Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  The building that so irked Orwell has had a makeover in recent years. A plume of glittering spray arcs from a chic new water feature and at night the town hall glows a pale and eerie blue, turning Barnsley into the Gotham of South Yorkshire. In a tiny room high in the spire, a pale fluorescent light burns through the night, prompting local speculation that it’s where the mayor keeps his sunbed. In June 2013, part of the town hall became Experience Barnsley, a museum dedicated to the history of the town and its people from the twelfth to twenty-first centuries. Outside a poster proclaims it ‘a proud Yorkshire story told by the people of Barnsley’. The endless exhortations to take pride in this county can become tedious. But I liked the cut of Experience Barnsley’s jib. As well as the quite proper nod to antiquity, there’s much on the town’s social history, coal mining and other industries, and the approach to this was robust and refreshing with no puff or blather.

  That October week in 1936, the Jarrow marchers, feted at the town’s new and advanced Steam Baths and fed on meat and potato pie, were not the only celebrated visitors to Barnsley. A Wigan compatriot of mine came here too. George Formby, banjoleleist, Apartheid rebel and recipient of the Order of Lenin, came to Barnsley to support the mining community. It had suffered a terrible tragedy, the Wharncliffe mine disaster, in which 58 men were killed in an underground explosion just two months previously. Every pit village and town knew and feared these frequent reminders of the human price of coal. But King Coal itself would surely never be unseated or deposed. Surely. In fact, coal mining was one of those rooted certainties of British life that would turn out to be as evanescent as the spray from Barnsley’s proud new fountain.

  STAGE TEN

  BARNSLEY TO SHEFFIELD

  16 October, 13 miles

  By day ten, the morning’s packing has assumed a brisk, almost militaristic routine. There is the folding and rolling of shirts, the thrusting into spare corners of socks and unmentionables, the stowing of the ‘good shoes’, the meticulous stashing of the travel tooth brush, the painkillers and the plasters. Always too, when the sign has just been flipped to ‘Please Make Up This Room’, the trudge back along the corridor to the room for something left behind: a washbag, a contact lens case, an iPad. This last though is crucial since, thanks to this modern miracle, I’m carrying with me several volumes of literature from or about the 1930s. I have with me academic histories, memoirs, reportage. I have Orwell’s first novel too, Keep the Aspidistra Flying as well as the collected works of the curious English Catholic writer Charles Williams and the rather less curious but equally Catholic Graham Greene. I have A J Cronin’s The Stars Look Down – a bleak and apposite tale of a family’s struggle for survival amidst a strike that the local Labour Party and Trade Union don’t support in a depressed northeastern mining town. It was written the year before the march and the echoes of Jarrow are deafening.

  As well as this, I have a collection of short stories by the Welsh writer Kate Roberts that chime perfectly with my march. Coal dust hangs thick and heavy in Roberts’s writing as the ghost of it still does in the streets and pubs of Barnsley. At its peak, Barnsley district had ten deep mines and the last to go was Grimethorpe. That huge colliery was famed for its brass band and then as the setting for the film Brassed Off. Grimethorpe’s last shift came up in 1993, having limped on for almost a decade after the defining mid-1980s strike. It’s all an age ago now, but for some those days feel like yesterday.

  I hop into a minicab for a short distance to pick up my route again and the driver tells me that one taxi firm, Black and White cabs (by far the most numerous on the rank) was set up by sacked miners who pooled their redundancy money after the strike. ‘Some of them, they’re like those Japanese soldiers who don’t know the war’s over. They’re still fighting the fight. We wind ’em up about it. “’Ere we go, the battle of Orgreave again! Give it a rest!” Something comes over ’em when owt to do w’it strike comes up. Thatcher, Scargill, picketing … you can feel ’em tighten up, see their expressions change. Mind you, they saw some stuff I suppose.’

  Memories are long here. A friend who grew up locally told me about the working man’s club in Mapplewell, the Tin Hat as it was known, where above the door was the name of one man who crossed the picket line during the miners’ strike and who was never to be let in. I run this past my driver and he laughs bitterly – ‘Sounds about reet’. As we drive, he points vaguely in the directions of the various pits, once employing thousands, now silent caverns brimming with dark, oily water ‘Dodworth were that way … Cortonwood … that were a decent size … Grimethorpe obviously. A lot of my family worked at Goldthorpe. They burned a dummy of Thatcher there on the day of her funeral. Bloody hundreds of ’em turned out. Right carry on it were.’ He laughs at the grotesque memory. Later I check this story and find that at this mock funeral, where a fake coffin and effigy were burned in an atmosphere of grim celebration, the number present was actually about two thousand.

  He drops me at a roadside café where I have my first cup of tea of the day and carry on with Kate Roberts’s story. It’s called ‘Protest March’ and accords completely with my Jarrow project. In it, Blodwen, living with her husband in poverty in a subterranean hovel, joins a protest march against the Means Test, that sinister, invasive scourge of towns like Jarrow. But even as she marches, she becomes disillusioned and begins to doubt that these gestures will ever change anything or that anything can be changed. ‘The crowd itself was looking like something absurd to Blodwen now and depressing in its absurdity. She thought, if the government were to see them now, what they’d do was laugh at them. After all, what were they marching for?’

  Marching rather than disobedience, the banner rather than the flung brick of the suffragettes, was the dominant protest mode of the 1930s. John Tanner at the Experience Barnsley Museum told me that eight Barnsley women walked to London as part of a 1930s hunger march. In 2016, whether you viewed it as energising or pointless, some of that mood seemed to be back. Just a few weeks before I began my march, supporters of Jeremy Corbyn rallied in Liverpool to show support for their leader and against Owen Smith, his rival in the Labour leadership elections. The difference in opinions even on the left about such events showed up the great open wound in the current British Labour movement. From Corbyn’s camp, an enthusiastic tweet from @cameronsporkies was typical:

  So Owen Smith, this is what unelectable looks like. Banking on another MSM cover up? #KeepCorbyn!

  Attached was a photograph showing an enormous throng outside Liverpool’s famous St George’s Hall. Even to the relatively impartial, it looked an awful lot of people; it transpired that the picture actually showed the crowd for Liverpool FC’s triumphant homecoming parade after winning the 2005 Champions League trophy. (Obfuscation has always been rife around ‘demos’ with police and activists making inflated or shrunken assessments of the numbers involved; in the 1980s, the constabulary’s often spectacular underestimations of crowd size became a comic staple of satire shows like Not the Nine O’ Clock News.) The Guardian reported 5,000 people at the Corbyn Liverpool rally whilst police officers estimated attendance at between 3,500 and 5,000. Organisers suggested 10,000. This size obsession has become such a contentious issue that there are now competing crowd size estimation techniques, such as the Jacobs method using grids over pictures. Gordon Arnold, a retired architect from Dallas, has created a crowd-counting app named CrowdSize which put Corbyn’s rally at around 4,000 people. A team from Warwick University is working on a system that will soon be able to accurately estimate the number of people at mass gatherings by the number of mobile phones present in an area.

  Quibbles about size miss the real point, however. To equate the turn-out at a rally, whether for Jeremy Corbyn or Nigel Farage, with general support in the wider population is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of electability and indeed democracy in general. This kind of wonky thinking is a modern malaise made endemic by the internet and in particular social media, what psychologists call ‘
false-consensus bias’. Or as some have it, living in the ‘Twitter Bubble’.

  Living like this, and I’ve been as guilty as anyone, is to wrongly assume that everyone thinks like you do, and furthermore, that anyone who doesn’t is a member of an aberrant minority. It is the tyranny of the timeline. False consensus bias is what fuelled the spluttering rage of many Remain supporters after the Brexit vote. Swapping opinions with only those people who agree with us has given us a distorted picture of what the wider world is really like. This has always been the way of things to an extent of course. We tend to gravitate to people who share our world view; we seek them out, we drink with them, eat with them, marry them. There was always an element of this in our consumption of the traditional media too. People by and large bought the newspapers that shared (or maybe shaped) their beliefs. (Interestingly, when I taught sociology, students were often shocked that newspapers were politically partisan or identified these allegiances utterly wrongly. They thought, for instance, that the Guardian was Tory because it was ‘posh’ and the Sun Labour because working-class men read it.) But there was always the chance still that you would see on TV news or hear on the radio a voice that challenged yours or an opinion you didn’t share. As the old media gives way to the power of the new, such moments become rare. By only ‘following’ and ‘friending’ people like oneself, other, dissenting voices can almost be avoided altogether. For me, this is what undermines much of the new radical left’s critique of the Mainstream Media (MSM as they would have it) and we’ll come back to it.

  We make Facebook friends of those who agree, we follow them on Twitter, we chat with them, and anyone who doesn’t share our opinions is a troll. After Brexit, some people were forced to concede that living in the Twitter Bubble might be warm, congenial and supportive but means you have some nasty shocks in store. This is not simply an inconvenience or an interesting sociological quirk – it may well be destroying proper political discourse and debate. John West, a US journalist who’s studied the phenomenon, put it powerfully if somewhat technically in a Vice piece about the use of Twitter in the run-up to the US election: ‘All of this paints a bleak picture of online political discourse … It is one balkanized by ideology and issue-interest, with little potential for information flow between the online cocoons.’ Trump versus Liberal Hollywood, Remain versus Leave; Corbyn versus the centre left, the Balkanisation, as West puts it, is ongoing and about as healthy as it was for the real Balkans. Corbyn even acknowledged it a day so after the rally when he said, not entirely convincingly, ‘The idea I live in some remote bubble of adulation is frankly ridiculous.’

  I finish Kate Roberts’ story ‘Protest March’ over my lunch on the road somewhere around Tankersley. Its political message is fairly hopeless but it does at least end on a note of human consolation when the disillusioned Blodwen is welcomed home by her previously cynical husband. Roberts wrote this story during a previous ‘fad’ for marching as a form of political discourse, just before the Jarrow Crusade and at the height of the popular wave of protest and hunger marches. Two other marches passed through Sheffield in the same month as the Jarrow Crusade. There was the National Hunger March, a more avowedly political enterprise entirely, and the National League of the Blind March, which was supported by Sheffield’s Trades and Labour council. To give an idea of the diversity and sometimes woeful disorganisation of such ventures – something the Jarrow march organisers were desperate to avoid – on the night the Crusade arrived in Jarrow, a straggling and desperate group arrived at Pomona Street School in Sheffield. They were ex-servicemen who were marching from Inverness to London to protest their meagre war pensions. Fifty had set off, but only 16 arrived in Sheffield at 3am, gaunt, exhausted ‘ghost like figures’ according to a local paper report, who’d badly lost their way on the moors above Sheffield.

  There was no such hapless waywardness for Red Ellen, David Riley, Paddy Scullion and the Jarrow men, and hopefully none for me. Sheffield wouldn’t welcome me as it had done them of course with cigarettes, tea and sandwiches and I didn’t expect it to of course. I know Sheffield a little and I knew that it is not hard to find your own welcome there and make yourself at home in this compact and vibrant city. Built on seven hills (like Rome, as they will quickly tell you), and with something of the air of a mountain stronghold about it. It is its own domain, utterly unlike Bradford or Leeds or its suspicious cousins in South Yorkshire; different, individual, a unique mixture of unyielding grit and romantic softness, a city where the hardest-looking bloke in the pub is likely to call you ‘love’ and give you a different smacker from the one you were expecting.

  Geology, topography, sociology; all contribute to the sense of a strapping, over-vigorous city bursting its banks and spilling over the hillsides. Then there’s the industry. Sheffield has never had any business in wool or textiles, carding or knitting. Sheffield makes steel, and is proud of it. Some of this gets into the local character. As Graham Turner said in his splendid 1960s book The North Country (now sadly out of print), ‘Neither [Leeds nor Bradford] can claim the virility which Sheffield’s basic raw material, steel, confers; making natty gents suitings hardly compares with fashioning 300-ton ingots.’

  Milling and making steel is harder work for less profit than carding wool. Sheffield likes to think itself a macho cut above Leeds for this and other reasons, even if some Sheffielders will concede that Leeds and Bradford are prettier cities because of it. In truth, despite the much-vaunted Yorkshire pride, there may even still be those who resent being lumped in with Yorkshire at all. Local industrialist Allan John Grant welcomed the Jarrow march in a speech that began, ‘There is no time to discuss the principle of these marches now that the deputation from Jarrow has reached Derbyshire …’ putting Sheffield in a different county altogether.

  Orwell came to Sheffield just before the Jarrow march and no one could have accused him of pandering to the locals or sentimentalising their city. ‘Sheffield, I suppose, could justifiably claim to be the ugliest town in the world … it has a population of half a million and it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village of five hundred. And the stench.’ This is the snobbery of the old Etonian to a degree, but even J B Priestley, a comradely rival from Bradford, described entry into Sheffield as descending through a ‘murky canopy’ into ‘the steaming bowels of the earth’. Modern Sheffield would surely have nothing so sulphurous to show me. But on my way into the city, something terrible, suffused with misery and wickedness both pulled and repelled me.

  It’s an ordinary enough road, heading anonymously south from the main A61 Penistone Road in from the outer suburbs of High Green, Burncross and Grenoside. Narrowing and cutting through working class suburbia, after the brash American uberstores, the Domino Pizzas and PC Worlds, the road gathers around itself smaller, more homely, sometimes dowdier enterprises; Hing Fan’s Fish and Chips and Chinese Meals To Takeaway, the Mirage E Cigarette Shop, Sybs Roofing Services, Tracey’s Sandwich Bar. Next door a shop selling vintage football programmes gives a hint of where you are near. And then a small, cold feeling as you take in the street corner and wonder what it was like on that summer day in 1988. Here a tiny road leads to the West Stand of Sheffield Wednesday’s famous old football ground; the B6079, better known as Leppings Lane.

  Hillsborough stadium hosted five FA Cup semi-finals during the 1980s and at several there were frightening scenes and near chaos. In 1981 during the tie between Spurs and Wolves, far more spectators were crammed onto the terrace than was safe and there were 38 injuries, several involving broken limbs. Sheffield Wednesday chairman Bert McGee was sanguine, snorting at police officers who feared fatalities. ‘Bollocks – no one would have been killed.’ Cage-like pens were then introduced which invalidated the safety certificate and there were no more cup semi-finals at this once-regular home for such big clashes until 1987. Again there was confusion and overcrowding at the 1987 cup quarter and semi-finals. At the latter, some people were pulled up out of the crowd by fell
ow fans from above for their own safety. In 1988, Liverpool and Nottingham Forest met in the semi-final at Hillsborough and again there was severe overcrowding and dangerous crushes. No action was taken. The following year, the teams were drawn to meet each other again at Hillsborough. Huge crowds built up outside before kick-off with Liverpool supporters being allocated the smaller West Stand at the Leppings Lane end. With 5,000 supporters still outside minutes before kick-off (and a request to delay the start turned down), Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield ordered gate C to be opened and fans surged into the central pens on the terrace.

  If you want a detailed account of the horrifying result of this decision, of what happened that afternoon, of the obscene deaths of 96 men, women and children; of the incompetence, wickedness, abuse and lies that followed from police, government and sections of the media over the next two-and-a-half decades, I urge you to read And the Sun Shines Now by Adrian Tempany. It is the definitive account of the disaster and its sordid aftermath by someone who was there. Tempany nearly died at Hillsborough and like many other heroic individuals, fought for justice and truth through the long decades ahead. Looking back over those last sentences, I hear a tone that could not be described as impartial. But how can one be impartial over Hillsborough? Tempany’s book will make you rage and weep.

  Feeling suddenly awkward and not wanting to be thought ghoulish, I walk briskly past C gate and the other blue gates of Leppings Lane with just a quick glance. I pause properly at the Hillsborough memorial at the main stand just a little further on and read the inscriptions and the dedications. It’s a simple stone tablet, usually decorated with scarves and pictures, reading, ‘In memory of the 96 men, women and children who tragically died and the countless lives that were changed forever … You’ll Never Walk Alone’. I have no personal connection to the Hillsborough tragedy. I can’t claim to be one of those countless lives directly affected by it – some who’ve tried this shabby trick have been rightly savaged for it, like UKIP’s Paul Nuttall – and so I don’t expect to find myself crying until I realise I am.