190 Years After Peterloo
Article published: Friday, August 28th 2009
16 August marked the 190th anniversary of the infamous Peterloo Massacre in Manchester. Paul Fitzgerald of the Peterloo Memorial Campaign examines the meaning of how we have, and haven’t, remembered this crucial event.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the Peterloo Massacre today is how few people, particularly in Manchester, actually know it happened. Armed military and private cavalry attacked a peaceful crowd of 60,000 pro-democracy and anti-poverty protesters gathered in the area that’s now G Mex, killing 15 and injuring over 600. But given the efforts made to at first suppress, ignore and then whitewash memories of the event, maybe it’s not so surprising.
The Peterloo Memorial Campaign was set up to try and change all that – and might well be succeeding. Once we discovered that the only ‘memorial’ to Peterloo was a euphemistic blue plaque on the side of the former Free Trade Hall, we stuck our own accurate, temporary version over the top on the anniversary of the massacre. Since then, we’ve been using the media attention this gained as a platform from which to demand a full scale, permanent memorial.
It’s quite strange to be involved in a campaign that gets what it wants – the council very swiftly agreed to replace the plaque, and actually did so before the year was out, using the wording we suggested. Shortly afterwards they announced plans to create a permanent memorial, which have now been made public as the centre piece of a major redesign of St Peter’s Square. Although arguments are flying back and forth about the memorial not being on the ‘sacred ground’ of the actual massacre (between the back of the Free Trade Hall and G Mex), plans for the memorial explicitly state the design must somehow mark the real site as well.
What has now become the focus of the campaign is the ‘brief’ that will be sent out to those artists who express an interest in creating the design. It’s all too easy to imagine an abstract or ‘conceptual’ design that says nothing about what happened, that informs no-one of what went on that day. It’s important to also remember the riots that erupted in the New Cross area of Manchester in the wake of the day’s horrific events.
The 200 people who gathered for this year’s commemoration on 14 August was an impressive sight – and all of them signed the ‘memorial criteria’ petition. The campaign has deliberately steered away from advocating any particular design – after all, it’s not really up to us, and we make no pretentious claims to represent the voice of the people of Manchester. We do, however, have a definition of the type of design we want to see, one that will put an end to the long and disgraceful history of whitewashing – the design of the memorial must be ‘prominent, realistic, informative and respectful’.
Peterloo continues to be a touchstone of how well our democracy is functioning: is what happened there something that still makes some people uncomfortable? Is the idea of a memorial that clearly shows ordinary citizens protesting against poverty and political oppression, being attacked by a private army composed of their bosses, still too threatening an idea to portray realistically and vividly?
Watch this space. And if the campaign begins screaming ‘WHITEWASH!’ at the top of its voice then please-come running to our aid…
http://www.peterloomassacre.org
http://www.speechlessthebook.org
More: Manchester, Opinion
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