With Henry Hunt we’ll go, We’ll raise the cap of liberty, In spite of Nadin Joe*

Manchester, 1819

It is time for another two pictures from the collection of Manchester’s history of protest.

I tried resisting using an image of Peterloo but it remains an important event in the history of the city and one that I have written about before.

So I shall confine myself to the picture and move on to a more peaceful demonstration which wound its way through the city streets passing close to St Peter’s Field in November 2011 and represented one of the biggest protests in Manchester since the the Coalition Government was formed.

* Henry Hunt, a popular song from the period of Peterloo.  Henry Orator Hunt was a radical who argued for annual parliaments and universal suffrage,

He had been invited to speak at the rally in St Peter’s Field in the August of 1819 and was arrested and convicted for his part in the demonstration.

Manchester 2011

Joseph Nadin deputy-constable of Manchester 1801-1821.  “He was a renowned thief-catcher with the reputation of turning every offence into a felony.  The significance of this peculiar twist is that a successful felonious charge was rewarded with a fee of 40 shillings” Hewitt Eric J.,A History of Policing in Manchester, 1979

This  reputation  led the radical Samuel Bamford to observe of Nadin that “he had the homely tact to take care of his own interests.  

He housed a good harvest whilst his sun was up and retired to spend his evening in ease and plenty on a farm of his own within the borders of Cheshire.” Bamford Samuel Passages in the Life of a Radical, 1840-42, also quoted by Eric Hewit

Nadin was also no friend of popular protest and radical politics and during the period that Habeus Corpus was suspended was zealous in his arrest and imprisonment without trial of radicals, and those suspected of being radicals.

Pictures; Peterloo, 1819, m07589, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and 2011 from the collection of Andrew Simpson