Eighteen dead, hundreds injured, and two hundred years before the city built anything to mark it.
On 16 August 1819, around 60,000 people walked into St Peter’s Field from the mill towns around Manchester. They came in their Sunday clothes, in organised contingents behind banners, many having drilled for weeks so that they would look disciplined rather than riotous. They came to hear Henry Hunt speak in favour of parliamentary reform.
Manchester at the time had no MP at all. A rotten borough in Cornwall with a dozen electors returned two.
The magistrates, watching from a house on the edge of the field, ordered Hunt’s arrest. The Manchester and Salford Yeomanry — local men, not regulars, many of them shopkeepers and manufacturers with a personal stake in the argument — rode into a packed crowd with sabres drawn. The regular 15th Hussars followed to clear the ground.
At least eighteen people were killed and somewhere between 400 and 700 injured, a large proportion of them women. A journalist named the event Peterloo, after Waterloo four years earlier, and the name was intended as an insult to the cavalry.
What followed
The government congratulated the magistrates. Parliament passed the Six Acts restricting public meetings and the radical press.
But John Edward Taylor, who had been in the field, founded the Manchester Guardian in 1821 in direct response, and the massacre became the founding wound of British working-class politics. The Reform Act came in 1832; Manchester got its MPs.
The memorial
For two centuries the site was marked by nothing, then by a plaque so mealy-mouthed it was replaced, then by a slightly better plaque.
The actual memorial — by Jeremy Deller — was unveiled for the bicentenary in 2019. It is a stack of eleven concentric stone steps forming a mound, carved with the names of the dead and with the towns the marchers came from: Oldham, Rochdale, Saddleworth, Middleton, Stockport.
It was designed to be stood on and spoken from, which is the correct idea.
The row
It was immediately criticised by disability campaigners: a monument to a demonstration for political representation that a wheelchair user cannot get onto.
Deller and the council accepted the criticism and committed to a solution. Various options were examined; a ramp compatible with the design has proved difficult and the matter has dragged.
It is worth knowing before you arrive, and worth thinking about while you stand there. The full story is in the article on Manchester’s radical century, and the banners are at the People’s History Museum ten minutes away.
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