As part of our ‘forgotten cotton’ campaign, the BBC featured an online report about the mass snowball fight of 1854, where 300 stock and cotton brokers entered into a snow scrap and pelted each other with snowballs.

When heavy snow brought trading to a standstill in Liverpool in 1854, brokers settled their differences with a more direct approach – a mass snowball fight. The brokers pelted each other with so much snow that a poem and a lithograph were created to commemorate the event.