There’ll be the same banners, marchers arriving, and the powerful reading of the names of the dead,by the Salford born actor Christopher Eccleston for this Sunday’s one hundred and ninety seventh commemoration of the Peterloo Massacre.
But organizers are also going to try something new, The Peterloo picnic, thus completing what the participants in 1819 were sadly unable to do.
Organizers will be laying out a giant version of the Peterloo ‘spiderweb map’ on the apron, with picnic blankets marking each of the towns that send marchers to St Peter’s Fields.
They want people from those areas to occupy them… with each empty blanket being an invitation for that town to join the commemorations in 2016.
Lightweight tape will make up the black lines linking all the towns, with Manchester itself marked by a giant Liberty Cap statue.
The organisers want people to bring a simple meal of bread and cheese, and while they eat and chat, acoustic musicians will serenade them with appropriate songs.
One hundred and ninety five six ago, fiveteen people were killed and over six hundred were injured at Peter’s Fields during a peaceful demonstration for electoral reform.
Local magistrates, watching from a window near the field, panicked at the sight of the large crowd assembled and read the riot act, effectively ordering what little of the crowd could hear them to disperse.
The Yeoman’s guard, allegedly fuelled by drink charged with bayonets fixed into a field of over fifty thousand who had gathered that Monday morning to hear speakers call for parliamentary reform.
The events of that day would inspire Shelley to write his poem which was banned for thirty years, and would be dubbed Peterloo, after the battle of Waterloo four years earlier.
