On a hot August day in 1819, over 60,000 men, women and children assembled on St. Peter's Field, near the centre of Manchester, to hear 'Orator' Hunt speak on the urgent need for parliamentary reform. Almost immediately on Hunt's arrival, troops were ordered to disperse the crowd. Within twenty minutes, the field was deserted and 60,000 people, among them the dying and wounded, were fleeing through the narrow streets of Manchester, adding the word Peterloo to the English language. This is the first book for the general reader to set this most memorable of Manchester days, which affected the whole English political climate, in the context of its background - the traumatic upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of the new urban 'working class' and the particular plight and struggles of the most organised and articulate of these newcomers, the Lancashire cotton workers. The author, herself a Mancunian with a localised knowledge of the area and its ethos, has drawn the protagonists in human terms - on the Radical side, the vain, arrogant, but sincere Henry Hunt; the ebullient, romantic, touchy Samuel Bamford; the self-taught, self-opinionated father of popular English journalism, William Cobbett; on the Government side, the colourless, but tough Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool; the personally kindly, politically inadequate Lord Sidmouth; the handsome, hated Lord Castlereagh; and the timid panic-stricken local magistrates who wielded such immense power. Most of the story is told in the words of the contemporary documents and representing the anonymous thousands is John Lees, a cotton spinner who survived the Battle of Waterloo only to die a long and painful death as a result of his injuries at Peterloo