Peterloo

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.

The film has a great deal of exposition to deal with, in order to fill in the political and social background, and this is generally achieved without too much sense of lecturing. The workers are presented as being far from ignorant or inarticulate, so that their explanations to one another, and the tensions arising out of some of their meetings, become the route into setting the scene as much as the vignettes of Government ministers (especially the Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth) and the Manchester authorities. 

Wisely, Mike Leigh has let events and pronouncements speak for themselves with litte overt judgement or heavy-handed pointing towards a desired audience reaction. THee was after all a genuine fear that revolution might spread from France (or even, a generation or more further on, from the United States), and vested interests (landed and indstrial) of course had a supreme confidence in their right to rule and dominate, and in the duty of workers to be subservient and grateful. On the other hand, workers' lives were unrelentingly hard, and the tariffs made food expensive, while the lack of representation in Parliament made a mockery of any sense that reform might be initiated there. (Manchester itself, by now a thriving industrial city, had no MP since it was insignificant when the county and borough constituencies were drawn up.)

The result is a film which repays close attention and which shows how irreconcilable opinions about social order and political rights led to a disastrous outcome. The differing personalities, the idealism of the organisers, the vanity of Henry Hunt, the initial scepticism of ordinary people gradually won over to some sort of optimism, and their terror at physical danger, are all portrayed in an unfussy style which renders our response less a matter of easy emotional outrage (all too often the aim of films looking at past injustices) and more an opportunity for sober reflection. The authorities are not depicted in a particularly favourable light, but neither are they unduly demonised, apart from their unerring tendency to condemn themselves out of their own mouths (at least to modern ears); the complete fatuousness of the Prince Regent is revealed in a short scene which speaks volumes in just a few sentences.

We can, among other things, be glad to live in a time and a country where popular marches of protest are not met with mounted soldiery, even if the government still largely chooses to ignore or discount the demands being made; but equally we cannot fail to notice that vested interests are very powerful and have barely had their sense of entitlement dented.