Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  I have no connections with Jarrow. I’ve no link to the march or any of the marchers. I’m from the north west, not the north east, and Geordie friends have never tired of reminding me that my bit of ‘the north’ is more like the Midlands to them. But something appealed about retracing the Jarrow march.

  Firstly – and I wouldn’t want to downplay this element – I just fancied going for a really long walk. I liked the idea of passing through unfamiliar landscapes, experiencing the character and thrill of towns, villages and cities never visited, meeting, eating, drinking, soaking the country in. I like Britain and British history. I like the people and I like hanging out with them. I like random eavesdroppings, chance meetings and unexpected encounters and I had many on this journey, from the rosy cheeked Women’s Institute ladies who gave me a bag of apples to Albanian builders tearful on grappa late at night, and from concert pianists to chip shop waitresses.

  Being British, I was also drawn to the notion of heroic failure. At the end of his life, the last surviving man of the march Con Shiels said of it that it ‘had made not one ha’porth of difference’ and been a ‘waste of time’. But some think the constant, largely supportive publicity for the Jarrow march, the effort and endurance of the men and the focus on the plight of the town and conditions in industrial Britain, helped shape public attitudes into a fresh and keen desire for change. This new national mood may well have contributed to the Labour landslide of 1945 and thus to the setting up of the Welfare State and the NHS, those imperilled secular sacraments of modern Britain that are part of our self-image and identity. As long as Jarrow’s remembered, ‘the struggle’ goes on. Even growing up half a century later and a hundred miles south, my nana would bring up the Jarrow march whenever industrial disputes or economic crisis were in the news, which they often were in the seventies and eighties. It was a crusade; the men were heroes, their treatment a scandal. These days, we didn’t know we were born, us modern softies with hire purchase fridges and central heating. We hadn’t known the deprivation and squalor of that grim decade, the 1930s. Even the term ‘the thirties’ has a ring to it, and it’s more a tolling bell than a dainty tinkle.

  Unless you’re one of those enormously irritating people who says ‘before my time!’ when receiving a question about the Marx Brothers or the Suez crisis in Trivial Pursuit, certain decades call forth an immediate mental image. The eighties: a girl with a bubble perm in legwarmers listening to a Walkman on rollerskates, or a yuppie banker in Sloane Square with a brick sized mobile. The seventies: a bovver boy in half-mast trousers eating a Findus Crispy Pancake during a power cut. The sixties, a couple in kaftans singing Donovan’s ‘Catch the Wind’ round a campfire, or pushing flowers down a National Guardsman’s rifle barrel or rolling naked in some mud whilst doolally on acid. And so on. The 1930s, should they conjure anything, will suggest a downcast man in clogs, flat cap and muffler standing on a street corner. At his knee, perhaps, two filthy kids who look beseechingly into the camera whilst playing with a hoop and stick or a lump of coal. Words and phrases that spring readily to mind might include ‘Means Test’, ‘Rickets’, ‘Hitler’, ‘Diphtheria’ and, of course, ‘Jarrow’.

  The thirties get a really terrible press. Though recent revisionist historians have proposed a different view of the decade citing the relative affluence of the south and such, this has yet to gain much popular traction outside academia. ‘A low, dishonest decade’ was W H Auden’s famous verdict, badmouthing the thirties almost before it was over in his poem ‘September 1, 1939’. That poem was written on the eve of war of course, and our view of the end of the thirties is inevitably coloured by it being the grim prelude to years of global carnage. In 1973, Claud Cockburn called it ‘the Devil’s Decade’ which quickly gained purchase as the accepted view of the times. In 2009, Richard Overy named it ‘the morbid age’. Most recently, Juliet Gardiner in her hefty, magisterial study The Thirties: An Intimate History claims, ‘the thirties is a statement as well as a decade because whilst those years are gradually slipping from our grasp what they have come to represent are ever more present; confusion, financial crisis, rising unemployment, scepticism about politicians, questions about the proper reach of Britain’s role in the world’.

  With no grand regnal designation such as the Elizabethan, Georgian or Edwardian age, the thirties have become simply part of what we blandly compartmentalise as ‘between the wars’, suggesting a hiatus, a pause, an interval between the two great defining conflicts of our modern world. But there’s another point of view, one building up a credible intellectual head of steam that cites the thirties as the shaping decade of the world we live in today. It’s the decade in which we start to voraciously consume mass media such as the new-fangled BBC, which was powered by the smart new National Grid; one where we become obsessed with personal fitness, fashion and sport and greatly more hedonistic, going to the movies, drinking, dancing, ‘clubbing’ and staying up late. The thirties in some ways start to look very much like Britain today, once you’ve wiped away the snot and coaldust.

  Other thoughts occurred to me too, casting Jarrow’s legacy in a different and less rosy light. In a modern world fixated on anniversaries – happy and tragic – and in a cultural milieu where the passing of a moderately successful pop musician or minor sitcom actor creates the torrents of grief once seen for dictators (and with sometimes, it seems, the same whiff of compulsion), Jarrow’s eightieth anniversary made barely an appearance in my ‘timeline’; no hashtags, no videos, no campaigns. Jarrow’s anniversary was not trending. It was not going viral. We had not reached peak Jarrow, or anything like it. For this reason alone maybe, it was a trip worth making.

  Of course, any writer with a gleam in their eye and a nose for a good ‘state of the nation’ story will find rich loam in this doleful era, and richest and most fertile of all is the seedbed of the Jarrow march. It resonates down the years and like all good myths you can bend it to your own ends in any era. From the moment the Crusade reached Marble Arch, writers and commentators have been finding echoes and parallels in their own age, and I clearly am no different. But even so, the particularly weird, fissile state of England in October 2016 seemed to have so much in common with the England of 1936 that a notion long nagging at me suddenly became compelling. When I realised that a significant anniversary loomed, I had the idea to retrace the walk on its eightieth anniversary day by day as the marchers did, visiting the same towns and comparing the two Englands of then and now.

  Some parallels between then and now suggest themselves immediately: A Conservative government recently returned to power with an increased majority. A Labour Party led into disarray by a leader widely seen as divisive and incompetent. The rise of extremism here and abroad fired by financial disasters, a wave of demagoguery and ‘strong man’ populism. Foreign wars driven by fundamentalist ideologies leading to the mass displacement of innocent people. A subsequent refugee ‘crisis’. The threat of constitutional anarchy with conflict between government, parliament and judiciary. Manufacturing industries, especially steel, facing extinction. Marches and mass rallies resurgent as popular but questionable forums for political debate. Explosions of new forms of media. Inflammatory rhetoric stoked by a factionalised press. Football a national obsession; its wages, profits and morality constantly debated. A country angrily at odds with itself over its relationship to Europe, the elephant in the nation: Brexit.

  David Cameron’s decision to hold a snap referendum on our membership of the EU on 23 June 2016 was both for him and, so many think, the nation a disastrous, vainglorious mistake. Margaret Thatcher hated referenda, feeling that they gave up parliamentary sovereignty and put national policy at the whim of a protest vote. This is precisely what occurred. Misreading the national mood entirely (and not helped by Jeremy Corbyn’s near-invisibility) the Remain campaign ignored concerns over immigration and talked dryly of economic competency and trade tariffs. Saatchi and Saatchi designed two stunning posters for the Remain campaign; one showed Bo
ris Johnson looking twerpish in a woolly hat knocking on the door of Number Ten with the caption ‘Be careful what you wish for’, another featured a grinning Nigel Farage lying smugly in a crumpled bed captioned ‘Don’t do something today that you’ll regret in the morning’. Strategists think they could have proved decisive. But they were never used.

  In the aftermath of the referendum vote to leave the European Union, the reaction from some liberal metropolitans was disbelief, disgust and not so much rage as a kind of pricked hauteur. Those boors and idiots up north had gone and spoiled it for everyone. This generalised shock and bafflement was not shared by those of us who come from these towns or had spent any time outside London and the home counties this decade. In the run-up to the vote, and in the absence of any genuine, cogent explanation of the issues involved, the intelligentsia, especially on the left, had simply snorted their contempt and dismissed any opposing views as ‘racist’ and held only by ‘little Englanders’. In truth, whether your England is little or large and whether you want its borders iron clad or porous, Brexit proved that one thing is not in doubt: we are a divided country, chiefly along lines of geography and class.

  The referendum result was so truly appalling to some in Britain probably because they had grown used to viewing the world through the filter of their Twitter timeline, hearing only the echolalic voices of those who thought like them. Thus was assumed a general soothing consensus about race, nation, work, power. The only dissenting voice I heard from the creative industries post Brexit came from socialist comic Jeremy Hardy who said, ‘the centre of British politics is so incredibly Europhile. They seem to base their entire view of the EU on the welcoming attitude to children in continental restaurants’.

  Brexit was such a shock to the metropolis because it broadcast and amplified the authentic voice of an England they had nothing to do with and probably didn’t much want to; not the warming, agreeable multicultural glow that came with chatting to your Senegalese neighbour, Nepali shopkeeper or Latvian plumber, but a different, chillier, altogether less genial acknowledgment of diversity that is the realisation that not everyone thinks, lives or acts like you do. Brexit proved that there is not one England. We are not all sweetly alike really when you get down to it. We are not all in this together, and in that too, we have much in common with the fractious and divided 1930s.

  As the shampoo ads once had it, here comes the science bit. The Gini coefficient was developed by an Italian statistician in 1912 to describe the income distribution of a nation. It’s the most commonly used measure of inequality. Before 1979, inequality in the UK was actually fairly low in terms of income, but through the 1980s income inequality began to rise. Apart from a brief pause during the recession and financial crisis of 2008–2010, the UK’s Gini coefficient has steadily increased to an all-time high. We are now the most unequal country in Western Europe and at a level of income inequality unheard of since the setting up of the Welfare State.

  Just as in 1936, the old centres of industry in the north – Britain’s ‘rust belt’ – have been hardest hit. Not everyone and not every town has felt the bite and sting of austerity or experienced the raw downside of globalisation and technology as keenly as some have. Thus metropolitan Britain could scarcely believe that the post-industrial north would be so insular as to baulk at warm notions and comforts as easy travel, study and work opportunities, access to continental markets and affordable mini-breaks to Budapest and Lisbon. However, having never properly enjoyed any of these, it was easy for Wakefield, Oldham and Skegness to reject them.

  A brilliant but atypical article in the Guardian by the LSE sociologist Dr Lisa Mckenzie bucked the trend, asserting in its title ‘Brexit is the only way the working class can change anything’. In it, she wrote:

  As a group of east London women told me: ‘I’m sick of being called a racist because I worry about my own mum and my own child,’ and ‘I don’t begrudge anyone a roof who needs it but we can’t manage either.’ Over the past 30 years there has been a sustained attack on working-class people, their identities, their work and their culture by Westminster politics and the media bubble around it … In the last few weeks of the campaign the rhetoric has ramped up and the blame game started. If we leave the EU it will be the fault of the ‘stupid’, ‘ignorant’, and ‘racist’ working class. Whenever working-class people have tried to talk about the effects of immigration on their lives, shouting ‘backward’ and ‘racist’ has become a middle-class pastime.

  In the midst of the post-Brexit handwringing, navel-gazing and fist-shaking, this struck a bracing chord. Whilst no Brexiteer, I’d been dismayed at how whole areas of Britain and all kinds of people I’d grown up with and lived among could be so easily, so lazily, so insultingly dismissed. When I saw that the Jarrow area had voted ‘leave’ by 62 per cent, I wondered what the Jarrow men would have thought, how they’d have voted and why, and what the world would have made of their march then. Heroic stand for the native community, or petty protectionism maybe?

  One enraged tweet I saw frothed about how the inhabitants of ‘these boring towns’ had done us all a terrible injustice and inflicted an act of suicidal revenge on blameless London, Brighton and the likes. Another message I received when I stated my intention to ‘do’ the Jarrow march again was the response from the software consultant quoted earlier viz, ‘Who cares? The world’s moved on.’ Our Kentish friend may well be right and, if so, I was about to find out exactly how. But I wasn’t so sure. As for those derided ‘boring towns’, in many ways, this is their story. But for me they are only boring if you are bored of history, people, politics, sex, death, religion, art and culture. Life, in other words. I’m very much hoping you’re not.

  The 1930s may have been a dire period for Britain’s coal mines, shipyards and steel mills but they were a boom time for travel writing and the solo literary traveller. Adventurous young men like Patrick Leigh Fermor and Laurie Lee packed tiny knapsacks of pitifully small litreage with neither Axiom 5 technology nor front entry mesh and stomped across Europe. Leigh Fermor trekked from Rotterdam to Istanbul getting into scrapes, sleeping in hedgerows, monasteries and the odd inn, sketching, talking, drinking and generally having a wonderful, character building time that would later make him a famed war hero. His magical account of his teenage odyssey A Time of Gifts is a classic of the genre. Laurie Lee ‘walked out one midsummer morning’ and that was the title he gave to the book of his journey, one that would ultimately take him to the battlegrounds of the Spanish Civil War. That bloody conflict was a darkening stain across Europe as the Jarrow men marched through England.

  At home, two colossi of English letters were making journeys through England that would prove just as vivid and celebrated, if less gilded, with smoke and rain and muck instead of wine, fruit and Mediterranean sun. In the first half of 1936, just before the Jarrow march, George Orwell spent three months in the north of England researching what would become The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell lived in Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield but his experiences in these towns – in whose deprivations and squalor he immersed himself completely – are those of Jarrow too. The remorseless, sapping, daily grind of poverty is described to haunting effect and those middle-class, leftwing intellectuals who will not dirty their hands with it are excoriated in a closing tirade which his publisher Victor Gollancz was extremely nervous about. (I would have loved to have read Orwell on Brexit and its treatment; he was an internationalist but he was both a patriot and fiercely supportive of the working people of England.)

  Orwell took some of his inspiration for The Road to Wigan Pier from a very successful and similarly motivated book of three years previously. J B Priestley’s English Journey was one more comfortably travelled than Orwell’s road (by chauffeured Daimler and pleasant hotel room rather than the trams and tin baths of Wigan) – but the sentiment was the same. The two writers, of different backgrounds and mien, laid bare an England of harsh contrasts and lives of constant desperation, one in which the plight of the ind
ustrial working class could only be remedied by democratic socialism. The success and impact of both books, along with and the Jarrow march, may well have contributed to the Labour landslide of 1945.

  So with both The Road to Wigan Pier and English Journey as daunting, humbling antecedents, I decided to embark on the Long Road from Jarrow. I wanted the title to have an echo of both and a hint of the metaphorical as well as the actual. I would start the walk eighty years to the day after the Jarrow marchers did, 5 October, and cover the route day by day as they did, staying in the same towns. I would do it on foot by and large, but if I needed the time to research and explore those towns – some of their daily stages covered 22 miles – I’d hop a passing bus if it took their route. I didn’t have a chauffeured Daimler but I did stay in hotels with reasonably fluffy duvets, trouser presses and complimentary tea and coffee making facilities. I would aim to get to London on 31 October and hopefully succeed where the march was fobbed off, not to say duped, by getting inside the House of Commons and actually meeting an MP. How this eventually turned out was sadder and sweeter than I could ever have imagined.

  My intention was to compare the England of now and then, to see if the shadow of 1936 really did fall across 2016, but also to get to the heart of England today first-hand. Commentators and chatterers across the media are fond of airy generalisations in think pieces composed in what Priestley described as, ‘warm, well-lighted book-lined apartments’. These ‘state of the nation’ prognoses and editorials are often written from one very particular part of that nation, and with a view partially obscured by the Gherkin and the Shard. I wanted to see, hear, smell even what England was like close up by walking it, moving along its length at a speed where I could look it in the eye, shake its hand, maybe buy it a drink. You can cover the distance I would travel on a high-speed train in three-and-a-half hours. But I was going to take three-and-a-half weeks; still brisk going on foot, but with time to linger, delve, look around and ‘mooch’, to use a good, descriptive old dialect word.