Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  Unlike so many plans – personal, national, political – this one actually works out. Aroma on Zetland Street is filling up with early night-outers and late market shoppers but they squeeze me in the window (as in, they find me a little table at the front of the restaurant, in case you thought that sounded weird). Happily, the waiter is a rugby league fan too and goes along enthusiastically with my plan. He arrives with the wifi code on a piece of paper on a silver tray and despite it being a lengthy, bamboozling string of random numbers, asterisks and hieroglyphs (always) I get it right first time and a small but crisp image of chunky men in cherry and white hoops on the greensward of Old Trafford, Manchester, appears above the poppadoms.

  The next hour passes extremely pleasantly indeed. It’s a tight, hard fought encounter but in the second half Wigan gain the upper hand and with it, to mix metaphors horribly, begin to turn the screw. At the bar, a couple waiting for a takeaway sink cocktails and bicker in a brittle way like a couple in a Noël Coward play before leaving with several white plastic bags of food. In the dying seconds (of the match, not the argument), Wigan score a late and conclusive try that clinches it and involuntarily like the oik I am, I half rise from my chair and growl ‘Come On Wigan’. As you can imagine, when a solitary strange man does this in a curry house full of locals who know one another, it’s quite the conversation starter.

  It draws me into a chat with the big cheery group on the middle table. I tell them why I’m here and, this time, all of them have heard of the Jarrow march. They all know at least roughly what it was about and means, and I record our conversation over the increasing hubbub of a Saturday night curry house in a northern town.

  ‘Protest … desperation … dignity … in the face of Conservative bastards – come and have a beer with us!’

  I perch at the corner of the table and am given a quick resume of Northallerton and its character, ‘It’s a market town, livestock market Tuesday and Wednesday. Always been a big agricultural community and there’s still that feel to the place. That’s why it’s such a Tory town. They say round here that in Northallerton they’d vote for a pig if you put it in a tweed jacket. They voted to leave you know [I don’t need to ask what]. The farmers think they’re going to get more money. One of my students is from a farming family and he keeps saying, “we’re going to be rich”. Baffling … he’s got a bloody shock coming to him. It’s the county town of North Yorkshire too so there’s always been that big admin sector, government offices … that’s a big employer. Rural payments agency used to be here but that’s gone now.’

  What’s still here though is the ‘Pongo’, as all the town calls it. Its proper name these days is Club Amadeus: ‘but everyone calls it the “Pongo” and nobody knows why. When we were kids in the seventies and eighties it was Sayers Disco. It was effectively two garages concreted together. Awful but great. Sticky carpets. That sort of thing. But there was nowhere else to go. There still isn’t. It’s still in two parts. The middle-aged people turn left at the door and the young ’uns turn right.’ The gentleman who told me all this can claim a certain authority. He was one of the rumoured and select band of just ten people who were in the audience in the most famous night in Pongo’s history, one that fixed Northallerton’s premier (and only) night spot as a footnote in the pop history of these islands.

  On 16 May 1976 the Sex Pistols played at Sayers Disco in Northallerton. Sending the fledgling band into the lion’s den of the northern club scene was part of manager Malcolm McLaren’s plan to toughen up the band and presumably provoke outrage. On the fortieth anniversary of their famous show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, I’d spoken to bassist Glen Matlock about those early sojourns. ‘I went into a chip shop and I asked, “What sort of fish have you got?” ’Cos in London you get rock, skate, whatever. The bloke just looked at me and said, “Are you taking the piss? We’ve got cod”.’ Drummer Paul Cook said that the furthest north he had been up to this point was Hampstead.

  McLaren would give the band just enough money to get to the shows and the band would exist on stolen chocolate bars and chips, then having to badger the clubs themselves to get their money. ‘It was vile, horrible, a nightmare. No chance to relax … nothing … awful nylon sheets … utter total boredom,’ recalled John Lydon, who would nightly bait the largely unresponsive audiences. Their van couldn’t manage hills so Matlock would use the Ordnance Survey map to plot the flattest route possible, even if this involved enormous detours.

  In Northallerton they supported the Doctors of Madness ‘a real record company band’ remembers Pauline Murray of the Ferryhill punk band Penetration, one of the rumoured ten in attendance. ‘The Pistols wiped them out, they wiped a lot of bands out … I saw it happen.’ Not everyone was so keen though, as I was about to find out. Declining yet more offers of beer from the wonderful folk at the curry house, I leave them to their poppadoms and head for the Little Tanner pub. ‘It’s quirky,’ they tell me, ‘and Brian who runs it put the Pistols on at Sayers.’

  The Little Tanner is definitely quirky, one of those strangely likeable new pubs or bars that have sprung up all over Britain in what feels like front rooms or old sweet shops or printers. Now the spaces are occupied, not unhappily, by luxuriantly bearded graphic designers wearing vintage US seed merchant baseball caps and drinking botanical gins and Sri Lankan pale ales. Even if these people had existed in 1976, they would not have been the kind of folk who went to see the Sex Pistols. Their audiences were largely either curious hippies or oikish 15-year-olds like me obsessed with the music press, hormonally restless and for whom liking punk was the cultural equivalent of smashing up a phone box.

  The hipsters aren’t in tonight but the nice barmaid Louise (or perhaps Lucy, the man with the phlegmy laugh and the large Gordon’s at the bar called her both during my brief stay) tells me with an apologetic smile, ‘Brian’s not in tonight I’m afraid, he’s in Thailand. But I know that he didn’t put the group on. He was the DJ. I think he said he had to wake them up in the dressing room to come onstage and play. I don’t think there was a stage, just the dance floor. And Brian thought they were rubbish … well, most people did then. It was very new, very different. Certainly for Northallerton …’

  In 1936, the biggest single employer of musicians and the greatest patron and commissioner of music in the land was the BBC. The ‘Beeb’ would have been the way most of the Jarrow marchers listened to music. Lord Reith believed that light music, along with comedy and quizzes, was ‘lowest common denominator’ fare and not to be broadcast at all on Sundays. But at other times, thanks to wiser and less snobbish counsels, it vied with classical music as the bulk of the BBC’s output. At 10.30pm, every night (except Sunday) there was a broadcast of an hour-and-a-half of music from a West End dancehall with bandleaders such as Henry Hall and Lew Stone and ‘crooners’ like Al Bowlly. Reith’s deputy described crooning as ‘a particularly odious kind of singing’ but the audience loved it. They deluged the Corporation with bags of fan mail to the surprise of BBC mandarins and musicians alike.

  By the mid-1930s, that august, now defunct publication the Melody Maker reckoned there were almost 20,000 dance bands in Britain, playing in various palais, lidos, theatres and hotels. The year before the Jarrow march, at a holiday camp in Great Yarmouth, Percy Cohen’s band played to 1,500 people a night. British dance bands tended to be either ‘sweet’ or ‘hot’, playing music that was essentially romantic and lush or quick and infectious. No British bands ever really ‘swung’ though in the way that their American jazz counterparts did, like Benny Goodman. Nonetheless, in the UK, dance bands and light music were a phenomenon that cut across all classes and ages, despite the out of touch scorn of men like Reith and his deputy and the ever-reliably wrong-headed conductor Thomas Beecham who declared with all the confidence of the mistaken that ‘the performance of music through the wireless cannot be other than a ludicrous caricature’. It seems the public have yet to twig this.

  The bar of the Golden Lion (‘OK
but a bit 70s’ was the curry house jury’s verdict) is full and raucous as I settle in with a last whisky. There’s what looks to be a wedding or at least a hen do; girls in scarlet and cream silks tottering to the toilets laughing. There’s a few couples sipping wine and at the bar a cliché made flesh – quite a lot of flesh actually – a group of loud, hearty florid middle-aged men in tweeds, Barbours, a gilet or two and those shirts with the thin-lined patterning that you can only buy in ‘country outfitters’. They seem amiable enough but then I can’t hear what they’re talking about. Maybe if I was a couple of tables closer I wouldn’t be so generous. Or maybe I’m just being prejudiced.

  I’d definitely felt a slight but perceptible change in landscape and mood as I came south from County Durham into North Yorkshire. No chimneys brood over the landscape of the north east now (or few anyway) but the Durham coalfield still carries the tough, ingrained feel of mining country. Towns like Ferryhill are very different in mood to Northallerton, especially on a busy market Saturday. No official reception met the Jarrow men here in 1936 and no councillor came to shake their hand. The council would not allow them to sleep in any school or council-owned building and so they took cold and uncomfortable shelter in the drill hall, just across from the Little Tanner and a couple of Methodist and Zionist church halls. Drill halls were once a fixture in every town, as meeting places for army reservists. ‘Thank God we found decent clergy in Northallerton,’ said marcher David Riley. The Northern Dispatch for its part said the men had ‘groused’ and that the welcome was every bit as warm as strange folk from up country could have wished for. The war over Fake News had some of its initial skirmishes in the 1930s maybe, I thought as I drained my Aberlour, negotiated a teetering girl in high heels with a Chardonnay and made my way up the anaglypta-ed and horsebrassed staircase to bed.

  STAGE FIVE

  NORTHALLERTON TO RIPON

  9 October, 19 miles

  When I was a teenager, quite an odd one perhaps, I loved the party conference season. Unlike the youthful William Hague I never went to one, but I much enjoyed them vicariously. The telly was on all day providing, for skiving students and dole-ites of which I was from time to time both, a genuine alternative to horse racing or The Sullivans in the form of a kind of engrossing live theatre. Several different kinds of theatre actually.

  The Conservatives’ was always the most tightly scripted, directed and stage managed, with hardly any surprises – except for 1980 of course – and with the only variable being the toadiness of the cabinet, the hair-raising stridency of Mrs T’s speeches and the length of the North Korean-style standing ovation that would inevitably follow them. The Liberals or SDP or Liberal Democrats or whatever they were called that year were always homespun and pleasant but mildly disorganised, like a CND jumble sale. Labour generally provided the great box office conference moments of the 1970s and 80s: Dennis Healey in 1976, sweating like a prize fighter, pummelling his way through the boos and catcalls to finally earn a standing ovation; Kinnock taking on Derek Hatton’s entryist Militant tendency in 1983 raging, ‘You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma … irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.’ Militant bayed and sulked. But more cheered; it was clearly the start of the long fight back to power, even I could tell that from a sofa in Wigan. And I could tell that the personable young chap I watched in the late 1980s with the proto-mullet and thin lapels and skinny tie à la Duran Duran, new Shadow Trade Secretary Tony Blair was going places.

  By 2005, things had changed in all kinds of ways. My days were no longer my own and thus I could no longer slump all day in front of speeches, motions, resolutions and shows of hands. Tony Blair’s days had got busier too. Labour had eventually ousted the Tories, a government that seemed as permanent as the ice caps during my twenties, and now he was giving his third conference speech as Prime Minister to the Labour faithful in Brighton. Looking back now, his words ring hollow with a conviction and sense of rectitude that proved fairly groundless.

  I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They’re not debating it in China and India. They are seizing its possibilities, in a way that will transform their lives and ours …. The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.

  Around that time I interviewed Digby Jones, the former head of the CBI, on Radio 2 and it proved one of only two occasions that I’ve ever lost my temper on live radio. Jones’s position was essentially the same as Blair’s, but expressed with even less sympathy for his countrymen and women. ‘The British worker is going to have to change and work harder and be more productive and more flexible. Because otherwise there are thousands of workers in India who are going to steal their lunch.’

  Neither the ice caps nor Tony Blair turned out to be permanent, and both Blair and Jones turned out to be wrong – as blithely wrong in fact as Francis Fukuyama was in 1992, in his once-influential book The End of History when he confidently predicted that we were entering the final phase of human social development, a serene universal shift to liberal democratic government and an end to geopolitical conflict. Even as he wrote, in Jalalabad or Khartoum or a cave somewhere in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden was planning the holy war on those same liberal democracies. It is a war that still rages today and has brought murder and mayhem to the cities of the east and the west. As Jon Cruddas now says of the imperious but naive assertions of Fukuyama, Blair and their ilk, ‘This sink or swim view of humanity is alright for the winners. Rule from 35,000 feet is fine if you’re in the first-class cabin.’ Soon even those in that cabin wouldn’t be safe, literally or metaphorically.

  Similarly aloof, the Labour Conference of 1936 had little cheer to offer the marching men of Jarrow. After a frugal breakfast of bread and jam in the town hall, trudging from Northallerton in the teeming rain, spirits were further dampened by news from the conference that the Labour Party had decided not to support the marchers by protesting the National Assistance Board’s decision to stop their benefit. The NAB had come to this decision as the marchers were ‘technically not available for work’. David Riley, mayor of Jarrow and the march marshal, broke the news to them saying that it was ‘a stab in the back’. A telegram was sent to Edinburgh to the conference delegates saying, ‘We, the sons of England’s most famous town, resent the unsympathetic attack on our members and the deliberate attempt to pauperise our crusaders.’

  Perhaps it was this muted and unhappy start to the day that has led to some confusion about where the actual march went next. According to the official route lodged with the authorities and the BBC, they headed for Thirsk and Boroughbridge, making an overnight stay in each. But this is clearly wrong and no one seems entirely sure why. Did they deviate from the original route? Was the itinerary drawn up incorrectly? Anyway, I know where I’m headed. I’m bound for Ripon and I leave Northallerton on another golden autumn morning in North Yorkshire – an egg yolk sun and a faintly speckled Cadbury’s Mini Egg blue sky to the gentle clamour of church bells. The FT’s cheery headlines are ringing in my mind too; ‘Chill wind blowing through corporate landscape … the pound in freefall … protectionism returns … Jeremy Paxman on writing his memoirs …’ I pop the FT in the recycling bin in Northallerton Market Square and head south on the Boroughridge Road.

  The miles that stretch between Northallerton and Ripon pass through the most conventionally pretty scenery to date. They offer a peek into Herriot country and a hint of the quintessential Dales. As the road curls gently south west it nuzzles against the River Swale until, at Skipton-on-Swale, it leaps the slow, blue, viscous rive
r at a fine little bridge. Eighty years after the marchers crossed this (breaking step in order not to set up potentially dangerous vibrations, as every schoolboy knows) I leaned here a while, watching the Swale whirl and pool around the reeds and disappear through trees across rolling fields.

  At the big, handsome village of Baldersby where the road bends towards Ripon, I stopped for lunch on the village green, my pack beside me on a bench. There was not a soul about and I couldn’t tell whether The Smithy was a pub, a garage, a tea shop or a garden centre. In any event it was closed, but this mattered not as I had had the uncommon foresight to bring my own lunch. Everyone I’d met in Northallerton had told me that I simply had to visit the artisanal deli of Lewis and Cooper. Indeed, everyone I’d met in Northallerton was either headed there or just leaving it when they said this to me. The few that weren’t were already in there. But through sharp elbows and enormous patience, I had emerged with some jamon serrano and a chunk of Gouda with cumin. ‘Only the best for the working class!’ I thought again, as I opened and carved the delicious fare with my Swiss army knife and ate it off the blade, feeling very much the carefree and seasoned man of the road stepping out one mid-autumn afternoon.