The facial hair question at Peterloo
When Red Saunders organised the Manchester shoot for the latest in his Hidden series of historical tableaux, on Peterloo, I know he paid particular care to the issue of facial hair in terms of the participants.
Mike Leigh, the famously hirsute Director of Peterloo the film, has told The Guardian that shaving is amongst other things a waste of resources.
So is there is a facial hair angle to Peterloo? The question is rather less frivolous than might be thought.
The most well-known leader of Chartism Feargus O’Connor frequently began addresses to Chartist gatherings by noting the ‘fustian (cotton) jackets, unshorn chins and blistered hands’ of those present. Their appearance indicated that they were working men and hence Chartists
The ‘Gentleman Leaders’ (in effect full-time financially independent political organisers) of radicalism and then Chartism were invariably clean shaven. I don’t recall ever seeing an image of Henry Hunt, the main speaker at Peterloo, arrested and jailed afterwards, as anything but clean shaven.
One of the main chroniclers of Peterloo Samuel Bamford, who was there on the day (with partner Jemima) but who only wrote about it several decades later, was certainly hirsute in later life and indeed before Peterloo. Whether he had a beard on 16th August 1819 and how that would have fitted with his perspective of his role on the day isn’t known.
It was a matter of facial hair distinguishing between leaders and led, although by the mid-Victorian period leaders too had started to have beards.
We obviously have no photographic evidence of Peterloo but we can at least look at Mike Leigh’s film
Henry Hunt is clean shaven as a Gentleman Leader would be expected to be. Samuel Bamford has a beard, which is sometimes did have. The Yeomanry were obviously clean shaven but the army- the Hussars- had sideburns and handlebar moustaches. The magistrates were clean shaven but William Hulton (foolish Country squire, The Guardian) their chairman had stylish sideburns.
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