Attempts to underestimate the crowd at Peterloo still persist
Dave Steele, an historian at Warwick, has claimed the crowd at Peterloo on Monday 16th August 1819 could have been no more than 32,000. He comes to this conclusion by looking at the area occupied by the Peterloo protesters and arguing how many could have fitted into a particular space.
I don’t know whether Mr Steele ever goes to demonstrations but if he does he must surely reflect that the number of people who can fit into a particular space does not conform on these occasions to a risk assessment.
As Robert Poole and Jacqueline Riding both historians of Peterloo note the 32,000 figure rather than the 60,000 usually accepted, might well be right and would still be a very large crowd given people had no coaches or trains to get them there but had to walk.
The issue is with Steele’s ‘workings’.
It is the same method that has been used by those with quite other agendas than he has to under estimate the size of crowds going back to the Chartists at Kennington Common on April 10th 1848.
The commonly accepted figure there is 100,000 plus but the authorities were determined to claim it was 20,000. On what basis did they do this? By claiming that no more than that could possibly have fitted into the space available. But of course they could and did.
Link to Peterloo crowd discussion
Chartists on 10th April 1848
https://kmflett.wordpress.com/2019/04/10/the-size-of-the-crowd-the-chartists-on-10th-april-1848/
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