Director: Mike
Leigh. Stars: Rory
Kinnear, Maxine
Peake and Neil
Bell.
Waterloo – a field in
Belgium where in 1815
the armies of Britain,
Prussia and other European powers defeated the
armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. St Peters Field
– a square in Manchester
where on 19 August 1819
cavalry charged a crowd
of unarmed protesters
killing around 20 people.
The closeness of the two
events led to the latter
being called the Peterloo
Massacre; an event now
the subject of a feature
film, Peterloo, directed by
Mike Leigh. The events
in the field in Belgium
were made into a film
almost 50 years ago, in
a film entitled Waterloo.
A film about the events
closer to home is long
overdue.
Peterloo starts on the
field of Waterloo where a
bewildered soldier stares
at the carnage around
him; it them moves to the
House of Lords where the
Prime Minister Lord Liverpool calls for a sum of
£700,000 to be paid to the
Duke of Wellington for his
services to the nation.
The film brings up the
issue of history. Whose
history? Do we celebrate
the aristocratic victory
in a field in Belgium or
commemorate the working-class victims of a massacre in our own country by
an unrepresentative government? It is sympathetic
to the largely working- and
lower middle-class reform
movement. In 1819 only
landowners (male ones)
could vote in elections, ordinary people suffered the
effects of both a downturn
in the economy and from
the Corn Laws, a tariff
in on imported grain that
put up the price of bread,
introduced by a govern- ment dominated by landed
interests.
Peterloo features an
array of British actors,
including Rory Kinnear as
the suffrage campaigner
Henry Hunt and Maxine
Peake as a matriarchal
figure and mother of the
soldier seen at the start of
the film.
Leigh uses her character’s
narrative to explain
contemporary economic and social problems.
Peake has made a suc- cess of playing prominent,
working-class female char- acters and has sponsored
a number of progressive
campaigns.
The film portrays Hunt,
a Wiltshire squire, as a
pompous character with
an exaggerated sense of his
own importance. He insists on being the only speaker
at the rally and demands
that no armed men are
present. The arms in ques- tion were little more than
pieces of gardening equip- ment as opposed to the
sabres and muskets used
by the attacking soldiers.
Anyone who has been on
a demonstration in recent
years would understand
that these men would have
acted as stewards and their
presence may have reduced
loss of life.
Leigh captures the
events of 14th August well.
He portrays the rally as a
family day out with pro- testers coming from across
Lancashire. The massacre
involved three separate
regiments: the Manchester
& Salford Yeomanry, a
largely irregular group of
cavalry who are shown
as violent and dangerous
drunks; the more disciplined 14 Hussars; and an
infantry regiment garrisoned in the town.
The Manchester & Salford Yeomanry are por- trayed as the real villains
of the event, which is the
view of historians of the
period, whilst the infantry,
although armed with rifles,
were the most vulnerable. The magistrates, mostly local landowners, who
bear ultimate responsibility
are portrayed as pompous
reactionaries with a sense
of entitlement who view
the lower orders with a
mixture of fear and contempt. It shows them as
provoking the massacre; a
magistrate reads the Riot
Act written on what looks
like a post-it note from the
window overlooking the
square when no one is listening or even able to hear.
We see unarmed members of the crowd killed
with sabres; one of whom
is the soldier shown at the
start of the film. Historic
records state show that one
of the victims of the attack
was John Lees, a veteran of
Waterloo.
Peterloo raises the
issue of patriotism. An
informant who offers his
services to the govern- ment describes himself
as a patriot. At the end of
the film Lord Liverpool
and the Home Secretary
Lord Sidmouth inform the
Prince Regent of the events
in Manchester; the three of
them start mumbling the
word “England” over again
as if in some kind of trance.
How much of a force for
good is it in a country not
facing foreign domination?
This leads us to the
issue of what should be
taught in schools, the
events in a field in Belgium or those in a square
in Manchester? There is a
public house about a mile
from my home; I have frequently enjoyed a pint of
ale, or two there. It is called
the Waterloo Arms – maybe it’s time that its name
was changed to reflect our
history not theirs.
Source: The New Worker
