The Scum of the Earth

by Colin Brown

  The italics were his own. His stress on the need for ‘steady, firm and temperate deportment’ was a warning not to give the magistrates any excuse to resort to violence and for the meeting to turn into a riot as it had at Spa Fields in Clerkenwell, London,* in December 1816.

  Hunt, 43, was an unlikely revolutionary. He was a prosperous Wiltshire farmer, who was perhaps the greatest radical speaker of the age – the Tony Benn of the Regency period. He was a colourful ‘John Bull’ figure who liked to box and wore a trademark white top-hat, but, like Benn, he was a democrat. He was dedicated to the cause of universal men’s suffrage and had been touring around the country, drawing huge audiences for his speeches – 80,000 in Birmingham, 40,000 in Blackburn, 20,000 in Nottingham and 10,000 in Macclesfield. Hunt was a moderate, not a revolutionary, but he warned the authorities of revolutionary violence if they did not listen to their peaceful demands. Another agitator who was at a meeting addressed by Hunt at Spa Fields in Clerkenwell, London, on 2 December 1816 would prove him right.

  Arthur Thistlewood, 46, was the illegitimate son of another prosperous farmer but, unlike Hunt, he was an unapologetic revolutionary. He had been to Paris in 1814 to learn about the revolution and was convinced that only bloody revolution and the overthrow of the English ruling elite could bring about change in Britain. He was a member of a group known as the Society of Spencean Philanthropists, followers of Thomas Spence, who believed in equal rights through common ownership of land. Spence had died in 1814 but his followers kept his ideas alive in small cells meeting in pubs. At the first of two meetings at Spa Fields, Hunt had got the support of a crowd of 10,000 to go to the Prince Regent with a petition for reform, but it was rejected out of hand without a meeting with the Prince Regent. Hunt was on his way to a second meeting at Spa Fields when he was told it was too late – the revolution had already started. Thistlewood used the anger of the crowd to launch a naïve plan for the overthrow of the government. Someone was stabbed to death and sailors who had been laid off after the Napoleonic Wars helped the mob to break into a gun shop at Snow Hill to seize weapons. The mob marched with a tricolour to the Royal Exchange to take control of the Bank of England and Thistlewood, showing a childlike conviction that the army was ready to revolt, led another armed mob to the Tower of London. He climbed a wall and called on the soldiers there to surrender the Tower and support the revolution. They did not fire on him but they refused to join Thistlewood’s revolution. The rioting was serious – there were pitched battles in Snow Hill and the Minories, an ancient quarter near the Tower, was held for hours by the mob – but the ringleaders were soon disarmed and rounded up. The revolution was put down before it began and Thistlewood, who had tickets to sail to America, was caught trying to board a ship at Gravesend.

  Thistlewood did not know that his group had been infiltrated by a group of police spies, including a police agent called John Castle, on the orders of John Stafford, a resourceful spymaster for the police at Bow Street. Stafford ran undercover intelligence agents in a clandestine force that was a forerunner of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch and MI5. Thistlewood and his gang were tried for treason, but despite the damning evidence the jury, possibly sharing sympathy for the defendants, refused to convict them after it heard that the key prosecution witness, Castle, was a criminal and an agent provocateur who had incited the plot – he was a former forger who had once turned evidence against an accomplice who was hanged. Thistlewood and the others were freed. Thistlewood did not learn the lesson from the Spa Fields trial but Stafford did. He would not make the same mistake again.

  An investigation was carried out by a secret Parliamentary committee into ‘the disturbed state of the country’, which was convinced there was a movement seeking to overthrow the government:

  Attempts have been made, in various parts of the country, as well as in the metropolis, to take advantage of the distress in which the labouring and manufacturing classes of the community are at present involved, to induce them to look for immediate relief, not only in a reform of Parliament on the plan of universal suffrage and annual election, but in a total overthrow of all existing establishments, and in a division of the landed, and extinction of the funded property of the country.

  Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, suspended the ancient right of habeas corpus protecting citizens from unlawful and secret detention. He also introduced the Treason Act 1817 to ensure existing powers remained in force after the death of King George III. The Act made it high treason to imagine, invent, devise or intend the ‘death or destruction, or any bodily harm tending to death or destruction, maim or wounding, imprisonment or restraint of the persons of the heirs and successors of George III’, starting with the despised Prince Regent. Sidmouth told Parliament there was ‘a traitorous conspiracy ... for the purpose of overthrowing ... the established government’ and referred to ‘a malignant spirit which had brought such disgrace upon the domestic character of the people’ and ‘had long prevailed in the country, but especially since the commencement of the French Revolution’.

  The renewed threat of revolution coincided with an event that further undermined the monarchy – the death of the Prince Regent’s daughter Charlotte, during childbirth in November 1817, which caused a national spasm of grief similar to that after the death of Diana, the Princess of Wales, in a car crash in an underpass in Paris on August 1997. The Duke of Wellington was characteristically unmoved: ‘The death of Princess Charlotte was probably by no means a misfortune to the nation. I fear she would not have turned out well.’1

  The poet Shelley was indignant that the country had gone into national mourning for a dead princess but shed no tears for three agitators for reform – Jeremiah Brandreth, a jobless stocking maker from Nottingham, William Turner and Isaac Ludlam, who had just been executed for high treason. These men had carried out a cack-handed uprising in Pentrich, Derbyshire. They were set up by William Oliver, one of the Home Office’s paid informants who acted as agent provocateur, and their leader, Francis Bacon, a framework knitter with revolutionary tendencies, was complicit in their prosecution. Bacon got off with transportation to the colonies. His three followers were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for treason at Nuns Green in front of Friar Gate jail, Derby, shortly after Princess Charlotte’s death. The Prince Regent intervened to have their sentence commuted – they were hanged and beheaded but not quartered. That was clemency in Regency England. Shelley wrote: ‘Spare no symbol of universal grief. Weep-mourn-lament. Fill the great City – fill the boundless fields, with lamentation and the echo of groans. A beautiful Princess is dead … But man has murdered Liberty.’2

  Against that background, with the people and Parliament polarised, it was almost certain that as John Lees set out that morning, the meeting at St Peter’s Field would end in violence.

  The Manchester magistrates, Hunt warned, were ready to ‘put us down by the force of the sword, bayonet and cannon’. Hunt’s words were more prophetic than even he realised.

  After leaving his father’s mill, John Lees joined a gathering of several thousand marchers gathered at Bent Green, near the factory, where they were addressed by Sam Bamford, a grammar-school-educated radical and silk weaver from nearby Middleton. Bamford was another agitator who had been imprisoned in 1817 on charges of high treason for his political activities but had been released after serving a jail sentence. He had marched over from his home town in Rochdale through woods and dingles with thousands of followers with military precision. ‘First we selected twelve of the most comely and decent-looking youths, who were placed in two rows of six each, with each a branch of laurel held in his hand, as a token of amity and peace,’ said Bamford:

  Then followed the men of several districts in fives; then the band of music – an excellent one; then the colours: a blue one of silk with inscriptions in golden letters, ‘Unity and Strength’, ‘Liberty and Fraternity’, a green one of silk with golden letters ‘Parliaments Annual’, ‘Suffrage Universal’, and betwixt t
hem, on a staff, a handsome cap of crimson velvet with a tuft of laurel, and the cap tastefully braided with the words ‘Libertas’ in front. Next were placed the remainder of the men in districts of five. Every hundred men had a leader, who was distinguished by a spring of laurel in his hat …

  The military discipline of the marchers was used as a pretext by the magistrates to prove these laurel-carrying radicals were actually a people’s army. The military order of the marchers was also used by Lord Liverpool in a Parliamentary debate in 1819 to reject demands by Lord Grey for a public inquiry.

  Bamford reminded the men and women who had been gathering since first light not to carry any weapons other than their ‘self-approving conscience’. Then a brass band struck up a stirring march, the banners flashed in the sunlight and they moved off to Manchester.

  Oldham is 700ft above sea level and John Lees would have been able to see the distant smoke from Manchester almost from the moment he left his father’s mill. He walked over the cobbles along Manchester Street and took the dusty road out of Oldham heading west. Today the mills in the centre of Oldham have been swept away to make way for the redevelopment of the town. There is a red-brick shopping centre like a fortress in the centre. The only obvious sign of Oldham’s industrial past as a great cotton manufacturing capital is its name: the Spindles.

  The houses in West Street where the Lees family lived were cleared to make way for a concrete tower block housing the civic centre. Over the road, roughly where the Robert Lees’s mill must have been, is a £2.9m state-of-the-art bus station with an elliptical steel roof that, at night, looks like a starship has landed in the middle of Oldham. Bent Green, a regular meeting place for reformers, was roughly where the road curls round a grassy roundabout with a clump of trees. A town map of the period shows the Bent running into West Street and then the Market Place (now the Spindles shopping centre). There are fields reaching up to Bent Grange and the procession with Bamford at its head would soon have entered countryside along Manchester Street, where the Oldham Way dual carriageway is today.

  Oldham had been transformed in a couple of generations from a small wool-weaving village overshadowed by Saddleworth Moor on the edge of the Pennines into one of the cotton capitals of the world. Lees was a common name: the first Oldham cotton mill was opened in 1778 in the district called Lees and by 1819 there were nineteen cotton mills in the town. A few men with enterprise in Oldham like Robert Lees had seen the profits to be made by replacing the inefficient old cottage looms with new mills employing hundreds of men, women and children on their spinning machines. The town’s population soared in a century from 12,000 in 1801 to 137,000 in 1901 and more than half of its people in the first half of the century worked on the spinning machines in the big mills. Children were employed fetching the bobbins and picking up rough cotton cast-offs from the floor between the machines as they clattered relentlessly backwards and forwards. It was hard, noisy and dangerous – the suffragette Annie Kenney, who was a cotton worker in Oldham half a century later, had a finger ripped off by a spinning bobbin. Times were also very hard. In 1815, while John Lees was driving his wagon with Bull’s troop to Waterloo, the cotton spinners of Oldham went on strike against the attempts of the mill owners to cut their wages. William Rowbottom noted in his diary on 5 June 1815:

  The spinners at most of the factories are now out of employ having refused to work at a reduced price. The present price is 2d 3 farthings per score for 24 hanks and 3d per score for finer sorts. The Masters insist on a reduction of one farthing per score and the spinners refused to comply. And about the middle of July they mostly returned to their employ having subdued their masters by compelling them to give the usual wages.

  John Lees was discharged and returned home to Oldham at Christmas, 1818. His father took him in and he was fortunate to be given a job in his mill as a rover, loading cotton yarn onto bobbins and giving the yarn a twist (roving) after the textile had been carded on Arkwright frames to straighten the fibres for spinning and combed. It was deafening, repetitive work, but it was a living. John had to share the same bedroom as Thomas Whitaker, his step-mother’s son. They got on and went out drinking together.

  Why John, the son of a mill owner, should have turned his back on Oldham and taken the long road to Waterloo with Major Robert Bull’s troop will remain a mystery. It could have been the prospect of excitement that drove him to join the army, but he may also have been running away from life in Oldham, for John Lees was born out of wedlock and rebelled against his father. The register of the Oldham St Mary Parish church shows that he was born on 16 September 1796* to Dinah Clough, a spinster at the time of her son’s birth, from nearby Lowermoor, Oldham. Robert Lees allowed his name to go on the register as his father, but they were not married. Robert later married Hannah Whitaker who already had a son, Thomas. It is not known what happened to Dinah, John’s mother.

  The Masters of the Mills like Robert Lees saw Hunt as the enemy. Eleven days before the meeting, an anonymous open letter to Mr Henry Hunt circulated around Oldham. It was a bitter attack on his policies and his personality:

  Infamy seems to accompany your steps as a shadow … Everything which you touch is contaminated and polluted, every cause which you espouse becomes dishonoured and defiled.

  The mill masters hated the agitators and there had been a long history of social unrest in Oldham, a Radical town. In the eyes of the mill owners, the crowds converging on Manchester to hear Henry Hunt were dangerous associates of the frame breakers, the followers of Ned Ludd who had tried to wreck their businesses by destroying their mills.

  Oldham, like Manchester, was renowned for its high rainfall as the clouds from the Atlantic dump their moisture when they hit the Pennines and the damp air was ideal for cotton spinning because it avoided the threads from breaking. But on that August morning, it was warm and sunny, and there was a feeling of optimism in the air. John, dressed in a dark-brown jacket, trousers, a waistcoat, shirt and a hat, was carrying a walking stick for the journey. Perhaps the stick was a clue that he expected trouble. Many were carrying them, although there is no evidence they were used as clubs. The marchers were blissfully unaware as they set off that the magistrates of Manchester were assembling a real army of 1,500 troops with three troops of cavalry and two 6-pounder cannon to preserve the peace.

  They were under the overall command of Sir John Byng, who had commanded the guards at Waterloo. After Waterloo, Byng had been put in charge of the military forces for the whole of the north of England. He had his headquarters in Pontefract and would have been at the meeting on 9 August, but he had another pressing engagement on the 16th – he had two horses running in the races at York. He left the Manchester meeting in the capable hands of the commander of the local Manchester District, Lieutenant Colonel Guy L’Estrange, commander of the 15th Dragoons.

  The magistrates met at 9 a.m. at the Star Inn on Deansgate near the field where the rally was to be held. At 10.30 a.m. they moved to the house of a prominent Manchester builder to observe events at the meeting place. Edward Buxton’s house at 6 Mount Street overlooked St Peter’s Field and was about 100yds from where the organisers were putting up the hustings in the form of two flat-bed carts lashed together.

  Oldham sent the largest contingent of 10,000 people to the rally and John must have felt the easy comradeship of his fellow cotton workers as they strolled along the dusty main road through the countryside to Manchester to hear Henry Hunt. There was an almost carnival atmosphere, as the procession, with bands playing and banners waving, passed the Werneth Mill and Werneth Hall, the Old Lane Colliery at Little Town and Hollinwood, where the houses spread along the sides of the Oldham road (now the A62) to Newton where the road ran alongside the Rochdale Canal. They met up with spinners from Leeds at Miles Platting, where the outskirts of the town began, and headed for Deansgate. Marchers from Lees, Mosley, Royton and Saddleworth came into the field linking arms, two, three, four and five friends abreast.

  The marchers from O
ldham arrived around midday and John Lees made for the hustings at Windmill Street. An estimated 5,000 marchers had already arrived from Stockport and more filled the open space as the hour went by. As the crowd steadily grew to around 60,000 – nearly the same as an average Premier League crowd at Old Trafford to watch Manchester United – the chairman and nine magistrates meeting in Buxton’s house across the field from the hustings became more nervous.

  The magistrates had assembled 600 cavalry from the 15th Hussars, 420 members of the Cheshire Yeomanry Cavalry, with another forty volunteers of the Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry, a troop of the Royal Artillery with two 6-pounders, and 160 soldiers of the 88th Foot, who were ordered to stand with fixed bayonets to block an exit route from the square. The Manchester Yeomanry were mostly mill masters with an axe to grind against the protesting workers and the Radicals. They were essentially amateurs dressed in blue military uniforms.

  Lees was not the only veteran of Waterloo at St Peter’s Field that day. Some of the men of 15th Hussars had fought at Waterloo. They had been part of the Fifth Brigade of light cavalry under Major General Sir Colquhoun Grant and had been cut up when they failed to break a hollow square of French infantry. Lieutenant Colonel Leighton Dalrymple, the Commander of the 15th Hussars at Waterloo, had been wounded. One of the Hussars’ officers, Lieutenant Harry Lane, remarked: ‘We did not succeed in breaking it, and, of course, suffered most severely.’ Defenceless protesters were easier meat. The 15th Hussars appeared on the streets of Manchester in blue tunics, scarlet facings, and silver lace, and had their swords sharpened, their usual practice before going into action. There was another force that would play an important role that day, the special constables known as Nadin’s Runners. Like the Yeomanry, they were drawn from local businessmen, including pub landlords, who were prepared for a fight. Joseph Nadin was a notorious thug who ran the local constabulary before the creation of the official police force. He was 6ft 1in tall, broad-shouldered and a former spinner, who had become a ‘thief taker’ for the financial rewards and established a corrupt regime of law enforcement backed by brutality. Nadin, the deputy chief of the local police, made sure his men were out in strength.