The specials’ blood was already up, according to Bamford, as one of their number had been severely beaten for spying on the Middleton men drilling the night before.19 The magistrates swore and signed an affidavit for Hunt’s arrest and that of other leading radicals, on the grounds that an immense mob had collected and they considered the town in danger. Joseph Nadin, the Deputy Constable, claimed that he could not serve the affidavit without using military force. ‘Then you shall have military force. For God’s sake don’t sacrifice the lives of the Special Constables,’ William Hulton, the chairman of the magistrates, replied. These orders were then passed to Colonel Guy L’Estrange – in charge of the professional soldiers in the absence of General Byng, who was busy enjoying himself at York races – as well as to Major Trafford, commander of the Manchester Yeomanry. Eyewitnesses reported that the yeomanry were already drunk by this point. ‘He could hardly sit on his horse, he was so drunk, he sat like a monkey,’ it was reported of one of them.
The orders were received first by the yeomanry, led by Hugh Birley, a local factory owner. They set off into Cooper Street, heading towards the house where the magistrates were sitting, to receive fuller orders. Their hasty advance brought the first casualty of the day: a baby in the arms of one Mrs Ann Fildes was wounded when she was knocked down by a horse.20 The Chief Constable now informed Birley that he had an arrest warrant that required military assistance to execute. He ordered Birley to take his cavalry to the hustings so that the speakers could be removed.
By this point, around 1.40 p.m., Hunt had just begun to address the crowds. They were now all so tightly packed around the hustings that one eyewitness, Elizabeth Healey, recalled she had to get out as she was struggling to breathe in the crush. She had a lucky escape. Hunt’s words were soon drowned out by the noise of approaching horses. He ordered the crowd to stand firm: ‘They are in disorder already. This is a trick. Give them three cheers.’ Hunt was right about the disorder: the inexperienced cavalry, with their freshly sharpened sabres unsheathed, had lost all composure, the troops fragmenting as each man pressed on towards the hustings, hacking, beating and trampling the crowd out of the way. As Bamford recalled,
[the cavalry] were in confusion: they evidently could not, with all the weight of man and horse, penetrate that compact mass of human beings; and their sabres were plied to hew a way through naked held-up hands, and defenceless heads; and then chopped limbs, and wound gaping skulls were seen; and groans and cries were mingled with the din of that horrid confusion.21
Once they had cut their way through the crowd, the yeomanry and special constables quickly set upon those on the platform. Mary Fildes was dragged from the hustings, her white dress catching on a nail. As she tried to free herself, she was slashed across the body with a sabre. Thirty-five people were dragged before the magistrates, including the reporter John Tyas and a heavily pregnant woman, Mrs Elizabeth Gaunt. Gaunt was badly beaten and later thrown into the New Bailey Prison, where she was kept in solitary confinement and physically abused.22 Henry Hunt alleged that, having been taken down from the hustings, he was abandoned by Officers Nadin and Andrew so that the yeomanry might cut him to pieces:
But I stuck to Nadin as my shield and buckler. They reached over his head and cut my hat; and my hand was also slightly cut. They then wheeled round and came again; but I wheeled round also, and still presented Nadin in front. When I got to the door I found my hat thrust off; I put my head on one side, and instantly there came upon my shoulder a blow from a bludgeon, which would have murdered me if it had come upon my bare head.23
With the speakers off the platform, the yeomanry went on the rampage, kicking up a cloud of dust that obscured the goings-on from the eyes of the magistrates peering down from 6 Mount Street. At 1.50 p.m., the Hussars, led by Colonel L’Estrange, were ordered to assist them, the chairman of the magistrates William Hulton telling him ‘[the protesters] are attacking the Yeomanry. Disperse them.’ (Some witnesses had seen stones and sticks being hurled at the yeomanry, but only after they had charged the crowd with swords drawn.) L’Estrange obeyed, forming his men into a line across the eastern end of the field, who then charged the crowd. They were joined by the Cheshire Yeomanry, attacking from the south. The fleeing crowd, trapped between these advancing troops, found their escape through Peter Street blocked by the 88th Infantry’s bayonets. Meanwhile, the yeomanry were warming to their task, hurling insults between blows: ‘Damn you, I’ll reform you’ – ‘I’ll let you know I’m a soldier today’ – ‘Spare your lives? Damn your bloody lives.’ The worst carnage occurred by the Friends’ meeting house as the demonstrators were hemmed in by the infantry and pursued by the Hussars. ‘The people came in great crowds past my door, and a parcel of them beat down the fence,’ a woman living near by reported.
The people were so pressed they could not get away. They kept cutting them in the corner, and the shrieks would astonish you, and they were laying on them all the time as hard as they could, and an officer belonging to the soldiers came up and said, ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, for shame forbear. The people cannot get away.’ Just as he was saying so the rail broke and let a whole number of people into my cellar.
The woman at the bottom of this human avalanche, Martha Partington from Eccles, was ‘took up dead’.24
Samuel Bamford recalled the hideous scene in the wake of the carnage:
The sun looked down through a sultry and motionless air … over the whole field, were strewed caps, bonnets, hats, shawls, and shoes, and other parts of male and female dress; trampled, torn, and bloody. The yeomanry had dismounted – some easing their horses’ girths … some wiping their sabres. Several mounds of human beings still remained where they had fallen, crushed down and smothered. Some of these still groaning – others with staring eyes, were gasping for breath and others would never breathe more. All was silent save those low sounds, and the occasional snorting and pawing of steeds.25
As a direct or indirect result of the actions of the yeomanry and the professional soldiers at Peterloo, fifteen people were killed and 654 are known to have been wounded, the majority seriously. The aftermath of the meeting was grimly recorded in the press. The Observer noted six coaches, three carts and three litters carrying away the wounded. The Star reported:
All the roads leading from Manchester to Ashton, Stockport, Cheadle, Bury, Bolton are covered with wounded stragglers, who have not yet been able to reach their houses after the events of Monday … There are 17 wounded persons along the Stockport Road; 13–14 on the Ashton Road; at least 20 on the Oldham Road; 7 or 8 on the Rochdale Road, besides several others on the roads to Liverpool.26
The violence did not end with the dispersal of the meeting. Rioting in the deprived New Cross area on the evening of the 16th led to two deaths. Two days later, a special constable, Robert Campbell, was killed in a revenge attack.27
Thanks to the pioneering work of Michael Bush, we now know perhaps as much as we ever will about the human cost of Peterloo. The surviving casualty lists that he has collated make for grim and revealing reading and explode a number of myths concerning the events of 16 August 1819.
For one, they make it impossible to challenge the label ‘massacre’. The number of injured used to be accepted as around four hundred persons out of a total of sixty thousand. We now know the number to be far higher, and Bush suggests that a figure of over seven hundred injured is not unrealistic. The imprecision is partly due to the incompleteness of the casualty lists (some known to have been compiled no longer survive), but also to the fact that those with minor – and even some major – injuries feared the repercussions of admitting that they had attended the meeting. William Marsh of Chorlton Row in Manchester received a sabre wound to the back of the head; his body was crushed and his left leg broken when he was trampled by horses. His three children worked at the cavalry leader Hugh Birley’s factory. When Birley found out that their father had been at the meeting, he sacked them.28 Jonathan Clarke, a hatter of Reddish near Stockport with
seven children, one newly born, was unable to work and so unable to pay the rent on account of his injuries. His landlord, branding him a reformer, seized his goods and chattels in lieu of the unpaid rent, selling them for £2 4s.
James Lees of Delph, a twenty-five-year-old weaver, was admitted to the Infirmary with two severe sabre wounds to the head, but dismissed untreated when he refused to say, as required by the chief surgeon, that ‘he had had enough of Manchester meetings’.29 The danger of revealing one’s presence at the meeting was such that some probably died in secret rather than seek medical help.30 John Rhodes, of 3 Pits Hopwood, who also received a severe sabre wound to the head, was found ‘wandering about bloody’ by a woman who ‘took him into her house, shaved off the hair and put on a plaister. He was dreadfully bruised internally so that he has not since held up his head and died about 18 November.’ The coroner’s inquest, presided over by the inappropriately named Kinder Wood, found that the cause of death was ‘the diseased state of the belly and chest, and so due to “natural causes and not external injury”’.31
Women feature prominently among the lists of those injured: though they made up only one in eight of the crowd, they constitute one in three of the recorded casualties. Apologists for the yeomanry and magistracy have argued that a high proportion of women were injured because they were more liable to be crushed by the crowd. However, this is contradicted by the evidence from the lists, which shows that most of the injuries sustained by women were the result either of sabre or truncheon blows or of being trampled by cavalry.32
What is more, women were clearly singled out for particularly brutal treatment by the yeomanry. Elizabeth Farren was attacked by a yeoman called Tebbutt. She received a deep sabre wound to the forehead and fell to the ground. Tebbutt continued his attack as she fell, causing her to drop her child, who was also struck by a blow from his sword. What made the attack even more horrific was that Tebbutt was not a stranger, but one of Farren’s neighbours.33 Elizabeth, Ellen and Isabella Harvey were all badly beaten, crushed and cut. Elizabeth was ‘Thrown down and trampled on, the flesh trod off her neck and face; shoulders, knees and ankle hurt severely’. Ellen was struck so hard by a sabre blow that it cut through her quarter-inch-thick whalebone stays. No relief was awarded to any of them because their family were ‘respectable people’ who would not accept charity.34 Mary Heys of Rawlinson Buildings, a mother of six children, her husband almost blind, was trampled under foot by a cavalry horse, ripping the flesh off her legs and feet. She was pregnant at the time. Following Peterloo, she suffered from almost daily seizures. Her child was born two months prematurely; Mary died during labour.35
The attacks on women at Peterloo clearly breached norms of masculine behaviour. The violence meted out to female reformers had been encouraged before that event by loyalist propaganda and, indeed, even by some reformist literature that viewed women’s participation in politics with disdain. In populist loyalist works like Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts, female reformers were presented as revolutionary termagants who had abandoned their domestic duties for politics. In one such tract, a male radical complains, ‘Why I must own that since our Debby has turned speechmaker, the children [are] all in rags, and I can’t get a clean shirt.’36 Female reformers were portrayed not just as neglectful of their matrimonial and maternal responsibilities but as sluts and whores. The Manchester Exchange Herald recorded: ‘The Public scarcely need to be informed, that the females are women well known to be the most abandoned of their sex.’ The New Times stated: ‘We cannot conceive that any but a hardened and shameless Prostitute would have the audacity to appear on the hustings on such an occasion and for such a purpose.’
This misogynistic invective was accompanied by similarly vicious popular prints. George Cruikshank’s The Belle Alliance: or, the Female Reformers of Blackburn depicted the women on the platform as sub-human, grotesques, barely clothed in shabby undergarments.37 The print is loaded with crude sexual innuendo. One female reformer holds a cap of liberty on a pole coming out from between a man’s legs. The women’s banner carries an image of St George besting the dragon – a clear reference to the slang term for sex with the woman on top, ‘riding St George’ – a literal sign of a sexual world turned upside down.38 A similar image by J. L. Marks, Much Wanted, a Reform among Females, presented female reformers as empty-headed, rosy-cheeked slatterns. Here the sexual imagery is even more blatant than in Cruikshank, with women holding obviously phallic rolled petitions and remonstrances. One woman has her hands clasped downwards in front of her in the form of a vagina. In the crowd, a woman carrying a washing-tub on her head appears unperturbed by a male hand groping her breast.39
Unfortunately, male reformers were not much more enlightened than loyalist propagandists and printmakers. Wooler’s Black Dwarf, in an 1818 editorial, reacted to ‘female politicians’ with an elaborate fantasy about women lawyers and clergymen, archly insinuating, ‘Gladly we would embrace such legislative bodies.’ Returning to the familiar theme of ‘the world turned upside down’, the editor speculated that if women were given political rights, men would only be allowed to be nurses and milkmaids.40
In the aftermath of Peterloo there was some sympathy for the women victims and in some cases, such as that of the radical publisher Richard Carlile, the event converted some male reformers to the cause of female political emancipation. However, compassion for the women reformers’ suffering was most often tempered by the persistence of conventional patriarchal attitudes. Cruikshank famously performed a dramatic pictorial about-face with his post-Peterloo print, Britons Strike Home, which depicted corpulent, drunken yeomen cavalry cutting down and trampling defenceless women, some with babes-in-arms. While we know that incidents of this kind did happen at Peterloo, women were presented here as passive victims and returned to traditional, motherly roles.41 This representation contrasts with the testimonies of eyewitnesses, which suggest that women forcibly resisted the military. Bamford recalled ‘a young married woman, with her face all bloody’, presumably from having suffered a sabre cut. Her bonnet had ‘slipped off her head and was hanging from her neck by the string’. Cradled in her apron was a supply of stones which she hurled at the cavalry until, according to Bamford, ‘she fell backwards and was near being taken; but she got away covered with severe bruises’.42 Equally, though The Times’s John Tyas may have indicted the yeomanry for their behaviour on 16 August, he also criticised women for being present at all. Ventriloquising his own feelings through the mouths of ‘local women’ who abused the female reformers, Tyas told his readers that it would have been better if they had stayed at home and left politics to their husbands.43
The government itself was utterly unapologetic, reiterating the loyalist commonplace that a female reformer was barely a woman at all. Lord Castlereagh, in his defence of the repressive ‘Six Acts’, stated that there was no provision for a law against women’s political participation because ‘when the French republicans were carrying on their bloody orgies, they could find no female to join them except by ransacking the bagnios and public brothels’.44* Of course, dehumanisation via hostile propaganda has historically been an important precondition for massacre, and even genocide: the root of the word ‘massacre’ itself is related to the Old French word for a butcher’s block. A year before the Great Reform Act, for instance, the British authorities in Tasmania instituted a ‘pheasant drive’ against the remaining aboriginal population, thereby bringing off the only totally successful genocide in human history.45 Similarly, the yeomanry at Peterloo had been consistently encouraged through loyalist imagery and print to see female reformers as less than women, less than human. E. P. Thompson described Peterloo as a ‘class war’, but it was also a vicious battle of the sexes.46
A habitual refrain of conservative writing on Peterloo has been that the ‘tragedy’ was only an ‘unfortunate’ consequence of the panicked actions of non-professional soldiers and cavalry. This is unsupportable. The casualty lists present many instances i
n which the actions of the yeomanry clearly moved beyond ‘dispersing’ the crowd to gratuitous acts of violence. One man, Patrick Reynolds, was separated from the crowd and chased by the cavalry into a lime pit, receiving severe chemical burns.47 William Cheetham of Little Bolton was badly cut on the back of the neck by a yeoman called Meagher, who appears in other depositions as a particularly nasty piece of work. In this instance he had ordered the crowd to disperse, to which Cheetham had responded, ‘Give us room to pass.’ Meagher then moved his horse a little and, as Cheetham went betwixt him and the wall, cut him, saying: ‘I will cutt off your damn’d head.’49 Neither were the professional soldiers, the Hussars, any more restrained. They feature less prominently on the casualty lists only because they entered the fray later than the yeomanry. Peter Warburton was pinned to the Quaker meeting house wall, sustaining seven cuts to his head and body from the sabres of the 15th Hussars. Charles Washington described how the Hussars had entered the chapel yard, hacking down people who had sought refuge within its walls. The soldiers of the 88th Infantry contributed to the bloodshed by cutting off escape routes from St Peter’s Fields. They stabbed people in the stomach, back, arms and head with their bayonets, or clubbed them to the ground with the butts of their muskets. Joseph Ogden was attempting to get home when he was stabbed in the head with a bayonet, then clubbed with the musket butt, leaving him disabled for six weeks.50
The most persistent myth concerning Peterloo is that it turned the tide of opinion towards political reform. Leaving aside the problem with the chronology here – it took another thirteen years for a very limited reform bill to pass through Parliament – this idea is not supported by the response to the event either by loyalists or by those sympathetic to reform. In the wake of Peterloo, a compensation fund was established by national and regional relief committees. These committees were run by ‘respectable’ reformers like the Manchester businessman Archibald Prentice. The sums dispensed are a telling reflection of the value placed by middle-class radicals on the lives of those who suffered at Peterloo. Seventy per cent of the payments made were for sums under £2 – pitifully small amounts in cases where the injuries meant that individuals were unable to work for weeks or even months on end. Owen McCabe received a mere £9 compensation, though he was condemned to walk on crutches for the rest of his life.51 Joshua Whitworth’s father, a man of seventy who was largely supported by his son, who was killed by a musket shot on the night of the 16th, received just £4 from the relief committee.52 In fact, though these committees raised thousands of pounds, most of the money went not to the largely poor casualties of Peterloo but to pay legal fees for the defence of the reform leaders. The contrast could not be greater between the suffering of Elizabeth Gaunt, thrown into the New Bailey, and the ‘tribulations’ of Henry Hunt in Ilchester Gaol. While the severely beaten Gaunt languished in solitary confinement, Hunt was enjoying convivial evenings with the gaoler and his wife, dining on fine turbot ‘presented by the radicals of Plymouth’ – other gifts included bottles of wine and gin, sugar loaf, grapes, apricots and pears – and listening to piano recitals by his ward, Miss Grey.53
A Radical History Of Britain Page 34
