#peterloo

The Mike Leigh collection

ID: printed from a newspaper letters column:

“Don't Tell the Children about Peterloo

Teach them how Tommies defeated the Hun

The victorious glory of a war no one won

Despising the Kaiser

That prophet of Doom

Then get them reciting from Brooke

Not Sassoon.

Dish out paper poppies

But whatever you do

Don't tell the children about Peterloo.

Don't teach how landowners, soldiers and cops

Rode into Manchester

Our protests to stop.

Of Yeomanry charges on people unarmed

Of victims of violence inciting no harm

Legitimate grievances silenced by force

Battered by batons and trampled by horses

Where the Gates of Saint Peter let the Devil ride through, but

Don't tell the children

About Peterloo.

Throughout years of history lessons in a Salford school nobody ever mentioned Peterloo, a hugely significant social and politi- cal event in the struggle for democracy and representation. This poem examines the motives of those who would steer clear of it in the classrooms of Greater Manchester - TONY KINSELLA”.

This is so depressingly true.

And, tbh, why I want to go into history as a career. I doubt I’ll ever be well enough to teach children, though I might manage part-time lecturing. But I want to write history about queer, trans, disabled, poor, BIPOC. I want to write about class warfare and marginalisation and how our society actually operates, ideally where people can read it.

Link to the Wikipedia entry on the Peterloo Massacre for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre.

I was listening to a podcast about it in the car with my OH recently and it struck me that, if the occasional names of politicians in specific posts had been left out, I wouldn’t have been that surprised to hear the same basic details in a contemporary news report. Current criminalisation of protest by the UK Tory government has reached very similar levels as it had at this time, and they appear to have about the same level of scruples about violence towards protestors to break up peaceful, determined protest.

Men's costumes in Peterloo (2018).

Costume design by Jacqueline Durran.

My long awaited update to DANDIES & DANDYZETTES! Here are the class portraits for the gentry, military, clergy and trade classes.

If the gentry man bears a passing resemblance to Hugh Bonneville, that's not a coincidence. I wanted to have examples of older people with somewhat more conservative fashions, like with the gentry man's queued hairstyle or the clergy woman's beribboned cap. The tradeswoman is carrying a leafy branch, a sign of revolutionary beliefs, carried by women at the Peterloo protests, which dates back to Camille Desmoulins' famous speech at the Palais-Royal before the storming of the Bastille, where he tore off a leafy branch and stuck it in his hat.

{09.04.22}