It was most welcome to see your Long read on the Peterloo massacre (4 January), a timely call to prepare due commemoration for the 200th anniversary next year of this crucial event in British history. However, it was dispiriting to find the key speaker at the great meeting in Manchester on 16 August 1819 traduced in this article with the kind of smears deployed by present-day tabloid writers against leaders of the left. Seemingly oblivious of academic research on Henry Hunt, Stephen Bates portrays the “Orator” as egotistical and vain, insincere and hypocritical, snobbish towards workers and lubricious towards women.

Hunt was the only “gentlemanly” figure of any note prepared to address mass meetings of “distressed manufacturers, mariners, artisans and others” to demand universal manhood suffrage; to welcome female reform societies on to the platform beside him, and later, as an MP, to present a pioneer petition for female suffrage. The self-proclaimed champion of the people, it was Hunt who ensured that the radicals gathered peaceably on St Peter’s Fields on 16 August 1819, while some local organisers, including Joseph Johnson, his host in Manchester, contemplated withdrawing altogether when the magistrates banned the meeting originally planned for 9 August.

Bates asserts that the “lofty” Hunt despised Johnson on account of his lowly status as a brushmaker. What was at issue for Hunt, with his deep concern for the plight of “the operative manufacturer, the mechanic and the labourer”, was his steadfast determination to proceed at all costs with a mass meeting of the northern working class. Renowned for his stentorian voice, white hat and disputatious character, Hunt applied his undoubted vanity to good effect. Well versed in the law, he stood defiant against the authorities, challenging their every move, while using his celebrity to embolden and marshal the radicals for a great constitutional display of strength. “We have nothing to do but concentrate public opinion,” he advised Johnson, “and if our Enemies will not listen to the voice of a whole People, they will listen to nothing, and may the effects of their Folly and Wickedness be upon their own Heads.” In the commemorations of the 200th anniversary of Peterloo, Hunt should be recognised for establishing the fundamental pattern of British protest: constitutional pressure open to all for the democratic rights of all.

John Belchem

Emeritus professor of history, University of Liverpool

Chair, Society for the Study of Labour History

• What is the best way to remember and commemorate the Peterloo massacre? I would propose changing the name of Manchester’s Piccadilly railway station to Manchester Peterloo station. If Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar (1805) and Wellington’s victory over Napoleon (1815) were commemorated with a square and a station, why not Peterloo, which had immense long-term political consequences as Stephen Bates describes and, with Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, produced the greatest political poem in the English language, maybe even in all European literature. I can think of no better, more effective way of bringing it to the notice of thousands upon thousands of people, day in day out, hour after hour than to have its name being boomed out over station concourses across the whole country and printed on millions upon millions of tickets and timetables. We are all in debt to those killed and the hundreds injured that August day in Manchester in 1819. Let them be remembered. Let us repay them.

Michael Knowles

Congleton, Cheshire

• As the author of the last two scholarly books on the subject – The Casualties of Peterloo (2005) and The Friends and Following of Richard Carlile (2016) – I would like to commend Stephen Bates’ account of the Manchester massacre for recognising the event as a genuine massacre.

However, for Mancunians a major difficulty in appreciating the event has lain in the fact that the perpetrators as well as the victims were residents of Manchester. Far from being just a step on the road to democracy, it also stood as a terrible stain on Manchester’s history.

While covering the ground reasonably well, Bates’ account makes a serious omission in failing to mention the infidel and republican Richard Carlile, who was present on the platform, and his role in publicising the event as an atrocity. The illustration you printed is from a print produced by Richard Carlile, but he gets no attribution. Moreover, in publicising the event locally and nationally, Carlile’s articles in Sherwin’s Political Register and in the Republican were of vital importance in presenting it in its true colours as a major outrage.

Professor Michael Bush

London

• Stephen Bates describes the fact that Peterloo took place on Monday 16 August 1819 as “puzzling”. No more puzzling than the great Chartist demonstration at Kennington Common on 10 April 1848 – also a Monday. Well into the 19th century many workers held to Saint Monday, that is starting the working week by taking a day off, secure in the knowledge that they would be expected to work hard in the later part of the week. Employers of course hated such unpredictable behaviour and sought to impose a standard working week. With the current government attempting to scrap the working time regulations, which restrict working hours over 48 a week, perhaps it is time to bring back Saint Monday.

Keith Flett

London

• Stephen Bates has correctly stated that the Peterloo massacre marked a turning point for British democracy. All British children should therefore be taught the context and the consequences of this terrible event in Manchester in 1819. But they should also be taught by their history teachers about another massacre that took place 100 years later: the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 in Amritsar, Punjab, when more than 350 innocent Indians were shot dead, and over 1,500 severely injured, by live fire from British imperial authorities. The teaching of the two massacres is essential for understanding both the domestic and imperial history of Britain.

Burjor Avari

Manchester

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