IT was 203 years ago this month that the Peterloo Massacre took place.

On Monday August 16, 1819, a crowd of around 60,000 men, women and children assembled in St Peter’s Field, Manchester to hear radical orator Henry Hunt speak in support of their call for political representation. Many had walked miles on that sunny summers day. Many were in their Sunday best. Organisers called for discipline and the crowd was good humoured. Hunt was anxious that nothing should happen that might give the authorities any excuse to disrupt the event.

Soon after Hunt mounted the rostrum, magistrates read the Riot Act and called upon the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to enforce the magistrates’ will. The Yeomanry who’d been drinking, and had their sabres sharpened, rode amuck through the crowd in what one historian described as a riot, not of the crowd but the military. Within minutes at least 15 were dead or dying and many hundreds injured.

The years up to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 had seen economic depression affecting manual workers particularly badly. Developments in textiles saw handloom workers driven into poverty while the Corn Laws saw the price of bread, staple of the poor, reach prices many struggled to afford. People starved. In several parts of the north, craftsmen in textile trades banded together to destroy factory owners’ new machines. In 1812, machine breaking was made a capital offence. Luddites attacked Rawfolds Mill, Cleckheaton, with two killed, and a mill manager returning to Huddersfield. In 1817 Jeremiah Brandreth, a stocking weaver, became the last man beheaded in Britain after he was cut down from the gallows at Derby.

The return of soldiers demobbed after Waterloo in 1815 put a greater strain on employment. Accounts by local magistrates suggest little sympathy for the rigours faced by the poor. Sentences for minor infringements were savage, perhaps from fear that revolution in France might cross the Channel.

Meanwhile, Sunday schools taught many of the poor to read and write and groups formed calling for political reform. From a Stockport Sunday school arose a development still surprising 203 years on - Female Reform Societies throughout Lancashire in the weeks leading to Peterloo. Several of the Manchester Female Reform Society, including president Mary Fildes, were on the hustings with Orator Hunt. As she tried to escape, her dress was caught on a nail and she appears to have been singled out for sabre attack. Records show women were victims of attack out of proportion to their numbers and many wounds were from sabre cuts to breasts.

News of the massacre quickly spread nationwide; public subscriptions and even the name given the event showed where people’s sympathies lay. But in the clampdown that followed, Hunt and several organisers were arrested and imprisoned while many, including Mary Fildes were forced to lie low. Those who wished to see improvement in the lives of poor working people would have to wait until 1832 and the Great Reform Act.

An enduring theme of Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo is the terrible disconnect between the Prince Regent and political class and the struggles of ordinary folk. Recently, a commentator warned that the consequences of current economic dislocation might be as dire as suffered in Britain in the Napoleonic Wars. I wonder if today’s political classes will prove any wiser than their Regency predecessors in forestalling discontent.