Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  I turn off the TV, turn over, and fall asleep in the quiet arms of a mining town with no pit, just like scores across the land, where the lights are going out. ‘No longer a going concern’ and definitely no concern of some.

  STAGE THREE

  FERRYHILL TO DARLINGTON

  7 October, 12 miles

  Breakfast in Ferryhill must have gladdened the Jarrow marchers’ hearts as it hardened the arteries; 70 pounds of bacon, 140 loaves of bread for frying, three boxes of tomatoes for same, all consumed in the Miners Institute. On leaving, they were also given 120 pounds of cherry cake for the journey, and the reporter from the Shields Gazette, Selwyn Waller, noticed that some were already putting on weight. Before they set off at 9.30am, some of the younger marchers had an impromptu dance with the girls of Ferryhill in the market place.

  Not having been asked to dance, not liking cherry cake much and, moreover, none being forthcoming, I skip breakfast, leave town and pause for elevenses from a van by the roundabout at the Eden Arms in Rushyford. Someone once wrote that a man never feels as free and alive as when he jumps on to the back of an old London bus in motion. I would add the similar feeling engendered by eating a bacon butty and drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup on a road never taken before and headed somewhere new.

  Seated at a plastic table on the layby, I listen back on my recording device to Robin and her mum exchanging views in the pub last night and think about the youngest of the Jarrow lads, early twenties I guess, dancing and flirting with the girls of Ferryhill before setting out with a wink and a spring in their step that October morning in 1936. The year before, the school leaving age had been raised from 14 to 15, but children could be exempted if they could find ‘beneficial employment’. This dismayed educationalists but was welcomed by those working-class families who needed the extra wages of their teenage offspring.

  Of course they weren’t ‘teenagers’. No one would have called them that as that designation only really arrived (and then across the Atlantic) with the Second World War, the ubiquity of the automobile and the growth of leisure industries and the mass media. The lads and girls who danced in Ferryhill market place were young men and women; ‘youths’ as they were called. They were not a separate tribe, there was no generation schism. They were merely younger, sillier and more carefree versions of their mums and dads. But essentially their sights were set on the same targets – houses, jobs, children – and they took the same, long-established route to get them.

  Most of the Jarrow marchers were well out of their teens since juvenile unemployment was always low even during the worst of the twenties and thirties slumps. ‘Youths’ were cheap to hire and pay and easy to get rid of. They were physically different too. According to Branson and Heinemann in Britain in the 1930s, the average 16-year-old then was more like a child of today. Most 12-year-olds of the 1960s were as big and strong as a thirties’ ‘youth’ and their lives were similarly constrained and slight compared to the teenager of our times: ‘Their horizons were limited, their lives rather bare, their opportunities for enjoyment meagre … there were no special teenage fashions in clothes or cosmetics, no teenage magazines to speak of, few teenage activities or entertainments laid on. It was not the custom to interview teenagers on the radio or to solicit their opinions or explore their attitudes.’ While things were slightly better for the 18–25-year-old group at whom much culture, entertainment, sport and recreation was aimed, they were still a marginal section of society compared to the powerful middle-aged middle class who held tight the reins of the law, the economy and the polity.

  Eighty years later, that situation would seem to have changed. Pippa Norris of Harvard talks of a ‘generational cleavage’ running through the new politics and the new populism, young people being (or asserting to be) globalist, progressive and more interested in issues like LGBT rights, multiculturalism and gender equality than the old blue collar concerns of community solidarity, nationhood and working conditions. Jon Cruddas, influential Labour MP and thinker, has talked of a shift in the power centres and bases of the left away from the industrial working class and towards what’s called ‘Globally Oriented Network Youth’. This new ‘radical’ sector tends to be found in cities, is well educated and easily embraces technological change, leisure and internationalism. ‘You can see it around Corbynism. But if you build a public philosophy and a politics around this network, one that discounts the working class, where are they going to go politically? They’re not going to regroup around this new fashionable left. They’re going walkabout on the right.’

  That’s the walkabout that took us away from Brussels, and whilst I don’t agree with that decision, I can understand it. In the three months between the seismic shock of the Brexit vote and me setting out from Jarrow, I read and heard countless leftist commentators and writers airily, and I think snobbishly, waving away some of the concerns of older, non-metropolitan working-class voters as racism and bigotry. I couldn’t agree with Stephen Bush, a writer I generally much admire, when he said that white working-class people in England had no right to talk about being vulnerable and marginalised. He didn’t ‘buy it’, as he put it. The only people who could legitimately feel this way were, say, Mexican workers in San Diego or Latinos in Miami or ethnic minorities in the UK. Whatever you think of this, this dismissiveness will win you no friends among the old blue collar labour heartlands, as was proved on 23 June to the apparent bafflement of some liberal observers. Belatedly perhaps, some have come to see the error of their ways. As Adam Shatz, London Review of Books contributing editor, said of the liberals’ response to the new populism and the white working class, ‘Most of us have found it easier to hate than persuade.’

  Such thoughts occupy me as I stride along, though with admittedly less strength than my regret at deciding to wear some rather raffish knee-length shorts on what has turned out to be the first grey, overcast and chilly morning of my trip. A sign points right to Newton Aycliffe and, fancying the warmth and buzz of civilisation for a while, I detour toward it. The marchers lunched at Aycliffe Village just down the road and I’ll head there later, but Newton Aycliffe is its brasher, younger brother. The largest new town in the north of England, it was founded in 1947 around a major wartime munitions base which brought workers from the surrounding regions.

  In 2015, against the prevailing economic mood, Hitachi opened an £82million train-building plant here, bringing the glory days of rail construction back to the north east, continuing the grand engineering traditions of George Stephenson and creating 700 jobs. It was feted by then prime minister David Cameron and was to be at the heart of George Osborne’s plans for the much vaunted Northern Powerhouse. Cameron and Osborne are both gone, distant as figures from a bygone political era like Disraeli or Stafford Cripps. But the trains are still being built. Head out to the site and you can see the huge, sleek beasts under vast white sheets awaiting their imminent roll-out. In Hitachi’s promo video for the project on YouTube, you’ll find gleaming hi-tech vehicles, besuited captains of industry smiling and handshaking through a flickering storm of flashbulbs and accompanied by a beautiful and elegant female Asian string quartet in white silk. All dazzlingly glamorous, but it will I fear give you an unrealistic expectation of Newton Aycliffe, especially if your first port of call is the town centre, or what passes for one.

  The architectural style known as Brutalism is beginning to find favour again amongst some critics after years of hostility from the likes of Prince Charles. The north east has more examples of this harsh but powerfully dramatic style than anywhere else in Britain. You won’t go far here without chancing upon looming concrete towers or raw, uncompromising brickwork; Redcar Library, Darlington Town Hall, the Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, the Wilton Centre, Teesside, Billingham Forum and Owen Luder’s iconic, divisive, now demolished Trinity Square car park in Gateshead.

  Newton Aycliffe is a whole town built in this rugged and unsentimental mode, a style which divides people. Supporters of Brutalism like the writ
er Owen Hatherley admire ‘its rough surfaces, heavy forms and dissonant, often monumental compositions’, and see it as ‘an attempt to recharge a modernism considered increasingly ingratiating and polite’. Sometimes though, a little ingratiation is no bad thing, especially towards the people who have to live in your brave experiments and your rough, heavy, monumental dissonance.

  The journalist Merrick Winn called Newton Aycliffe ‘the town that has no heart’ in 1957 and you do feel on arrival at this bleak, windswept promenade that the people here deserved something better. It’s hard to imagine anyone but those that created it on a drawing board having much affection for the Thames shopping arcades – the nearest thing Newton Aycliffe has to a town centre. But with the ceaseless energy that people have, for better or worse, the townspeople have colonised this dire space and made it their own. An old chap on a mobility scooter chats about ‘regeneration’ with a lady with a B&M Bargains bag and a small, angry dog. Office workers dash by with soup and salads and mobile phones held end on away from their faces in the style they’ve seen on The Apprentice. Two goth girls sit giggling on a hideous concrete planter. Given a choice, I doubt this is anyone’s idea of a pleasant spot to spend your lunch hour. A regular town centre in all its higgledy-piggledy organic confusion would be preferable to this regimented chilliness.

  I find more warmth in every sense in the public library, as is often the case. I sit and leaf though a lever arch file full of pictures of the town’s construction and inauguration. Every computer terminal is occupied with people doing whatever it is people do on them all the long afternoon. A young blonde woman in boots and a leather jacket comes in. She’s just moved back to Aycliffe village and wants to send a fax to her new employer’s head office in New Zealand. While she and the ladies behind the counter establish whether they have the technology to do this, they ask how’s she’s finding the old place after her time away and I schmooze my way into the conversation by asking about my destination today.

  ‘If you want to know about Aycliffe,’ the newly returned young woman tells me, ‘go down to the village hall. Every month, there’s a community club there and you can get a late breakfast. Ask for Harry Moses. He knows everything there is to know. He’s written books.’

  Harry isn’t around when I arrive at the village hall an hour or two later. But I get a cuppa and a warm welcome from the ladies of the Women’s Institute. Brenda, Anne and Gill Atkinson are running a bring-and-buy stall. They all know of the original march and Anne has an actual souvenir. ‘I believe they stayed here overnight and camped in the field opposite. When I was a little girl I found a tent peg in the field that must have belonged to them because no one ever camps there. I’ve still got it. If Harry were here he might tell you more. And one of our members, Muriel, is 95 and sharp as a pin. She might remember them coming through as a girl.’ A few phone calls establish that, like Harry, Muriel is away for the weekend, but we manage to rustle up David Lewis from the village’s local history society and he takes me on a whirlwind tour of Aycliffe.

  It’s a pretty place, once on the old Great North Road and hence squarely on the route of the Jarrow march. I mention to David that I didn’t like to contradict Anne, but the marchers didn’t overnight here. ‘No,’ he agrees, ‘but they did, as she says, have their lunch in the old cabbage and potato patch just opposite the hall, so they might well have put up some kind of tent or awning. They would have had to come here as there was no bypass then.’

  The modern bypass, though, means that the village green is a delight; sun dappled and serene on this warm Friday morning. The only activity is a prowling, indolent cat and a gentleman in a fleece and trainers pottering along to his front door with a pint of milk. David has hit his stride. ‘The church is older than Durham cathedral, Anglo-Saxon … that little red building there is the old toll house … you had to pay to use the old North Road … that pub, the Royal Telegraph, would have been here then. And that one, the County. Tony Blair went there for lunch with the President of France, there’s the blue plaque. And that river running by is the Skerne.’

  David has a story that relates how unassuming Aycliffe has another unique place in industrial relations history beyond being where the Jarrow marchers had their butties.

  The village hall used to be a school, opened in 1898. There was a church school here on the green but the head teacher and the vicar’s wife were in constant conflict, basically because the head was his own man and wouldn’t simply do the vicar’s wife’s bidding. She was always meddling and criticising him and she managed to get the head sacked by the vicar even though the village liked him and he did a good job. So the villagers got together a petition that said Thompson, the head, had been sacked ‘ignominiously and without valid cause’ and demanding his reinstatement. It was signed by 162 parents representing 449 children. When that got nowhere, the people were so angry that they built a new school on land bought with their own money. But the interesting thing, historically, is that the dispute was one of the first to be taken up by the National Union of Teachers, one of its very first industrial disputes. It went to parliament and in the end the head was re-appointed.

  Our circuit of the village has brought us back to where the school once stood and I slurp another tea before hitting the road. Brenda from the WI sees me off in the bright sunshine and gives me a bag of apples for the journey, which strikes me as nicely ‘old school’ and makes me feel like a peddler or man of the road in a Thomas Hardy novel. I munch a couple myself (apples, not Thomas Hardy novels) and give the rest to some friendly but skittish horses in a field on High Beaumont Hill, and this encounter is the only eventful moment on an afternoon’s gritty, noisy walk along the big new A176 into Darlington. I’ve never been to ‘Darlo’ before so I’m looking forward to exploring and from the stuff I read on Wiki last night in the curry house, it has several interesting quirks and claims to fame; the Brutalist town hall, comedian Vic Reeves, Quakerism and the coming of the railways.

  If you have ever been hugely, vexedly distracted from the matter in hand by the twee recorded message about what is permissible to flush down the toilet of a Virgin train, or sat becalmed in a Hertfordshire field, the victim of a failure of lineside equipment near Leighton Buzzard, then in some senses you have Darlington to blame. It was the pressing need of the people of Darlington to get themselves and their stuff to Stockton that birthed the railways. By ‘stuff’ we mean specifically coal, the chief reason hotshot Geordie engineer George Stephenson established the world’s first public railway between the two towns, primarily to bring coal from Killingworth colliery to the port of Stockton. This was the really important cargo. People were relegated to being dragged along behind in open carts. For these pioneering rail users, there was also the nagging worry widely reported that one might asphyxiate at the high speeds – in excess of ten miles per hour – that the loco could reach. This was a falsehood encouraged by wealthy canal owners desperate to keep their investments profitable and propagated by their press baron friends.

  Work began in 1822 laying track on the 12-mile route between the two towns. Three years later, the railway opened to great fanfare. Large, eager crowds flocked to watch Stephenson himself at the controls of the ‘Locomotion’ as it pulled its 36 wagons – 22 of coal and flour and 14 of workmen and guests. During the final descent into Stockton, it unexpectedly reached 15 mph, surprising one passenger who fell out of his wagon and was badly injured. Add to this the fact that a few years later, on the maiden voyage of the first regular passenger service between Manchester and Liverpool, a high-ranking MP was run over and horribly killed, and one begins to realise just what excitement and faith there was in this new mode of transport. People like Stephenson were determined to make a success of the railways, whatever the cost.

  It seems the accident outside Stockton did not sour the mood a jot. Spectator John Sykes recalled, ‘The novelty of the scene, and the fineness of the day, had attracted an immense concourse of spectators, the fields on each side of the rai
lway being literally covered with ladies and gentlemen on horseback, and pedestrians of all kinds … By the time the cavalcade arrived at Stockton, where it was received with great joy, there were not less than 600 persons within, and hanging by the carriages.’

  My entry into Darlington was more low key, it has to be said. Night had fallen and there was a chill in the air. But there was some of that old frisson of transport-related danger. Darlington, like most of our town centres, is now thronged with boy racer cyclists criss-crossing at speed, buzzing pedestrians and proffering the odd obscenity for seasoning. Even the most pacifistic among us surely find themselves fantasising about administering rough summary justice on these occasions, but at least these unlovable scamps have youth and stupidity as mitigating circumstances. Even just three days into my trip as a pedestrian, I am already reserving most loathing for those bulky middle-aged men, often in upsettingly snug lycra and with a little ribbed plastic hat, who ride their bikes on the pavement scattering old ladies and children, being too wussy and precious to ride on the highway as they are legally required. The punishment commensurate with this arrogance is yet to be devised. But I’m working on it.

  Such retributory thoughts would not have sat well with some of Darlington’s most eminent founders. Quakerism was born in the turbulent England of the Civil War when a young man called George Fox, a firebrand and electrifying preacher, toured the north of England spreading the word about a vision he had had on Pendle Hill in Lancashire. Fox’s revelation was that the light of God was within everyone, discoverable within oneself and needing no formal or credentialed hierarchy of clergy. This was a radical notion which brought him into conflict with the established church who hauled him before various inquisitions for blasphemy. As Fox recalled, ‘They were the first that called us Quakers, because I bade them tremble at the word of the Lord.’ Quakerism grew from its beginnings in the English north to become a global religion and, along with other Nonconformist strains of Christianity like Methodism, part of a radical, dissenting, even socialistic strand in our history. Where Anglicanism and Catholicism are ultimately two different faces of the same conservative coin (and I say that as an ex-altar boy), Nonconformism, as the name suggests, is predicated on a lack of trust in the vicar or the priest, the dog collar or the surplice, on what Larkin called ‘the vast moth eaten brocade’ of the Establishment religions. Methodism and Chapel are indissoluble from the great Labour traditions of Wales, whilst Nonconformism made Manchester the great radical city of the industrial age.