I could find no trace of exactly where the Jarrow marchers stayed in Wakefield, neither street nor chapel nor cemetery, and this despite the best efforts of some generous and enthusiastic help on social media from Christine Wood, Richard Earnshaw, Chris Treece, Stuart Watson and ‘Kevin’. Stephen Garside even sent pictures of what we think is the now disused site with both chapel and graveyard gone. We do have a record of their stay though in the diary entry of one of the marchers, David Ramshaw. ‘Wakefield. Civic reception. Menu, sandwiches and tea. Slept in pulpit of condemned church.’ On waking at 6am, he then woke the other marchers with a mock sermon from the pulpit. John McNulty wouldn’t have heard this. He was outside sleeping on a gravestone.
The marchers didn’t stay long in Wakefield and neither did I. Not through any dislike of the city I should say, simply because I had written quite a lot about ‘Wakey’ in a previous book and didn’t want to go over old ground. Some things are worth repeating though. Wakefield is now a national centre for modern art. The Hepworth, named for sculptor Barbara Hepworth, the town’s most famous daughter and the greatest female British artist of the twentieth century, is a stylish and striking multi-million-pound venue. It had 100,000 visitors in the month following its opening in May 2011, and half a million within six. The Art House in the centre of town provides dozens of working artists with studio space and its associated venture, the Artwalk, sees those studios, as well as the shops, offices and bars of the town throw open their doors every first Wednesday of the month to become a city-wide living gallery, filled with painting, sculpture, lithographs, etchings, gouache and any other imaginable kind of art. I encourage you to make the trip one month.
When the Jarrow march passed through Wakefield, British art was in a febrile state. Hepworth, along with husband-to-be Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, and critic Herbert Read were having a public argument with senior artistic figures like Paul Nash over whether more modern art should be allowed into the shows of the Royal Academy. Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein’s sculptures were appalling the Establishment with their eroticism and modernism. Three months before the Jarrow march, the International Surrealist Exhibition opened in London, bringing Britain its first sight of Breton, Magritte and Dali.
Most intriguingly, a small but significant part of British art history was blossoming both as the Jarrow march set off and not very far away from them. The then-current Shell Guide to Northumberland and Durham described Ashington as a ‘mining town built in the early part of this century … dreary rows a mile long with ash pits down the middle of the streets’, which makes it sound like an unlikely place for a new art movement, but that was exactly what was happening here. In 1936, the Ashington Group – ‘the Pitmen Painters’ as they became known – held their first exhibition in Newcastle. The group of 24 arose from a Workers Education Authority class in art in which the men had started to express themselves in striking and individual paintings. The exhibition was a huge success and the painters were acclaimed. British artists Clive Bell and Julian Trevelyan championed them and art historian Sir Anthony Blunt (later to be Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures and later still exposed as a Soviet spy) said that the exhibition was ‘the most important event of the year from the point of view of English art’.
So while Jarrow marched, Ashington painted, but while audiences and critics from outside the manual working class generally applauded, some within were suspicious. Wal Hannington, leader of the National Unemployed Workers Movement, grizzled that art clubs, like the BBC’s morning talks for the unemployed, and occupational and recreation centres were a crafty tactic of the ruling class to ‘dope’ the workers. Orwell, who was touring the north at the time for what would become The Road to Wigan Pier, thought such initiatives were ‘simply a device to keep the unemployed quiet and give them an illusion that something is being done for them’. Whether capitalist sop or genuine liberation of the spirit, the story of Ashington’s artistic movement is told in The Pitmen Painters, a play by Lee Hall of Billy Elliot fame, which addresses these conflicts and questions; after attending a modern art exhibition at the Royal Academy one painter says he realises that art teaches you ‘not to put up with what you’re given’.
There are some, and they may have a point, who say such proletarian defiance is as much what motivated the Brexit vote as bigotry. Wakefield is as good a place to dwell on such matters as any, and perhaps better. Put simply and factually, Wakefield voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU; 66.3 per cent on a turn-out of almost 80 per cent.
The Guardian’s Northern Editor Helen Pidd visited the town the morning after the vote and reported finding a nervous bafflement among many, not least the town’s large Eastern European community. Aneta Duchniak opened Duchniak’s, the first Polish restaurant in Wakefield, two years before the vote. According to Helen’s article, ‘Many of her regulars are Yorkshire folk who have taken a shine to her delicate pierogi dumplings and hearty borscht soups. Lots of them wanted Britain to leave Europe, she says, and yet they made a special effort to come in afterwards to tell her it wasn’t personal. “They said, ‘We want to support you, it’s nothing against you, it’s against Brussels controlling us’.”’
Some see this kind of thinking as specious and self-deluding, a mask for ingrained racism. I’m not so sure. Whilst I wouldn’t claim that it’s an intellectually sound position, or to be defended necessarily, I can well believe, from my conversations in towns like Wakefield or Dewsbury or Rochdale or Oldham or Wigan, that some who voted to leave bore no personal animosity to immigrants but harboured some vague and misguided grudge against the EU. This grudge was fed by the falsehoods of UKIP and the right-wing tabloids and acted on out of impotent anger.
Also, these towns have good reason to doubt the word of those infamous experts in Westminster. As Pidd points out, ‘When Poland joined the EU in May 2004 – along with Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia – there was little fear or fanfare about what their membership could mean for Britain. The government certainly wasn’t worried. Tony Blair’s administration estimated that no more than 13,000 of these new Europeans would seek a new life in Britain each year from 2004. These figures were largely based on predictions made by the academic Christian Dustmann of University College London, and worked on the (incorrect) assumption that other large countries in the EU, in particular Germany, would also open up their labour markets. It soon became clear that Dustmann’s estimate was hilariously – or catastrophically, depending on your view – wrong. Between May 2004 and June 2007, 430,000 Poles applied to the Home Office worker registration scheme, joining the 69,000 Poles already in Britain, pre-EU enlargement. As the scheme was voluntary, the true figure was thought to be much higher. In July 2006, the respected Polish newspaper Polityka estimated that one million Poles had moved to the UK.’
That will almost certainly now change. Indeed, it is already changing. More Poles head for Germany now than the UK and that will surely increase as we slowly, wearily, raise our drawbridge against Europe. In addition, the Polish government wants its workers to come home and is luring them with a very generous child benefit system. The Polish economy suffered from the mass exodus to England by losing its youngest and brightest and experienced shortages of qualified workers in key industries. But many academics believe that some Poles will never leave, just as their forefathers came and stayed during the Second World War. Dustmann, he of the original massive underestimate, told Pidd, ‘Overall migrants from Poland are very well educated, young, and have a high labour-force attachment. They easily assimilate and will be indistinguishable in the next generation.’
For now, there are still many visible signs of our new Polish communities. I pass several Polski skleps on my way out of Wakefield headed for the A61 and the route to Barnsley. I stop into one and buy a kielbasa from Milena which I munch on like a lolly as I stomp past the Hepworth and the Wildcats Belle Vue stadium. My day was very much like the marchers’ was 80 years before; uneventful and ben
ign, weak sun and cloud enlivened by the odd blustery shower. But my walk fell on a Saturday and so there was a reason to quicken my step to my next destination, the grand old South Yorkshire town of Barnsley.
Berneslai gets its first official mention in the Domesday Book, though the Saxons had a foothold here long before. Before that even, 2,000 years ago and for reasons that are unclear, the embalmed bodies of several North Africans were buried beneath the town, a discovery made by Barnsley-born Egyptologist Joann Fletcher. ‘You don’t think 2,000 years ago that Ancient Egyptians came to Yorkshire – but they did … in some ways it blows your mind,’ she said, mind blown.
But the big significant date in the town’s popular history (along with their FA Cup Triumph of 1912) occurs in 1249 when the town opened its first market. Nearly a thousand years of street marketing have not even begun to dull the locals’ appetite for the notion. The market is 700 years old and has some 400 stalls indoors and outdoors, and whether coming on foot, by bus or by train, you cannot miss it; it is a huge structure, as big as the Cardington Airship Hangars in the Fens, looming over the bus station and the rail interchange. On a Saturday, from certain angles, Barnsley can feel like a vast market with a town clinging on for dear life. Once, the outdoor stalls of Barnsley were known for their wool and fish, and you can still find balls and shoals of both here. But these days, in the gigantic covered unfussy uber market, big enough to house a 747 and maybe a Saturn Five, you can also find those essentials of modern life, a discount Iron Man Duvet or a bumper economy rack of vials of Black Cherry E Cig Vape. You can find handmade Loake loafers for a couple of hundred quid, a gallon of hair conditioner for coppers, plus flavours of Polish crisps that even Polish people think niche. At Vinyl Junction 42, I noticed a couple of seventies albums by John Miles; a nice coincidence in that his granddad was the cook on the Jarrow march. Flicking through I see a whole rack of second-hand albums by the dreadful right-wing rock guitarist Ted Nugent. I wonder if someone has found out about his support for Trump and flogged them all in a fit of rock pique?
The day turned bright and warm by the time I leave the market to take in the town. Just by the stalls selling discount leather belts is the Alhambra, a blue and white building that is now a bingo hall but in 1936 was one of the town’s many picture palaces along with the Cudworth, the Empire, the Pavilion or the Theatre Royal. A year later, the Ritz opened its doors with William Powell in My Man Godfrey (and closed on 16 March 1974 with Reg Varney in Holiday on the Buses). It was subsequently demolished, perhaps to avoid giving the town painful memories of the latter. After a meeting in the miners’ hall, the men were treated to free seats by the various cinema managements. Still proudly independent at that time, the Alhambra was taken over by the Odeon chain two years later (the fate of many independent cinemas), but only on condition that it could keep its own name. This it did to the end and still does as a shopping centre, though it closed as a cinema on 26 November 1960 with the The Entertainer starring Laurence Olivier, a classy but draining movie. Back in 1936, several marchers fell asleep in the Alhambra’s comfy one and nines after the exertions of the day.
What did they snooze through, those weary men of Jarrow? No records were kept but it may well have been one of the British comedies we discussed earlier. This, though, was the period when Hollywood began to establish itself as the global powerhouse of mass entertainment. In 1936 alone it produced a tranche of films that still make cineastes drool. There was Chaplin’s brilliant satire on mechanisation and alienation Modern Times and Gary Cooper in Frank Capra’s charming Mr Deeds Goes to Town. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire were paired in the delightful Follow the Fleet, whilst Spencer Tracy starred in a darkly intense drama about the mob titled Fury, the American debut of the great German expressionist Fritz Lang. He had successfully made the move to Hollywood as Europe fell under the growing shadow of Nazism and the threat of war. From Britain in this prevalent mood of futuristic paranoia, came Alexander Korda’s classic Things to Come. This version of H G Wells’s dystopian novel brought to the screen seemed even more prophetic than it did on publication three years before when the author had predicted the Second World War and the coming of a world super state.
The fact that Barnsley could host the men in four or five picture houses is testament to what a boom time this was for the cinema. Between 1934 and 1937, the cinema-going audience grew from 18 to 20 million per week on average. New cinemas were opening all the time and, like Barnsley’s Ritz, were often elegant and stylish art deco entertainment temples in gilt and neon. Their appeal cut across class boundaries too. Whilst workers could enjoy Fields’s and Formby’s homespun cheeriness, middle-class filmgoers preferred comedies of manners and tremulous tearjerkers. Going to the cinema had none of the slightly seedy and downmarket associations of going to the pub, which would generally be a drably functional ‘boozer’. This made cinema-going especially attractive to middle-class women, as well as to couples of all classes for whom it provided a warm, dark, convenient venue for ‘courting’. The cinema was a profoundly democratising force at this time, offering a new range of ‘celebrities’ to admire for their talent, grace or beauty rather than the aloof and remote aristocracy who had been admired from afar for so long.
‘Tarn’ is quieting now as the market packs and folds itself back once more into the back of vans and trucks; a late bargain here, a quick sale there. The wide civic square is sunlit and almost empty, feeling like a planner’s model of an imagined cityscape, a South Yorkshire Brasilia or Canberra. I stride purposefully past the Old No 7, a terrific boozer with labyrinthine depths I once spent far too much time in after a gig in Barnsley, in order to fully take in one of Barnsley’s most famous and controversial sights. It’s a grand thing but it very much annoyed a visitor to Barnsley called George Orwell back in the thirties.
In 1936, as plans for the Jarrow march were taking shape, Eric Blair AKA George Orwell, Old Etonian and former colonial policeman turned journalist and writer, was sent north by his publisher Victor Gollancz to research a book on the conditions of life in the depressed industrial north. Orwell thought of his trip initially as ‘venturing among savages’ but that didn’t prevent him producing a sympathetic but unsentimental account of life in towns like Wigan, Sheffield and Barnsley that became the searing and enduring classic polemic The Road to Wigan Pier. For his researches he kept rough notes and a diary that you can now find in his collected works. Here is his account of his trip below ground in Barnsley’s Grimethorpe Colliery:
The place where the fillers were working was fearful beyond description … the seam of coal is only a yard high or a bit more, the men can only kneel or crawl to their work, never stand up. The effort of constantly shovelling coal over your left shoulder and flinging it a yard or two beyond, while in a kneeling position, must be very great even to men who are used to it. Added to this there are the clouds of coal dust which are flying down your throat all the time and which make it difficult to see any distance. The men were all naked except for trousers and knee-pads.
Orwell came away from his time in the mines of the north with enormous respect and admiration for colliers. He later wrote, ‘If there is one man I feel inferior to, it is a coal miner.’ I once met someone whose family Orwell had lodged with while he was in Wigan and it had become part of that family’s lore that he was a ‘lovely young man’; thin, unfailingly polite, never snobbish, always willing to help. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell never patronises the people he meets, though occasionally you can sense a mild innate disgust at their manners, eating habits and such. But he was on their side and they came to respect each other. ‘When I sit typing, the family, especially Mrs G. and the kids, all gather round to watch absorbedly, and appear to admire my prowess almost as much as I admire that of the miners.’
Perhaps this is why in the book’s notorious conclusion, Orwell excoriates the intellectual left such as George Bernard Shaw as ‘cranks’ and mocks ‘every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Qu
aker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist and feminist in England’. While this is overheated to the point of silliness, it arises from an anger with the ‘crank’s’ lack of genuine empathy or solidarity with the industrial working class Orwell had lived among and come to know. Orwell was a socialist. But he was also a patriot and a traditionalist; he would have loathed identity politics and Corbyn’s regime I think, seeing it as a distraction from the proper business of socialism – the improvement of the lot of the worker, the poor and the disadvantaged.
It was in this savage mood that Orwell turned his considerable scorn on Barnsley town hall. The foundation stone was laid on 21 April 1932 and it was opened by the Prince of Wales (soon to be notorious himself) on 14 December 1933. The cost was £188,037 12/10d. George Orwell in his book was highly critical of this expenditure, claiming that the council should have spent the money on improving the housing and living conditions of the local miners. Nonetheless, the huge, dazzling edifice, more akin to the seat of parliament of a Baltic capital than a provincial town hall, has become perhaps the town’s most iconic feature – and the clichéd adjective is justified here. Built from Portland stone and designed by the architect responsible for the Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont (which it resembles), it’s visible from the adjoining motorway and receives extravagant praise on TripAdvisor – ‘Absolutely amazing building, a Barnsley landmark … This is a place you step in and just think wow’ – as well as the obligatory churl – ‘impoverished … a step back in time … grubbiness of public spaces’. But as this last was posted by Toby and Bunty, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.
Long Road from Jarrow Page 17
