Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  It was a very pleasant 20 minutes, watching the occasional light aircraft drone gently overhead and brushing the odd cheesy crumb from the folds of the OS map. It was so unseasonably mild, balmy even, that stretched out with my pack behind my head, I might even have dropped off. But then a thought occurred. Whatever The Smithy was, it was closed because it was Sunday. And if it was Sunday then there was a chance that, even if there wasn’t honey still for tea, there was choral evensong at Ripon cathedral soon. A spot of light Googling revealed that it would indeed be happening at 3.30pm in Ripon cathedral, the very place where the town’s Bishop welcomed the marchers. Ripon was a comfortable market and agricultural town in the thirties, as it is now, and the Jarrow marchers met a pretty indifferent response here, it’s said, except at the cathedral. I thought that the least I could do was symbolically return the favour (I’ve started to see myself as a marcher) and pop in for choral evensong.

  I quickened my pace across the amiable and easy pastures of North Yorkshire. What hills there were were far-off charcoal smudges in the hazy distance and I caught a glimpse of them from the appropriately named nook of Pennine View. Then on again, past Carlton Miniott and Ainderby Quernhow, two more splendid entries for the Villages That Sound Like 1950s Character Actors Game (‘… and who can forget Carlton Miniott and Ainderby Quernhow as the two bungling policemen in Mayhem at the Vicarage’).

  Above me and above the rolling dales, the skies had darkened and around 2.30, I felt the first unwelcome splashes of rain since starting off. Soon it came in great, soaking gusts and I was grateful for the shelter of a petrol station awning. Inside in the shop, a gentleman called John Lyndley chatted to me as we both perused the Hula Hoops and Skittles. John told me that Ripon was a lovely old town and he also passed on a cherished family tale that his granddad had known a bloke who’d been on the march who had declared on arrival at Ripon that his ‘boots had broke down’ and made a new home in that cathedral city. I was hearing many, many stories like this on my travels and whilst they may not all turn out to be quite true, that’s really not the point. King Arthur and Robin Hood didn’t exist but they are still culturally enduring; potent and vivid ciphers for our country, lenses through which we see ourselves. Jarrow did happen, even if some of the stories are pure and righteous romance.

  Remarkably soon, the rain was gone. The clouds became ragged and then dispersed in a stiff wind leaving skies wide, clear and blue as I raced to get to Ripon for evensong. I’d decided at the outset that the book came first, and if in search of a good story or an interesting encounter, I needed to use motorised transport for a short distance, I would, so long as it stuck to the route of the march. But it was Sunday of course and since bus deregulation in the 1980s, rural services in places like this must be long gone. One of Mrs Thatcher’s many apocryphal remarks (my favourite is ‘happiness is a ticked-off list’) was ‘a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure’. I was happy for Mrs T to think whatever she liked of me from wherever she may be. But she had seen to it that there were no buses for me that Sunday.

  Now absurdly keen to see my plan through, I upped the pace to a mild trot, which isn’t easy with a rucksack the size of a child’s wardrobe. Still, it all felt very ‘ecclesiastical race against time’, à la The Da Vinci Code. I’ve never seen or read The Da Vinci Code, but I have seen the films promoted on the sides of buses (which is where I get most of my movie marketing from) and they generally seem to involve Tom Hanks dashing through a cloister or transept looking quite determined followed by a pretty girl 30 years his junior. Tom presumably makes these films at gunpoint whilst visualising the cheque.

  When I was teaching sociology to likeable scallies in Skelmersdale new town in the late eighties, the standard line on ‘the sociology of religion’ trotted out in the textbooks and syllabi was that we were living in an ‘increasingly secularised society’. The theory ran that church attendance was falling, the teachings of religious leaders going unheeded and religion itself, once such a potent force in people’s lives, was dwindling to the extent that soon it would be no more influential on society than chamber music or mime. With the supreme confidence of the deluded, no one foresaw the rise of Islamic fundamentalism or that of the Christian right in America, the constant rows over antiSemitism in the Labour hierarchy or even the brief revival of Catholic churches in England driven by devout young Polish immigrants. The predictions of experts often carry no more weight than the prophecies of oracles.

  If anything the church in England was weaker and more beleaguered in the 1930s than it is today. Attendance was low and had been falling generally since the First World War, when the horrors of the battlefields had shattered the faith of many. Those who attended church were largely middle class and female. Mass Observation, the large-scale survey movement, found downright hostility to the church in some towns and cities, with only one in ten people going to church regularly in the mid-1930s. They were building community halls not churches on the new estates and holding whist drives instead of masses. The church was strongest in the affluent south and weakest in the industrial north, outside of the Catholic stronghold of Lancashire. Catholicism generally was still strong, bucking the general trend in the working towns and cities of the north. But Anglicanism and Nonconformism, the great pillars of the Establishment and the marginalised respectively, were in decline. That bête noire of the Jarrow marchers, Bishop Henson, said that the church had become ‘an effete establishment … moving like a rudderless vessel over a rock haunted ocean’. Clearly, those rocks were socialism, feminism and social change, and what was needed was the enduring power of fire and brimstone.

  There were no such modern uncertainties when Ripon cathedral was built. Back then, God was a very real presence in people’s lives, as indeed was the devil. The flames of hell licked at one’s feet at every step of life, for peasant and aristocrat alike, although of course the very rich could buy a Get Out of Hell Free pass in the form of an ‘indulgence’. In the seventh century, St Wilfred put a stone roof on the wooden monastery here, thus erecting one of the first stone buildings of the Anglo–Saxon era. Soon, people came to worship here from the many surrounding hamlets and farmsteads dotted across the empty landscape.

  That was 1,350 years ago, and St Wilf’s place is still looking pretty impressive and certainly welcoming if you’ve trotted the last few miles to it in intermittent rain while being buzzed by articulated lorries. I slumped into the nearest pew and admired the décor. There’s a lot of it to admire. If I were Nikolaus Pevsner I could give you the full chapter and verse on the various naves and misericords and flying buttresses, on gilts and flutings and curlicues. Lacking that kind of critical vocabulary, I’ll just say that architecturally, it’s a bit of a doozie.

  Of course, on this autumn afternoon, what we’re all really here for is the singing. Marvellous it is too. The choristers enter to the sound of the organ in full throated, eerie, Abominable Dr Phibes mode and proceed to match it note for note with a song that reaches to the very top bits (I told you I was no Pevsner) of the cathedral’s soaring interior. Organ fans will already know that the instrument here is one of Harrison and Harrison’s, the esteemed Durham family firm who also provided the sonorous beauties in King’s College Cambridge, Royal Festival Hall and Westminster Abbey.

  Sermons, especially when delivered in a Yorkshire accent, always make me think of Alan Bennett’s hilarious ‘Take A Pew’ in the Beyond the Fringe revue. But today the sub-Dean’s was very interesting, even faintly political, with a few pointed references to Britain’s ongoing national rending of garments over Brexit. ‘It’s worth remembering at the current time that our patron saint St George is half Greek and half Palestinian …’ There’s even a wry dig at David Cameron, the departed and largely discredited former PM. ‘You could say that Jesus Christ invented the Big Society, one of David Cameron’s favourite ideas. Anyone remember the Big Society? Anyone remember David Cameron?’ This may hardly be Lenny Bruce
, but in the Tory heartlands of North Yorkshire, it’s positively incendiary. (Between Ferryhill and Wakefield, the march never left Conservative-run districts.)

  It’s over by half four and very lovely it was too. Emboldened by the music and the general vibe of serene, sun-dappled radiance, I try and grab a few words with the Dean, who’s present today. A helpful gentleman tells me that he’ll go into the vestry and enquire. He disappears off ‘backstage’, where if the Dean were a touring rock performer he would now be sitting with a white towel around his shoulders wreathed in sweat and drinking from a bottle of Amstel. Ten minutes later, the Dean emerges in full regalia, smiling, and offers me a firm handshake. He is well aware of today’s anniversary. Eighty years ago, his predecessor welcomed the Jarrow men here and offered them a tour of the cathedral. Every one of them wanted it, although some of the Catholics – Tyneside was home to a good deal of the country’s three million – were worried that they might be excommunicated for even entering an Anglican church. It must have been quite a day.

  ‘Well, of course, cathedrals are used to large numbers. But, yes, it must have been very special. They were here for a particular reason at a particular time in history and the fact that the cathedral was hospitable and welcoming would have been regarded by them as a blessing, an approval of what they were marching for. The link between the church and politics is nothing new. Politics is about how people organise themselves, how they live together and that is the business of the church too. Jesus came to make this world more like heaven. So how do we so structure our society so it more resembles heaven than it does, well, anywhere else,’ he chuckles.

  In 1936, Ripon was fairly well insulated from the economic downturn that was blighting the rest of the north. This is perhaps why the reception for the marchers here was so distinctly muted. Local paper the Evening Chronicle reported that the town had viewed them ‘askance’ and been ‘unsympathetic’. Some youngsters had even ‘tittered’ at them when they arrived bedraggled and footsore. The Dean though stresses similarities, not divisions: ‘Sometimes industrial areas think they have had it hard and that rural society has it easier. That’s not always the case. A town like Ripon has all types, all strata of society. Life would not have been easy for everybody, not then, not now.’

  The Dean has a big patch, though again I’m sure that’s not the right word. ‘This Episcopal area encompasses most of North Yorkshire west of the A1, right to the Cumbria and Lancashire borders and up as far as the Tees and Durham. There are lots of small rural communities; remote, isolated, and suffering real issues. There’s the difficulty of trying to keep your community and society active and vibrant with small numbers of people. Younger people can’t find work and have to move away.’ The Dean sounds exactly like William Hague, which is disconcerting, but I concentrate hard.

  ‘And then, also as a diocese we include West Yorkshire which is an industrial, or rather a post-industrial heartland. The north, it’s seen some stuff, some changes, but this church is alive, it’s full of faith, it’s keen to serve the needs of this community. We see the whole breadth of life here. We’re a cathedral for everyone and you can come and hear this lovely music at evensong every day. Well, not Mondays … and not all Saturdays. Nearly every day!’ and again he ends with a chuckle.

  If I was expecting a firebrand revolutionary, I didn’t get it. But I think I did get the Dean. He struck me as a canny, slightly guarded Yorkshireman – is there any other kind? – and he was perhaps being a little cautious and circumspect as one would with a rough-looking Lancashire cove with a flat cap and a backpack who gatecrashes your choral evensong and claims to be writing a book. ‘Before you go, you must see the crypt by the way. Anglo–Saxon. Marvellous. Nearly 1,400 years old. But watch your step. And hurry up … we’re closing.’

  Taking this as official blessing, I find my way to the other side of the church, unclip the velvet rope, and make my way gingerly down into a stepped descent and then along a passage of ancient rough-hewn stone. The voices above me grow quieter, and further along by a little alcove where a candle would have once burned but is now in shadow, the passage turns and gets narrower still before opening into the crypt itself. It is a small stone chamber, spectral in the half-light falling from a small window. Around the room in several more recessed alcoves are black oily stains from the candles of Saxon monks that burned more than a thousand years ago. I realise I can hear nothing now from the main church, nothing at all in fact except my own breathing and my pulse in my ears. There is something very old and very eerie about this place and after a minute or so, I turn and go quickly back up the worn, rough stone steps into the huge silent interior of the twilit chapel.

  I’m the only person here, and dusk has fallen while I was in the crypt. No matter though. Someone will still be tidying up, putting away the collection box, doing whatever it is you do before locking a cathedral for the night. Except that when I get to the large vaulted front door, having met no one, I find that it is already locked. I turn around and look back down towards the altar. But it’s already getting difficult to see it.

  If, like me, you’re a fan of Robert Aickman’s ghost stories, and in particular his story ‘The Cicerones’ about a hapless tourist who gets lost and trapped in an ancient cathedral at night, you will know why a very real, cold ripple of panic began to run over me. This became colder and stronger when the next door I tried was locked too. And the next. I won’t tell you how Aickman’s story ends but I will tell you that eventually I found a small narrow wooden door hidden in the west end of the vast church and slipped out into the churchyard now bathed in yellow sodium lights, deserted and gloomy. I didn’t care. Relief flooded over me, quickly followed by embarrassment and then a kind of sheepish mirth. Night was coming on over Ripon and somewhere in this lovely old town there was a pint of beer and a whisky waiting for me, and by the time I clasped it gratefully, I’m sure my hand would have stopped shaking.

  STAGE SIX

  RIPON TO HARROGATE

  12 October, 11 miles

  On 9 October 1936, as the Jarrow men enjoyed their Sabbath day of rest in Ripon, the Sunday papers they may have read would have little resembled the enormous overstuffed beasts we stagger back from the supermarket with or burden the paper boy with now. But they would have been full of an early vintage of the fizz and froth of today’s news. The 1930s were the decade that pop culture properly got into its stride and what we think of as the mass media began to seed and grow. Hollywood, ‘swing’ and the doings of sportsmen, musicians, actors and aristocrats were staple fare of the papers, but the big media story of the weekend 80 years ago was the announcement by the BBC that they would be launching a new entertainment platform called ‘television’ in early November, just as the Jarrow march reached London.

  By October 2016, television had grown to be a behemoth that first conquered and shrank the world and then seemed to be beginning to wane and be eclipsed by the revolutionary global power of the Internet. Nevertheless, 70 million Americans would be glued to their small screens – more probably giant screens – tonight for the second presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It would be the first encounter since the leaked tape full of lewd misogyny had shown him in his true lurid colours. I didn’t think I’d be watching since I was bound for Harrogate where I could find much nicer things to do I was sure. Before I left Ripon I wanted to make a visit that couldn’t be described as fun but would be salutary and very relevant to my trip.

  For their part, before the Jarrow marchers left Ripon, they held a public meeting as was usual as well as a bizarre mock trial that no one has ever quite got to the bottom of. Marcher Eddie Fitzpatrick dressed as a judge in some borrowed robes and sentenced David Riley to ‘bully beef’ and fatigues for the rest of his life. Was it just a bit of fun and an excuse to dress up and tease the Mayor? Or a smokescreen designed to hide the real disciplinary hearing of a different marcher who had broken the strict rules by getting drunk and thereby threatened to harm the
carefully managed saintly image of the marchers? That image was reinforced and restored however at the meeting. An Alderman of Ripon spoke of how the discipline and self-sacrifice of the marchers had convinced him of the march’s worth after initial misgivings. David Riley gave a grim illustration of the real cost of poverty when he stunned the audience by telling them that for every stillborn child in Ripon, there were two born dead in Jarrow. Then, having been declared fit and well (apart from blistered feet and the exhaustion of one older marcher) by Mr Cargill and Miss Blake, the medical students who were part of the march, they were on their way again to the sound of the harmonica band augmented by a drum they had been given in Ripon. They were bound for another affluent Conservative town; Harrogate. Privately, the march leaders worried what kind of welcome or lack of it awaited them there.

  Along the way, they were treated warmly, royally even. As they marched through the little agricultural hamlets of Wormald Green, South Stainley, Ripley and Killinghall, one newspaper said that the driver of a passing Rolls-Royce – can there have been many about, one wonders? – wound down his window to hand the men pound notes. I was to pass these villages too, some now dormitories for commuters to Harrogate or even Leeds, but no Rolls-Royces passed my way. I did get a thumbs up from a lorry delivering granary bread and seeded baps though, so this cheered me a little, and that was needed after my detour to Ripon workhouse.

  It sits squat and forbidding at a quiet edge of town away from the pretty cobbled streets of bistros and bars. Standing between the pillared gates, under the curved iron arch with its cheerless lantern, one thought comes immediately to mind; what must it have felt like to see this place, to look upon this stained brickwork, those mean windows, that sinister and menacing door, arriving not as a tourist wanting diversion, but desperate and friendless at a place of last resort. ‘Workhouse’, like ‘Means Test’, is a word that still haunts working-class life. Its long, dire echo resonates far beyond its era. It’s another one of those words that I can remember my nan using when I was a kid in the 1970s. Its era may have gone, but its power to frighten lived on.