Peterloo Massacre Peterloo Massacre The Peterloo Massacre occurred at St Peter's Field, Manchester, England, on 16 August 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd of 60,000–80,000 who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 had resulted in periods of famine and chronic unemployment, exacerbated by the introduction of the first of the Corn Laws. By the beginning of 1819, the pressure generated by poor economic conditions, coupled with the relative lack of suffrage in Northern England, had enhanced the appeal of political radicalism. In response, the Manchester Patriotic Union, a group agitating
Waterloo Bay massacre the archival and newspaper record and noted that there was no evidence for a massacre on the scale of that claimed by Congreve, Beviss or John Chipp Hamp. In 1936, the historian James Dugald Somerville wrote a series of articles in the "Port Lincoln Times" regarding early settler life on the Eyre Peninsula, in which he concluded that "it is a certainty that the Waterloo Bay 'massacre', as pictured by H.J.C. [Congreve].. A. Beviss and others did not occur, and that the natives did not cut the head off Hamps' body and place it in the camp oven". In 1937,