Peterloo Massacre (1819)

On 16 August 1819 60,000 people congregated in St Peter’s Field in Manchester, with demands for the right to vote, freedom from oppression and justice.  Despite its peaceful beginning, this was a day that would end with a bloody outcome.

Why was it called Peterloo?

From Waterloo to Manchester
In 1789 the French Revolution shook the world and the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity spread rapidly.  In Britain, less than 3% of the population could vote and the system was entirely corrupt.  The ideas of the French Revolution were therefore eagerly received and most powerfully expressed in Thomas Paine’s book, the Rights of Man (1791).  Paine’s words inspired ordinary people to question the systems they lived under, systems that had been challenged by those across the channel.  The British government prepared for war not simply to defeat the revolutionary ‘menace’ in France, but also to destroy the revolutionary ‘menace’ in Britain that Tom Paine had helped unleash.  Britain eventually won the Napoleonic Wars (1803 – 1815) against France, but at great expense and with a huge national debt.  Moreover, the militant ideas from France lived on.  Returning British soldiers, like John Lees who was a veteran of the victorious battle of Waterloo, were now living not in the prosperity of the victor, but in poverty.  Lees came from Oldham and when he returned home he continued his trade as a cotton spinner, but now with drastically reduced wages.  Lees was one of those who protested in Manchester on 16 August 1819 and, having survived the battlefield, was to lose his life at the hands of his own army in the Peterloo Massacre.  In the days that followed, the massacre was named ‘Peterloo’ by a journalist in a mocking reference to the celebrated victory at Waterloo in the Napoleonic Wars that Britain had fought.  Lees’ dying words to his friend were, at ‘Waterloo there was man to man, but at Manchester it was downright murder’.