User:Rupert Clayton/MSY additions

Thomas Trafford, owner of substantial lands in Lancashire and Cheshire, was commissioned as the cavalry's first Major-Commandant on 23 August 1817. As with many yeomanry regiments of the time, it was a relatively inexperienced militia recruited from among shopkeepers and tradesmen.

Recruitment, musters and social events appear to have been the primary activities during the first year of operation. A notice in the London Gazette on 6 October 1818 listed the appointment of officers to the corps over the past year. Five captains were appointed on 30 September 1817 (Robert Josias Jackson Norreys, Hugh Hornby Birley, Robert Hindley, Richard Jones Withington and Edward Vigor Fox) as were two cornets (Josiah Kearsley and Thomas Heywood). Thomas Ollier was appointed surgeon on 5 December 1817. The following spring, Richard Simpson was appointed as captain and Edward Milne as cornet, both on 17 April 1818. Unsurprisingly, the officers were drawn from the ruling class of early nineteenth-century Manchester. While Trafford, Norreys and Fox came from longstanding local landowning families, the other officers were drawn from Manchester's Tory factory owners. Withington's father, John, owned silk and cotton mills; Birley was also a factory owner. The officers also had close ties to existing government in the city. In 1815 Birley had served as boroughreeve, a position also held by Fox's father, William Fox, (in 1806) and by Withington's brother, Thomas Scholes Withington (in 1819). Josiah Kearsley was a churchwarden of the parish of Manchester in 1814.

The first mention of the cavalry in print is when the Manchester Mercury records that Trafford and the officers and gentlemen of the yeomanry were patrons for performances of Walter Scott's Guy Mannering and John Fawcett's Perouse; Or the Desolate Island, along with an interlude from Joseph Reed's The Register Office, at the Theatre Royal, Manchester on 29 April 1818.

By the autumn of 1818, the yeomanry was beginning to be used to control or suppress workers' demonstrations in the towns around Manchester. A troop of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry's cavalry under Robert Hindley was dispatched to handle a crowd of weavers who gathered at Burnley on 16 September 1818.

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 * Richard Jones Withington, 16 January 1795