Christopher Eccleston and Maxine Peake join Peterloo event
Actors Christopher Eccleston and Maxine Peake joined hundreds of people at an event to mark 196 years since the Peterloo massacre in Manchester.
At least 10 people were killed and hundreds injured in 1819 when troops charged a crowd at St Peter's Field who were demanding political reform. The artist Jeremy Deller is in talks about creating a permanent memorial, the Peterloo Massacre Campaign said. Chairman Paul Fitzgerald said the work of art had been "budgeted". Eccleston said a permanent memorial was important "because [Peterloo] was whitewashed, because it was suppressed, if they had fronted up about it in the first place, there would be no need for this kind of thing". More than 60,000 people, who were reported to be unarmed, attended a meeting on 16 August 1819 that called for voting rights for working men. But local magistrates sent in an armed cavalry through the crowd to arrest speakers, including the political reformer Henry Hunt. The consequent carnage, dubbed Peterloo after the battle at Waterloo a few years earlier, inspired the protest poem The Mask of Anarchy by the English Romantic writer Percy Bysshe Shelley and the birth of the Guardian newspaper in Manchester. Earlier this year Oscar-nominated director Mike Leigh, who was born in Salford, said he hoped to film a movie in 2017 on the Peterloo massacre. Peake said: "I did write to him and say thank you for doing this project... it's not just a northern issue, it's a nationwide, a worldwide issue." Organisers of the annual commemoration said they wanted "to try something new" this year by arranging a picnic of bread and cheese, adding it completed "what the [1819] protesters originally set out to do".