Peterloo remembered: Sean Cooney’s haunting folk chronicle of resistance and remembrance

‘“At Waterloo the fight was fair, was man to man, each side, but Manchester was murder,” he said before he died’, sings Sean Cooney at Manchester Folk Festival (March 20–22). He’s singing about John Lees, a young Oldham mill worker who fought at Waterloo in 1815, but died as a result of being badly gashed by the sword of a soldier at St Peter’s Field in Manchester on 16 August 1819. 60,000 people gathered on St Peter’s Field that day to demand the right to vote and to be represented in parliament – Manchester had no MPs at the time – and 15 of those protestors lost their lives once violence broke out.

Cooney, of the folk trio The Young’uns, had already written songs for a theatre and song project titled Rising Up, which commemorated the bicentenary of the Peterloo Massacre in 2019. With a script written by Debs Newbold, that project drew parallels between then and now through the stories of two women: Mary Fildes, who was at Peterloo, and a fictional contemporary character involved in the #MeToo movement.

But the project wasn’t over. Cooney felt that he “needed to finish the job properly, finish the songs that I started five years before and write new ones”. With support from Sound Roots, who run Manchester Folk Festival, and Rochdale Borough Council, Cooney wrote a one-hour piece with “14 main songs and a few short street songs” and a spoken word narrative “reflecting the hundreds of eyewitness accounts of the massacre.”

This latest project, Peter’s Field, is performed by Cooney (singing and narrating the story) with Eliza Carthy on fiddle/vocals and Sam Carter on guitar/vocals at this year’s Manchester Folk Festival. In a song about the Irish-born Fildes, who was president of the Manchester Female Reform Society, Carthy sings, ‘But when the soldiers charged the crowd, and slashed their thirsty swords around, Mary Fildes she stood her ground, and held her standard, fast’. Writing the song about Fildes led Cooney to “write more songs about the women of Peterloo, because in the little bit we were taught at school about Peterloo, the involvement of women was never mentioned, but thousands of women were there and were organised in female reform societies across Lancashire.”

Peter’s Field is an astonishing work. The story is told through songs and narratives about significant figures like Fildes, Henry Hunt (the main speaker) and Sam Bamford, a radical weaver from Middleton, as well as ordinary people like Lees and others. The performance moves briskly from a jaunty ‘Radical Rags’ about the biblical inspiration for many of those walking to St Peter’s Field that morning, fiddle and guitar building the anticipated arrival of Henry Hunt at the stage, and the sense of horror as the soldiers arrived wielding their sabres. There is also humour in ‘John Brierley’s Cheese’ about a man who avoided death because he kept cheese under his hat, a respectful dignity in the singing of the names of the dead and the mournful telling of the demise of John Lees. It is a compelling, passionate performance, radio-ballad-like, evocative and haunting.

Unlike the contemporary parallels at the forefront of Rising Up, Cooney decided with Peter’s Field to “let people make those parallels themselves, if they want to”. Doubtless, for many, the parallels loom large. Cooney, Carthy and Carter have recorded Peter’s Field, with broadside ballad authority Jennifer Reid narrating and singing the street ballads, for release on the 206th anniversary of Peterloo in August this year.

There was much else to savour in Manchester. Nick Hart and Tom Moore’s combining of viola and viol gave an earthy, timeless feel to a delightful bunch of English traditional songs and tunes, with some learned from Martin Carthy, one from melodeon player Tony Hall and ‘The Colour of Amber’, the title-track of their album, from traveller singer Mary Ann Haynes. Lisa Knapp & Gerry Diver performed songs and tunes from their album Hinterland and a couple from Diver’s Speech Project, creating rich, quirky soundscapes on fiddle, banjo, dulcimer, percussion and loops, Knapp fully inhabiting the songs and Diver’s fiddle tunes linking back to his upbringing in Manchester’s Irish community. Brown Wimpenny were a revelation: 10 of them on stage, starting a capella, they cantered through multi-layered jigs, traditional songs and a seafaring hymn, at times playful, sometimes anarchically cacophonous, but full of entertaining, harmonic delights.