fewer than fifty voters, while Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield, with a combined population of more than 540,000, had not one MP between them. Reform also had a record of inspiring popular discontent. In 1819 a crowd of 15,000 had gathered at Newhall Hill in Birmingham to symbolically elect Charles Wolseley as the town's "Legislatorial Attorney and Representative" in Westminster; when Manchester followed Birmingham's lead two months later, troops opened fire and killed 15: this event became known as the Peterloo Massacre. Lord John Russell tried sporadically and unsuccessfully during the 1820s to abolish specific rotten boroughs and transfer representation to larger towns, but the newly elected Whig government headed by Lord Grey in November 1830 was the first to commit to parliamentary reform. Grey formed a committee to draft reform proposals that would be sufficient to quell public opinion and "afford sure ground of resistance to further innovation", but the resulting Reform Bill received only lukewarm support in parliament and further elections were held in May 1831. Newly armed with a majority of over 130 seats, Grey introduced a Second Reform Bill in July 1831, which passed through the House of Commons with a majority of 140, but was defeated in the House of Lords in October amid rioting in Derby, Nottingham and Bristol. By the 1830s the most influential extra-parliamentary support for reform came from the Birmingham Political Union, which had been founded by Thomas Attwood in December 1829 as "a General Political Union between the lower and middle classes of the people" to engineer the political reform that Attwood had come to think necessary to achieve his ultimate goal of currency reform. The unusually small size of the units of production characteristic of the Birmingham economy, coupled with the resulting high degree of social mobility and shared economic interest between Birmingham workers and factory owners, enabled the BPU to attract a broad support across classes and maintain its position of leadership among the hundreds of more fragmented unions that followed its example and formed across the country in 1830 and 1831. The BPU had made its reputation amid the spontaneous rioting that had accompanied the fall of the First Reform Bill in 1831, assembling 150,000 protesters at Newhall Hill in the largest political assembly the country had ever seen. Its threat to reorganise itself along semi-military lines in November 1831 had led to suggestions that it was