The Preston Memorial Which Remembers a Tragic Event 180 Years Ago

By Margaret Brecknell

An imposing statue outside the Corn Exchange building on Lune Street in Preston commemorates one of the most tragic and shocking events in the city’s history, which took place in August 1842.

Civil unrest was rife in the Britain of 180 years ago. The Chartist movement had been formed in 1836 by those who were looking to establish a fairer and more democratic society by reforming the way in which Parliamentary elections were run. In early May 1842, over three million people, including many Lancastrians, signed a Chartist petition calling for a reform of the electoral system by giving all men over the age of 21 the right to vote.

The petition was summarily rejected by Parliament, an outcome which in itself caused great anger among the working classes. However, the country was in the grip of a recession and workers were soon also hit by stringent pay cuts of up to 25%. This led to a General Strike, which began with coal miners in Staffordshire and soon spread to factory workers in the

 Above: Preston Martyrs Memorial Detail Soldiers Opening Fire.  Below: Preston Martyrs Memorial Detail The Victims. Photo Credits: Bruce Lamberton/CC BY-SA 4.0

northern mill towns.

The jobs of mill workers were also threatened by the introduction of new machinery. In what are now known as the Plug Plot Riots, protestors began to travel from factory to factory, removing the plugs from the new steam boilers which had been installed, so that all work ground to a halt. They then encouraged the workers to join the strike.

By mid-August, the strike had reached the Lancashire town of Preston. The town’s mill owners were known for paying some of the lowest wages in the country, so it is hardly surprising that Preston became a focal point in the struggle for better rates of pay.

On Saturday, 13th August, the first edition of the Preston Pilot reported that, “We sincerely regret to state the turnout mania has broken out in Preston, but as yesterday was the first period of its appearance, and that in no very formidable form, so we must devoutly hope that the time for reflection which has since transpired may have been so profitably spent by the unfortunate, but still culpably misguided victims, as shall enable them to return at once to a sound and better state of mind”.

The pro-Chartist newspaper, Northern Star, reported a slightly different version of Friday’s events, namely that, “Before night every cotton mill was turned out without any resistance; and all done chiefly by boys and girls”. A large meeting was held at Chadwick’s Orchard in the centre of Preston (today this is home to Preston’s Covered Market) and a resolution passed to refuse to return to work “until they had a fair day’s wages for that work”.

Whatever the truth of the situation, the hopes expressed in the Preston Pilot’s report early on Saturday 13th August proved to be entirely in vain. The paper’s second and third editions related the catastrophic events which occurred in Preston later that same day.

By 6am on Saturday, large numbers of protestors were already assembling again in Chadwick’s Orchard. On hearing that some of the mills had resumed work, they began to go from workplace to workplace, sabotaging machinery as they went and encouraging workers to join the strike.

A large mob had been formed by the time the protestors began to gather at the bottom of Lune Street outside Preston’s Corn Exchange. By this stage the Mayor, Samuel Horrocks, had arrived on the scene, together with the Town Clerk, two local magistrates and members of the Lancashire County Police. They had also enlisted the help of soldiers from the 72nd Highlanders, who had been stationed in the town to assist in case of any civil disturbance.

Women and children had joined the throng of protestors and were sent to the nearby canal wharf to collect loose stones. These were then thrown at the police and soldiers with increasing regularity. In a last-ditch attempt to retrieve the situation, local mill owner and magistrate, John Bairstow tried to reason with the crowd, as did the Mayor, but to no avail.

Mayor Horrocks then read the Riot Act, ordering the mob to disperse. This Act had been in force since the early 18th century and gave local authorities the right to order the dispersal of any gathering of twelve or more people who were “unlawfully, riotously, and tumultuously assembled together”. If members of the crowd did not then go their separate ways, the authorities were permitted to use force to disperse them.

By all accounts, this action only served to increase the barrage of stones being thrown by the protestors. Indeed, the Mayor himself is said to have been struck by a stone as he endeavoured to read the Riot Act. Horrocks was a member of one of Preston’s wealthiest mill-owning families and his presence only seemed to enrage the crowd further. His father and uncle had established a cotton mill in the town way back in the 1790s and had subsequently both served as MP for Preston. Horrocks Junior had only a few months previously moved into the family’s large mansion, Lark Hill House (now part of Cardinal Newman College), following his father’s death earlier that year.

Just to make matters worse, a group of protestors had detached themselves from the main mob and had made their way to the upper end of Lune Street, meaning that the police and soldiers now faced being beaten back by stones on all sides.

With the situation now escalating out of control, the soldiers of the 72nd Highlanders were given orders to open fire. Many crowd members may have expected blanks to be used, but, in a chilling echo of the Peterloo Massacre which had occurred in Manchester just over two decades previously, live rounds were fired. The crowd fled in shock, but at least four men are known to have been killed and several more were seriously injured.

The Northern Star reported that, “People could scarcely believe their senses. Riots have before happened in Preston but never before was the military ordered to fire”.

With townsfolk threatening to seek revenge for what had occurred that day, the 72nd Highlanders soldiers were given orders to leave town immediately and were replaced by another military detachment. In the event, the mills reopened on Monday morning and most people had returned to work by early the following week.

The names of the four men who are known to have died were Bernard McNamara (aged 17), George Sowerbutts (aged 19), William Lancaster (aged 25) and John Mercher (aged 27). Of the injured, one had to have a leg amputated and another a hand.

A subsequent inquest ruled that the killings had been “justified homicide”. On reading the local Preston newspaper reports of the evidence given at the inquest, it soon becomes apparent that a concerted effort was made on the part of the authorities to heap blame on the dead men, emphasising the supposedly significant part that they played in the riot.

One witness testified that, “On Saturday, at about eight o’clock in the morning, a party, to the number of 500 or 600, came to the factory and forced their way into the factory yard…I saw Sowerbutts coming from the old boiler house. He had a brick-bat and a cinder called a ‘clinker’ in his hand. I did not see whether he did anything with them. He appeared to be taking an active part in the disturbances”.

This is, perhaps, not the most convincing of witness statements, particularly, when the same witness later attests to having seen Sowerbutts, shortly before the fatal shots were fired, throwing stones at the military “with a

view of doing them an injury”, before adding that, “I had not known him before Saturday, but I am sure he was the person”.

Accounts vary as to who gave the order for the shots to be fired, but the Mayor, Samuel Horrocks, was widely blamed and became the subject of much public disapproval. The Northern Star even went so far as to suggest that the Mayor “ought to be tried for wilful murder”. Horrocks would himself die only four years after the tragedy.

In the end, the Reform Act of 1867 led to greater democracy, giving working class men the right to vote for the first time and paving the way for fairer working conditions.

The Preston Martyrs Statue was built in 1992 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the tragic events which unfolded outside the Corn Exchange on Lune Street that fateful day in August 1842. The large stone sculpture depicts the shooting and the four protestors who were killed. Its designer, Gordon Young, is renowned for his big, bold artwork - his later work includes Blackpool’s famous Comedy Carpet. In creating the Preston Martyrs Memorial, he was inspired by Goya’s famous painting, The Third of May 1808, which depicts French Napoleonic soldiers firing on unarmed Spanish civilians.

The inscription on the Preston Martyrs Memorial plaque speaks for itself, reading “Never without sacrifice have gains been made towards justice and democracy”.