ON August 16, 1819, 18 people were killed and hundreds more were injured in the Peterloo Massacre.

What essentially started as a peaceful protest for parliamentary reform by the working classes, ended with members of the cavalry charging into the crowd of 60,000 to 80,000 people who had gathered in St Peter’s Field, Manchester.

The day’s connections to Bolton have been well documented in the past and a Peterloo exhibition will be staged at the Central Library from this Saturday.

In the bicentenary year of the event, a local history society has now uncovered some ‘fascinating links’ to Westhoughton.

Westhoughton-born actress Maxine Peake starred in 2018 Mike Leigh film Peterloo but the Westhoughton Local History Group claim that the town’s connections do not end there.

The group claim Westhoughton is unique in that select people from the area represented both extremes of the wide social spectrum of the period.

Representing the class of wealth, influence and power were two men who played prominent roles in the lives of the people of Westhoughton some seven years earlier, when, as part of the frequent crushing of Luddite revolts, the famed Burning of Westhoughton Mill in 1812 had resulted in hangings and deportations.

The first of these was William Hulton, a member of the family dynasty which had owned large tracts of land in Lancashire since the late 12th century, ultimately establishing the family seat at Hulton Hall, surrounded by the extensive Hulton Park, on the eastern fringes of Westhoughton.

Hulton held many positions of high office, including, at the time of Peterloo, the chairmanship of the powerful Lancashire and Cheshire Magistrates. In this role it was he who gave the order to the Yeomanry and Hussars to charge the Manchester crowd with such fatal results.

Secondly, Bolton-born Colonel Ralph Fletcher was also a member of a local wealthy family which had generated much of its wealth from coal-mining in the district, ultimately including Atherton Collieries at Howe Bridge, adjacent to Westhoughton’s southern boundary. Fletcher was a magistrate in Bolton and Manchester, under Hulton’s direction, and was also in charge of Bolton Volunteer Yeomanry.

He was a ‘spymaster’ in the pay of Whitehall, having established The Society for Information and Correspondence, which was essentially a network of local paid spies, most of whom were out of work men willing to betray their fellow sufferers for money. In this role, Fletcher was required to report almost daily to the Home Office on any so-called ‘seditious activity’.

At the other extreme of the spectrum was a group of desperately-hungry and politically radical workers from the Wingates district of Westhoughton, mainly handloom weavers and agricultural labourers. They were willing recruits to the cause, and marched to Manchester and back on that ill-fated day, although there are no records of any Westhoughton casualties.

To commemorate the day, Westhoughton Local History Group will stage a reconstruction of the part which the town played in the Peterloo story, with a group of adults and children acting out a narrated story, to a background of projected images of the unfolding dramatic events.

It will take place before an invited audience at Westhoughton library on Thursday August 15 and will coincide with the opening of an exhibition on the library’s upper level, which will remain in-situ until the end of September.

In addition to the dramatic production and the exhibition, the group will also be publishing an extended illustrated essay summarising the Westhoughton dimension to the 1819 happenings.

Westhoughton will also be included on a new memorial to be unveiled on the forecourt of Manchester Central Conference Centre on Friday August 16 — the 200th anniversary.

The memorial has been designed by renowned artist Jeremy Deller and will also include Bolton, Atherton, Wigan and Leigh.