Long Road from Jarrow
Page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Stuart Maconie
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
‘The Town that was Murdered’
Pre-Amble
Stage One
Jarrow to Chester-Le-Street
5 October, 12 miles
Stage Two
Chester-Le-Street to Ferryhill
6 October, 12 miles
Stage Three
Ferryhill to Darlington
7 October, 12 miles
Stage Four
Darlington to Northallerton
8 October, 16 miles
Stage Five
Northallerton to Ripon
9 October. 19 miles
Stage Six
Ripon to Harrogate
12 October, 11 miles
Stage Seven
Harrogate to Leeds
13 October, 15 miles
Stage Eight
Leeds to Wakefield
14 October, 9 miles
Stage Nine
Wakefield to Barnsley
15 October, 10 miles
Stage Ten
Barnsley to Sheffield
16 October, 13 miles
Stage Eleven
Sheffield to Chesterfield
18 October, 12 miles
Stage Twelve
Chesterfield to Mansfield
19 October, 12 miles
Stage Thirteen
Mansfield to Nottingham
20 October, 14 miles
Stage Fourteen
Nottingham to Loughborough
21 October, 5 miles
Stage Fifteen
Loughborough to Leicester
22 October, 11 miles
Stage Sixteen
Leicester to Market Harborough
23 October, 14 miles
Stage Seventeen
Market Harborough to Northampton
24 October, 17 miles
Stage Eighteen
Northampton to Bedford
26 October, 21 miles
Stage Nineteen
Bedford to Luton
28 October, 19 miles
Stage Twenty
Luton to St Albans
29 October, 10 miles
Stage Twenty-One
St Albans to Edgware
30 October, 11 miles
Stage Twenty-Two
Edgware to Marble Arch
31 October, 8 miles
Postscript
Further Reading
Thanks
Copyright
About the Book
Three and a half weeks. Three hundred miles. I saw roaring arterial highways and silent lanes, candlelit cathedrals and angry men in bad pubs. The Britain of 1936 would have been a land of beef paste sandwiches and drill halls. Now we are a nation of vaping and nail salons, pulled pork and salted caramel.
In the autumn of 1936, some 200 men from the Tyneside town of Jarrow marched 300 miles to London, in protest against the destruction of their towns and industries. Precisely 80 years on, Stuart Maconie walks from north to south, retracing the route of the emblematic Jarrow Crusade. Travelling down the country’s spine, Maconie moves through a land that is, in some ways, very much the same as the England of the 30s with its political turbulence, austerity, north/south divide and food banks. Yet, in other ways, it is completely unrecognisable.
Maconie visits the great cities as well as the sleepy hamlets. He meets those with stories to tell and whose voices build a complex and entertaining tale of Britain, then and now.
About the Author
Stuart Maconie is a writer, broadcaster and journalist. His previous bestsellers have included Cider with Roadies, Pies and Prejudice and Adventures on the High Teas. He currently hosts the afternoon show on BBC Radio 6 music with Mark Radcliffe, as well as weekly show The Freak Zone. Based in the cities of Birmingham and Manchester, he can also often be spotted on top of a mountain in the Lake District with a Thermos flask and an individual pork pie.
Also by Stuart Maconie
Cider with Roadies
Pies and Prejudice
Adventures on the High Teas
Hope and Glory
The People’s Songs
The Pie at Night
For Tracy Brabin and Jo Cox, Members of Parliament for Batley and Spen, West Yorkshire
PROLOGUE
‘Going far, son?’
I turn to meet the voice, somewhat awkwardly since I’m still getting used to the graceless choreography required when travelling laden with a large, bulky modern rucksack. It’s made in Colorado and according to the manufacturer, ‘delivers serious function while looking great, featuring Axiom 5 technology, front entry and stretch mesh front and side pockets’. It can hold ‘65 litres’ should I ever be tempted to fill it with liquid. Nonetheless, it’s this highly visible piece of kit which has presumably prompted the question from behind me. That and my remorseless, solitary plod along an unlovely stretch of northern trunk road on a quiet weekday morning.
‘London,’ I answer.
‘Bloody hell!’ he replies.
He’s a big man in his late fifties, I’d guess; Geordie accent, close cropped hair, brisk, active. He moves alongside me, clutching a thick rope leash wound around his wrist at the end of which strains a large German Shepherd dog; enthusiastic, curious, increasingly aware I feel that there is half a meat and potato pasty in either the stretch mesh front or side pocket (I forget which) of my great-looking, yet seriously functional pack.
It’s 5 October 2016 on the A41 between Pelaw Grange and Chester-le-Street. A rinsed fresh autumn morning in Northumberland; a sky of rippled, downy cloud and a low gauzy sun over the far blue smudge of fells. Nearer to hand, less lovely, the buffeting, thunderous, continuous rush of articulated lorries along the noisy arterial road.
‘London?’ There’s pity in his voice, with a hint of disbelief and perhaps a dash of admiration. ‘Elsa!’ He yanks the boisterous dog to heel.
‘Yes, I’m retracing a famous journey …’ I pause. ‘If I were to say “the Jarrow march” to you, would that mean anything?’
He smiles and looks me up and down, as if wondering what kind of response might go down best. Over the next month of walking almost the length of England, I’ll ask many people this question and get all kinds of responses to that word ‘Jarrow’ and the famous march of 1936. Some will be knowledgeable, some vague, some apologetic, some impassioned, many wildly inaccurate. A few faces will be blank and sheepish, offering an embarrassed shrug or a wild guess. Others will have learned about it at school, especially up here on this first northern stretch, where many will have treasured, polished stories to tell. Some will have had family members on the march. Others will claim to.
I’ll meet people whose granddads cooked the marchers breakfast in a drill hall in Leicester and a lady whose mum watched them stride past her cottage down a country lane near Bedford. A taxi driver in Darlington will talk of knowing old miners who had walked with them through Manchester and Birmingham. A sweet, older woman in Newton Aycliffe will tell me that she still has a tent peg that she found as a girl left behind after they had taken down their camp in her village. They didn’t pass anywhere near Birmingham or Manchester and they never pitched a tent in Newton Aycliffe but as Frank Lloyd Wright once said, ‘the truth is more important than the facts’.
The man on the A41 between Pelaw Grange and Chester-le-Street thinks for a second or two, then with a jutting jaw, a sly look and an eye on my reaction says, ‘Aye, it means something. A bunch of bloody left wingers who went to London to stir up trouble because they had nothing better to do.
’
Certainly the last of this is true. It was having nothing to do – no work, nor money, security or purpose, just long, empty repetitious days of hardship, boredom and despair – that sent the marchers all the way down to London 80 years ago. In a sense then, my dog walking companion is absolutely right. He registers my surprise though, which is genuine. You don’t find many north easterners who’ll ‘trash’ the Jarrow marchers. Respect for Jarrow’s great collective effort is coiled into the DNA of the region, embedded in its still proud sense of self.
‘Every bugger in County Durham claims their dad or granddad or budgie was on that bloody march. Sorry, son, but I’m a bitter man. Worked in the steelworks in Consett and it was never the same after nationalisation in ’67. Labour let me down. I’m a rarity round here in talking like that. This is Labour country, Country Durham. Mining country … with no mines. Well, I wish you luck. You’ll see some places … I almost wish I was going with you … Cheerio, son.’
He crosses the road gingerly, Elsa recalcitrant still, odour of pasty still lingering on the breeze perhaps. As he gets to the other side he yanks on the dog’s chain, halts her and turns around on the opposite verge. He shouts something across the road back at me with a wry grin.
‘I hope you get a better welcome than they did anyway … all five hundred thousand of them.’
A joke. A good one. I want to ask him more, but a speeding convoy of huge vehicles flicker and rumble past like a strip of film, and when they have passed he too is gone. But to answer his first question, which I don’t think I did: yes, I am going far. Three hundred miles, give or take.
To London. A long road from Jarrow.
They denied us the future we wanted, but that doesn’t mean they can deny us our past …
Matt Perry, The Jarrow Crusade: Protest and Legend
‘Who cares? The world’s moved on …’
Software Consultant, Kent, via Twitter
The Shields Gazette, established in 1849, is the oldest evening paper in Britain. It still appears nightly, in print and online, and remains the voice of home and the journal of record for generations of Geordies, Mackems, Wearsiders and for thousands across the north east of England. On New Year’s Day 2013, in amongst details of the Queen’s Honours List and drunken revelry in Hebburn, it carried these notices:
SHIELS Con. Died aged 96.
Dad, you had a long life. We are so proud to have been a part of it. Love and miss you always, Moya & Brian x
Dad, you will always be near us. Con, Eileen, grandchildren and family.
Con Shiels, a widower of Jarrow, South Tyneside died on Boxing Day 2013 after a short illness, mourned by his son, two daughters and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He’d been a fitter by trade and had served 12 years in the Royal Navy. But it was the events of one late October day in 1936 that Con spent the rest of his long life being asked about, interviewed by earnest academics, TV comedians and politicians, appearing on scores of documentaries, speaking to classrooms full of eager schoolchildren.
On 31 October 1936, aged just 20 and enrolled on a work scheme in London, Con joined his father, an unemployed riveter, and nearly two hundred other men from his home town to walk the eight or so miles from Edgware to London’s Marble Arch. They were on the final leg of a protest over the decision to close their steelworks, to publicise the plight of their dying town and to ask for government assistance in creating new jobs. They’d been on the road on foot for three-and-a-half weeks and covered almost 300 miles by the time young Con Shiels joined them. The youngest present, he went on to outlive every other man on that walk and thus when he passed way, he held a claim to be the last of the Jarrow marchers.
A decade before, on 14 September 2003, another nonagenarian and another ‘Con’, Cornelius Whalen of Hadrian Road, Jarrow, died at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead. He was the last man alive to have walked the whole 291-mile route from Jarrow to London amongst that famous body of men. In commemoration, the Jarrow Brewery named a beer after him, the Old Cornelius. But it was Con Shiels who was actually the last survivor to have walked among them, if only for that final dour, rain-lashed day along the Edgware Road. At a packed requiem mass for him at St Matthew’s RC Church, Jarrow, parish priest Father Peter Martin said: ‘This is the closing of a chapter of history. There can’t be any others who can say they took part.’
Except that there might have been. There might still be even, though this is extremely unlikely of course. The truth is we just don’t know. The Jarrow march of October 1936 is an event which, although lit by fires of memory and the glow of romance, has many an obscure and shadowy cranny and corner. That’s decidedly strange when you consider that we are not amongst the Vikings or the Saxons here. We are not in the realms of Camelot or Sherwood Forest. We’re talking of twentieth century Tyneside and modern Britain. Here is an event that happened relatively recently and within living memory, had two ‘embedded’ journalists in its number and was covered by the national press, radio and newsreels. It was a fairly straightforward undertaking; a three-and-a-half-week march to deliver a petition to parliament. But it has attained the status of a national myth akin to the stories of Robin Hood or King Arthur, and like those, has become negotiable, malleable, debatable. While its status is unarguable, its details are anything but.
For instance, above my desk as I write this is a laminated copy of the original schedule of the walk drawn up by the organisers and lodged at the time of the march with the BBC and the National Archives. It is hard to conceive of a more august or official document of the trip. It is also quite wrong. Two overnight stays are recorded in Thirsk and Boroughbridge. These never happened. The marchers didn’t even pass through these towns, though they did lodge in nearby Ripon. Ripon, however, doesn’t appear on the itinerary. During his 2005 bid for leadership of the Conservative Party, David Davies claimed his grandfather had marched with the Crusade from York to Aldermaston. His grandfather may well have marched somewhere with someone. But the Jarrow marchers passed through neither York nor Aldermaston.
Famously, a dog accompanied the march. Many of the press reports dwelt somewhat sentimentally on this adorable pooch, presumably to provide some cute human (or rather canine) interest and distract from any awkward political dimension. Depending on whose account you read, this was either a setter, a retriever or a terrier. But even a cursory glance at the pictures would suggest that it’s actually a Labrador. Whatever its breed, this plucky, uncomplaining companion was called Paddy. Or perhaps Peter. Then again, some people say it was called Blackie. Others say Jarrow.
Anyway, what is certain is that it walked all the way with the men, all 200 of them. That’s ‘two hundred’ according to the police and the march organisers in any case. We can only find corroborating evidence and names for 176. And when I say ‘names’, there’s another complicating issue here because many of the men gave false ones so that they wouldn’t have their benefit stopped by the National Assistance Board. For instance, marcher Thomas Downey was probably actually Thomas Dobson.
While the marchers covered the miles, their equipment went ahead in a van. No one knows the driver’s name or the make of his vehicle. On arrival in London, they were taken on a river boat trip and the 10,000 signature petition they had carried in a box for the entire route was hurriedly taken from them at the House of Commons. It has never been seen since. No one knows where it is, or if it still exists. It might be mouldering in a forgotten cabinet in the bowels of Westminster, or lying in its wooden box on the muddy bed of the Thames.
Some may find all this vagueness and fudge dispiriting. But apart from that last properly shameful detail, I think it entirely in keeping with the march and its legacy. ‘Jarrow’ (the whole matrix of events reducible to one word like ‘Aberfan’, ‘Hillsborough’ or ‘Orgreave’) has become mythic, storied; a thing of lore and romance as much as hard fact, one whose details and legacy are still debated today. Many of the ‘facts’ surrounding the march may be opaque or
contentious, but the ‘truth’ of the Jarrow march, its emblematic significance as a piece of Britain’s social history, is as enduring as it’s contested. Douglass in the New Statesman in 1996 said, ‘it is a story told and retold …. The ghosts of Jarrow’s Crusaders still march into Jarrow’s consciousness.’ The Jarrow march casts a long shadow, and you invoke the name lightly at your peril.
In 2000, a collective of disgruntled road hauliers, the self-styled ‘People’s Fuel Lobby’, announced their plans to send a slow-moving convoy cum blockade of lorries down the A1(M) from Jarrow to London to force the government into lowering duty on fuel thus safeguarding their profits. Spokesperson Andrew Spence declaimed, ‘I don’t know if anyone has heard of the Jarrow Crusade? Well, it’s starting again, only bigger. We want as many vehicles on the road as possible.’ Spence’s crass attempt to usurp this icon of working-class struggle for such selfish, disruptive, acquisitive ends was a PR disaster. Denounced everywhere, it lost the People’s Fuel Lobby what little public support they had.
Whilst the 1930s produced many marches, protests and outpourings of anger and dissent, none are as well remembered, beloved or lionised as the Jarrow Crusade. When discussing the Jarrow march, be it with Geordies, Labour movement stalwarts, working people of the north or British people of a certain vintage generally, it’s wise to remember that you’re on hallowed ground and dealing with emotive, if not entirely accurate, memories. Tread softly, as W B Yeats asked the famously unfussed Maud Gonne, for you tread on my dreams, or in my case, lacing up my Size Nine Meindl Respond GTXs and treading on a whole romantic cultural icon, over community and place and memory.