Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  The afternoon was shading into a golden, glorious early evening as I paused on a bench at an intersection provided by Durham City Council ‘for the benefit of residents and visitors alike. Pause for a while and enjoy the area’. I tried, DCC, but there’s only so much enjoyment to be gained from watching articulated lorries thunder by. But the thought was there. Once rested, I’m off again to the sound of birdsong and down a quiet stretch of road at the bottom of which a little cottage has a pretty sign framed and hung on a gate. It reads, ‘Come My People. Enter thou into thy chambers and shut the doors abut thee, Isaiah 26 20. Leave The EU.’ I read it several times, undecided whether it’s an ironic sneer at ‘little Englanders’ or a genuine plea for ‘drawbridge up’ isolationism. This is the weird new febrile, uncertain England I walk through.

  A sign tells me I’m five miles from Spennymoor, one from Durham, 12 from Bishop Auckland and 13 from Consett. Ferryhill, my destination, is not mentioned. This is disconcerting. I decide to take a minicab from here to my nearby hotel, drop my bag, and then return and pick up the Jarrow route into Ferryhill proper. I call a local number and the man who comes to pick me up is a Scot. ‘If you want a recommendation for local pubs, I should say that I don’t go drinking in Neville’s Cross. Old habits die hard. It might be another ambush.’

  In the taxi, along empty rural back lanes to the soothing backdrop of Smooth FM’s liquid melding of Elton John, the Bee Gees and George Benson, I fall into an easy, knackered kind of conversation with the driver. He’s smart and funny, silver-haired at the margins of a shiny dome, 60-ish, resembling a more genial Larry David. ‘I’ve always worked away or long hours. Used to work on the pipelines. My wife finally got fed up and decided she wanted me to retire. She says, “I’ve been married to you for 34 years and only seen you for 18 months.” Well, I says, you can either have the big money or me in the house. So I retire and I stay at home with her and we go shopping and on wee errands … well, she soon got sick of that, so here I am again, on the roads.’

  Unlike the waitress in the Chester-le-Street café, my driver has not only heard of the Jarrow march but is positively interested. ‘I was born 17 years after the Jarrow march but I suppose like them I came south looking for work. A group of mentally disabled people – is it special needs? Learning difficulties? Sorry, I don’t know the phrases – they did a stage play about the march just recently. It was in the local papers. Industrial history’s a bit of a thing with me. This used to be mining country, County Durham. They say you could once walk from Black Hall colliery just near here all the way to Workington, coast to coast, completely underground in the old mine tunnels. In Ferryhill you’ll see a pub called the Dean and Chapter, everyone knows it as the Black Bull, but they changed its name to that of the old pit here. Nice gesture I suppose. Yes, lot of changes in those 80 years …’

  At this very moment we hit a pothole and my head grazes the vinyl roof.

  ‘… But the council hasn’t finished the road yet.’

  He drops me off at my hotel, a queer, rambling but intriguing-looking place in the outlying countryside. ‘You’re actually slightly closer to Sedgefield here, Blair’s old constituency, you know. The Dun Cow is where he took George Bush and 20 armed security officers for lunch. They had the fish and chips I believe. Good pub. Minister’s Indian restaurant, that’s a nod to him too, superb. Enjoy! Hey you know, we had an oyster festival here last week, and a Bavarian stomping band … Oh, it all happens round here,’ he says with a wry smile. Then his radio crackles and he is called away to Pelaw Green.

  With a parting, over the shoulder wave, he leaves me to Ferryhill in the dusk. With the sun dropped behind the distant treeline of Thorpe Larches, it’s turning distinctly cold. The lights are on in the bus that pulls into the station, disgorging its homecoming workers back from the factories of Sunderland or the offices of Durham, a gang of kids from the big college there or in Spennymoor. I take a walk along the main street where, up at the eastern end, there’s a ‘Europe Beacon’, a stylised and somewhat ironic gas lamp, considering that this corner of Durham voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union with the only substantial Remain vote coming from the students of the famous and prestigious university. Outside the Post Box pub, a lad in kitchen whites blows on his hands and pulls on a fag; a real one, increasingly a rarity in the land of outlandishly named vaping outlets. Already I am finding that there are new constants and fixtures of every English high street today, 80 years on from Jarrow, when it would have been tobacconists and butchers. Now it’s e-cig shops, retro barbers, cupcake bakers (often defunct, a bewildering craze on its way out), pizza shops where a moustachioed eastern European man stands behind a teetering tower of boxes waiting to be filled, and tattoo parlours. Ferryhill’s is called Comfortably Numb, which is actually rather good.

  My dog-walking ex-Consett steelworker told me that Ferryhill was ‘a pit village with no pit’. It’s a simple statement of fact that, like the famed ‘pub with no beer’, suggests a certain melancholy. The town has a tough and insular air, sitting on a limestone ridge on the former Durham coalfield, its jaw set against the world and the coming winter. It’s quiet today, but on Friday things get livelier for the market and in summer, fetes and galas parade the old miners’ banners and celebrate the town’s heritage. At the Dean and Chapter pub – the former Black Bull – a young woman sips a bright blue drink as she feeds the kaleidoscopic fruit machine, and a hefty, older man sits hunched at the bar over his pint and Gazette. From the outside, it is a northeastern Hopper scene. The exterior has been redone vividly and rather forbiddingly in slate grey and coal-black livery with ghostly silhouettes of former miners. The legend reads, ‘The Dean and Chapter, this pub is dedicated to the 73 miners who lost their lives at the colliery from 1904 when production began until 1929. The colliery closed in 1966.’ A long time gone, but where work has been hard, the memories are long too.

  Night is properly here now, cloaking the town. The marchers got their first hot meal of the trip by the roadside at Neville’s Cross – a stew of lentils, carrots, leeks and turnips. I get mine in a curry house down one of the dark ends of Ferryhill’s main drag and where, as I’m the only customer, the waiter comes and sits with me as I finish my carafe of house red, admiring my recording device (‘what is that, man?!’) and listens thoughtfully as I tell him why I’m here.

  ‘You’ve walked from Jarrow? From Jarrow?! Today?!’

  Yes, and I’m going a lot further. He’s never heard of the march but is fascinated and horrified that the men went all the way to London. ‘Times must have been hard. I don’t think anyone would do that now. Too far. They’d be on their phones haggling on Uber!’

  He lives in Sunderland and gets the bus in every day to Ferryhill. ‘It’s not my restaurant but I sort of manage it. It’s owned by my uncle.’ He nods towards the kitchen from where some clattering, sizzling sounds and pungent, heady aromas are emerging. ‘He’s been here five years. I’ve been here … hmm … about two and, to be honest, now I’m getting …’

  He searches a little mournfully for the right word.

  ‘Restless?’ I offer.

  ‘I just have this feeling that there must be something more, something else out there … see a bit of the world. But I suppose I’ll stay here,’ he concludes with a small resigned smile.

  ‘Well, the food is lovely,’ I say, not entirely truthfully. ‘The Jarrow marchers wouldn’t have eaten bhuna and bhajis.’ ‘No,’ he laughs, and then, in case he thinks I’m presuming them bigoted, I quickly add, ‘I mean I bet there was no hot food in Ferryhill at night then.’

  ‘Well, there is now,’ he laughs, ‘if you like pizza. And they could certainly have got their hair cut,’ alluding to the town’s glut of cheap independent pizza shacks and mock Edwardian barbers.

  The streets of Ferryhill are dark and deserted tonight but things were different 80 years ago. The welcome here was as warm as it had been muted in Chester-le-Street. A message chalked on the road as the marchers ar
rived read, ‘Welcome to the Jarrow Crusade. We are in solidarity with you.’ In a letter home from the road, the Crusade’s cook, Con Shiels’ dad (also called Con, confusingly) said, ‘We got a better welcome here, as all the town was out.’ After placing the oak petition box (lettered in gold leaf paint from Woolworth’s costing a penny) in the council chambers and holding a public meeting in the street, the marchers were fed on scones and ham sandwiches in the Miners Institute. In a famous incident, one marcher was seen carefully lifting the ham from his sandwich and posting it back home. When asked, he explained that his family had not eaten meat for six weeks.

  The Manor House has been here several hundred years, but with their strict discipline, I doubt any marchers popped in for a pint. I’m pointed in its direction by two twinkling ladies in their eighties tightly linking each other for warmth as they make their booteed way along. ‘You can’t miss it! We’ve just come from there!’ they giggle, and perhaps their tight embrace is for reasons of stability as well as warmth. I lift the latch and find the pub empty except for a little lively, amiable knot of drinkers at the bar. I find a spot a discreet eavesdropping distance away and order a pint which I promptly knock over, spilling the contents all over the bar. This is embarrassing but it does effect a dramatic entrée into the conversation.

  At the bar in a loose circle with pints and white wines are a couple in fleeces, a hearty solo male drinker and a mother and daughter with a fascinating dynamic who I chat to in earnest. Mum is in her forties; denims, check shirt, casual and smart in an alternative, relaxed style. Her daughter though is immaculately coiffured, glamorously made up, salon tanned, tall and catwalk elegant. The differences between them are not just aesthetic I’ll find, but both are bright, chatty and personable. Mum moved to Ferryhill some years ago, but was brought up in Jarrow and remains a proud Jarrow lass.

  ‘It’s an anniversary tonight, isn’t it? They passed through here and stopped the night. They were marching for jobs, not handouts. They wanted to work. And they were given no support at all except from the ordinary people. Their Labour MP pushed their case but the rest of the party didn’t want to know. They ostracised her for it. Ellen Wilkinson, she was called. Now everyone wants to claim them for their own. Have you ever studied the Jarrow march, Robin? Robin’s doing Government and Politics at college. She’ll give you a different view I imagine.’

  Daughter Robin tells me that she’s a Conservative, ‘and that makes me proper weird round here. You never meet anyone who’s a Tory. Or at least who’ll admit to it. Of course, there are lots of different types of Conservative. There is for instance (and here I think Robin is quoting from her course notes) the One Nation Conservative who believes in the Welfare State and in helping the vulnerable and the less well-off. But even they aren’t naive. You have to face the fact that some people are just … higher than others. There’s a natural hierarchy among humans.’

  Really? I say. Is there? Listening back to the recording they kindly let me make of the conversation, I realise that the speed at which I snapped this back at Robin was ungallant to say the least. But Mum is with me.

  ‘Is that right? A natural hierarchy? So the rich are rich on merit, are they? Not because of inherited wealth or their old school ties or …’

  Robin knows Mum has the better of this rally but attempts a lobbed return. ‘Mum, you can’t say that … that … a teacher, say, has the same intelligence as someone on the dole …’ She drifts back to the baseline as Mum closes in at the net.

  ‘Well, they might well have. And anyway, it’s not about where you end up. A society should have equality of opportunity. Look at me and you. When I went to college, I didn’t have to borrow or beg from my mum and dad. I got a grant and went to university and I got a degree. You’re a bloody talented drama student and you can’t tell me that you wouldn’t go to uni and study if it wasn’t for the money. And, love, I can’t afford to pay for you to go …’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ interjects Robin, quickly but not completely convincingly. ‘We went to parliament on a college trip and some of the politicians told me it was a waste of time. The assistant chief whip of the SNP hasn’t been to university, you know …’ she tails off.

  My feeling about this is the same now as it was in the pub that autumn night. It may well be right that university is not for everyone, but I would surely like to meet the men in Westminster who, having had the best education money can buy, tell working-class girls from the north east that university is a waste of time.

  Inevitably, as talk, beer and wine flow, the conversation glides inexorably towards one topic. ‘They’re all saying round here this Brexit is a great thing,’ says Mum. ‘They’ll learn. I don’t think it’s a great thing at all. My cousin is in medical science, he’s researching a disease of the feet, not a very serious one but an unpleasant one that could be cured. The research is funded by the EU. Or was. Straight after the referendum, £600,000 of investment cut instantly and 20 people out of work.’

  As I leave, each drinker except Robin – who to be fair hadn’t heard of it – offered some positive thought about the march that passed through here 80 years ago.

  ‘I don’t know if Jarrow would happen again. People standing together, women, children with their husbands, you think – wow! But are we like that any more? On the news tonight they were saying, yes, it’s all romantic and all but did it achieve anything? Well, I think it did. It achieved something in that we’re talking to you about it now.’

  This is the notion that Matt Perry addressed in his lecture; that if Jarrow and by extension the Labour movement forget the march then it certainly has failed. But not if it is collectively remembered. They can take away the future that working people wanted but they cannot deny them their past.

  Just down the road from the Manor House there’s one minicab in Ferryhill’s taxi rank and I take it back to my hotel. The driver is a handsome woman in her fifties, but her eyes are dark and lined and her face is flecked with little scratches and nicks. These are not signs of abuse necessarily, but of someone who isn’t looking after herself as well as she should. She asks me what’s my business in Ferryhill and when I tell her I’m researching a book, her own story starts to emerge.

  ‘I’ve thought about writing a book, just to tell about my life.’

  After 32 years of common-law marriage and two kids now at university, her partner left her last year and she seethes, ‘The bastard is now trying to get me out the house, the house and the home I’ve built for 32 years. It’s dragging through lawyers now. They say you’ve got rights, but have I? That’s why I’m driving this cab. You think you know someone but you don’t. I said to the bastard, “All these years, what was I to you?” I know that people split up but he wants me out on the street. It’s my home, it’s my kids’ home. My son wants to kill him. So,’ she glances at me in the rearview mirror with a sad smile, ‘you think anyone would be interested in my story?’

  Maybe, I say. As she’s pulling over and reading the meter and I dig for change, I suggest that she starts a blog to see how that feels and to perhaps find sympathetic readers with similar experiences. She turns to me puzzled, awkward. ‘What’s a blog?’ And so I get my phone out, lean into the little space between the two front seats and flip through a few blogs randomly; musings about spiralised vegetables and vinyl records with a nice but angry lady from Ferryhill that I’ve just met.

  ‘Yours doesn’t have to be like this, of course,’ I say. ‘People blog about family, divorce, kids, all kinds of things.’ As I leave, she stays parked, and as I reach the door of the hotel, I look back and see her looking into her lap still, her face uplit in the chilly northern dark by her phone. Perhaps she’s found an inspirational blog from a woman sharing her similar story with the world. Or maybe she’s just buying a copy of Donovan’s 1971 Mini Monster EP on Pye. Either way, it was an interesting trip.

  I’d noticed while scrolling though the blogs on my phone that Matt Perry had emailed me. So, having kicked off my sh
oes and with one eye on Question Time on the tiny wall-mounted TV in my room (the kind specifically designed for you to bang your temple on), I read his message. At his lecture, we’d been talking about the Jarrow march in the context of other ‘iconic’ events in Labour and working-class history, prompted by the fact that the 1984 miners’ strike is back in the news with calls for a debate on the clashes of Orgreave. The strike was initially about the pit closures enforced by National Coal Board chairman Ian MacGregor doing the bidding of Mrs Thatcher. Matt has been reading MacGregor’s memoirs.

  Hi Stuart,

  You might have missed the topical connection between Orgreave, MacGregor and the Jarrow Crusade. And might want to use it. In his memoirs, he recalls getting a job in 1936 with Sir James Lithgow, who established the National Shipbuilding Securities that bought Palmers and put a 40-year ban on shipbuilding on it. ‘Of the half dozen or so men who have influenced my life, he was the one – my first great mentor … I did not take on the Coal Board in order to butcher the industry, or to smash the miners. But there was no way I was going to let their leadership stand in the way of establishing management’s right to manage the business and make it a going concern.

  At this very moment I look up and catch a glimpse of Question Time. When I was a child, this was the BBC’s flagship political debate programme, where union and parliamentary titans clashed under the withering basilisk gaze of Sir Robin Day. These days, tuning in, you are more likely to be treated to the political insights of some unspeakable and deranged reality TV show flotsam or the dim but loquacious lead singer of a minor 1990s pop–soul ensemble. But speaking at the moment is Leanne Wood, the leader of Plaid Cymru, who has been pricked into passionate scorn at mention of Theresa May’s claim that the Tories are the party of working people. ‘I worked as a probation officer in South Wales during the miners’ strike,’ she says, white-faced with quiet rage. ‘I saw the human cost and the legacy of closing those pits. They will never be the party of working people. We should never forgive them. Never, ever forgive them.’