Five plays, two musicals, an opera, three pop songs, two folk songs, several paintings and poems, a short story, performance art, a mural, two sculptures, glassware, four television documentaries, four radio programmes, a children’s story, a cuddly toy, a real ale, a public house, an election poster, street names, innumerable pieces of journalism and historical references and of course hundreds of often reproduced photographs.
Popular art has kept the name of Jarrow and its complex associations – struggle, hardship, heroism, failure even – alive down the decades. Nevil Shute’s novel Ruined City concerns the plight of a town in the north east called Sharples, a thinly disguised Jarrow, left devastated by the closure of the ‘Barlow’ shipyard which is clearly modelled on Palmers. Later in 1974, as an economic and energy crisis gripped Britain and the lights flickered on and off in offices, homes and factories, the nation’s pop pickers cheered themselves by singing along to Alan Price, formerly of the Animals, and the most famous musical tribute to the Jarrow marchers. ‘Jarrow Song’, which reached number six in the charts, came from an album called Between Yesterday and Today, in which Price delved into working-class life in the north east for inspiration. Born just six years after the march and an old boy of Jarrow grammar school, Price’s jaunty brass band number masks a message substantially more militant than the ethos of the march itself. It starts with Geordie McIntyre, whose wife tells him to go to London, where:
… if they don’t give us half a chance, Don’t even give us a second glance
Then Geordie, with my blessings, burn them down.
Actually, the notion of burning anything down, or indeed any inflammatory or revolutionary fervour, was something the march organisers were desperate to avoid. Price’s lyric though has no such qualms and ends by concluding that 1973 finds the working-class north as disadvantaged as it was in 1936 and in the same need of salvation.
There’s a musical, Cuddy’s Miles, based on the Jarrow march, written by John Miles; a seventies rocker probably best known for his grandiose hit ‘Music’, whose granddad Cuthbert (or Cuddy) was one of the march’s two cooks. Just in case you think the kids are missing out, a New Zealand company produced a cuddly bear toy called Jarrow which the little ’uns could play with whilst reading The Road to London. Andrew Matthews’ slim book was produced in conjunction with the National History Curriculum in 1997 and tells the tale of Clogger, a little lad from Jarrow who stows away on the march. While loosely based on real events, the real stowaways never got out of the north east and certainly didn’t make it all the way as Clogger does. Along the way, he gets a few terse lectures about the essentially inequitable nature of capitalism and specifically the failings of Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative administration. Produced just as New Labour were sweeping to power, the tone of the book is decidedly partisan. It ends with Clogger’s dad explaining Baldwin’s refusal to meet the marchers (you can still pick up the book quite easily on eBay, so clearly not all were pulped by incoming Conservative education secretaries post 2010):
‘He’s frightened. The whole governments afraid there’ll be a revolution like the one they had in Russia …’
On the train back to Jarrow, Clogger was quiet for a long time.
‘Dad,’ he said eventually, ‘isn’t there a way of sharing things out, so that rich people aren’t quite so rich but people like us have enough to get by?’
On the small screen, Peter Flannery’s epic TV drama Our Friends in the North began life as stage play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982. As writer in residence when the RSC staged a cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays, Flannery was seized by the thought that his Newcastle background – the legacy of the Jarrow Crusade, housing, industry, corruption – could form the basis of a large-scale work based on life in England in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Initially keen, the BBC then dragged its feet for literally years. Flannery said later, ‘I remember pitching it to BBC executive Alan Yentob as a drama about post-war social housing, probably because I’d spent the day writing one of those scenes. He looked alarmed. Two days later, I’d have said it was all about sex and Soho. It got through eventually.’ When it did come to the screen, it was recognised instantly and widely as one of the greatest achievements of British television of any era and made stars of its young cast Gina McKee, Mark Strong, Christopher Eccleston and Daniel Craig. Thus the Jarrow march can claim to have indirectly shaped the creation of two other legends in the pantheon of British romantic myth, Dr Who and James Bond.
In the opening episode of Our Friends in the North, it’s 1964 and Nicky, played by Eccleston, has returned to Tyneside after a summer’s activism in the USA with the civil rights movement. Almost immediately, his new-found political zeal brings him into conflict with his disillusioned dad Felix. Felix shows no enthusiasm for the future Labour government that seems likely after the forthcoming election. ‘The Labour Party of which I was once proud to be a member were the first to condemn the Jarrow marchers as hooligans. They stabbed us in the back before we got to Durham. We were sold down the river long before you were born, son.’
Nicky’s reply across the kitchen table echoes the dog walker on the Pelaw Grange road.
‘Here we go. It never takes long, does it? … The Jarrow march.’
Flannery is from Jarrow, had family members on the march, and the scene is clearly drenched in memory and meaning. About four months before setting off on my march, I spoke with Peter Flannery about representations of working-class life in the media. Our Friends in the North treated such people with a Tolstoyan depth and, despite that note of exasperation in Nicky/Peter’s attitude to his father’s generation, there’s a real pride and loyalty to the values of an older era which drove Flannery to get his work on screen despite the misgivings of commissioning editors in offices in W1.
One very famous controller of BBC 2 said, ‘Does it have to have the word “North” in it? And does it have to be about the Labour party? They’re failures. I don’t want it to be about failure.’ So isn’t it interesting that they only agreed to make it when Labour were almost in power and fashionable again? In our hearts, we knew that my dad’s generation were right but we didn’t want to trade on the old gripes and grudges. I looked at my parents – why are they so gloomy and cynical about political purpose when I felt so optimistic? In my youth it felt like a sea change was coming. Doors were opening in your own head. We felt on the brink of something better, not like Jarrow, but a real change. But you can’t divorce that from an era that’s gone now – the era of funding. That’s what makes things possible. What made it possible for me wasn’t my role models like Courtney and O’Toole and Richard Burton, brilliant though they were, it was the fact that Durham County Council were willing to give me a grant of twelve pounds a week.
Thanks to social media and a few posts of mine, I had some new friends in the north. Their tweets and messages ping into my timelines over the weekend. Graeme Fenwick tells me that his 93-year-old next-door neighbour waved off the marchers as a little girl in a Jarrow street. Laura Perlmann remembers being hugely proud to play Ellen Wilkinson in her school play about the march. A few correspondents, like Peter Flannery, actually had relatives on the march. Joanne Hackett-Smith’s granddad, John ‘Smiler’ Harney, wrote a poem about his experiences on the march that she says she’ll send me a copy of. Iris Walls wrote:
Hi Stuart, my uncles Edward Stead and Sammy Needham were two of the marchers. Sammy looked after the dog which joined the march and stayed with them right throughout the journey until back in Jarrow. Are you going to be at the Civic reception on 5 October at Jarrow Town Hall? It’s only 60 or so yards from Christ Church. It starts at 12.30, Wednesday.
I wonder whether I should use my years of rock journalist expertise and savvy to ‘blag’ my way on the guest list. Perhaps not. I’m not on ‘official business’, nor am I ‘Beefy’ Botham stomping along mob-handed for charity. Nonetheless I jot down the time and venue in my brand-new Jarrow notebook specially purchased for the journey (with small
concealed pen in the spine), place it with laptop, shoes, soapbag, maps, carefully rolled and folded shirts and trousers, phone, chargers, cables, replacement contact lenses and other assorted paraphernalia inside my rucksack. Noting with some satisfaction that I still have several litres to spare, I settle back as the train makes the long pull over Shap Fell from my soft north of silent mills and damp valleys into the high lonely north of sea and mountain and, once, of steel and ships.
PRE-AMBLE
There are some cities one never enters without a gladdening of the heart and a quickening of the pulse. Newcastle ranks high among them, possessing that dazzling alchemy of fine buildings and big, open water that always works a certain magic trick. Just as no man ever felt more glamorous or sophisticated than when rounding a corner in his water taxi motor boat with a wake of foam, turning onto the Gran Canale and seeing the palazzos of Venice or the bridges of Rialto or Accademia rise up before the prow, so (in a quite different way admittedly) it’s always a palpable thrill to cross the Tyne by the high line over the King Edward VII bridge and see the best-looking city in England spread alluringly below me as the weekend begins.
The train is indubitably the best way to arrive. All the ‘Toon’s’ most thrilling features crowd and elbow each other sideways to get into shot like those daft excitable kids you see behind sports reporters on TV. At the Ouseburn end there’s the stately brick edifice of the Baltic Warehouse, now a fabulous art gallery, glowering grandly across at the huge, sleek, curvaceous silver snail of the Sage Concert Hall. In between is the posh apartment block whose two adjoining rooftop penthouse flats are owned – so a Geordie once told me – by local lads made good, Ant and Dec, which is probably far too cute to be true. The star of this particular show though, as always, is the Tyne itself and its various bridges – graceful and slender, muscular and imposing, funky, functional, old, new – each echoing its neighbour along the broad, silky muscle of the river.
In four days’ time, my Jarrow march starts in earnest and I’ve arrived in the north east early to meet people, do some research, attend a couple of events, mull, acclimatise, buy plasters and toothpaste and generally do all the things that I’m sure I won’t have time to after I stride optimistically out of Jarrow on Wednesday morning to spend the next month trekking the long miles to London. I breakfast at a busy greasy spoon tucked below the giant arches of the Tyne Bridge, built by Dorman Long of Middlesbrough in 1928; pure architectural Gotham in green metal and tensile steel. Two council workmen come in, paint spattered and chalky – that’s their appearance, not their names – and proceed to put themselves efficiently and remorselessly outside two large breakfasts whilst gutting and filleting the morning’s tabloids. They dispense swift, terse, unrepeatable judgements on Theresa May, global warming and Ken Bruce’s PopMaster. I ask them if they have they heard of the Jarrow march. They tell me they know the song, and after some debate and rehearsal, proceed to sing me a challenging, atonal version of ‘Fog on The Tyne’ by Lindisfarne.
I head from the waterside to town proper up the steepening curve of Grey Street, the most elegant thoroughfare in England according to John Betjeman. I pop into Newcastle’s finest department store Fenwick’s for last minute supplies. Foot balm, a flat cap (a nod of solidarity to Jarrow’s marchers), some new socks and some shaving oil. This being the modern world – and me wanting to keep people apprised as to my progress – I tweet a picture of my purchases. A trollish home counties dentist posts, ‘If the Jarrow Marchers could see this, they would give you a righteous shoeing.’ No they wouldn’t, I tweet back, tetchily perhaps. This sort of stuff riles me though; the implication that one should ‘know one’s place’ and that working-class people deserve no better than spittoons and scrag end. I attach to my reply my favourite quote from Nye Bevan when challenged about his love of lobster and champagne, ‘Only the best for the working class’.
Once installed in my room, I go through a long-practised routine. Turn off the wall mounted TV with the boomingly loud dance music satellite channel the chambermaid had on, boot up the MacBook and log on (oh, the simple, unalloyed joy of hotels that don’t require you to fill in an online questionnaire or decipher those weird hieroglyphics), turn down the aircon temperature (you can grow rubber in most British hotel rooms, and in those that you can’t, you could cryogenically store Walt Disney). Then I start an afternoon of research. This begins with a dip into the labyrinthine depths of the BBC’s fabled Redux website and archive.
The British Broadcasting Corporation was still a fledgling operation in 1936. It was gearing up to broadcast its first television programmes during the march, actually commencing them the day after the marchers reached London. Perhaps this is why the BBC appears to harbour such a crush on the Jarrow Crusade. This has shown itself through many documentaries, plays and features down the 80 years since. Looming large during the corporation’s formative years, the march is now bound up in some way with what Hollywood would call the BBC’s ‘origin story’. The Jarrow Crusade fits well with the BBC’s remit and ethos; national stories that emphasise consensus and moral example rather than conflict, dissent and entrenched interest. A more cynical take on this might be that Jarrow is the BBC’s favourite protest because it was the meekest and most obliging to the powers that be.
Redux is one of the BBC’s more secret services. When I was first tipped off about it, it was very much Auntie Beeb’s Fight Club, in that the first rule of Redux seemed to be that you didn’t talk about it. A verbal invite was whispered to me in a TV green room by a producer friend and after that I had to apply to join by writing to the shadowy cabal of technocrats who administer it. After a week or so, I received an anonymous email saying that I was in. I was elated. I felt like I’d been accepted into a more benign version of the Freemasons or a less metrosexual Groucho Club. The Magic Circle perhaps, or Big Chief I-Spy’s Club.
Redux is an archive of BBC TV and Radio programmes. But what an archive. Invented by boffins in the BBC’s hidden techno-lair at Hook Norton on a day off from the official corporation business of spreading communism and undermining decent British values, it is a vast, bottomless resource for nerds and pros. Firing up my laptop, I enter the search term ‘Jarrow march’ and look up the most recent result on the subject, a BBC TV documentary The Road From Jarrow on the march and its legacy dating from 1996.
It was with the most profound sinking of the heart that I make out, through the juddery visual tape hiss, the unmistakable features of presenter Sir Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s former press secretary and once ubiquitous bluff pontificator of the loony right. Much of my dismay rests on aesthetic considerations. Sir Bernard is a hard man to gaze comfortably upon for any length of time and such discomfort is only heightened by his belligerent, nasal ‘Zippy from Rainbow on helium’ vocal delivery. My other complaint is more substantive, however; namely that inviting a right-wing ideologue to author a piece on a leftist protest is perhaps not the best guarantee of fairness or accuracy. (A reader called David Walker tweeted me wryly about the choice of Ingham as presenter on the Jarrow march: ‘Blimey, did he advocate using unidentifiable policemen on horseback to break it up?’ – an Orgreave joke.) This perverse booking would seem a perfect illustration of a malaise of the modern media, that of ‘false balance’, the notion whereby kneejerk gainsaying is equated with truth. At least they just give Michael Portillo documentaries about old railway lines and steam engines.
Anyway, it’s not long before Sir Bernard deviates from historical analysis into one of his trademark riffs of irascible windbaggery. ‘Discipline has given way to indiscipline. Family, the one thing that sustained the Jarrow marchers, has gone to pot.’ When Ellen Wilkinson is mentioned, it is through gritted teeth, and she is described as ‘Fiery Helen’ or ‘Wee Ellen’ when her nickname was universally ‘Red Ellen’, a designation that presumably stuck in Bernard’s throat. It soon became very clear that not only was this rubbish, it was self-serving, ahistorical rubbish, although there were some good cont
ributions from Peter Flannery and marcher Con Shiels. A few minutes though were enough to make me blithely unconcerned that the other two episodes of this have been wiped. I make another ‘advanced’ pass though the archive and happily I find a more recent and insightful looking radio documentary about the Jarrow march from 2008. Naturally, it is presented by Michael Portillo.
Despite the perverse choice of presenter once again, it is really very much better; more sociological, less opinionated, and in essence a consideration of why the Jarrow march lives on whilst the many hunger marches of the era have been forgotten. The documentary touches upon what would seem to me to be the obvious explanation; the men of Jarrow essentially came politely and with cap in hand, without the dangerous whiff of revolutionary sulphur of the older communist marches.
That night I walked in the dusk across Newcastle to one of its cultural and historical landmarks, the Literary and Philosophical Society. Newcastle is proud of the Lit and Phil and it’s as much a part of the cultural fabric of the city as the Big Market, St James’ Park or the Angel of the North, and rather older than any of them. Established in 1793, it is the largest private library outside London. It is where Joseph Swan first demonstrated the electric light bulb. It received Britain’s first wombat and duck-billed platypus and notable current members include Alexander Armstrong and Neil Tennant. In the beginning, it was styled as a ‘conversation club’, albeit one in which discussion of religion and politics was strictly forbidden. That has since been relaxed and so there are no awkward moments or angry shushing tonight during Matt Perry’s lecture on Ellen Wilkinson, of whom he has written a comprehensive biography. It’s compelling stuff and Matt doesn’t gloss over some of the anomalies of her career and mysteries of her life: though initially a staunch supporter of Indian liberation, when in government, she thought we should put the troublesome Gandhi in gaol, and of course there are the vague and cloudy circumstances of her sad premature death.
Long Road from Jarrow Page 4
