John Brooke (1755–1802)

As Under Sheriff of the County of Warwickshire, together with magistrates Joseph Carles and Dr. Benjamin Spencer, Brooke had responsibility for public order in Birmingham during the Priestley Riots in 1791.

Unable to stop the violence, which erupted at a dinner commemorating the French Revolution on 14 July, Brooke reported to the Home Office of “this most ungovernable mob.”[2] There is some evidence that the episode represented the deliberate unleashing of a looting, drunken, unruly mob by the magistrates against the dissenters and the reformers, in an attempt to check their new political aggressiveness in Birmingham.

Numerous affidavits providing evidence that Brooke, Carles, and Spencer had acted with neglect, if not worse, were collected and made available to the House of Commons.

The refusal of the Prime Minister (William Pitt the Younger) to act on these dispositions and of the House of Commons to listen to them provides the basis for allegations of the government’s complicity in the riots.

In 1792, he was appointed Steward of the Manor of Aston, in which capacity he secured the election of a churchman as Low Bailiff, a position which had been customarily filled by a dissenter.