Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  The workhouse was a place of shelter and employment for those who could not support themselves, and put that way it may seem welcoming, even kindly. Without doubt, at some level the impulse behind them was to a degree benevolent. But in practice they were grim and unhappy places, frugal and basic, offering only drudgery and discomfort. Partly, this was deliberate. Conditions in the workhouse were purposely harsh to discourage anyone who could possibly avoid them. They were bleak fixtures of civic life for centuries, but by the time of the Jarrow march, they were chiefly the domain of the sick, disabled or elderly. Even so, they were still there; a shadow in every town, the bottom rung on the ladder of degradation. Several of the Jarrow marchers had spent time in them. Jarrow itself had been described as ‘a workhouse without walls’.

  Ripon’s central workhouse, set back by the Jolly Fryer fish bar, dates to the seventeenth century and was one of two in the town. A warden manned the door, vagrants were discouraged, and, on the whim of the gatekeeper, individuals or families were admitted. Once through the entrance hall, the sexes were separated – families were broken up – and admitted to the casual wards. The new inmates were told to strip and bathe, and their clothes were fumigated in the sulphur disinfector room. Then in return for a bed and meagre rations (often stopped altogether if some minor offence were committed), inmates would perform menial, tedious tasks of physical labour such as breaking stones or picking oakum. In Ripon, they chopped wood in the small courtyard. The novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford’s grandmother was born in this workhouse; when a birth occurred here the child’s birthplace was simply registered as ‘75 Allhallowgate, Ripon’ to prevent prejudice against the child later.

  Ripon workhouse is a tourist attraction now, which is odd but very definitely an improvement. You tour around led by a series of information posters and an audio guide. Most of the building is exactly as it was in the Victorian era and, whilst a few effects are recreated, like the permeating odour of carbolic, the overwhelming sense of misery soaked into the walls is very real. Long drab corridors stretch away containing rows of tiny cells each bare but for a narrow, hard bed. At the end of the corridor, there is a restraining seat with leather straps and leashes. Fumigation rooms, pegs for pale, threadbare utility clothes (small versions for the children), cracked baths, bare walls. And everywhere the notices.

  RIPON POOR LAW UNION: PAUPERS SHOULD OBSERVE THE FOLLOWING. ON ENTERING THE WORKHOUSE YOU WILL BE CONFINED TO THE DAYROOMS, SLEEPING WARDS AND EXERCISE YARDS OF YOUR CLASS. YOU MUST NOT TALK WITH OR COMMUNICATE TO ANYONE OF A DIFFERENT CLASS.

  It is a chilling place. Registration hall, meeting room, kitchen, laundry, dormitories, mortuary; each bleaker than the last. Stern portraits of former governors stare down from bare plaster walls and it is easy and tempting to see these men as villains, when in fact, they were probably more enlightened than many of their peers. At the end of the tour, as is obligatory these days, comments are invited on postcards which can be pinned to the wall. Like the ‘below the line’ comments on even the most achingly liberal newspaper’s websites, they make one despair.

  ‘People on benefits should come here to see what real poverty is.’

  ‘Great Idea. Save us millions in benefits. Stick them in the workhouse.’

  ‘No charging point for my iPad – Lucy, aged 44.’

  Hoping that the last was at least some kind of ironic comment on the others, but still in a fairly dismal mood, I find myself back out on Ripon’s drizzly and deserted streets, hoping that a late lunch at the Jolly Fryer might conjure a bit more fellow feeling and warmth towards humanity. These hopes are soon realised as I step inside the cosy little café and straight back into the 1950s, maybe the 1940s, maybe even the days of the Jarrow march itself. Wood panelling, low lighting from cute little wall mounted lamps, laminated place mats with coaching scenes; I half expect to see Trevor Howard removing some grit from Celia Johnson’s eye at the next table. In fact, it’s a middle-aged couple discussing last night’s TV.

  HER: I forgot Emmerdale was on at quarter to seven because of the football. I had a bath and nearly missed it. It’s so daft though. I’m going to stop watching it.

  HIM (shocked): It won top soap again, Helen. Third year running.

  HER: Aye, by the TV Times … it’s not gospel, is it? Anyway, I’m going to try a small portion of that special today. Bit of an unknown quantity.

  Having perused the burgundy leatherette menu with its bewildering array of specials and deals (kiddies, OAPS, early birds, two-for-ones, etc) I decide to stay classic. Beef burger and chips, ‘with tea and bread and butter please’. The lovely waitress, a lady of about 70, tells me, ‘It comes with tea and bread and butter love, and free curry sauce as it’s Wednesday. I’ll give you some scissors, those packets can be tricky.’ I stay here for half an hour or so, faith in humanity being restored with every friendly, tasty, happy passing minute.

  The marchers needn’t have worried about Harrogate, where they received the warmest welcome of the march so far. Two miles outside town, a man who had come to meet them unfurled a banner which read ‘Harrogate workers welcome Jarrow workers’ to initial cheers but was apparently asked to take it down when it was suspected he might be a communist. If this sounds cowardly, indeed pathetic, it should be said in mitigation that the Jarrow organisers needed the hospitality or at least support of many of the Conservative local councils that they’d be passing through. One of these, of course, was Harrogate.

  A journalist from the Guardian joined them as they marched:

  The villagers of Ripley and Killinghall rushed to their doors to see the marchers pass; motorists waved as they went by; one shouted, ‘How are you sticking it? and a woman cried, ‘Hello, Geordies.’ And the ‘Geordies’ themselves were in great form, so that every moment I expected the band to change from ‘Annie Laurie’ and ‘Swanee River’ to ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer.’ Contributions to the ‘kitty’ fell in as we went; here it was a pound there it was a penny, the penny specifically being the offering of an ecstatic little girl who ran across the road to meet us as if no one less than Bonnie Prince Charlie was at our head … There can be no doubt that as a gesture the march is a bounding success. I fell in with it this morning on the Ripon road. Under its two banners (‘Jarrow Crusade’), with its harmonicas, its kettledrum, and its four hundred feet, it was going strong. The marchers have with them two doctors, a barber, a group of pressmen, a Labrador dog mascot … It is an example of civic spirit probably without parallel anywhere else in the country.

  Once over the River Nidd in Nidderdsale the final three miles to Harrogate are straightforward enough. You enter the town along a lovely wide boulevard, but coming up this last pull of open road must have been tough especially when, at the brow of the hill, the road descends again – always dispiriting. As any fellwalker will tell you, the cardinal rule is ‘height once gained should never be conceded easily’.

  I visit WH Smith’s Harrogate branch for batteries and newspapers and, just alongside the new releases table containing a Pokemon Go annual and a Benedict Cumberbatch mindfulness colouring book (no, really), I come across a book entitled Harrogate in 1000 Dates. It’s a timeline of significant events in the town’s history and, whilst it finds room for such landmark dates as the staging here of the 1982 Eurovision Song Contest and the opening of Betty’s Tea Room in 1919, the entry for 1936 includes the opening of the town’s Odeon cinema but not the arrival of the Jarrow march. This is strange, given that the town apparently embraced them warmly with collections and greetings on the street. Similarly, apart from one awful hour, I have the happiest time yet here, spending a delightful afternoon and evening walking, eating, drinking, exploring – and a long, blissful sojourn in bed.

  Harrogate manages the neat trick of being smart without being prissy, and it’s a town of contradictions. You can drink gourmet Ecuadorian coffee and eat artisanal cupcakes just feet from where the town drunks shout unhinged abuse at each other and dance to ghetto blasters. Hipster shops are everyw
here, and the nice, chatty proprietor of a vintage clothes store tells me she likes the town but is thinking of moving as, however lovely, ‘the money from selling my Harrogate place will buy me a lot elsewhere and I need a new project, as I’ve no pension.’ I tell her that with a bit of luck I never intend to retire. I hope there’ll always be someone wanting a few hundred words of my deathless prose. She laughs. ‘The vintage world is a bit like that. You see these little old couples who’ve been in it for years, still at all the fairs and stuff.’ Still, presumably, selling Jarvis Cocker his polyester peardrop-collared shirts, faded cord jeans and retro specs.

  On the corner of the sweetly named Strawberry Dale Avenue, by Bridal Boutique and Commercial Road, stands the Harrogate drill hall where the town’s detachment of the Army Cadet Force meet as well as the 58th Harrogate Squadron of the Air Training Corps (motto ‘Venture And Adventure’). This is where the Jarrow marchers were put up in Harrogate, and though compared to some of the town’s architecture, it’s not a particularly impressive building, what it did have was the outrageous luxury of central heating, far from common in 1936. That would have made a world of difference to these weary men.

  If any of the marchers had room in their pockets for a paperback book to curl up with on the drill hall floor, it might well have been one of the three Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels that were published in the few months before they set off; The ABC Murders, Murder in Mesopotamia and Cards on the Table. Christie was at the height of her popularity in 1936, having come through a mysterious personal crisis a decade before. On the evening of Friday 3 December 1926, after kissing her sleeping seven-year-old daughter Rosalind goodnight, closing the bedroom door and going downstairs, Christie drove away from her Berkshire home into the night and simply disappeared. Days passed and one of the largest searches ever mounted was undertaken for the celebrity writer. More than a thousand policemen were assigned to the case along with aeroplanes and hundreds of civilian volunteers. Two of her peers in the crime writing fraternity, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers, were consulted. Her car was soon found abandoned near a lake close to Guildford called Silent Pool. Dark speculation swirled around the press.

  Eleven days later she was found staying quietly at the Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate. In a joyous footnote, it was one of the hotel’s resident banjo players who spotted her. Whilst all this did make it into that book of Harrogate’s most important events, this enigmatic episode has never been fully explained. Did she lose her memory after a car crash? Was she angry or upset about her husband’s ongoing affair? Or, as has been recently speculated, might she have been in a ‘fugue state’ with no real knowledge or control over her actions? Whatever the real story, the Old Swan revels in its Christie connection. It’s one of the main venues for the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. In a nice, if probably entirely coincidental twist, now that Nordic Noir and Scandi Crime writing have become so fashionable and successful, it’s fitting that Harrogate should also now boast a Scandinavian restaurant called Norse. I had a wonderful time there and will try to refrain from eulogising the menu and the evening of eel, celeriac and general smoked, soused and pickled gorgeousness.

  If your tastes run to classic British fare though, like two chicken curries, rice, naan breads, chips and a couple of pints of lager for under a tenner, head for the town’s Wetherspoon which as well as being cheap is probably the most architecturally gorgeous in England. More to our point, this is where the Jarrow marchers came on the evening of 11 October 1936.

  It wasn’t a Wetherspoon then of course. It was the Winter Gardens Harrogate, adjacent to and part of the world-famous Royal Baths. But happily the Wetherspoon retains the famous old name, and it was here that Harrogate turned out in force to join with the Jarrow marchers at a public meeting. Harrogate loved them. The county set ladies wept openly at Paddy Scullion’s tales of midwives putting their own pennies in the gas meter to deliver babies in cold, dark, impoverished Jarrow homes. Marcher Sam Rowan commented, ‘By the time Paddy Scully had finished that night, the women were in tears. They were shedding buckets of tears in their fur coats, I can tell you, down in Harrogate.’

  ‘Red’ Ellen gave another witty, blistering oration. ‘I know that the authorities are getting very tired of Jarrow. They are going to be even more tired of it by the time we have finished.’ The Wednesday gossip column of the Harrogate Herald was glowing, if a little patronising. ‘A petite figure with a wealth of bronze hair spoke fearlessly from the heart and as she warmed to her subject she fired the audience to frequent bursts of acclamation … As I listened I was reminded of Joan of Arc.’

  These days, the only burning steaks in the Winter Gardens are the ones that come sizzling from the grill: ‘8 or 14 oz Aberdeen Angus steaks from Britain and Ireland matured for 35 days then seasoned by us. With chips (add 597 Cal), peas, tomato, mushroom (add 143 Cal) and a drink.’

  The J D Wetherspoon chain was founded by Tim Martin who opened the first in Muswell Hill, London, in 1979, naming it after one of his primary school teachers. It has become a modern British leisure phenomenon. Wetherspoon has been called ‘the canteen of Britain’, or according to the Guardian, ‘a chain at the coalface of boozed up Britain’. A writer from webzine Vice actually spent a week in various Wetherspoons around the regions and whilst his resultant piece was largely fair, even affectionate, it still roped in the usual clichés: sullen, shaven-headed men getting dourly hammered, couples drinking Guinness at nine in the morning – all of which you can find in the fashionable dives of Soho. But of course if Francis Bacon does it, it’s bohemian; if Wayne Rooney, or one of his lookalike spiritual brethren, does it, it’s barbarian.

  Into this already rich mix of social stereotyping and class mistrust, you can add the fact that Martin, founder of the budget boozer of provincial Blighty, was also one of the biggest donors to the campaign to leave the EU. Bluff and aggressively matey, with a mullet and a penchant for polo shirts, he could have come straight from central casting as the blokeish beer and burgermeister of Brexit Britain. He spent some quarter of a million pounds of his own money on backing the campaign and was rewarded by seeing millions wiped off Wetherspoon’s shares in the chaotic markets after the referendum result. This was a delicious irony for many ‘remainers’. But the fact certainly remains that while the English commentariat were looking elsewhere in the summer of 2016 – to the Beltway, Baltimore, Aleppo or the Chilcott enquiry – much of Wetherspoon’s England was looking closer to home and, rightly or wrongly, echoing the views of Tim Martin.

  To the best of my knowledge, the Harrogate Winter Gardens’ Wetherspoon was my first. I liked it. As the phrase goes, what’s not to like? Some people might find some callow and wearisome irony in the fact that the Winter Gardens is now a Wetherspoon but it makes perfect sense. It fulfils just the same valuable and happy function now as the Winter Gardens did back in 1936 by providing nighttime entertainment for the working folk of Harrogate. Back then it was piano recitals, plays and acrobats. Now it’s big screen football and pub quizzes. It was full, and not of slavering beer monsters as I’d been led to expect, but of cheery, civilised working people having a pint and meal after work, many of them watching the World Cup qualifier between England and Slovenia on enormous screens. The match was an arid affair but it was certainly improved by a couple of large Hendrick’s gin and tonics in an ice-frosted glass zesty with lemon and costing £3.80 a time. As the game ended around ten, and as I was leaving, several plates full of slathered, smothered, seared and seasoned fare arrived nearby for a table of four. Again, context is all: if you eat late at night in Madrid, you’re cosmopolitan and free-spirited; if you do it in Yorkshire, you’re a slob. Bon appétit, I thought.

  I enjoyed Wetherspoon rather more than my other evening’s outing in Harrogate. But then that was probably my fault. Although I seem to be almost alone in this in modern Britain, stand-up comedy is not really my thing. I know quite a few stand-up comics, and I like them all. But like grand opera, the circus, Formu
la One and many other popular and respectable diversions, it just doesn’t do it for me. Perhaps it’s all those panel shows. But as the Harrogate Comedy Festival was on whilst I was in town, and as comedy was certainly a popular entertainment for the average Briton of 2016 and 1936, I thought I should ‘take in a show’, as the genteel old phrase once went.

  What would have made the Jarrow marchers laugh? The answer, by and large, was ‘other northerners’, chiefly ones making the transition to film fame from careers in music hall. Comedy was the decade’s most successful film genre and one of its biggest stars was himself a son of the north east. Will Hay came from County Durham and was in his mid-40s when he made his first film, having been a top draw on the touring comedy circuit. His screen career was brief but glittering, making it all the more surprising that his name is nowhere to be found in the indexes of any of the major social histories of the period – surprising and disappointing since Hay’s popularity reflects something in the national character. His speciality was playing a stuffy, bumptious schoolmaster, and how much we laughed at it shows how much British comedy of the time (and for decades to come) would centre around pricking the pomposity of authority figures, from Chaucer’s clergymen to Captain Mainwaring. Jarrow’s cinemas would have been packed for Hay’s mid-1930s hits like Boys Will Be Boys, Where There’s a Will and Oh Mr Porter; cinema being a relatively cheap form of escapist entertainment even in poverty-stricken towns like Jarrow. Some of the comedy films of 1936 now sound like parody; Cheer Up!, Excuse My Glove!, Keep Your Seats Please! The last of these was a vehicle for another comic colossus of the period, George Formby. Again, Formby’s schtick (if one can use that slick Americanism about a toothy banjo player from Wigan) was the cheeky little guy getting the girl and getting one over on his social betters, usually whilst strumming an upbeat, mildly obscene ditty and winking.