reform who had been present at what became known as the Peterloo Massacre. On 16 August 1819, in St Peter’s Square, Manchester, a 60,000-strong unarmed crowd gathered to hear a speech by a great radical orator, Henry Hunt, who believed in some very dangerous things: equal rights, universal suffrage, parliamentary reform, an end to child labour and so forth.
Fearing that Hunt would stir the crowd to some form of insurrection, the city’s magistrates ordered in the yeomanry, who literally cut their way to the platform on which Hunt was speaking in order to arrest him. Numerous men, women and children were treated for fractures, sabre cuts and gunshot wounds. More than 400 people were injured and 11 were killed. It was all over in ten minutes. The story of the day led to a great poem, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, by Shelley (‘Rise like lions after slumber . . . Ye are many – they are few’).
The historian E.P. Thompson described the decision facing the authorities on that day in his 1963 book, The Making of the English Working Class: ‘Old Corruption faced the alternatives of meeting the reforms with repression or concession. But concession, in 1819, would have meant concession to a largely working-class reform movement: the middle-class reformers were not yet strong enough (as they were in 1832) to offer a more moderate line of advance. This is why Peterloo took place.’
The term ‘fake news’ had not yet been invented. But Taylor, standing on the edge of the carnage, knew what to expect. The official authorities would tell lies about the day. They would claim they were acting in self-defence; they had been attacked by the mob and had drawn their swords as a desperate last measure.
The one national reporter on the scene, the Times’s John Tyas, ended the day in captivity (or sanctuary) and was unable to file a story. Knowing this, Taylor wrote his own report and got it swiftly to London. It was printed in the Times on the morning of 18 August, two days later. The story marked, in the words of one writer, the ‘birth of the public reporter in English public life’.1
By the following day’s edition Tyas was free to file his own eyewitness account and the Times went to town, filling more than two broadsheet pages.
In the volume of space devoted to the massacre you can feel the editor of the Times, Thomas Barnes, grappling with how anyone could establish the truth. Would people naturally trust the word of one reporter over that of the magistrates? Would readers be more convinced if there were multiple accounts broadly corroborating one version? In addition to its own reporting the paper went in for two techniques that became routine in the early twenty-first century – aggregation and crowdsourcing.
The aggregation took the form of excerpts from other local papers’ reports of the day. The crowdsourcing came from a petition and from numerous ‘private letters’ similar to Taylor’s. They painted a confusing picture, but the accumulation of evidence overwhelmingly demonstrated that the crowd had behaved peacefully and there was no possible justification for the violence meted out.
Taylor understood the importance of facts – and also predicted that the facts of the day would be contested, and litigated, for months, if not years. He wanted to place on record ‘facts, undeniable and decisive . . . truths which are impossible to gainsay’.
He was entirely right. The authorities pushed back hard, creating a set of ‘alternative facts’ around the events of the day: they claimed to have witnessed pikes dipped in blood and torrents of stones and bricks thrown at the troops. The speakers on the day were later arrested and jailed by the same magistrates who had ordered the violence. Thanks to Taylor’s quick response ‘within two days all England knew of the event’, says Thompson. ‘Within a week every detail of the massacre was being canvassed in ale-houses, chapels, workshops, private houses.’ And, thanks to the public reporting of the facts of the day, Thompson was able to write in 1963: ‘Never since Peterloo has authority dared to used equal force against a peaceful British crowd.’
Peterloo is as good an illustration as any as to why good journalism is necessary. Nearly 200 years later, in the early days of the Trump presidency, the Washington Post expressed the same motivating ideal with the slogan: ‘Democracy dies in darkness’. The New York Times, faced with an administration in 2017 that cared little for the distinction between facts and falsehoods, marketed itself with the words: ‘Truth is hard to find. But easier with 1,000+ journalists looking.’
Power needs witnesses. Witnesses need to be able to speak freely to an audience. The truth can only follow on from agreed facts. Facts can only be agreed if they can be openly articulated, tested . . . and contested. That process of statement and challenge helps something like the truth to emerge. From truth can come progress. In the absence of this daylight, bad things will almost certainly happen. The acts of bearing witness and establishing facts can lead to positive reform. By the start of the twenty-first century these might – in relatively enlightened democracies – seem unremarkable statements, but 200 years ago these were comparatively new propositions.
Taylor decided to found his own paper. The first edition of the Manchester Guardian hit the streets about 18 months later – initially a weekly paper printed on machinery that could turn out 150 copies an hour. Its third edition reported on the House of Commons debate on the Peterloo massacre, over nine-and-a-half columns.
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To compress a very long story into a very short narrative: the Taylor family married the Scott family. A young member of the latter tribe – C.P. Scott – became editor at the age of 25: by the time he died in 1932 he had not only edited the paper for 57 years, he also owned it. On the death, in rapid succession, of Scott and his son Edward, the family placed the paper into the care and ownership of the Scott Trust in 1936 to preserve and protect the Guardian ‘in perpetuity’.
The Scotts could have made themselves very wealthy by selling the Manchester Guardian to Lord Beaverbrook or any other number of suitors: instead they gave away their inheritance in order to sustain decent, serious, liberal journalism. They were not in it for the money. The Manchester Guardian was a public service.
Pause and reflect on that very unusual moment – described by Winston Churchill’s future lord chancellor, Gavin Simonds, as ‘very repugnant’ (‘you are trying to divest yourself of a property right’).2 Sir William Hayley, later editor of the Times, said of John Scott’s decision to, in effect, give away the Guardian: ‘He could have been a rich man; he chose a Spartan existence. And when he made up his mind to divest himself of all beneficial interest in them he did so with as little display of emotion as if he had been solving an algebraical problem. Most men making so large a sacrifice would have exacted at least the price of an attitude.’3
On the paper’s 100th birthday in 1921 Scott – who’d been editing for nearly 50 years – wrote perhaps the most famous short essay on journalism, with its pithy aphorism: ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred.’4 He used the article to underscore his passionate belief that, while a newspaper was a business, it had little point unless it was more than a business. A newspaper could – then, as now – aim to be ‘something of a monopoly’. Many business people might relish that. Scott felt the opposite. The Guardian, he thought, should ‘shun its temptations’.
A newspaper has two sides to it. It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. It is, in its way, an instrument of government. It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces . . . It may make profit or power its first object, or it may conceive itself as fulfilling a higher and more exacting function.
