When sixty thousand people from the North-West of England marched and danced to brass bands in their Sunday best on the sixteenth of August, 1819, some carrying children, others with banners bearing words like ‘Reform,’ ‘Universal suffrage,’ or ‘Equal representation,’ they had no idea. When someone started singing and the entire crowd joined in, out of time and out of tune, yet united in one harmonious purpose, they didn’t foresee what was to come. When they listened enraptured to John Knight of Oldham, protesting about the Corn Laws that robbed the people standing peaceably before him of the money to buy flour with which to make bread, how could they foresee amidst their disciplined roars of appreciation that terror was about to rain down on them?
Picture this. You’re watching from a window near St Peter’s Fields in Manchester, England. You crane your neck. You’ve never seen so many people in one place. The women have picnic baskets and many wear white, but the men are muscular workers shod in shoes too small, with soles hanging off – those that aren’t barefoot. You, whose belly has always been full, wouldn’t want to meet them on a dark night. It befalls you to read the Riot Act. You open the window as wide as you can. You do your best, but your voice doesn’t carry above the speeches, chatter, and cheers. You can almost smell the acidic alarm growing amongst the magistrates behind you, polluting the smell of homemade, hard-won bread being lovingly placed in the mouths of children in the streets below. Someone suggests calling in the Salford Yeomanry, led by Captain Hugh Birley and Major Thomas Trafford. If they arrest Henry Hunt and a few others, the crowd will likely disperse. You wait nervously, hoping the plan pays off. But the men of the Yeomanry have to be hauled from taverns. Their beer belligerence is palpable. Your hand, resting on the windowsill, begins to shake. The crowd links arms, despite hot, tired, thirsty bodies, to resist their comrades’ arrest. That’s when the Yeomanry charge, swords ready to slash and kill. Some have old scores to settle. You can hear them calling men by name as they strike. A few people storm the Quaker Meeting House. Some get in. Others flail, pinned against its walls. Then six hundred of the fifteenth Hussars arrive on horseback, brandishing clubs and sabres, led by Colonel Guy L’Estrange. As white dresses turn to red, a child falls like your discarded smock at the end of a hard day. You turn and walk from the room in deathly silence.
If such a heinous crime were to be committed today, would I be as brave as the cavalry officer who tried to strike up the swords of the Yeomanry, crying ‘For shame, gentlemen: what are you about? The people cannot get away!’ Would I risk my liberty and publish the names of the dead and injured? Would I raise money for their families? Would I speak truth to power, as some brave souls did? I’m humbled when I read that John Edward Taylor set up the Manchester Guardian in response to what he had witnessed on the sixteenth of August, 1819. I am in awe of Shelley, who wrote ‘The Masque of Anarchy,’ calling on reformers to ‘Rise like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number.’ I applaud William Hone’s book ‘The Political House that Jack Built’, illustrated by Cruikshank. Using a nursery rhyme to get its message across, it became devilishly popular, daring its critics to make a fuss in the face of such mockery. What would I do when the government responds to ordinary folk’s desperate demonstration by passing a law like the Six Acts, severely curtailing the public’s freedom to meet and protest? My body trembles as I contemplate echoes in the UK Conservative government’s determination to clamp down on peaceful protest through the Policing Act of 2022 and the Public Order Act of 2023. We can, and must, learn from the past. There must never be another Peterloo. As I age, I’m less able to march and stand for hours listening to speeches, and still less to contemplate a night in a police cell. But as Butler remarked in 1839, the pen is mightier than the sword. And so, I write.
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