Matt kindly gives me a copy of his book and tells me I should visit the Jarrow Crusade eightieth anniversary exhibition at South Shields Museum that he’s curated. We also make a tentative arrangement to meet at an event I am very much looking forward to, the tempting if queerly named Jarrow March Eightieth Anniversary Fun Day at Monkton Stadium in the town. How could anyone resist? Tombola, food, brass bands, stalls, activist fun and special guest star, one Jeremy Bernard Corbyn, MP for Islington, leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, the Labour Party, and saint or fool depending on your point of view. I tell Matt I’m looking forward to it.
Geordies are proud of their Metro transport system, and Jarrow particularly so as it was the brainchild and passion of Michael Campbell, the so-called Statesman of Jarrow, leader of Tyne and Wear council who managed to champion the project to completion at a time when Britain was in hock to its eyeballs and could barely keep the lights on. When work began in 1974 it was the biggest urban transport project Britain had attempted in the twentieth century. Tunnels were driven beneath the city’s streets and viaducts thrown airily across the Tyne and Ouseburn valleys. It has always been non-smoking and wheelchair friendly and classical music was piped into stations to improve the ‘passenger waiting environment’. It opened in the summer of 1980 to instant acclaim and popularity. When my Geordie mate Stod came back to college for the autumn term that year, he talked of little else.
The Metro’s sixty stations are a potted history of British transport architecture from late Victorian at Tynemouth and art deco at West Monkseaton to the1980s minimalism of Park Lane and Ilford Road. At South Shields station, a fruit and veg stall has blossomed under its brutalist steel girders which is a neat bit of civic adaptation. Having certainly got the rucksack capacity but not the desire for a few heads of cauliflower, I pass it by and head to the South Shields Museum and the Jarrow exhibition.
Celebrations of local culture are of variable entertainment value, as anyone who’s ever broken their leg at a Gloucester cheese rolling or attended a potato picking festival in Kent can attest. But they seem ever more crucial as municipal Britain takes wave after wave of battering from central government. Despite grand speeches about ‘devolving autonomy’ and a ‘northern powerhouse’, we are the most centralised country in the Western world. Westminster has the nation’s purse strings in a grip of iron and for every pound raised by tax, 91p is allocated by central government. Towns like South Shields and Jarrow have been hardest hit.
Put baldly, the north east is the poorest region in Britain. In an essay of December 2016 entitled ‘The Strange Death of Municipal England’, Tom Crewe states that, ‘almost a billion pounds have been sucked out of its economy since 2010 [and] it has the highest percentage of deprived neighbourhoods in the country … Newcastle City Council has reduced its budget by £221 million with another £100 million in cuts planned for the next two years. Leader Nick Forbes told the Guardian, “people went white … at the prospect of it”.’ So this is a northern power house that cannot afford the electricity bill.
At South Shields Museum though, however embattled, there’s a flutter of excitement among the staff as a film crew from the BBC’s Look North magazine show are upstairs in the exhibition hall. ‘I’m afraid that the museum is closed to the public at the moment,’ says an earnest, diligent, young staff member. ‘Ah, I see …’ and produce my BBC pass, always a useful thing to have in one’s pocket, even if the picture makes one look like Alan Titchmarsh’s idiot younger half-brother. I am waved through under false pretences which makes me feel rather a heel and so, once upstairs, I lurk outside the inner door until the filming is over.
The interviewees are Matt Perry (who’s having a busy week) and Tom Kelly, a local writer and poet who along with Matt has been working with school kids in the town to produce some excellent, inspiring work about community and history. Matt is a boyish academic in mod casuals, Tom a genial silver-haired Geordie in a stripy jacket. Matt and Tom are hoping not just to keep alive the memory of the march but to use it as a springboard for all kinds of creative activities. A workshop in which:
Pupils will examine archive material, photographs and personal accounts to bring the story to life as they think about the lives, hopes and feelings of the men, as well as thinking about the general morale and conditions. Afterwards, they will put themselves in the shoes of the marching men, to write either a poem, diary entry, song or newspaper article. The day can also include a session making banners, posters and badges.
It’s easy to mock such well-intentioned efforts at educating kids about ‘people’s history’. But after one workshop, five kids came back and said they had found out that they had relatives, great-grandfathers and great uncles on the march and that it had made them feel ‘ten feet tall’, and had sparked long conversations between generations in the family. I remember grim, pointless field trips spent brass rubbing the tombs of long dead viscounts. Keeping the stories and culture and sacrifices of their granddads and grandmas alive for these kids is surely just as valid a way to spend a Tuesday afternoon.
In the exhibition, portraits and testimonies bring the marchers vividly to life. James Henry Walters hadn’t worked since being gassed twenty years before at the front (62 per cent of the men were First World War veterans) and was keeping a wife and four children on 36 shillings a week. Touchingly, he commented, ‘The march will be a success … the country’s behind us.’ Philip McGhee was one of the lucky ones in that he had only been out of work two years when the march took place. There is a sweet picture of the oldest and youngest marchers: John Farndale who at 18 had worked two weeks since leaving school at 14 and Geordie Smith, 62 and a veteran of the Boer War. Framed on the wall is the original of John ‘Smiler’ Harney’s poem (my correspondent Joanne’s granddad), touching in its defiantly high spirits.
Playing on a continuous loop are the two brief fragments of surviving newsreel footage of the march; the men on their way to Darlington (‘great sympathy for this orderly march’ says the narrator, plummily) and their sodden final entry into London. The Metropolitan Police had originally tried to prevent all filming of the march fearing it would create too much sympathy for the men but in the end they grudgingly relented. Seeing Ellen and the tired, soaked phalanx on this grainy monochrome film, trudging across London in the dreary, pouring rain, water cascading from their antique sou’westers and capes, reminds me of just what I’ve got in store over the next month. I make a mental note to check the long-range weather forecast, through splayed fingers possibly.
The morning of the Fun Day though dawns bright and warm across the north east and, though I don’t know it yet, it’s a herald of a mercifully mild October to come. There is for sure a rich, easily mined irony in styling the commemoration of a hunger march as a ‘Fun Day’. Wags across social media have clamoured to point this out when I mentioned the event. ‘Relive those heady days of the Means Test and rickets with a go on the bouncy castle and a jumbo hot dog’ and so on and so on. They have a point. I thought it was important that I was there though. I wanted to sense the mood of the community, I wanted to see how Labour’s newly reelected leader acquitted himself and I really like hot dogs, especially the al fresco variety.
Having initially been distinctly cool on the idea of the Jarrow march, not to say positively obstructive, the Labour Party, like the Beeb, have spent much of the intervening eight decades getting enthusiastically on board. The Jarrow memorial in the town (one of them anyway) has been unveiled not once but twice by successive leaders Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, both seeking glory by association and presumably glossing over the lack of party support back in the day. Carrying on in this vein, the Labour ruling executive of 2016, unlike that of 1936, are keen to express their solidarity with the sacralised memory of the march. So much so that they have sent their top man up from London for the job, rather like the dispatching of Michael Caine in Get Carter except hopefully without anyone getting pushed off a multi storey car park or shot and dumped in a massi
ve coal scuttle.
The Jarrow Fun Day on 1 October 2016 is the first public appearance of Jeremy Corbyn since being reelected as leader of the Labour Party with an increased majority a week earlier; which is a sentence that no sane person could have envisaged reading or writing before 12 September 2015. Though an MP for over 30 years, he had never held any position of authority or responsibility and during the party’s 13 years in power, when he might have been expected to help with the business of government, Corbyn voted against the whip 428 times – more than any other Labour MP. Then he was regarded, as one unnamed Labour insider told the New Yorker, as ‘a quaint irrelevance’. His relevance may be arguable but his quaintness is not. In a paroxysm of either stupidity or optimism depending on one’s point of view, Labour introduced a system whereby three quid bought you a vote in their leadership election. Corbyn was washed to power on this unleashed tide of activism, and some mutterings of chicanery.
Many of those who’d been vaguely aware of him as a bearded antediluvian spear-carrier of Labour’s London left have been baffled, not to say appalled, by Corbyn’s ascent. Not just by his rise to power – stranger things have happened in Westminster – but his elevation to Che Guevara style counter-cultural icon among some young and not so young. (I gave the piece I wrote for the New Statesman on the Fun Day the title JC Un Rock Star but they didn’t use the headline, perhaps unfamiliar with Bill Wyman’s solo hits.) Corbyn is a phenomenon that seemed to have disappeared along with Benny Hill, Red Wedge and student union bars named after Steve Biko. He’s a variety of political animal most thought had become extinct, a Spartist dinosaur reeking of hummus and hemp and definitely not the smoky fires of industry.
As a Corbyn agnostic with a strong disposition towards downright atheism, I wanted to see how the north east took to the new Messiah. Over his first year in the job, I’d found him weak and disengaged, especially on issues close to the heart of the working-class north. He had been almost silent on Orgreave and Hillsborough; both emotive events back powerfully in the news. Conversely, you couldn’t shut him up on the Middle East and Arab–Israeli matters, and believe me I had wanted to.
There was another flavouring in the mix. Tony Blair was the longstanding MP for nearby Sedgefield. Many in the north east still regard him as one of their own and had never enjoined with the now prevalent view of him as slick warmonger. The New Labour love-in of 1997 now makes some rather embarrassed. Power corrupts, but it also makes others uncomfortable, particularly those who’d prefer a state of continual carping but largely impotent opposition. There was much muddled and dubious logic surrounding the Iraq war. But Professor Peter Clarke, author of the Locomotive of War put it well when he told BBC History magazine, ‘Blair took a very moral view of why the British and Americans should invade Iraq. Something he had reason to rue afterwards but even if it was a terrible mistake, we should not doubt his sincerity’. Many brilliant voices of the secular left – Christopher Hitchens most famously – thought that, in essence, it was a just war. Also it seemed to me that in the revisionist rush to excoriate Blair and his legacy, we had forgotten SureStart schemes for working-class families, the now-abolished AIM education grants that supported many poor ethnic minority students, the introduction of the minimum wage and many other achievements which no one should be ashamed about.
In this conflicted, sceptical state of mind, I make my way through the sunny, pleasant suburban streets of South Tyneside between Hebburn and Jarrow to Monkton Stadium. Along Dene Terrace, the houses and gardens are well kept, the streets clean, the people busy. Eighty years ago, when the last-minute arrangements for the near military planning of the Jarrow march were taking place here, Dene Terrace would have looked and felt very different. The faces thinner, the streets grimier and the houses grimmer. Monkton Stadium wouldn’t have been here either, since this fine local landmark and resource was built as a direct result of the Jarrow march. In June 1937, unemployed men from the area (including some marchers) rebuilt a derelict sports ground with money from the Surrey Fund, established after the Jarrow march by Sir John Jarvis, MP for South Shields. In the years since it’s become one of the crucibles of northeastern athletics and distance running, training ground of Steve Cram, David Stephens and more.
When I arrive at the gate to pick up my wristband from councillor Audrey, I am told, a little breathlessly, that ‘he’ is already here: ‘We gave him a dinner at the Lakeside pub last night. I think he enjoyed it.’ Inside, there’s a low-level buzz of activity. As well as the usual Fun Day stalwarts – stalls selling smelly soaps and wonky home-made craft items, the aromatic burger van and the little kids serenely orbiting in giant teacups – there’s a tangible if cordial political dimension and presence; trade union groups hoping to save the local hospital, a lively contingent of ladies from Women Against State Pension Inequality dressed as suffragettes. Various local politicians are waiting for their chance at the mike, but they all know that they are the support act. The star here is slightly younger than Mick Jagger and has become a slightly odder kind of rock star politician.
The stands are full-ish of Jarrow and Hebburn families. Many have the names of a Jarrow marcher on small placards that they wave. Congratulating myself on recognising her from her tiny Twitter profile photo, I spot ‘@JoHack’, or Joanne Hackett-Smith, one of the first people to contact me when I ‘reached out’ (in the modish parlance) for people with Jarrow march stories. Jo is smart, blonde, 30-something and rightly proud of her march associations. She’s a civil servant, a local girl, and her great-grandfather (‘Granda’ as Geordies have it) was John ‘Smiler’ Harney whose sweet poem is in the South Shields exhibition. He lived in Lime Street Jarrow with wife Eleanor and was father to ten children, though only eight survived (at the time of the march, Jarrow had one of the worst infant mortality rates in Britain).
When Smiler reached London, he met a woman who said she could offer his family work, particularly his daughter who could clean for her. He continued to write to the woman and he eventually received a fancy coat in the post. She said if his daughter wore the coat and travelled to London, she would hire her as a live-in housekeeper. ‘This was a bribe I suppose,’ reflects Jo.
‘So he sent Florrie, my granny, aged 13 to London on the train alone. She arrived at a posh house in London where the lady of the house was a doctor’s wife. They had one child and the mother didn’t work. She was awful to my grannie apparently; she had to scrub all the floors before she would feed her on a morning. She was also made to eat alone, with no interaction with the family whatsoever and she could only use the tissue paper from oranges for the toilet.’
Florrie was desperately unhappy, but didn’t dare tell her father John because she knew the family back in Jarrow needed the money. Such experiences were not uncommon. Many young, working-class girls from industrial Cumbria, Lancashire, the north east and Wales were sent down into domestic service with well-to-do London families that was effectively little more than slavery and certainly not as benign as the world of Upstairs Downstairs or Downtown Abbey. Eventually, one day, some old Jarrow friends also in service in London called for Florrie and the doctor’s wife refused to let her leave the house, demanding she went to her room. ‘Imagine the anxiety and fear of a 13-year-old girl being controlled by a complete stranger,’ says Jo.
The Jarrow girls went to the local bobby on the beat and explained the situation. By happy coincidence, he was from Sunderland. He went to the house and demanded Florrie come to the door with her suitcase packed. Florrie went home to Jarrow and lived into her nineties. ‘But granny always said she was “sold down the river for a bliddy coat!”’ remembers Jo. We could have talked much more, but at this point I had to take my leave of Jo as, with a discernible rustle of excitement, the Fun Day’s main attraction was passing beardedly amongst us.
While it would be wrong to say that Corbyn’s presence created the same scenes of unhinged mania that might attend the arrival of Beyoncé, or Barack Obama or one of the judges on Strictly C
ome Dancing, there was a definite buzz in the air. As he was led around the grassy enclosure, patiently and amiably nodding as various things were pointed out to him, a small but intense knot of admirers tailed him closely. I fell into their wake and together we circumnavigated the arena like a clump of drifting frog spawn.
If I was expecting dazzling bon mots, Bevanesque oratory or high wattage charm, I was to be disappointed. His visible mood as he was corralled into several selfies was that of a man who would much rather have been at a polytechnic sit-in or an airless council chamber in Haringey debating sanctions against South Africa, both of which I imagined he did enthusiastically ‘back in the day’. Eventually, with a flourish by the brass band, activities proper commenced.
The host of the event was a local TV anchorman who was well known to the crowd, and by far the best dressed of the various people to take the stage that day. His daughter, a budding pop chanteuse, also provided some musical entertainment, although the song she sang was one of those enervating John Lewis advert ballads rather than ‘The Red Flag’ or an inspiring anthem about Soviet steel production, both of which I’d have enjoyed more.
Jarrow’s MP Stephen Hepburn gave a doughty and on-message speech by way of introduction to the Labour leader which was as much about JC (Jeremy Corbyn) as JC (Jarrow Crusade). This reached a weirdly obsequious climax as he evokes the trials of the marching men. ‘Had he been at the side of the road when those marchers passed by, Jeremy would have shared his sandwiches with them,’ he says, and at least one audience member found the faintly Christ-like tone of this eulogy somewhat creepy.
The New Yorker compared Corbyn to Chauncey Gardiner, the simple-minded gardener embraced as a guru in Peter Sellers’s Being There. But soon after the man himself takes the mike it becomes very clear to me that JC is not so much Chauncey or that other JC (Jesus Christ) as JP (John Peel), the late radio presenter and alternative music guru. The two men have many things in common. They share a physiognomy; both bearded, softly spoken, mildly drony. Both were educated at private school in Shrewsbury and acquired greatest affection and fame in middle age. But there’s more than that. JC and JP deftly cultivated images as principled mavericks and saintly rebels despite long, comfortable careers in two of the cosiest berths in the British Establishment – the BBC and the Labour Party. All the while though, they presented to the world a much-admired resistance to being sucked into the mainstream, even whilst being at its very heart. (There are few places more mainstream or ‘Establishment’ than the Palace of Westminster or the Top of The Pops studio.)
Long Road from Jarrow Page 5
