seen on 2 November 2018
Mike Leigh directs a large cast including Maxine Peake, Pierce Quigley, Rory Kinnear, Karl Johnson and Tim McInnerney in an almost documentary style film about the build up to a popular march by the working classes in and around Manchester which took place in August 1819 to demand political reform and relief from the Corn Laws, which was broken up by armed and mounted soldiers and local yeomanry, acting after the Riot Act had been read on behalf of magistrates and the mill-owning gentry.
Contemporary accounts emphasise that the crowd was good-natured and orderly, with many women and children present and dressed in their Sunday best; the organisers had eschewed the carrying of any implements that could be used as weapons (sticks, cudgels, or farm tools). Some 60000 gathered in St Peters Field, and the soldiers marched and rode in with drawn cutlasses once the fiery orator Henry Hunt began speaking, in order to support his arrest. Amidst the confusion and in the relatively confined space, about a dozen civilians were killed and perhaps 600 to 700 wounded.
The term 'Peterloo' was coined by the editor of the Manchester Observer (the newspaper which had promoted the meeting) in order to link the location (St Peters Field) with the Battle of Waterloo (1815) to point up the hideous irony that soldiers who had recently been protecting the nation were now being turned upon its own unarmed citizenry.
