Filming Peterloo in the Age of Brexit

In his interviews on Peterloo, Mike Leigh insists that the event on which the film is based is a forgotten incident in British history. I was somewhat surprised at this, because I am roughly the same vintage as the filmmaker and became familiar with the story at the age of sixteen. How is it that a southerner knows the tale, when Leigh, who hails from Salford in Manchester, knows next to nothing, particularly when the event occurred a short bus ride from his home? Part of the answer has to do with secondary school examinations. I took 19thcentury English political history as one of my advanced-level examinations, and Peterloo, the brutal suppression of a reform meeting in Manchester on 16 August 1819, was front and centre of any assessment of the administration of Lord Liverpool. My knowledge of the event was reinforced at graduate school, when social history became the rage. Peterloo is central to the making of the English working class. In E. P. Thompson's narrative, it occupied a critical juncture in the early working-class movement, as the mass platform of constitutional assembly began to displace the clandestine, insurrectionary impulses of Luddism and radical secret societies.¹

I don't know whether Leigh ever read Thompson's classic text, but his observation that Peterloo is not well known, even in his native Manchester, can be attributed partly to its gradual and uneven erasure from popular memory.² Celebrated by the Chartists as an unprecedented attack upon working people, particularly at moments when the rights of free speech and public assembly were threatened, the Peterloo martyrs and their flags resonated in public memory. By midcentury, Manchester Liberals had appropriated Peterloo as a formative step in the progress of reform, although the notion that Peterloo was in any way a "massacre" continued to be disputed by Conservatives, who managed to block suggestions that the event should inform the frescoes that decorated the New Town Hall in 1877. This contested memory meant that by the early 20th century there were only two memorials in Greater Manchester dedicated to Peterloo – more specifically, to Henry Hunt, the central speaker at the 1819 reform meeting.³ While suffragettes and left-wing groups strove to keep Peterloo in the lexicon of radical labour history, at its centenary and beyond, Peterloo did not feature in the historical pageant organized for Civil Week in 1926, the year of the general strike, or at the centenary of Manchester's municipal charter in 1938. A painting depicting the Peterloo Massacre was commissioned for the new Free Trade Hall after the blitz of 1940, but amid controversy and hostility from the city's Conservative faction, it was relegated to a spot in the rear foyer. The Labour-controlled council of the 1970s tried to rename Peter Street after Peterloo, but when confronted with business opposition it settled for a fairly anodyne plaque on Free Trade Hall that mentioned only the "dispersal of the crowd by the military."⁴ Indeed, when St. Peter's Field became a shopping precinct, it led an obscure life on the side of the Radisson hotel. In 2007, a Peterloo Memorial Campaign (pmc) was launched to produce a more robust memory of the event, and after ten years' hard campaigning this has finally borne fruit. A landscaped hill, made from concentric steps, is in place in time for the 2019 bicentenary, close to where the massacre took place. It has taken a lot of political will to get there. Leigh's film is part of this bicentennial effort to put a critical event in British and Mancunian working-class history firmly back in public memory. It is important to note that Maxine Peake, one of Leigh's principal actors in Peterloo and a local left-wing celebrity, has performed the ritual of reading the names of the dead at the annual meetings of the pmc.

Leigh may have exaggerated the amnesia surrounding Peterloo, but he is essentially correct in asserting that the massacre has low visibility...