Peterloo - 197th anniversary - featuring the Tapestry!
I must report on this year's Peterloo commemoration before it slips by. After last year's event, when several hundred people turned up to hear readings by Maxine Peake, Christopher Eccleston et al, we deliberately decided to go for something a little different, not attracting as big a crowd but trying to refocus attention on our primary goal, the Peterloo Memorial. (Our understanding is that Jeremy Deller was offered the commission two years ago, but not much seems to have happened since then.)
We decided to create a Peterloo Tapestry, and asked people to bring items which summed up what they felt about Peterloo or wanted the memorial to embody, and which could be attached to a 30-foot bolt of cloth donated by Quarry Bank Mill. After the usual Sunday marches from the various towns whose workers came to Peterloo, we assembled this in the Friends Meeting House, which is on the same site as the original Friends house from the time of Peterloo, though only the outer wall (pictured in 2011) survives from that time.
On Sunday morning, stevie-carroll drove over from Yorkshire to join me on the march from Stockport (we don't march from Didsbury, whose only known representative at Peterloo was on the wrong side, so I walk from Stockport as the nearest Peterloo town.) We took a bus to Stockport and found several marchers waiting for us, including Jane in early nineteenth-century dress and carrying her own banner to commemorate the local women who marched in 1819.
It's a seven-mile march, passing through Levenshulme and Ardwick on the way to Manchester - we take the older road which we assume was the one taken by the original marchers.
We got to St Peter's Field, site of the 1819 meeting (now the plaza in front of Manchester Central - if you were at Mancunicon, it's only a few minutes' walk from the Beetham Tower), just before one o'clock.
Maxine Peake, who has become one of our most loyal supporters over the past few years, read the names and details of fifteen people who died at Peterloo. She also did some television interviews - when I've mentioned the event to neighbours over the past week, the usual response has been "Oh yes, we saw Maxine Peake on TV!"
Political commentator Paul Mason also attended and read a letter from Henry Hunt, the chief speaker at the 1819 meeting, encouraging the people of Manchester and neighbourhood to come. Hunt warned supporters to be peaceful in carrying out "your praiseworthy and patriotic intentions": sadly, he was all too right that "Our Enemies will seek every opportunity by the means of their sanguinary agents to excite a Riot, that they may have a pretence for Spilling our Blood..."
Finally, our current Lord Mayor, Carl Austin-Behan, read Hunt's diary entry from the first anniversary of Peterloo, which began "I eat no meat this day."
At this point, I will digress to mention that Carl is a lovely man who serves as councillor in a nearby ward, and he got married to the equally lovely Simon a year ago this week. I'm so proud that they're our Lord Mayor and Consort (though Carl insists on calling Simon the Lady Mayoress!) - the first gay couple to fulfil these roles together in Manchester.
I had meant to get a photo of the crowd, but after taking pics of the speakers found myself in the middle of the crowd of marchers who were being photographed by the press, and couldn't do both things at once!
After this, we moved on to the Friends Meeting House, where I finally managed to get a photo of my marching companions:
Jofli was much admired!
Carl was a star at the Meeting House. We'd asked him to start the tapestry by placing a prepared item in the centre, and rather assumed we'd take a photo of him with needle and thread, then do the sewing ourselves. But he was determined to do the job himself, and spent several minutes stitching all the way round!
This is what he was stitching to the tapestry - a red Liberty cap, plus a disc made from one of the organ pipes from the old St Peter's Church (now demolished) which gave its name to the site of Peterloo, which we stamped with the date 1819.
We then added spindles from Quarry Bank Mill bearing ribbons with the names of the Peterloo dead.
Lots of volunteers got down and worked on the tapestry.
I had prepared three items. My main piece was an embroidered text taken from Jemima Bamford's eyewitness account of the massacre.
I was also asked to make this, listing the Peterloo Memorial Campaign's three key words summing up what we want the memorial to be:
And finally I added this, representing the Stockport pub from which we march; it's a Peterloo pub because Henry Hunt stayed there and addressed a crowd from an upper window.
Here you can see my Jemima Bamford text as part of the tapestry; the item at the bottom was knitted by Jane, who walked with us from Stockport, and commemorates Mary Heys, one of those who died at Peterloo.
These two items are the manuscript of the opening verses from Shelley's poem about Peterloo, the Masque of Anarchy, and the letter from Henry Hunt which Paul Mason had just read out.
This is an annotated page of the Masque of Anarchy, donated by Maxine Peake - she performed the poem at the Manchester International Festival in 2013.
Someone had embroidered a verse from the poem, in which Shelley depicts leading politicians as the true Anarchists, and identifies them with vices:
"Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.
And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them."
This was one of the most striking contributions, showing one of the Yeomanry and a child, presumably two-year-old William Fildes, the first person to be killed when he was knocked from his mother's arms.
There was a special tribute to William Fildes from our youngest helper, who is also two years old. He had chosen fifteen buttons from his great-grandmother's button bag to represent the people who died.
One last item: John Henshaw, the star of a recent film about the Rochdale Pioneers who set up the first successful Co-Operative shop in 1844, cut up a T-shirt with a slogan from the film:
Because the tapestry is 30 feet long, it's quite hard to get a full view of it. I took two from the gallery of the hall, and stuck them together (sorry about the wonky join).
But it's easier to photograph it from one end.
To store and carry the tapestry, we had created a drum - it's surprisingly light and easy (for two people) to lift.
So that was the end of our activity on Sunday.
Then, on Tuesday, which was the actual anniversary, we displayed the tapestry on the site of St Peter's Field and in front of the Town Hall.
I had picked up the wreath on my way into town, so arrived to find a crowd already viewing the tapestry, laid out on the site of the massacre in front of Manchester Central.
Volunteers helped us to raise the tapestry.
John Henshaw (see above) read out the names of the dead.
He then laid the wreath under the Peterloo plaque on the old Free Trade Hall (we used to hold the ceremony here, but the crowds got too big and started to spill on to the main road, so now we do most of it at Manchester Central and then a few of us take the wreath to its final resting place under the plaque, as there's a lot more footfall on Peter Street so more people will see it, and the plaque helps to explain why it's there).
While we were doing this, the main crowd were escorting the tapestry to the Town Hall, a brilliant idea which someone had suggested on Twitter on Sunday night. Because I was with the wreath, I didn't get a photo of the tapestry being carried through the streets, but That's Manchester filmed that and you can see it in this YouTube video.
We rejoined the main party in front of the Town Hall.
One of the big questions is where the tapestry will end up - because it's so long there isn't room for it in the obvious places like the People's History Museum, which has been very helpful. But Carl was rather taken with the idea of displaying it in the Town Hall, which has many long corridors, so maybe he can use his Lord Mayoral influence.
This was the final viewing of the tapestry for now, though we may have another session later in the year. We actually had more contributions than we could fit on, but there are lots of small gaps between the items; we think we may be able to unstitch and rearrange some of the larger ones to fit more in, and add small pieces bearing single words in between them.
So we rolled it up again; despite the hot August weather, we had to brush off some of the first autumn leaves that were drifting down on to the tapestry.
And then I went off to catch the end of the Roses match at Old Trafford.
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
comments.
We decided to create a Peterloo Tapestry, and asked people to bring items which summed up what they felt about Peterloo or wanted the memorial to embody, and which could be attached to a 30-foot bolt of cloth donated by Quarry Bank Mill. After the usual Sunday marches from the various towns whose workers came to Peterloo, we assembled this in the Friends Meeting House, which is on the same site as the original Friends house from the time of Peterloo, though only the outer wall (pictured in 2011) survives from that time.
On Sunday morning, stevie-carroll drove over from Yorkshire to join me on the march from Stockport (we don't march from Didsbury, whose only known representative at Peterloo was on the wrong side, so I walk from Stockport as the nearest Peterloo town.) We took a bus to Stockport and found several marchers waiting for us, including Jane in early nineteenth-century dress and carrying her own banner to commemorate the local women who marched in 1819.
It's a seven-mile march, passing through Levenshulme and Ardwick on the way to Manchester - we take the older road which we assume was the one taken by the original marchers.
We got to St Peter's Field, site of the 1819 meeting (now the plaza in front of Manchester Central - if you were at Mancunicon, it's only a few minutes' walk from the Beetham Tower), just before one o'clock.
Maxine Peake, who has become one of our most loyal supporters over the past few years, read the names and details of fifteen people who died at Peterloo. She also did some television interviews - when I've mentioned the event to neighbours over the past week, the usual response has been "Oh yes, we saw Maxine Peake on TV!"
Political commentator Paul Mason also attended and read a letter from Henry Hunt, the chief speaker at the 1819 meeting, encouraging the people of Manchester and neighbourhood to come. Hunt warned supporters to be peaceful in carrying out "your praiseworthy and patriotic intentions": sadly, he was all too right that "Our Enemies will seek every opportunity by the means of their sanguinary agents to excite a Riot, that they may have a pretence for Spilling our Blood..."
Finally, our current Lord Mayor, Carl Austin-Behan, read Hunt's diary entry from the first anniversary of Peterloo, which began "I eat no meat this day."
At this point, I will digress to mention that Carl is a lovely man who serves as councillor in a nearby ward, and he got married to the equally lovely Simon a year ago this week. I'm so proud that they're our Lord Mayor and Consort (though Carl insists on calling Simon the Lady Mayoress!) - the first gay couple to fulfil these roles together in Manchester.
I had meant to get a photo of the crowd, but after taking pics of the speakers found myself in the middle of the crowd of marchers who were being photographed by the press, and couldn't do both things at once!
After this, we moved on to the Friends Meeting House, where I finally managed to get a photo of my marching companions:
Jofli was much admired!
Carl was a star at the Meeting House. We'd asked him to start the tapestry by placing a prepared item in the centre, and rather assumed we'd take a photo of him with needle and thread, then do the sewing ourselves. But he was determined to do the job himself, and spent several minutes stitching all the way round!
This is what he was stitching to the tapestry - a red Liberty cap, plus a disc made from one of the organ pipes from the old St Peter's Church (now demolished) which gave its name to the site of Peterloo, which we stamped with the date 1819.
We then added spindles from Quarry Bank Mill bearing ribbons with the names of the Peterloo dead.
Lots of volunteers got down and worked on the tapestry.
I had prepared three items. My main piece was an embroidered text taken from Jemima Bamford's eyewitness account of the massacre.
I was also asked to make this, listing the Peterloo Memorial Campaign's three key words summing up what we want the memorial to be:
And finally I added this, representing the Stockport pub from which we march; it's a Peterloo pub because Henry Hunt stayed there and addressed a crowd from an upper window.
Here you can see my Jemima Bamford text as part of the tapestry; the item at the bottom was knitted by Jane, who walked with us from Stockport, and commemorates Mary Heys, one of those who died at Peterloo.
These two items are the manuscript of the opening verses from Shelley's poem about Peterloo, the Masque of Anarchy, and the letter from Henry Hunt which Paul Mason had just read out.
This is an annotated page of the Masque of Anarchy, donated by Maxine Peake - she performed the poem at the Manchester International Festival in 2013.
Someone had embroidered a verse from the poem, in which Shelley depicts leading politicians as the true Anarchists, and identifies them with vices:
"Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.
And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them."
This was one of the most striking contributions, showing one of the Yeomanry and a child, presumably two-year-old William Fildes, the first person to be killed when he was knocked from his mother's arms.
There was a special tribute to William Fildes from our youngest helper, who is also two years old. He had chosen fifteen buttons from his great-grandmother's button bag to represent the people who died.
One last item: John Henshaw, the star of a recent film about the Rochdale Pioneers who set up the first successful Co-Operative shop in 1844, cut up a T-shirt with a slogan from the film:
Because the tapestry is 30 feet long, it's quite hard to get a full view of it. I took two from the gallery of the hall, and stuck them together (sorry about the wonky join).
But it's easier to photograph it from one end.
To store and carry the tapestry, we had created a drum - it's surprisingly light and easy (for two people) to lift.
So that was the end of our activity on Sunday.
Then, on Tuesday, which was the actual anniversary, we displayed the tapestry on the site of St Peter's Field and in front of the Town Hall.
I had picked up the wreath on my way into town, so arrived to find a crowd already viewing the tapestry, laid out on the site of the massacre in front of Manchester Central.
Volunteers helped us to raise the tapestry.
John Henshaw (see above) read out the names of the dead.
He then laid the wreath under the Peterloo plaque on the old Free Trade Hall (we used to hold the ceremony here, but the crowds got too big and started to spill on to the main road, so now we do most of it at Manchester Central and then a few of us take the wreath to its final resting place under the plaque, as there's a lot more footfall on Peter Street so more people will see it, and the plaque helps to explain why it's there).
While we were doing this, the main crowd were escorting the tapestry to the Town Hall, a brilliant idea which someone had suggested on Twitter on Sunday night. Because I was with the wreath, I didn't get a photo of the tapestry being carried through the streets, but That's Manchester filmed that and you can see it in this YouTube video.
We rejoined the main party in front of the Town Hall.
One of the big questions is where the tapestry will end up - because it's so long there isn't room for it in the obvious places like the People's History Museum, which has been very helpful. But Carl was rather taken with the idea of displaying it in the Town Hall, which has many long corridors, so maybe he can use his Lord Mayoral influence.
This was the final viewing of the tapestry for now, though we may have another session later in the year. We actually had more contributions than we could fit on, but there are lots of small gaps between the items; we think we may be able to unstitch and rearrange some of the larger ones to fit more in, and add small pieces bearing single words in between them.
So we rolled it up again; despite the hot August weather, we had to brush off some of the first autumn leaves that were drifting down on to the tapestry.
And then I went off to catch the end of the Roses match at Old Trafford.
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
comments.