As Manchester prepares to commemorate 200 years since the events at Peterloo, About Manchester takes a look at another incident which claimed at least over one dozen lives and causalities into the hundreds.

The then small village of Middleton on the road from Manchester to Middleton would in 1812 witness scenes that some may argue were a precurser to the events at Peter Fields seven year later.

Britain was still at war with Napoleonic France and the North of England was in the grip of the followers of Ned Ludd, who broke into mills and workshops to destroy the new machinery that they believed threatened their rights to sell their labour for a profit.

Their power was exerted as much through rumour as action. Factory owners were Owners threatened before hand with the letter advising that Ned would be visiting.

That April had seen a steam loom factory in Stockport come under attack and with food prices rising there began three days of rioting around the food markets which saw food is seized and pelted at the merchants, potatoes a favourite, their price after a bad harvest high. 

There is further rioting around New Cross and Knotts Mill, a meal cart is overturned in Miles Platting and a shop is emptied of its contents on Deansgate.

The Luddites meanwhile turned their attention to the factory of Daniel Burton & Sons in Middleton which utilised mechanised steam looms.

Emanuel Burton had been warned trouble was brewing and had armed around forty to fifty of his employees, drilling them in the use of firearms for weeks.

The scenes were gruesome, crowds gathered, estimated at three thousand and a pistol fired from the crowd was the signal for proceedings to begin. A group of boys leading the crowd began shouting and then threw stones which broke windows in the mill. The crowd joined in and then attempts were made to try to force entry.

Burton ordered his workers inside the compound to fire blank cartridges to try and scare the crowd off, around fifty discharged over fifteen minutes or so, but the crowd soon realised the shots aimed at them weren’t finding any kind of target.

Samuel Bamford present at the scene would later write of a cry going around the crowd.

“Oh! they’re nobbu feyerin peawther; they darno shoot bullets” and the crowd, unintimidated, renewed their attempts to get into the mill.

Seeing this, Burton decided to use live ammunition and in the ensuing battle at least five of the crowd were shot dead with at least eighteen injured. The crowd began to disperse in fear and a troop of Scots Greys and a detachment of Cumberland Militia arrived from Manchester and cleared the streets with the Militia taking up residence at the mill.

That wasn’t to be the end of the violence.More would die the following day as crowds had gathered again in greater numbers and augmented by a large number of Colliers from Hollinwood and Saddleworth, some of whom were carrying shotguns, most carrying pickaxes.

With the militia guarding the factory a group turned their attention to the Burton House where as Bamford describes

“the mob immediately ransacked the cellars and larder, the younger ones crunching lumps of loaf sugar or licking out preserve jars, whilst the older hands tapped the beer barrels and the spirit bottles, or devoured the choice but substantial morsels of the pantry or store-room. This part of the business having been accomplished, the work of destruction commenced, and nearly every article of furniture was irretrievably broken.”

The authorities were worried, there were rumours of Jacobean oaths being delivered and as the crowd once again descended on the mill, more shots were fired. Again we have Bamford’s account

“A man named John Nield, from Oldham, was shot through the body by one of the Greys whilst attempting to escape near Alkrington Hall; another man was shot by one of the Greys, and left for dead, near Tonge Lane; a woman, also, who was looking through her own window, was fired at by another of the same party, and a bullet went through her arm. But a Serjeant of the Militia earned deathless execration by shooting an old man, named Johnson, from Oldham. Johnson had never been nearer to the mob or the factory than the Church public house, where he had sat in the kitchen with the family, and had smoked his pipe and drunk a glass or two of ale. Towards evening, when it was supposed that all the disturbance was over, he strolled into the churchyard, and was standing with his hands in his coat pockets, reading the inscription on a grave-stone at the steeple end, when a Serjeant and private of the Militia, having ascended the Warren, caught sight of him from mongst the trees; the Serjeant went down on one knee, levelled, fired, and killed the old man dead, the ball passing through his neck.”

In all it was estimated that another twelve were dead and up to one hundred injured. Figures that if correct would put it on a par with Peterloo.

Here the militia claimed provocation, armed protesters would have fired firstly into their ranks.

Luddism was to die out almost as quickly as it started in Lancashire but it was only the interlude in the radicalism movement which would be stubbed out on a fateful summer day at St Peter’s fields in 1819.

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