by Colin Brown
St Peter’s Field was a triangle of ground, bounded by houses in Peter Street, Mount Street and Windmill Street. It is now occupied by the Radisson Hotel, formerly the Free Trade Hall.
I am standing by a taxi rank in Windmill Street at the back of the Radisson Hotel. This is roughly where Hunt stood on the makeshift stage with the two carts lashed together. Across the road, trendy coffee bars have opened where his barouche stopped and the banners were raised. Office workers sit sipping cappuccino at a street cafe, not knowing that it was here among their tables and chairs that an atrocity took place. Over to my right, Buxton’s house stood at No. 6 Mount Street, which has been replaced by the corner of The Midland hotel, built at the turn of the nineteenth century for the Midland railway station. Nadin’s special constables formed two lines, creating a channel from Buxton’s house almost to the right-hand side of the speakers’ stage, so that when the time came they could arrest Hunt with ease.
The magistrates watched from the windows to the side of the platform as Hunt’s open barouche arrived shortly after a clock struck 1 p.m. It carried Hunt in his distinctive white top hat, John Saxton, the editor of the radical Manchester Observer, which had invited Hunt to speak at the rally, and several of his fellow speakers including John Knight, who had helped found the Observer, Joseph Johnson and Richard Carlile, a publisher of reformist tracts in London. The ladies of the Manchester Female Reform Society, dressed all in white, were to lead the carriage onto the field but owing to the density of the crowds, this proved impractical and the women in white had to follow behind. Their leader Mrs Mary Fildes had been lifted into the carriage to sit alongside Hunt, holding the Female Reformers’ colours aloft. The banners at the hustings included ‘No Corn Bill’, ‘Hunt and Liberty’ and ‘Equal Representation or Death’. The band struck up ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ with a roar from the crowd, and the carriage slowly moved forward with Hunt, his fellow speakers and Mrs Fildes dressed all in white with a straw bonnet. William Harrison, a cotton spinner from Oldham, thought she was the ‘most beautiful woman I ever saw in my life’. Before Hunt spoke, the band solemnly played ‘God Save the King’ to show their loyalty to the Crown but the magistrates had already decided to act.
The magistrates’ excuse for deploying such a large force was the interception of a letter by Joe Johnson, a journalist on the Manchester Observer and member of the radical Manchester Patriotic Union. It was sent to Henry Hunt saying:
Nothing but ruin and starvation stare one in the face … the state of this district is truly dreadful and I believe nothing but the greatest exertions can prevent an insurrection. Oh that you in London were prepared for it.
The word ‘insurrection’ was enough to give them nightmares.
The Riot Act was read by Reverend Charles Ethelston from Mr Buxton’s window, though no one down at the hustings said they heard it. This ordered the crowd to disperse and gave authority to the Yeomanry Cavalry, supported by the Hussars, to act.
Hunt had been speaking for a few minutes, when at 1.30 p.m. the magistrates formally ordered the arrest of Hunt, Knight, Johnson and another speaker called John Moorhouse. Nadin told his Chief Constable, Jonathan Andrews, that despite the double guard of his special constables reaching almost to the hustings, he could not arrest Hunt and the others without military support. When Andrews relayed this to William Hulton, chairman of the magistrates, Hulton replied: ‘Then you shall have the military force. For God’s sake don’t sacrifice the lives of the special constables.’ Hulton sent two notes, one to Major Thomas Trafford in charge of the MYC and the other to Lieutenant Colonel L’Estrange commanding the Hussars, who were also waiting in the streets away from the crowd, telling them to proceed immediately to Buxton’s house where the magistrates were gathered. He added: ‘They consider the Civil Power wholly inadequate to preserve the peace.’
Down at the hustings, Hunt was reinforcing his message to remain peaceful, telling the crowd if any person ‘made tumult or attempted disturbance’ they should put him down and keep him down and not allow him to rise until the meeting was over. But before he had chance to say more, the Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry, who had been waiting around the corner, rode into the ground to try to arrest Hunt. They came into the square from near the Quaker Friends Meeting House and stood in front of the houses. They had been seen before the rally drinking in a nearby pub and one of them was so drunk he could hardly sit on his horse. He was clinging to it, said William Harrison, ‘like a monkey’. Harrison, who described himself as ‘real Lancashire blunt’, said the cavalryman was ‘fuddled’.
The Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry spread out, pushing the crowd back, but could make little headway to the stage. Hunt assumed the magistrates were trying to provoke a riot and shouted: ‘Stand firm, my friends. They are in disorder already. This is a trick. Give them three cheers.’ Even the magistrates thought the Yeomanry looked incapable of holding their horses steady. The crowd gave the Yeomanry Cavalry three hearty cheers. There are allegations that they threw stones at the volunteers on horseback but most say they remained peaceful because they thought they intended merely to arrest the speakers as many expected. However, the cheerful atmosphere of the crowd changed when the horsemen drew sabres and blades started flashing right and left.
The Yeomanry formed a circle with Nadin’s Runners around the hustings, drew their swords and charged into the crowd. Women screamed. Men fended off the blows with their sticks or bare arms. To the magistrates, it looked as though the crowd had turned on the volunteers. The Reverend Edward Stanley, Rector of Alderley, who was in Buxton’s house with the magistrates, said for a very few paces the movement of the Yeomanry was not rapid:
There was some show of an attempt to follow their officer in regular succession, five or six abreast; but they soon increased their speed and with a zeal and ardour which might naturally be expected from men acting with delegated power against a foe by whom it is understood they had long been insulted with taunts of cowardice, continued their course, seeming individually to vie with each other which should be first.
Jonah Andrew, a cotton spinner from Leeds, said, ‘They began to cut and hack at the people like butchers.’
Nadin followed behind the Yeomanry with his special constables and arrested Hunt, Johnson and John Tyas, a journalist from The Times of London. Hunt jumped down from the platform and surrendered himself. Although they had got their man, the constables then attacked the colours and the banners around the speakers’ platform as vigorously as if they were French eagles at Waterloo. Watching from Buxton’s house, Hulton saw the melee around the Yeomanry and ordered L’Estrange to rescue the Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry from the mob. The 15th Hussars formed a line across the eastern end of St Peter’s Field and charged into the crowd. Harrison was squeezed against the palisades near the houses. He said: ‘The Yeomanry Cavalry began cutting all before them and on each side, and the people began shouting for mercy – they said, “Have mercy, O have mercy”.’
John Lees climbed up on the planks of the makeshift stage as the crowd surged forward in panic to get away from the soldiers, but the Yeomanry and the Hussars pursued him. Martha Kearsley from Oldham saw two soldiers striking him and he was warding off their blows with his walking stick as well as he could and a cavalryman fell off his horse. Lees jumped off the hustings and Robert Cooper, a hatter from Oldham, saw one of the 15th Hussars cut him in the right elbow with his sword, as Lees held up his arm to protect his head. Jonah Andrew was close to Lees when the cavalry attacked him; they surrounded him and he saw a Yeoman Cavalryman cutting at him ‘with great vengeance’. Andrew said he saw seven of Nadin’s special constables round on John Lees, giving him a severe beating with their truncheons all over his back:
Windmill Street, Manchester – site of the Peterloo Massacre. The taxi rank is where John Lees was beaten. (Author)
One of them picked up a staff of a banner that had been cut with a sword and said, ‘Damn your bloody eyes, I’ll break your back’. And they st
ruck at him for a considerable time with their truncheons and the staff of the banner.
The truncheons carried by Nadin’s men were long wooden clubs, with the royal crest on the handle to show they were acting in the name of Prince Regent.
Joseph Wrigley, who met up with John Lees at Oldham on the morning of the meeting, saw him receive the cut on the back of his right arm from a sabre. ‘He was parrying off the blows of one of the military and another came up and cut him. He had his right arm up over his head protecting it with a walking-stick.’ Wrigley said he could not help Lees because ‘everyone had to look to his own life’ when the sabres flashed. Wrigley could not tell whether it was Yeomanry or the Hussars who slashed at Lees because they were mixed up.
The Hussars are generally said to have shown greater professional restraint than the volunteers of the Yeomanry, though they were far from blameless. Not all were seeking blood. ‘There was an officer who gave me an opportunity of escaping or I should have been left for dead on the field,’ said Wrigley. They were under orders to use the flat of their swords – a very difficult manoeuvre for a man holding the reins of his horse. It could explain how John Lees’s clothes were slashed on the shoulder, but the skin on his shoulder was not cut.
Lees staggered out of Manchester with his left shoe split open by a cavalry horse that trampled over him. At 5 p.m. he was passing the windows of a pub, the Shears at Newton Heath, on the way back to Oldham when he was spotted by Robert Neald, who had known him for about seven or eight years. Neald called Lees inside: ‘He showed me one wound on his right elbow and said he had another on his shoulder … I thought it was a stab and I saw his shoe was rent.’ John pointed out Joseph Wrigley, who said he had seen Lees being cut by the cavalry. John shook hands with Wrigley, who asked him to go to the Woolpack Inn but Lees refused, saying his arm was stiff and he wished to get home. When he got home his stepmother, Hannah Lees, met him at the gate. She was worried – she had been told by her son Thomas that John had been injured in the fracas at Manchester. She gave him some tea and toast and he went to bed. Thomas said:
He looked very pale. I discovered he was wounded. I went up stairs with him. He was very faint when he got to the top and I helped him off with his clothes. I undressed him and pulled his shirt off. He looked very ill and his shirt stuck to his body. He had a severe cut to his right elbow and the flesh was cut to the bone. I saw [it] and I washed it.3
John told Thomas the injury to his elbow was not the worst: ‘He desired me to look at his shoes, how they were cut off by the horses. I found the left foot [shoe] cut off and the leather torn.’
The next day John went to the factory but was too ill to work. His father, Robert Lees, had little sympathy for his son. He was angry because he had gone to the meeting, and when he saw John standing at the top of the landing at the factory, he bluntly told him that if he could not work he would have to go to the parish for a hand-out because he would give him no money. Hannah Lees advised John to go to the doctor and he went to Mr Earnshaw, a Quaker, who acted as a family doctor, and prescribed him medicines three times a day, which Lees took. One of the odd aspects of his condition is that, despite his injuries, he went out drinking with his half-brother Thomas and his friends and borrowed a couple of shillings from Hannah to pay for the beer.
The following Sunday, 22 August, Thomas and John walked to Widow Wright’s, a public house in Oldham, but they had nothing to drink there. At the King’s Arms, John had a glass of brandy and water but would drink no more. A week later, on Sunday 29 August, they went to the Dusty Miller with a friend, where they each had a pint of beer at 4d, then another pint each at another pub, and later a quart of ale among the three of them at Westwood. John was tipsy but not drunk, said Thomas. John also managed to go with Thomas to Stockport, a distance of about 13 miles, where they spent the night. They left Stockport at six in the morning and stopped at four pubs on the way to Manchester, which they reached at 2 p.m. before they got a cart ride back to Oldham.
But in the third week after he was attacked, John’s condition deteriorated and he was no longer able to get about by himself. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of the third week, Thomas and his half-brother James carried John downstairs from his bed to give him company – he hated being left alone. But on Wednesday 1 September, John began retching, being sick and unable to keep his food down.
Thomas Whitaker said:
As we lay in bed on the Wednesday night he said he had a terrible pain in his shoulders and he could not bear them to be touched. On the Thursday he complained of a pain in his left foot and could not rest at all and he lost the use of his limbs.
He took to his bed on Saturday night and on Sunday he could no longer speak. He also lost the sight in one eye and complained of being cold. He died in the early hours of Tuesday 7 September – twenty-two days after the rally. Two days later, on 9 September, his death was registered in Manchester. I found entry number 2,350 in the Manchester Death Register. It simply says: ‘John Lees of West Street, Age 22.’
John Lees’s body was stripped and laid out by Betty Ireland, the wife of a shoemaker in Oldham. She was shocked. She had seen many dead bodies but she had never seen anything like this: there was hardly a place on his back that was not bruised, she said. It looked as though he had been tied to a halberd and flogged and his body was putrefied.
The police summoned a surgeon called John Cox, who carried out a rudimentary post mortem the day after John died. He noted that on the man’s elbow there was a cut an inch and a half long, open about an inch at its widest part. The cut had ‘taken the extreme point of the bone away – it was a little oblique as if it were done by a sword’. On his left side there was a bruised space as large as his hand over the short ribs. There was a bruise as large as a man’s extended hand on the right side of the back, two marks over the hips, which were ulcerous, but he could not find a stab wound on the shoulder. The skin was inflamed and livid all around his neck but there appeared to be no injury to Lees’ head. When he moved the body ‘much blood gushed from the mouth and nostrils’. After he opened the body, he found the larynx or windpipe and the right lobe of the lungs full of blood.4
John Lees was listed among eleven dead in the official report on the massacre as being ‘sabred’ – suggesting that this veteran of Waterloo had been killed by the men with whom he fought alongside at the battle. The other ten listed in the official report as killed were: John Ashton of Cowhill, Oldham, ‘sabred’; John Ashworth, a special constable, of the Bull’s Head, Manchester, ‘sabred and trampled on’; Thomas Buckley of Baretrees, Chadderton, ‘sabred and stabbed’; William Dawson, of Saddleworth, ‘sabred and crushed – killed on the spot’; an infant called Fildes of Kennedy Street, Manchester, ‘rode over by cavalry’; Arthur O’Neil, No. 3 Pigeon Street, Manchester, ‘inwardly crushed’; Martha Partington of Eccles ‘thrown into a cellar’; Joseph Whitworth of Hyde, ‘shot’; James Crompton of Barton, ‘trampled on by the cavalry’; Mary Heys of 8 Rawlinson’s Buildings, Oxford Road, Manchester, ‘rode over by cavalry’.
The lists of dead and injured graphically illustrate the brutality meted out to the protestors, but all the evidence at the inquest on John Lees suggests that in his case the official report is wrong – John Lees was not killed by a sabre blow either by the Yeoman Cavalry of Manchester or the Hussars.5 Cox was hesitant about giving a cause of death because he was clearly reluctant to give testimony that would allow a charge of murder to be brought against the cavalry or the police, or the magistrates who ordered them to disperse the crowd; but he was quite clear about one thing – John Lees did not die from a sabre cut. ‘The immediate cause [of death] was the suffusion of blood into the lungs,’ said Cox. He believed it had been caused by the rupture of a blood vessel. Cox said he carefully put his hand all over Lees’ head and saw no injury done to it, but he did not look at the brain, so his evidence does not rule out brain damage.
I asked Dr Julian Burton, clinical lecturer in histopathology at the Universit
y of Sheffield, to look at the post mortem evidence from Cox, the police surgeon, to see what a modern pathologist might find. Professor Burton told me that the history of vomiting, loss of sight and loss of the use of his limbs suggests John Lees may have suffered a significant head injury. He was certainly sabred – possibly by his former comrades at Waterloo – but the mortal blows are more likely to have been delivered by Nadin’s Runners, who beat him around the head, neck and back. According to Dr Burton:
This could result in bleeding in, or more likely around, the brain. Such bleeding can occur slowly and it can start, stop and then start again. A bleed inside the cranial cavity would cause vomiting and may account for the loss of sight and the use of limbs, though both together is unusual and hard to reconcile. Raised intracranial pressure can cause inflammation and ulceration of the stomach and can cause vomiting. Recurrent vomiting can cause tears in the lining of the gut at the junction of the gullet and stomach and these can bleed profusely.
This is new evidence and, though speculative, it could explain how John Lees could go on a bender around the pubs of Stockport and Manchester with his half-brother and yet die of his injuries three weeks after he was attacked. Dr Burton believes John Lees almost certainly died from bleeding caused by a stomach ulcer, brought on by a beating that caused a brain injury. And that was almost certainly caused by the pounding he was given by Nadin’s Runners. These findings were supported by Paul Johnson, consultant forensic pathologist and Home Office pathologist at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, who told me: