PETERLOO
FROM PAGE TO SCREEN Jacqueline Riding looks back at her experience as historical adviser to Mike Leigh on his film about the Peterloo Massacre, the 200th anniversary of which has been marked this year I began working with Mike Leigh in 2011 after responding to a job advertisement in the Guardian for an experienced researcher and specialist in British art. The film, at that stage referred to as ‘Untitled 13’ , was released in 2014 as Mr. Turner. I soon discovered that the historian working on a Mike Leigh movie was required to advise on and provide detail about an extraordinary breadth of subject matter. For Mr. Turner my work covered every aspect of the artist’s life and, more broadly, his times, from the physical appearance of the Royal Academy of Art’s Annual Exhibition and, specifically, the exhibits in 1832, 1845 and 1850 (covering the three sequences seen in the film), to early nineteenth-century housekeeping and cookery, including recipes involving a pig’s head, and the contents of a physician’s medical bag in the 1830s and 1840s. The
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role involved working very closely with Mike himself – being his ‘extra brain’ , as he described it – as well as with the producers, assistant directors, departments covering costume, make-up and hair, production design, and alongside the cast, whether in groups (by character type, ‘artist’ , for example) or individually. Given the sheer scale and variety of information needed, I turned to The London Library. I had experienced the huge benefits of membership when I was assistant curator at the Palace of Westminster in the 1990s, and I continued to consult the collections throughout the two-year period from pre- to post-production. Coupled with the ability to take books home and the range of online resources (including the Burney Collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers, 19th-Century British Library Newspapers and the Times Digital Archive
1785–2010, which are, for me, invaluable), browsing the open shelves provided many discoveries – and distractions – on the way. When Mike announced at the end of 2014 that the focus of his next project was the Peterloo Massacre, an event which, historically, occurred just before the opening scene of Mr. Turner, I returned to the Library. Here I can only offer a hint as to the diversity of the research covered for this film, which then underpinned my accompanying narrative history, published in 2018 as Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre, and the richness of the Library’s collections on the topic. But before I continue on the research, I will set out briefly the events in Manchester on 16 August 1819. On that day, at an area of open ground known as St Peter’s Field, local yeomanry cavalry – an amateur citizen regiment who were, from the evidence of most eyewitnesses, desperately ill prepared, some drunk – supported by British-army regulars, including the 15th Hussars, tore through a pro-democracy meeting of 60,000 people. At that time around 2 per cent of the United Kingdom’s population could vote and Manchester had no Member of Parliament (the entire county of Lancashire had only two MPs), so they had gathered to demand universal male suffrage and equal representation in Parliament. The event itself lasted less than half an hour, but in that short time at least 15 of the people present, including an infant and 2 women, were killed or died later from their injuries, and over 650 were beaten, sabred and maimed. This was the British state, only four years after the defeat of the ‘tyrant’ Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo, turning its forces against the people – artisans,
