A history lesson

Today we paid a most enjoyable visit to a very good friend of ours, David Mervin, who before his retirement was an academic at the University of Warwick. Until a few months ago David lived in Arnside but for family and health reasons he has moved to a village in central Lancashire with the entertaining name of Ramsbottom.
This morning he took us for a walk along the bank of the River Irwell and that is where I took this shot of the hamlet of Chatterton and its peaceful riverside meadow. If we had not had David for company we would never have imagined that in 1826 this meadow was the scene of a riot and a brutal massacre.

David has researched this and with his kind permission I reproduce below his account of what happened.
North West England may have been the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution but in its early years the common people paid a heavy price for the developments which have given us our modern world.

David writes as follows:


It is difficult to believe that nearly 200 years ago this idyllic scene was the setting for  the little known brutal suppression of a mass demonstration by impoverished hand loom weavers. This was the culmination of events that began on Monday 24th April 1826 with a thousand men and women gathering at  Whinney Hill near Accrington. After speeches the throng, many carrying pikes, cudgels and sledgehammers, set off on a mission to destroy power looms in mills in the area, machines which were seen  as being responsible for  the dire straits that handloom weavers now found themselves in.

At the beginning, some of those marching had the impression that soldiers sent out from Manchester to intercept them were sympathetic to their cause. According to one young handloom weaver when mounted soldiers with drawn swords confronted the group he was with:-
Some of the old fellows from the mob spoke. They said ‘What are we to do? We're starving. Are we to starve to death?’ The soldiers were fully equipped with haversacks and they emptied their sandwiches among the crowd. Then the soldiers left and there was another meeting. ‘Were the power-looms to be broken or not? Yes, it was decided, they must be broken at all cost‘.

By the next day, moving on from Accrington and then to Oswaldtwistle, Blackburn and Darwen the crowd had doubled in size. The following  morning there were 3000 demonstrators surging down the Rossendale Valley to Rawtenstall and on to Edenfield,. Altogether 24 mills were attacked during the three days of rioting and more than a thousand power looms were destroyed.

On Wednesday 26th April 1826 the military decided to make a stand at Chatterton a small mill village on the outskirts of Ramsbottom. Ignoring the reading of the Riot Act the crowd now broke into the mill that stood on what is now the recreation field and began destroying 46 power looms while others stoned the soldiers in attendance. Eventually the order was given to open fire and  6 people were shot dead  with many others wounded. Several months later  53 men and 12 women were tried at Lancaster Castle for their part in the riots. 35 men and 6 women were sentenced to death, these sentences were later commuted for some, although 8 men and 2 women were sentenced to be transported to Australia.