Samuel Bamford: poet, weaver and chronicler of Peterloo
Samuel Bamford
Samuel Bamford (1788–1872), radical poet and weaver, was born in Middleton, Lancashire to a humble but self-educated family. After a short stint working on a coal ship as an adventurous 17 year old, he returned to Manchester working in a warehouse by day and at night educating himself. He read widely from John Milton and William Shakespeare to Thomas Paine and William Cobbett. After he married in 1812 he and his wife worked as handloom weavers while Samuel supplemented their meagre income with writing poetry and selling books. They were often hungry.
By 1816 Bamford was active in the campaign for parliamentary reform organising meetings in local villages and towns. He was arrested in March 1817 for suspected treason and later acquitted due to lack of evidence. Not surprisingly Bamford was heavily implicated in the organisation of a vast pro-reform meeting which later was known as the Peterloo Massacre. His account remains a key historical source for this pivotal moment in Manchester’s history.
The March to Peterloo
On Monday 16 August 1819 Samuel Bamford walked six miles to St Peter’s Field, Manchester. He led a contingent of friends, family and fellow radicals to join a vast meeting for Parliamentary reform. The meeting was to be a peaceful one and there were around 60,000 men, women and children there. Bamford’s autobiography, published 22 years later, vividly recalled how this vast gathering descended into butchery and terror.
Over the whole field were strewn caps, bonnets, hats, shawls, and shoes and other parts of male and female dress; trampled, torn and bloody … Several mounds of human beings still remained where they had fallen, crushed down and smothered. Some of these were still groaning, — others with staring eyes, were gasping for breath, and others would never breathe more. All was silent save those low sounds, and the occasional snorting and pawing of steeds
Bamford’s autobiography includes his wife Jemima’s recollections of that day. In her own words she described what happened after she lost sight of her husband and how she feared him dead. This is particularly interesting as working class women rarely have a voice in nineteenth century prose.
Bamford, along with other radicals identified as the ringleaders, was imprisoned and tried at York Assizes in March 1820. The charge against them was “an alleged conspiracy, to alter the law by force and threats; and for convening and attending an illegal, riotous, and tumultuous meeting at Manchester, on Monday the 16th of August, 1819”
The daily courtroom debates were reported nationally and in all 85 witnesses were called. We can hear Samuel Bamford’s voice and the voices of other working men and women who gave evidence during the two week state trial. As the digitised trial report shows, the authorities came out badly and no-one was found guilty of any actual sedition, but five of the ten defendants were convicted on the single charge of seditious intent and jailed for a year or more. Samuel Bamford was sentenced to a term of one year.
Bamford never forgot the horror of St Peter’s Field and he was assiduous in opposing anything that might lead to a head on confrontation with the State. Despite remaining a supporter of parliamentary reform he was critical of ‘physical force’ Chartism. Instead he favoured moral persuasion. A letter pasted into the fly leaf of Volume 1 of Samuel Bamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical (1841) expresses the hope that his book will educate working people thereby preventing them from becoming ‘ultra hot-headed dupes’. His own experience at Peterloo made him a fierce opponent of Feargus O’Connor and other Chartist leaders who flirted with violence. The letter jubilantly notes that the circulation of his autobiography has already led to a dramatic decline in sales of the Northern Star newspaper (edited by O’Connor) in Middleton from 450 copies to 30.
Discussion Points
How valuable are autobiographies as a historical source? How might you check Bamford’s account for accuracy?
Why do you think that so few working men or women left written accounts of their life in this period?
Additional resources
Spartacus Educational website supplies a more detailed account of Samuel Bamford’s life story . For more information on the numerous eye witness accounts of the Peterloo Massacre see the Peterloo Witness Project
The Library has an extensive collection of resources on the Peterloo Massacre
Images reproduced with the permission of The John Rylands University Librarian and Director of the University of Manchester Library. All images used on this page are licenced via CC-BY-NC-SA, for further information about each image, please follow the link in the caption description.
