ABSTRACT
The free-trade campaign, for 1840, was commenced with great vigour. It had been determined that a numerous meeting of delegates should be held in Manchester, and that on the occasion of their assembling, there should also be given to the opponents of the Corn Law, throughout the populous district surrounding Manchester, an opportunity of hearing the advocates of unrestricted commerce. There was no hall in the town large enough to contain half of the actual members of the local association. It was therefore resolved to construct one for the purpose. Mr. Cobden, who owned nearly all the then unbuilt-upon land in St. Peter’s Field, offered it as the site of the erection; and thus it curiously happened that it was raised upon the very spot, where, in 1819, a peaceably-met and legally-convened meeting was dispersed by the sabre, because its objects were to petition for a repeal of the Corn Law, and for reform in Parliament. The survivors of that fatal day had seen the Reform Bill passed; and many of them, seeing on that blood-stained field, a great place of assemblage rising up, to be devoted to the purpose of abolishing, by peaceful and temperate discussion, the op pressive monopoly against which the older radical reformers were all united, began to entertain the hope that, in spite of the protectionists and their new allies, the physical-force chartists, the time was coming when selfish monopolies would share the fate of the rotten boroughs. The erection of the temporary pavilion, afterwards to be replaced by the more permanent Free Trade Hall, was the work of one hundred men for eleven days. It is thus described in my paper of the time:—
“The length is 150 feet; width, 105; area, 15,750 square feet. In its frame work, pillars, &c, 4,500 cubic feet of timber have been used; in the flooring of the pavilion and its ante-rooms 17,100 square feet of three-inch plank; there were twenty-five tables from side to side; it was seated for 3,800 persons, and 500 more found entrance after the dinner. It was lighted by twenty-four chandeliers of twelve burners each, eight chandeliers in each of the three aisles, and there were three others at the entrances. Besides these was a device in gas upon the wall above the president’s chair, consisting of the word JUSTICE in letters of a yard in length. About 20,000 yards of white and pink calico had been used in the drapery. The whole had a very light appearance, the ground of the draperies forming the walls and roofs of the pavilion being white, panelled by broad bands or fillets of pink and white drapery within, which gives the form of a coned roof to each of the aisles, at a height from the floor of from twenty to twenty-four feet. A striking relief to the almost uniform colour was given by the draperies which cover the front of the galleries. These were of a deep crimson, having mottoes inscribed on them in letters of large dimensions. The one along the principal gallery, directly facing the chair, and extending the whole length of the pavilion is, “Landowners! Honesty is the best policy;’ that on the gallery at the east is, ‘Total and Immediate Repeal;’ and that at the west, ‘A fixed duty is a fixed injustice.’”
