In the fourth of our series dedicated to the campaign to create a statue in the city dedicated to women, we look at Margaret Downes. 

We don’t know her age, we do know that she was one of the casualties on an August Day in 1819 in Manchester.

Historians  believe that eighteen people were killed and around seven hundred were injured when a peaceful crowd that had assembled to demand the reform of Parliament at Peter’s Fields close to where the Midland Hotel stands today, was attackedby armed soldiers and yeomanry.

Among the deaths were four women Mary Hays of Chorlton Row , trampled by cavalry, Sarah Jones of Manchester, truncheoned Martha Partington, of Barton, crushed in a cellar and Margaret Downes, cut down by a sabre as the Yeomen charged into the crowd and dreadfully cut in the breast.
Women played a big part in the movement for reform that culminated in the events of August 1819 when between sixty and eighty thousand assembled to hear Henry Hunt speak, and after the charge of the Yeomanary in the crowds as they made to arrest the speakers, they played their part as well.

Samuel Bamford describes the scene

“A heroine, a young married woman of our party, with her face all bloody, her hair streaming about her, her bonnet hanging by the string, and her apron weighted with stones, kept her assailant at bay until she fell backwards and was near being taken; but she got away covered with severe bruises. It was near this place and about this time that one of the Yeomanry was dangerously wounded, and unhorsed, by a blow from the fragment of a brick; and it was supposed to have been flung by this woman.”

Historian Robert Poole has called the massacre one of the defining moments of its age. In its own time, the London and national papers shared the horror felt in the Manchester region christening it Peterloo in sardonic reference to the Duke of Wellington’s victory in the fields of Belgium four years earlier.

We don’t know a great deal about Margaret Downes but of one thing there is no doubt, she is a Martyr and a statue will recognise that fact.

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