Peterloo Hunt Breakfast

There's been a rally in Manchester today to mark the "Peterloo" massacre of August 16th 1819.  An order by magistrates to disperse a crowd of demonstrators in St Peter's Field was interpreted as a cavalry charge which killed 15 and injured hundreds. The crowd had turned out to hear the revolutionary campaigner Henry Hunt, who was jailed for his part in the meeting, and whose policy of mass nonviolent agitation was not entirely unlike Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha.

Where Hunt's approach differed from Gandhi's was his use of merchandise. He took to advertising the radical cause on promotional jars of shoe polish, bearing the snappy slogan "Equal Laws, Equal Rights, Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, and the Ballot." He also developed a tie-in soft drink: his Breakfast Powder was billed as "most salubrious and nourishing Beverage that can be substituted for the use of Tea and Coffee, which are always exciting, and frequently the most irritating to the Stomach and Bowels." Practical revolution in the style of Amelia Bloomer (see earlier post).

Breakfast Powder was made from roasted corn, and given that he was campaigning for the repeal of laws that had made corn too expensive for the poor, he wouldn't be the last politician to position his finances with a view to future legislation.


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