Sir Charles Napier 005

Original Sir Charles Napier public house, demolished in 1967 and reopened next door the following year in the former YMCA building next door. Tontine Street was to the right of the pub, and Kirkham Lane was to the left of the cottages seen in the image.rnThe pub was named after a well-known military man who enjoyed an illustrious career serving the British Empire. During the campaign for universal (manhood) suffrage of 1839, Government stationed 6,000 troops in the North of England under Napier’s command. Unlike the perpetrators of the Peterloo massacre in 1819, Napier was sympathetic to the ‘Chartist’ cause and did his best to minimise violence while obeying his orders. He privately blamed ‘Tory injustice and Whig imbecility’ for the desperate state in which people in the industrial North found themselves. rn