Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  I stomp the Bowes Railway Path for several more congenial miles through which, if you ignore the distant thrum of the A1(M) and the Sunderland Road, you get a real sense of how beyond the big population centres, ‘the great north’ is vast and wild and empty. Eventually this enormous silence and emptiness of green moors and distant hills gives way to the urban edge of Sunderland. This is the land of the Mackems, the nickname supposedly reflecting their manufacturing heritage and gift to the world, as in ‘we mak’em and they tak’em’. This was a name given in Sunderland’s heyday of mining, shipbuilding and glass – all gone now of course, but the city has seen massive regeneration in recent decades. Nissan came here famously and reset the region’s economy. Danish mechanical engineers Grundfos and various service industries have relocated at Doxford International business park.

  I walk though Crowther Industrial Park between the large striplit units of Schiedel Chimney Systems and Ronbar Flexible Conduits and Accessories, emerging onto the main road from a subway and into the prim bungalows and mock Palladian columns of Picktree suburb. Somewhere around here, 80 years ago today, borrowing a football from schoolkids who’d bunked off to greet them, 40 or so of the marchers played football in the street. The north east was and is football mad and was once a hotbed of British football talent, even if the area’s giants are snoozing a little too soundly for local satisfaction these days. A prominent sign advises that I am entering into County Durham or ‘Land of The Prince Bishops’. The Prince Bishops were a ruling class of noble clergymen of the fourteenth century onwards, but they always sound to me like a sixties beat group with bowl haircuts, white sports jackets and winklepickers.

  After another hour down the roaring road, I finally enter Chester-le-Street as the sun drops low and slants blindingly across the quiet town. I’m about an hour ahead of the marchers. They arrived at 5pm to be met by local councillor Mr Robson and the women’s section of the local Labour Party, who came to greet them with bread and jam. Marcher Sam Rowan said later that he would ‘remember to his dying day’ that he’d ‘never seen men so disappointed in their lives’– presumably at a second round of sandwiches. Ungrateful perhaps, but then these men were tired and hungry and the contrast with the exultant send-off from home must have been marked. Was Chester-le-Street jealous or grudging of its local rival’s new fame? Certainly some of the most generous and sympathetic receptions the Crusade would receive were in places you would least expect it; Yorkshire’s Tory strongholds and comfortable southern villages.

  Though the men felt their reception here was ‘cheerless’ and ‘ambivalent’, pushed and ‘packed like sardines’ into the tiny parish hall for their supper, the Shields Gazette put a distinctly upbeat spin on proceedings, mindful of the effect on morale amongst families back in Jarrow. Chester-le-Street’s own weekly paper though, the Chronicle and District Advertiser, only found room a week later for a brief mention of the marchers in the ‘We Know’ column, buried amidst Mothers’ Union meetings, exam results, the Dean of Peterborough’s visit and an in-depth investigative report on the trade in stolen leeks from local agricultural shows. (This apparently silly story had a serious dimension. Allotments were a vital source of food that unemployed men could feed their families with and, as writer Arthur Barton put it, provided ‘a refuge where he could get away from the accusing faces of his children and his wife’s incessant ‘will ye now work again?’) Regardless of Bernard Ingham’s homilies, the truth is poverty divides and wounds families and communities, rather than bind or strengthen them.

  I enter Chester-le-Street slowly, footsore, squinting, my flat cap pulled down over my eyes against the glare of a brilliant dusk. I fancy I cut rather a dash; a Clint Eastwood-esque man of mystery, making curtains twitch and causing owners to pull down the shutters and spin the signs to ‘Closed’ in Lloyds Pharmacy, G W Horner’s general store and Bridge End Kebabs and Burgers. My first day’s march is over and I’m ready for something long and cold. There’s a café open on the square and I stride in as they are wiping down the tables and upending the chairs. Sensing my disappointment, the two ladies say they can stay open for a few minutes more (and a few dollars, well, quid more) and I take a seat. One lady brings my order and I launch into an explanation that I hope will prove an overture to an informative and wide-ranging chat.

  ‘I’m a bit hot and thirsty, you see, because I’ve walked from Jarrow. I’m retracing the Jarrow march. The Jarrow march!’

  ‘Oh have you? Very good. That’ll be £2.65 please. I’ll be locking up in ten minutes.’

  Deflated, I take a long draught of my mango and apple crushed fruit cooler, something that neither The Man With No Name or The Jarra Lads would have ordered I’m sure. But at least I’m on my way.

  STAGE TWO

  CHESTER-LE-STREET TO FERRYHILL

  6 October, 12 miles

  Immediately the Jarrow march reached Chester-le-Street on 6 October 1936, Ellen Wilkinson headed north to Edinburgh for the Labour Party Conference which opened that day. In this bald statement is a very striking illustration of one difference between then and now. In the new, devolved UK and particularly since the election of 2010, Scottish Labour could probably hold its conference in a small branch of the Edinburgh Woollen Mill outlet and not unduly inconvenience any customers.

  Writing three years later, in The Town That Was Murdered, Wilkinson’s burning frustration with her ‘comrades’ in the party still smouldered.

  It was a queer experience, that Labour party conference in Edinburgh in 1936 … Having got the men well started on their road I dashed to Edinburgh for a couple of days for the unemployment and distressed area debates … I went from the warm comradeship of the road to an atmosphere of official disapproval. The Trades Union Congress had frowned on the march and the Labour party followed the lead.

  There were other good reasons for Ellen to make sure her voice was heard at conference. High on the agenda for debate was the worrying rise of the far right both here and abroad. In Spain, Franco’s Fascists were waging war on the democratically elected government and their own people, helped by Hitler. Closer to home, the very day before the Jarrow Crusade set out, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, or British Union of Fascists as they were officially known, had attempted to march through predominantly Jewish areas of London’s working-class East End and been beaten back by anti-fascist demonstrators, socialists, Irish republicans, Jewish groups and ordinary Londoners in what would become known as the Battle of Cable Street.

  According to the News Chronicle, ‘the greatest East End crowd in living memory – some estimates say 300,000 – awaited the Fascists.’ This huge and diverse contingent faced the Blackshirts with a chant of ‘They shall not pass’, a deliberate echo of the No Pasaran battle cry of the Spanish Republicans. All police leave was cancelled and 6,000 foot and mounted police were assembled to escort the 2,000 Blackshirts, at least until the full force of the opposition was known. Tram drivers parked their vehicles across Aldgate to block the Fascists’ intended route. Off-duty seamen opened their storage sheds and turned lorries on their side to form barricades. Women flung the contents of chamber pots over the Mosleyites from upstairs windows. Eventually persuaded to abandon their route through Jewish areas, Mosley’s crew were escorted by police through deserted back streets. Later Mosley complained that, ‘it was the first occasion in which the British government has surrendered to the Red Terror.’

  Wilkinson though did not arrive in Edinburgh in time for the conference’s morning debate. At it, her secret lover Herbert Morrison (grandfather of Peter Mandelson) condemned the anti-fascist contingent and praised the police, in the same spirit which had seen the parliamentary Labour Party wash its hands of the Jarrow marchers. Morrison and Red Ellen were certainly unlikely paramours, which tells one something about the capricious workings of the human heart as well perhaps as other organs.

  Minus Ellen, the marchers were up and off from Chester-le-Street by 7.30am after what seems a fairly cheerless and uncomfortable nigh
t on the cold floor of the church institute. I was up bright, if not quite this early, and over a cappuccino in Mr Pickwick’s café (random Dickensian posters, brisk mid-morning trade of chatty oldsters) I looked at the news pages of 6 October 2016. Unlike the BUF, the modern British far right were keener on breaking their own heads than that of their enemies. Nigel Farage, a strangely ubiquitous media figure for a man who has failed seven times to be elected to parliament, had once again taken control of the chaotic UK Independence Party following a punch-up in the Strasbourg council chamber which had left MEP Steven Woolfe in hospital needing a brain scan. His alleged assailant, a fellow UKIP MEP, later described the incident as ‘handbags’. Wolfe replied that the party was ‘ungovernable’ and in a ‘death spiral’. Elsewhere, more literally and more tragically, a hundred people were killed in a hurricane in Haiti.

  I checked my texts, tweets and emails and there was encouraging stuff from friends and strangers alike. My old mate Andrew Collins pointed out that as I was doing this for a book, I was following very much in the Jarrow men’s footsteps; a northerner walking to London and hoping to get some work out of it. Other contributors suggested good places to get ‘bait’ if I was ‘clamming’ at various pubs and cafés here and in Ferryhill, today’s final destination. Strolling through Chester-le-Street as noon approached, I summoned the effort of will required to forgo the tempting if dyspeptic offer advertised in a pub window. ‘Pint of Crushed Berries Bulmers served in a glass with ice, cheese burger, chips, onion rings and our home-made coleslaw, all for £7.95.’ In the same glass, I wondered?

  Today’s stage, 12 miles from Chester-le-Street to Ferryhill, would take me through a series of evocative-sounding places. There was the curiously named Pity Me, lonely and harsh-sounding Framwellgate Moor and Neville’s Cross, the site of a famously vicious battle between the English and the Scots. Soon out of Chester-le-Street, the original marchers had discovered two stowaways, a couple of 14-year-old lads from Hebburn who were put on the next bus back home but whose tale inspired the kids’ book about Clogger that found its way onto the national curriculum. It took the marchers a while to notice them among the throng, certainly longer than it would have taken me to spot extra companions as I walked alone through County Durham. My spirits were high though. A tweet from a correspondent called Anne Graham said that she would look out for me as I passed through Pity Me and, even if she missed me, I should call in at Taylor’s the butcher for ‘the best pork pie in the north east’. Surely this was a claim no red-blooded, mildly peckish northerner could ignore. I narrowed my eyes, scanned the horizon and paced another mile or three of long, straight road.

  Neither Pity Me nor Framwellgate Moor are as forlorn or desolate as their names suggest. They meld into one; two long, straggly urban villages clinging to the sides of the major road from Newcastle to Darlington. According to the Oxford Dictionary of British Place Names, there are various theories on the origin of Pity Me. It may indeed be ‘a whimsical name bestowed in the nineteenth century on a place considered desolate, exposed or difficult to cultivate’. Or it may be an anglicisation of the Norman Petit Mere, a small or shallow lake. Most wild and romantic are the folk tales that say the coffin of St Cuthbert was dropped near here en route to Durham, at which point the saint implored the monks carrying him to take pity on him and be more careful (which must have come as a surprise), or that a group of monks, who were similarly surprised to encounter some raiding Vikings, sang the fifty-first psalm, ‘Miserere mei, Deus’ or ‘Pity me, O God’.

  Nothing so rum befell me as I made my way along the parade of shops that form a kind of retail border land between the two villages. In a consecutive run come the Ebony Salon, Look Lush Lucy’s Nailbar and Terry’s Barber Shop. In 1936, these sites would presumably have been hardware stores and grocers, bakers or cobblers and there are two ways of seeing this shift, both of which seem to me partly true. Yes, we have become an image-fixated, self-absorbed, adorned and decorated nation, for sure, but when times are tough, people still want to look good – or at least striking, almost as an act of defiance – and that may be no bad thing. After all, we have been doing these things to ourselves with woad and kohl and pelts almost as long as we have been hunting and skinning stuff and so, appropriately, at the end of this array of beautification, I find the much-vaunted Taylors The Butcher.

  The staff in their nylon housecoats and jaunty hats are gearing up for lunchtime but it’s already busy; a young goth couple, a clutch of workmen in flecked blue overalls, a man in a suit buying several pasties. I mention my journey and that I’ve been recommended here by a local gourmet and one lady disappears into the back. A few minutes later, a hearty bespectacled man appears wiping his hands before shaking mine. John Green, head butcher, and I chat by the purple flicker of the Insectocutor. He’s well up on the Jarrow Crusade (‘it was a time of real deprivation and they were marching to London to show their willingness to find work’) though, like many, he places it ten years earlier than is the case, presumably to chime with the General Strike. John lives in Ferryhill where I’m headed today. ‘Eight miles you’ve got left I’d say. Straight down, you can’t miss it.’ He tips me off about a good pub, the Manor House, and sends me on my way with a pie which is not only gratis, always a splendid seasoning, but hot. Midlanders regard this as sacrilege but it’s the way the north likes them. For what can give more solace and joy than the feel of hot grease dribbling down the chin whilst dining on foot al fresco and en plein air, as our continental friends would have it? Afterwards, freshening up on a bench with a packet of wet wipes bought from the Co-Op, I reflect that this may well be the second best pork pie I have ever had. (The first will always be the one consumed one winter’s afternoon in Cromford, Derbyshire in the street outside the pie shop and to which no words can ever do adequate justice.)

  On a milky, muggy October morning at a busy intersection around which a few pubs, tanning salons, some maisonettes and the Bella Mamma Italian café bar cluster untidily, one would have no idea that this is a place not only steeped in violence and bloodshed, but one with a very real significance in the history and composition of the modern United Kingdom. What happened here at Neville’s Cross 650 years ago still shapes England and Scotland’s fractious and intense relationship.

  It happened on an October day too, the seventeenth of that month in 1346. Following English King Edward III’s resounding victory over the French at Crecy in the summer, the French King Philip invoked the terms of the Auld Alliance between the Scots and asked King David II of Scotland to avenge him and retaliate by invading England. The Scots had it their own way for a few weeks, rampaging south through Northumberland sacking and looting as they went. But when they came to Neville’s Cross, a settlement named after the old Saxon Cross here, they camped and waited to be paid protection money that was promised for the next day, unaware that the Archbishop of York had mobilised 7,000 men of northern England into a fighting force that lay in wait in the autumn mists of County Durham.

  With favourable ground and better tactics, the English routed the Scots army. Many Scottish nobles perished and the rest fled the field, abandoning King David II and his bodyguard. Legend says that they escaped and hid under a bridge over the nearby River Browney but were given away when their reflections were spotted by a detachment of English soldiers. Already hit twice in the face by arrows – the metal tips could not be removed and gave him pain and headaches for the rest of his life – King David was captured and imprisoned for 11 years, and whilst most of southern Scotland subsequently fell to the English, David’s sacrifice and stoicism was seen as instrumental in securing independent nation status in the long term.

  The cross has gone, relocated to Durham town centre now, and the actual battlefield has been developed and built upon; studio flats and garages where a generation of high Scottish nobility was cut down by blades and hails of arrows. But a network of paths and an information board will guide you through a quiet pasture which once ran with blood. As I walk the le
ngth of the land on this journey, time and time again I will be reminded that every postcode, every OS square, every parish boundary is packed and freighted with history at its densest and darkest. Another legend of Neville’s Cross has it that the English were led into battle by a woman, the dark-skinned Queen Philippa, Edward III’s consort of Moorish extraction and a leader every bit as loved and exotic as Red Ellen at the head of her band of men.

  A quick glance at the various Macs and Mcs among the roll call of marchers shows that many of Ellen’s men were either Scottish or of Scottish lineage and were rubbing alongside their English brethren a deal better than in the fourteenth century. Scottish migrants had been drawn south by the promise of work in the mines, steelworks and shipyards of Jarrow during the town’s boom years. Between the wars, Scottish unemployment was always higher than in England, and even when some parts of England (though not Jarrow, for sure) began to experience some economic upturn in the mid and late thirties, Scotland remained poorer. Much of the available work had also been relocated to England where the workforce was seen as more amenable and malleable. This labour drain sapped not just Scotland’s economic and industrial vigour but its self-confidence and pride. By the time of the Jarrow march, Scotland was widely viewed south of the border as the sick man of the union – a basket case in modern parlance. But for years this was slow to solidify into any real organised support for nationalism or independence.

  Prior to the EU referendum of June 2016, the last convulsion in British politics had been the bitterly, narrowly contested vote on Scottish independence in 2014, which brought forth a turn-out of 84.6 per cent – the highest recorded for any election or referendum in the UK since the introduction of universal suffrage. Its aftershocks were still being felt on the day I arrived in Neville’s Cross. Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP was suggesting in that day’s paper that Scotland’s clear ‘remain’ majority in the EU vote meant that she had a mandate for a new referendum on independence. Scotland want to be part of Europe, even if England don’t. Let’s call the whole thing off.