Today is the anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, 1819, one of the most important events in England in the nineteenth century.
What happened? Well... here's as good a description any...
On 16 August 1819 Mary Fildes and members of the Female Reform Society marched to St.Peter’s Fields in the centre of Manchester with many other people to angrily demand the end of political corruption, hunger and unemployment. The women said, “Every succeeding night brings with it new terror, so that we are sick of life and weary of a world, where poverty, wretchedness, tyranny and injustice, have so long been permitted to reign amongst men.”
As Mary and a peaceful crowd of tens of thousands of men, women and children listened to a speech by radical orator Henry Hunt, they were attacked without warning by the military, sent in by Manchester’s unelected authorities, resulting in many deaths and injuries. Mary only narrowly escaped serious injury as horsemen slashed at her with sabres. This shocking event became known as Peterloo Massacre.
Source
The effect? The newspapers were horrified but the government knee jerk response was to pass the hugely oppressive Six Acts which aimed to prevent the working classes from engaging in or accessing politics of any kind (perhaps the worst of which was a tax on newspapers which kept the news out of economic reach and wasn't fully repealed until the mid century. There was a vibrant illegal press in response to this though).
The massacre quickly entered into folk history and served as a rallying cry for the democratic movements that followed.
Find out more from the People's History Museum here and the Society for the Study of Labour History here.
