On August 16, 1819, a large gathering took place here in Manchester where one of the speakers was a somewhat famous working-class radical named Henry Hunt, who would go on to later years to be elected to Parliament, where he was actually the first person in that body to ever propose letting women vote. He was killed shortly after. Ripped limb from lip. But he did that stuff in government in the 1830s, and he had some bad times to get through first. Hunt was a particular target of the authorities because he believed that getting large groups of people together and collectively making a demand was a politically useful tactic. So when he was set to speak at this 1819 rally, the magistrates in town were concerned that it would spark a riot. The conditions that normal people were living in were desperate and Hunt was a notoriously good speaker, so this was a potential powder keg. The authorities ultimately made a very bad decision and set about trying to arrest Hunt while he was on stage. This was a crowd estimated to be at least around 50,000 people, and Hunt showed up at about 1 p.m. The magistrates were watching from a nearby building, and when he got such a huge response when he took the stage, they realized that they should probably do something. They got to act. The crowd was so large and packed in that they decided that they needed to send in a fucking cavalry. So they sent for horsemen, and in their rush to get to the site of the rally, one cop knocked over a lady named Ann Fildes, who was carrying her two-year-old son in her arms. She survived, but the young kid William died. What, a cop murdered somebody? First casualty. He was not alone that day, though. Thanks to the unnecessary chaos of trying to arrest Hunt and other radicals, at least 17 other people lost their lives, and hundreds were injured. Some were trampled by the cavalry, one was killed in revenge the following day, and one guy named John Rhodes was stabbed in the head, and then his death was determined to have been from natural causes.