This verse sits at the end of Percy Shelley’s 1819 poem 'The Masque of Anarchy'.

The aristocrat-turned-radical wrote it as a funeral march for the British working class murdered by police at the Peterloo massacre.

80,000 people had gathered in Manchester to demand the vote. 700 of the protestors went home battered and bruised. 15 went home in coffins.

This event meant a great deal to my family and my parent's being from working class stock in Manchester one can understand why. It remains the one time I heard my brother sing in public at a folk club here in Oxfordshire when he stood up one open mike night and sang Harvey Kershaw's 'The Peterloo Massacre' I have never been so moved or so proud





Reason (if any were needed! It isn't!) to adore Maxine Peake . . . .