Mary Fildes

Mary Fildes was president of the Manchester Female Reform Society in 1819, and played a leading role at the mass rally at Manchester in that year which ended in the Peterloo massacre. She was also the grandmother of the artist Luke Fildes through her son James. Family Born Mary Pritchard in Cork, Ireland, between 1789 and 1792, she came from a family of Manchester grocers. Her known family connections were Welsh rather than Irish, so her parents may simply have been visiting Ireland. She married William Fildes, a reed maker, on 18 March 1808 in Stockport, England. They had eight children: James (b. 1808; father of Luke Fildes), Samuel (b. 1809), George (b. 1810), Robert (b. 1815), Sarah (b. 1816), Thomas Paine (b. 1818), Henry Hunt (b. 1819), and John Cartwright (b. 1821). Mary named her younger children after some of the notable political figures of the day: John Cartwright, Thomas Paine and Henry Hunt. Peterloo Massacre In 1819 on 16 August, a vast orderly concourse of working men and women assembled on St. Peter's field, then on the outskirts Manchester. A group of Manchester female reformers processed in with the carriage of the speaker, Henry Hunt, Mary riding at the front of the carriage waving a flag. She mounted the platform and stood at the front with her flag, along with other female activists. Elizabeth Gaunt and Sarah Hargreaves sat in Hunt's carriage nearby. The London radical journalist Richard Carlile, who was present at the rally, described her as a heroic figure and gave her a prominent place in his print of the event, 'To Henry Hunt Esquire'.