’ and ordered the attendees to leave sticks, or anything that couldbe considered a weapon, at home. Though Sidmouth had hastily indicatedcaution to the magistrates during the weeks preceding the meeting, thejustices’ anxious belief in the revolutionary potential of the movementdetermined their actions. Within minutes of Hunt beginning his speech, themagistrates issued an arrest warrant for him. They claimed to have read theRiot Act (though it is obvious that few people in the crowd could have heardthis demand to disperse) and sent for military assistance to clear the way forthe deputy constable to get to the stage. The inexperienced volunteersforming the yeomanry cavalry charged violently into the crowd, got stuckand were followed by the regular hussars, who attempted to clear the field.At least 14 people are known to have died and over 650 were injured, manyseverely cut by the yeomanry’s sabres. Samuel Bamford published the best-known account of the violence in his autobiographical Passages in the Life ofa Radical (1840-44):‘Stand fast,’ I said, ‘they are riding upon us; stand fast.’ And there was ageneral cry in our quarter of ‘Stand fast.’ The cavalry were in confusion:they evidently could not, with all the weight of man and horse, penetratethat compact mass of human beings; and their sabres were plied to hew away through naked held-up hands and defenceless heads.Although Bamford was writing 30 years later, his testimony differs littlefrom the one he gave at his trial in 1820 and the hundreds of eyewitnessstatements also given at the trials, in petitions to Parliament and at thecoroner’s inquest into one of the victims, John Lees of Oldham.15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 5/14Disturbances at Manchester!, illustration by Atkins, 1819 © Mary Evans Picture LibraryNewspaper reporters quickly dubbed the event as the ‘Peter-loo Massacre’, inreference to the Battle of Waterloo four years earlier. The response of LordLiverpool’s Tory government was repressive. Refusing demands for aninquiry into the actions of the magistrates, the government pushedlegislation through Parliament known as the ‘Six Acts’, severely restrictingfreedom of assembly and the press. Hunt, Bamford and the other leaderswere tried at York Assizes in 1820 and sentenced, on a range of charges, toup to two years’ imprisonment. ‘The Spirit of Peterloo’Political activists and historians have debated the causes and consequencesof Peterloo ever since the evening of 16 August 1819. For conservativepoliticians, Peterloo represented an uncivil radical fervour that was rightlycrushed by the forces of law and order. The majority of the ruling elite in15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 6/14Britain associated democracy with revolutionary France and ‘mob’ rule wellinto the 19th century and worried about it accordingly. The moderateReform Acts that eventually passed through Parliament in 1832, 1867 and1884 redistributed seats but only extended the franchise gradually. It wasnot until the 1918 Representation of the People Act that the link betweenownership of property and the vote was finally broken for men, although notfor women over 30, who were also enfranchised.With conservatives downplaying or ignoring Peterloo, democratic and tradeunion movements took up the cause of commemoration. In the 1830s and1840s, the Chartist democratic reform movement and the Liberals eachclaimed to be the true successors of the Peterloo radicals. Both politicalgroups emphasised the heroic role of individual radical leaders, especiallyHenry Hunt, who had entered the field to the refrain of ‘see the conqueringhero comes’. The Anti-Corn Law League was able to cement its connectionwith Peterloo, physically and symbolically, by erecting the Free Trade Hallon St Peter’s Field in 1853 as a monument to economic liberalism. TheReform League claimed connection with its reformist predecessors atPeterloo during its campaign for the second Reform Act of 1867. Politicalinterest in the massacre then waned, although it did appear in TheManchester Man, a widely read novel of 1876 by Isabella Banks.15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 7/14Obverse and Reverse of a medal commemorating the Peterloo Massacre, 19th century ©Timothy Millett Collection/Bridgeman ImagesFrom the 1900s, the female suffrage movement revived the memory ofPeterloo. The Women’s Social and Political Union’s newspaper, Votes forWomen, regularly commented on how suffragette demonstrations inManchester shared the ‘spirit of Peterloo’ and Emmeline Pankhurst madepublicity capital of her paternal grandfather’s attendance at St Peter’s Field.By the time of the centenary in 1919, Peterloo had become a key steppingstone in the development of the working-class movement. Conservativescontrolling the city council downplayed its significance and did notcountenance an official municipal commemoration. The timing of thecentenary linked the economic and social conditions of demobilisation,unemployment and labour disputes following the First World War with thesituation after the Napoleonic Wars. A coalition of the Independent LabourParty, the British Socialist Party, the Trades Council and the Women’sInternational Socialist Council organised commemorations at Platt FieldsPark to the south of Manchester. They sought to demonstrate the same15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 8/14power of collective action shown at Peterloo by placing the massacre withina framework of the struggles of the labour and trade union movementagainst employers and the authorities. The narrative no longer focused onHenry Hunt and was replaced in prominence by the call to action, ‘we aremany; they are few’, coined by Percy Bysshe Shelley in his protest poemMasque of Anarchy. It is a phrase still used by the Labour Party. Class WarWith universal suffrage achieved in the 1920s, Peterloo became a historicalrather than contemporary reference point. Historians began examining therole of the magistracy, asking who was to blame. Donald Read’s Peterloo,published in 1957, argued that the casualties were the result of panic andmistakes on the part of the magistracy rather than premeditated or plannedviolence.E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, first published in1963 with a second edition released in 1968, further set the tone of thedebate. Thompson agreed with Read’s interpretation, that the magistrateslost control on the day, but, he argued, ‘it was the panic of class hatred’. Inone of the more overtly Marxist statements in the book, Thompsoncontinued: ‘There is no term for this but class war. But it was a pitifully one-sided war.’Thompson saw the actions of the magistrates and of the Home Office aspremeditated, intent on crushing what they regarded as the revolutionaryambitions of the working class. Thompson’s interpretation remainsinfluential and his broader conclusions about the consequences of themassacre have been upheld. Middle-class reformers responded to workingclass organisation by combining more determinedly to prevent areoccurrence in their campaigns for parliamentary reform in the 1820s and15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 9/141830s. Peterloo shook the confidence of the ruling elites in their ability toresist all calls for change, leading some of the more liberal Tories to admitthe need for limited concessions. The sheer horror of the event led to a morecareful consideration by local authorities of the need for militaryintervention at times of crisis. New interpretationsThe 150th anniversary in 1969 renewed popular interest in the massacre butcreated another round of contestation in civic politics. As in 1919,Manchester’s Conservative city council did not organise an officialmunicipal commemoration. The publication of Peterloo: the Case Reopenedby Robert Walmsley restarted the debate about Peterloo’s causes. Walmsleyattempted to restore the reputation of his ancestor, William Hulton, head ofthe Manchester and Salford bench of magistrates. He claimed that themagistrates were the real victims, unfairly blamed, as he saw it, for doingtheir job against a seditious band of radical leaders agitating an armedcrowd. The book’s impact was mitigated by a more popular account ofPeterloo, The Peterloo Massacre, by Joyce Marlow, a local actor and Laboursupporter.From the 1970s, feminist and gender history brought attention to theemergence of female-organised reform societies in early 1819. Mary Fildes,leader of the Manchester female reform union, took to the stage at massmeetings in July and August 1819, alongside other women activistsdistinctively dressed in white. Michael Bush has demonstrated that womenwere over-represented in the casualty list at Peterloo, suggesting that theyeomanry deliberately targeted the ‘women in white’, who were denigratedfor boldly stepping outside their traditional domestic role.15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 10/14Peterloo Massacre, containing a Faithful Narrative of the Events which preceded,accompanied, and followed the fatal Sixteenth of August, 1819, edited by an observer, with aportrait of Henry Hunt, 1819 © British Library, London/Bridgeman ImagesCultural and social historians have also made their mark on the study ofPeterloo, considering how the protests were shaped by the rich customarytraditions and local identities of the thousands of people who attended thereform meetings. Robert Poole, the leading contemporary historian ofPeterloo, has demonstrated how the protesters from the surroundingweaving districts drew upon the regional custom of rushbearing (parades of15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 11/14rushes on carts that took place annually in August) and Methodist culturesof dress and hymns. Poole has also challenged conservative interpretations(including Philip Lawson’s 1988 essay in History Today, ‘ReassessingPeterloo’) that claimed the crowd was armed, therefore portraying themassacre as a pitched battle. Like most other recent interpretations,including those of Jacqueline Riding, the researcher for Mike Leigh’s 2018film Peterloo, Poole has shown how this view wilfully takes the loyalistauthorities’ evidence at its word and ignores the multiple reports from thoseinjured and from independent witnesses. Poole’s Peterloo: the EnglishUprising (2019), uncovers new evidence of over 70 previously unseenpetitions to Parliament from victims detailing their injuries and calling forredress by the government. Poole justifies calling the massacre an ‘uprising’in the radical definition of the working classes using their collective – butpeaceful – power to defy a governing elite that they believed was corruptand oppressive.Peterloo todayIn the build-up to the bicentenary of the massacre, research and communityevents have emphasised the role of memory and emotion. Following a‘memory boom’ in First World War studies, historians are much more alert tohow memory shapes political movements and the legacies of traumaticevents. This attention to memory is reflected in UNESCO’s Memory of theWorld Register, established in 1992 to preserve the world’s documentaryheritage. It awarded one of its first UK entries to the Peterloo casualty relieffund book, detailing recipients of public subscriptions to help victims ofPeterloo, now held at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.The general emphasis during the bicentenary has been on the crowd, seen asrepresentatives of Greater Manchester. Commemoration activities haveincluded local history societies helping to trace Peterloo ancestors and their15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 12/14descendants in parish and census records, reflecting the growing popularityof genealogy in connecting people to major events through the lens offamily history. The controversies over which political group can claimownership to the memory of Peterloo have given way to a broaderunderstanding of its role in the history of democracy. Katrina Navickas is Reader in History at the University of Hertfordshire.Her current project is ‘A History of Public Space in England, 1700-2000’.POLITICALPOPULAR ARTICLESThe Puzzles of ThermopylaeGood Time Charlie15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 13/14RECENTLY PUBLISHEDOn The Spot: Justin MarozziGood Time CharlieThe Black Legend Written inSilver15/10/2019 Memories of a Massacre | History Todayhttps://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/memories-massacre 14/14© Copyright 2018 History Today Ltd. Company no. 1556332.MOST READ1. The Puzzles of Thermopylae2. Good Time Charlie3. A History of Chop Suey4. Menstruation and the Holocaust5. 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Memories of a Massacre

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