A new project by historian Robert Poole aims to shed light on a lesser known Manchester movement for parliamentary reform that took place two years before the Peterloo Massacre.

The so called Blanketeers had resolved to take the desperate measure of marching from Manchester to Westminster in an effort to secure universal male suffrage and annual parliaments, but according to Robert, its motives and consequences have never been really understood and explained.

One consequence he says was that two years later, faced with a peaceful gathering one August day in St Peter’s Fields where Manchester Central now stands, the authorities would overreact believing that there was a general attempt at a popular rising with disastrous consequences of the people of Manchester and the towns and villages around.

The story of the Blanketeers movement has its origins at the end of the Napoleonic wars and a generation, weary of fighting who saw no peace dividend, instead demobilization, mass unemployment, the corn laws and high taxes. In 1815 a volcano in the Pacific would result in the lost summer of 1816 and shortages of food and rising prices.

Meanwhile the government were never going to be in the mood for reform, they had fought Napoleon to maintain the norm.

There was though dissent in the air.Down in London, the exclusive Hampden club where membership was twenty guineas a year and members such as William Cobbett and Major John Cartwright, a veteran who had supported the rebellion of the American colonies.

In June 1816 they agreed to support a campaign for parliamentary reform and set up clubs around the country including Royton,Oldham,Stockport ,Blackley and Manchester.

In October of that year five thousand would gather in Manchester to set up a union in the town for Parliamentary reform. On 28th oct 5,000 gathered at the Quaker chapel to set up the Manchester union for parliamentary reform.

Whilst in London the Hampden Club drew up a bill for universal taxpayer suffrage for representation, William Cobbett published an address appealing to the country’s workers to strive for reform.

The workers of Lancashire followed the progress down in London, two large meetings took place in November of that year with one proposing a Bastille like storming of the Tower of London.

The Manchester radicals convened waiting for news from London which never came whilst carrying on with its weekly meetings with hundreds attending.

On the 9th December, they received a notice from the Hampden club, who had been told that the Prince Regent would not meet them until March to listen to their demands.

Whilst Londoners resolved to wait, Manchester would not, taking representation from a meeting in Middleton that they would present their demands to Parliament when it reconvened in January.

Sam Bamford would be their representative, travelling to London to meet at the Crown and Anchor where he famously proposed the militia ballot system, if you could fight for your country then you should be able to vote.

The reformers were soon disappointed, Parliament opened at the end of January and every petition was heard but found fault with, on technical or trivial grounds and left to literally lie on the table.

Manchester in response, resolved at a meeting at the beginning of March attended by over twenty five thousand people to march to London carrying the petition. The following day, the government suspended habeas corpus and began to round up all the ringleaders prior to the march.

Then one of Hampden’s members Major Cartwright came to the rescue, finding an act from the seventeenth century which suggested that parliament could not be petitioned except by papers with twenty signatures and accompanied only by only ten individuals to parliament.

This gave the Manchester reformers an opportunity, to create hundreds of individual petitions all believing they were constitutionally correct enshrined in Cartwright’s research.

They set out for London, with their knapsacks, food and blankets, hence their name,but most never got further than Stockport or Macclesfield before being rounded up.Over two hundred were arrested.

Now Robert has been trawling the archives looking for documentation that might help to explain what has been called the world’s first unaided working-class rebellion. He wants to find out what the rebels and conspirators were trying to do, and how far was it all a put-up job by government spies.

If you want to help Robert out on this project get in touch with him at RPoole@uclan.ac.uk and help him transcribe some of the documents he has discovered

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