The Peterloo Massacre took place at St Peter's Field, Manchester, Lancashire, England, on Monday 16 August 1819. Eighteen people died and 400–700 were injured when cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.
Samuel Bamford was an English radical reformer and writer born in Middleton, Lancashire. He wrote on the subject of northern English dialect and wrote some of his better known verse in it.
Joseph Rayner Stephens was a Methodist minister who offended the Wesleyan Conference by his support for separating the Church of England from the State. Resigning from the Wesleyan Connection, he became free to campaign for factory reform, and against the New Poor Law. He became associated with 'physical force' Chartism and spent eighteen months in jail for his presence at an unlawful assembly and his use there of seditious language. Born in Edinburgh in 1805, he moved to Manchester when his minister father was posted there in 1819. During his religious career, he worked in a variety of places before arriving in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1832. He was the brother of the philologist George Stephens.; three of his other brothers emigrated to Southern Australia and played their parts in the early years of that colony.
The Radical War, also known as the Scottish Insurrection of 1820, was a week of strikes and unrest in Scotland, a culmination of Radical demands for reform in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland which had become prominent in the early years of the French Revolution, but had then been repressed during the long Napoleonic Wars.
John Fielden was a British industrialist and Radical Member of Parliament for Oldham (1832–1847).
The Spa Fields riots were incidents of public disorder arising out of the second of two mass meetings at Spa Fields, Islington, England on 15 November and 2 December 1816.
William J. Oliver, (?1774–1827) also known as Oliver the Spy, W. J. Richards and W. O. Jones, was a police informer and supposed agent provocateur at a time of social unrest, immediately after the Napoleonic Wars.
William Benbow was a nonconformist preacher, pamphleteer, pornographer and publisher, and a prominent figure of the Reform Movement in Manchester and London. He worked with William Cobbett on the radical newspaper Political Register, and spent time in prison as a consequence of his writing, publishing and campaigning activities. He has been credited with formulating and popularising the idea of a general strike for the purpose of political reform.
Robert Poole is a UK-based historian, currently professor of history at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston. He gained his PhD from the University of Lancaster in 1986, where he was associated with Prof Harold Perkin's Centre for Social History, organising the 1996 conference of the Social History Society on 'Time and the Construction of the Past'. He has also held positions at the universities of Keele, Edge Hill and Cumbria. He has also been Leverhulme Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Manchester (2000-1), an associate of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester (2010–17), an associate of 'The Future in the Stars' research programme, Friedrich-Meinecke Institut, Freie Universität Berlin (2012–16), and visiting senior research fellow to the History Group, University of Hertfordshire (2013–15).
Burnley Barracks was a military installation at Burnley in Lancashire, England. Built for cavalry, but later used for infantry and storage, military activities at the barracks declined in the late 19th century.
The Manchester and Salford Yeomanry cavalry was a short-lived yeomanry regiment formed in response to social unrest in northern England in 1817. The volunteer regiment became notorious for its involvement in the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, in which as many as 15 people were killed and 400–700 were injured. Often referred to simply as the Manchester Yeomanry, the regiment was disbanded in 1824.
The Manchester Gazette was a conformist non-Tory newspaper based in Manchester, England.
The Hampden Clubs were political campaigning and debating societies formed in England in the early 19th century as part of the Radical Movement. They were particularly concentrated in the Midlands and the northern counties, and were closely associated with the popular movements for social and political reform that arose in the years following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. They were forced underground, and eventually disbanded in the face of legislation and pressure from the authorities.
Elijah Dixon was a textile worker, businessman, and agitator for social and political reform from Newton Heath, Manchester, England. He was prominent in the 19th century Reform movement in industrial Lancashire, and an associate of some of its leading figures, including Ernest Jones, and his obituary claims that he was called "the Father of English Reformers". His activism led to arrest and detention for suspected high treason, alongside some other leading figures of the movement, and he was present at key events including the Blanketeers' March and the Peterloo massacre. In later life he became a successful and wealthy manufacturer. He was the uncle of William Hepworth Dixon.
The labour movement or labor movement consists of two main wings: the trade union movement or labor union movement on the one hand, and the political labour movement on the other.
Mary Fildes was president of the Manchester Female Reform Society in 1819, and played a leading role at the mass rally at Manchester in that year which ended in the Peterloo massacre. She was also the grandmother of the artist Luke Fildes through her son James.
Peterloo is a 2018 British historical drama, written and directed by Mike Leigh, based on the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. The film was selected to be screened in the main competition section of the 75th Venice International Film Festival. The film received its UK premiere on 17 October 2018, as part of the BFI London Film Festival, at HOME in Manchester. The screening marked the first time that the festival had held a premiere outside London. Leigh said he was delighted that Peterloo would be premiered "where it happened".
Charles Wickstead Ethelston, also given as Wicksted (1767–1830) was an English cleric, now remembered for the part he played in his role as magistrate on 16 August 1819, ahead of the Peterloo massacre.
William Robert Hay (1761–1839) was a British barrister, cleric and magistrate, one of the Manchester group associated with the Peterloo Massacre.
Thomas Evans was a British revolutionary conspirator. Active in the 1790s and the period 1816–1820, he is otherwise a shadowy character, known mainly as a hardline follower of Thomas Spence.
