Many thousands had come from surrounding towns and villages to hear speakers including Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt at a demonstration demanding the right to vote held on St Peters Field in central Manchester on 16th August 1819.
They were cut down by Yeomanry on horseback using sabres and numbers died or were injured.
Much work is underway in Manchester to mark the 200th anniversary this Friday and Mike Leigh has made a film.
In the meantime its worth recalling a couple of points that EP Thompson made about Peterloo in the Making of the English Working Class.
Thompson notes ‘the actual bloody violence of the day. It really was a massacre.. there is no term for (it) but class war. But it was a pitifully one-sided war…Eleven* were killed or died from their wounds’.
The second point Thompson makes is ‘the sheer size of the event, in terms of its psychological impact.. it was without question a formative experience in British political and social history’.
A great deal more could be said.
As Boris Johnson is now the Tory Prime Minister perhaps it is time 200 years on for the Tories to stop forgetting the events of Monday 16th August 1819 and for him to make a public apology for Peterloo. Wlliam Hulton the Chair of the Magistrates on the day who gave the order to send in the Yeomanry, was a lifelong Tory after all
*now thought to be 18
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