The Barnsley taxi driver who’d told me about the legacy of the miners’ strike also furnished me with a choice nugget of information about my destination today, namely that Chesterfield was, and I quote, ‘a real ballache to get to’. For cabbies maybe. But there’s a very quick and convenient train, or there’s the typically luxurious, futuristic X17 bus, or if you’re on Shanks’s pony like me, there’s the irredeemably dull waymarker of the A61 and the Chesterfield Road. I began my walk in a blaze of autumn sunshine, which made for a far more pleasant morning than the original marchers had, whipped and soaked by the worst weather of their trip so far. Robert Winship had to be left behind in the hospital with malaria which brought the total of men having to drop out to six. Slightly less than 200 men then departed the city in icy rain and buffeting winds; although morale was still high after porridge, ham, tea, toast and butter. Ellen Wilkinson left for some Labour Party business in Glasgow and the men set off on the 12 wet miles to Chesterfield.
I stride past Hallam University and along by one of the great railway pubs of England, one of my very favourites, along with the ones at Stalybridge and Huddersfield. This splendid place is the Sheffield Tap. If it were the end not the beginning of the day, I would certainly slip through the arches of the fine Grecian architecture of Sheffield Midland Railway Station for a pint or two of citrusy Jaipur IPA, or Cask Ruin from Bakewell, or most apt, Yorkshire Blackout, brewed to the 1930s recipe of a soldier who never returned from the Second World War and described as ‘deliciously smooth and dark with chocolate and vanilla flavours’. But I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, as the great Robert Frost once wrote. Twelve in my case.
My way leaves the city and wends down Bramall Lane. Sheffield United’s home ground has none of the dark connotations that Hillsborough now sadly has, just a very distinguished past. Bramall Lane, named after an important manufacturing family, has a good claim to be the first ever football stadium. It had the first floodlights and the first sizeable capacity terraces and stands for spectators to watch in relative comfort. It hosted the final of the first ever football tournament (four years before the FA Cup). It is the oldest major stadium in the world still hosting professional football and the biggest outside the top two tiers of English football. Its proud history rather throws into awkward relief ‘The Blades’ current lowly status but their fans are still loyal and vocal. It’s quiet though this morning after a very lively Saturday, which two lads in garish polyester leisurewear are discussing whilst wobbling on their bikes like circus performers on the pavement by Munchies Café, Smoketastic Vaping Shop and the tattoo parlour. Appropriately, one is vaping, the other eating a pasty. Both are copiously tattooed.
‘Four nil … and we had four disallowed. Mental.’
‘We never had four disallowed, tha daft bastard.’
‘We did and all. Did you not watch it on Sky? What kind of fan are thee? Part timer …’
‘So it could have been eight nil. Is that what tha’s saying?’
‘Well done, mastermind. Part timer. Glory hunter. Tit.’
Those ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ and ‘thas’, which somewhere else would smack of affected archaisms, are still common in Yorkshire and Lancashire. They are an echo of the Norsemen we once were; part of the daily natural living speech of South Yorkshire and even when it comes, as these did, amid a shower of casual obscenities that I have removed, it’s still charming in a robust kind of way.
Up the road now and along one of Sheffield’s many edges where after a faceless row of bookies and garages, a sudden, sublime view slides open, revealing the city cradled in a bowl of hills foregrounded before the sunlit Pennines. Sheffield’s unique topography is always liable to gift you a moment like this. Step around the corner of the Washeteria or, more likely, the E Cig shop and the land will sweep away before you in a wash of green and brown, a carpet of mossy valleys and sketchy trees. After a couple of hours, I reach Dronfield, ‘the place where the male bees swarm’, and a hotly contested patch. Dronfield lies halfway between Sheffield and Chesterfield and a tug of love was fought over it not that long ago. Amorous, avaricious Sheffield wanted it for her own and Dronfield was almost merged into that city and hence South Yorkshire. But the local community preferred to stay true to Derbyshire and through concerted effort of will they got their way.
Around here, on the route of the old eighteenth century turnpike, maybe at Dronfield or Old Whittington something curious happens to the vowels. But working out exactly where and what is the stuff that keeps linguists up at night. Yorkshire is a huge county and there’s a corresponding variation in the way people speak. If sufficiently skilled, we could guess, even if we hadn’t passed by Harewood House, that Emmerdale is set in North Yorkshire from the gritty prettiness of its rural setting and the yellowy stone of its cottages, but also from the way they sound their ‘a’s in the bar of the Woolpack. It’s said that the best way to tell if someone comes from Leeds or Bradford is to get them to say Bradford; a true Bradfordian says ‘Bratford’.
But there’s no easy way to differentiate a north Derbyshire accent from a South Yorkshire one, or to spot that you’ve crossed the border. You’re just suddenly aware that it’s happened, the change as swift and surprising as the fall of dark in early winter. Even the people around here can’t really explain the linguistic subtleties beyond a few vague generalities about ‘broader vowels beyond the Trent’. Browse the local websites and you will find considerable joshing disagreement about whether Chesterfielders – Cestrefeldians if you will – are northerners or Midlanders. No consensus seems to be reached, although being annexed into the Yorkshire TV region seems to have annoyed a few. Here’s a typical response: ‘Probably northern I think, otherwise we would all sound like Brummies! Having said that, I would rather watch Central/Midlands TV than Yorkshire. I find it really irritating listening to Look North & Calendar, banging on about how brilliant Yorkshire is supposed to be. I think they have forgot that we are supposed to be in their TV region.’
When the marchers reached the handsome market square in Chesterfield, they were greeted by a party of communists from the nearby pit village of Normanton who were holding a public rally and offered them 20 pounds (well over a thousand now) from the sale of flags and pamphlets. Under pressure from the Conservative councillor on the march, march marshal David Riley turned this down saying, ‘This is the fourth time the communists have tried to gatecrash. They are not going to get in as easily as they think.’ This seems ungrateful, even a little craven, but it does show again how desperate the Jarrow organisers were to preserve the saintly odour of being non-political. The dubiousness of this stance was underlined by the fact that the march did accept a substantial donation from a local Conservative association.
It’s market day in Chesterfield and, true, the lady in the fleece and headscarf hawking mushrooms and plums sounds very different from her South Yorkshire counterparts, like the ‘dee-dars’ of Sheffield. But I half expected her to sound like Gina Lollabrigida and be singing out about her zucchini e asparagi in a lovely bel canto. On this warm and gentle afternoon, with stalls and tables spread across the broad piazza of the square, there is an implausibly Italianate feel to Chesterfield; appropriate since Chesterfield is home to what is, according to the council, ‘The most famous architectural distortion in the world, after the leaning tower of Pisa’. You could, I think, confidently substitute the words ‘most famous’ with ‘only’ in that sentence. But then again, I may have overlooked the Tilted Chapel of Bratislava or similar. In any event, I couldn’t dream of a sojourn in Chesterfield that didn’t take in its most famous feature, and it shouldn’t be hard to spot.
First though, I took a promenade in the square. Perhaps it’s a trait of this eastern flank of the country but England seems as much a nation of market towns today as it did in 1936. Chesterfield holds one on three out of five weekdays and then again on Saturday. It looks bustling to me but one stall holder selling fruit and veg mutters about how council i
nterference, high rates, poor parking and other strictures have made it a pale shadow of what it was. It has a friendly, unfussy, hardworking feel though, like Chesterfield itself.
Eighty years ago, Chesterfield proved admirably hospitable to the Jarrow men. The Victoria café laid on free hot food and the stall holders and townsfolk raised £19 13s (almost as generous as the Normanton commies) as well as donating clothes and bedding. Both major established churches in the town held services for the men; the Catholics were made welcome at Spencer Street’s Church of the Annunciation whilst the Anglicans were taken to the parish church in the town centre, where presumably they raised their collective eyes in amusement to its spire as they doffed their caps and found a pew.
Just as the bewigged head of little Mozart brands everything in Salzburg, and that prim shot of Shakespeare with the terrible haircut can’t be avoided in Stratford, so a particular example of dodgy medieval cowboy construction defines Chesterfield. It adorns everything from IT consultants to tanning salons. There’s Spire Beauty Academy and Spire Insurance Brokers in a building called North Midland House (which is a clue I suppose to where Chesterfield sees itself). As for the infamous object itself, I didn’t have to ask directions. I just scanned the skyline and there it was. The Church of Saint Mary and All Saints, Chesterfield has a spire which twists through 45 degrees and leans nine-and-a-half feet from plumb. That’s all fairly meaningless though until you see it up close (you can glimpse it from the trains to Newcastle from the Midlands) and the only sensible reaction on seeing the spire, twisted as a Mr Whippy ice cream cone, is ‘how the hell did that happen?’
Naturally, there’s some unfeasible if entertaining old guff/ revered legend about just how this has occurred. According to one tale, a blacksmith from Bolsover did such a botched job of shoeing the devil’s hoof that Satan jumped up enraged and kicked the spire bandy. Another explanation questions the virtue of the town’s womenfolk, the spire being said to have craned its neck to look down on the rare occasion a virgin was married in the church. The truth is that they simply used crappy unseasoned wood which warped pretty quickly in Middle England’s rainy climate. Also, the Black Death had made it even harder to get a decent tradesman out of Ye Olde Thomfons Local Directory than it is now. But it’s the actual engineering facts of how the spire was built that proves the old adage that the truth is invariably stranger and more interesting than fiction. In a town as bristling with signage as Chesterfield, it wasn’t hard to find my way down to the old mechanics’ institute, now home to the museum, to get the straight dope.
Veda, Peter and Amanda at the museum are so helpful, enthusiastic and skilled at what they do that I imagine even now someone behind a desk several hundred miles away is planning to put them out of a job. They exude a quiet, firm civic pride in their town as well as provide you with lots of accurate, useful information. When I arrived just before lunch, an elderly lady was just leaving, thanking them warmly with a handshake each, whilst in the back room a party of small children was being gently corralled around some old Roman artefacts. Chesterfield has its roots in an Iron Age market town but was really founded by the Romans, whose stay here was brief but productive. When they abandoned the town to head north and subdue the ruffians up there, it grew steadily through the Saxon period, is mentioned in the Domesday Book and under the Normans developed quickly into a market town with a thriving wool and leather industry. Then in the fourteenth century, they decided to build a church.
While I am having this explained to me, there has been an elephant in the room, or more specifically a windlass. Peter notices that I’ve been eyeing it with some interest and so, with the same air that you might relent and let a small dog get up on the furniture, takes me over to explain exactly what a windlass is. Essentially, it’s a huge, old, wooden version of those things hamsters run around on in their cage. This one is as tall as a house and would have been placed as high up as it could be during the construction of a tower. Men (and sometimes donkeys) would clamber in and walk inside it, exactly hamster-in-wheel style, and this motion would be used to pull building materials up to those constructing the tower. They have also been used to pull water from wells and in gold mines. If you were thinking of asking me how the medieval windlass differed from the Chinese or differential windlass at this point, don’t.
It took 60 years to build St Mary’s and thus the windlass must have been dismantled and re-assembled many times, being raised storey by storey as the tower grew higher – you can see the carved instructions on the wheel, Ikea flatpack style – until eventually it was completed. After that, the huge wheel lay forgotten on the top storey for 700 years until rediscovered after the Second World War. The wood used was a thousand years old and probably came from Sherwood Forest. I’m not an engineering buff by any means, but just standing by this tremendous and aged object was a thrilling experience. You can almost feel the hands that have run along it, the labour inside it, hear the voices raised in laughter and curses as the hard working day went on. It tells a powerful human story.
My hour in the Chesterfield museum brought home to me again that history is not just a parade of kings and queens, royal intrigues and stately homes. It’s also about work, workers and engineering. Inspired by the mood, I walked just five minutes up the Newbold Road to the Holy Trinity Church. The rector here put the Jarrow men up back in 1936 and the caretaker was so thoroughly decent to them that they bought him a pipe in gratitude. I went into the churchyard in the chilly dusk, half hoping to find some kind of plaque to the march. Instead though, and just as worthwhile, I found the grave of one George Stephenson. Like the Jarrow marchers, he came down here for work from the north east, in his case to build the railway to London. He liked Chesterfield so much that he never left. He died here and his body lies in the vault of the church. ‘Yes, it’s not a bad old place,’ said Peter at the museum and George seems to have agreed. I liked it too, but it was getting dark, and I had no kindly caretaker to help me out, so it was time to find somewhere to stay.
STAGE TWELVE
CHESTERFIELD TO MANSFIELD
19 October, 12 miles
As the Jarrow men walked south through County Durham, Yorkshire and Derbyshire, General Franco’s Fascists were on the march, marching northwards and eastwards across Spain from their military basses in cities like Zaragoza, Valladolid, Cadiz and Cordoba. Though it was far away and in a different country, along with the Battle of Cable Street and the Jarrow Crusade itself the Spanish Civil War has become part of the doomed romantic mythology of the 1930s for the left. A democratically elected people’s movement, a broad church of progressives of all kinds, helped by poets, painters and young working-class idealists and destroyed by Fascist bullies in uniform aided by Nazi bombs while the rest of their world turned their backs.
That may be the romantic view, but it is also essentially the truth. In February 1936, a Popular Front coalition won a narrow victory at the Spanish general election. Instability followed, and General Francisco Franco returned from exile on the Canary Islands to wage an appalling war against the legitimate government which, after two years of bloodshed, he won. Franco said he would ‘save Spain from Marxism whatever the price’ and when a journalist replied that that meant he would have to shoot half of Spain, Franco said, smiling, ‘I repeat, at whatever the cost.’
In September 1936, 27 nations met in London to debate the Spanish question. They decided on a policy of non-intervention, a policy they shamefully stuck by even when Hitler began to aid Franco. The USSR was the only country to help the Republicans, along with thousands of civilian volunteers from all over the world for whom this was a defining moment of the age – one in which they were prepared to take arms for freedom against the forces of oppression. ‘I suppose it’s a fever in the blood of the younger generation that we can’t possibly understand,’ fretted Virginia Woolf in a letter to her sister. But for the younger literary generation it was really very simple. Spain and its new democracy had to be saved. It was a cause wor
th fighting and – if need be – dying for.
Most went to join other likeminded young people in the International Brigades. W H Auden drove an ambulance across the battlefields along with Julian Bell – Virginia Woolf’s nephew – who lost his life on one. Orwell went with a gun as did Laurie Lee. Poets like Stephen Spender and David Gascoyne were supporters of this ‘poets war’. But it would be wrong to think that all the artistic community were on the Republican side. T S Eliot felt ‘a few men of letters should remain isolated’. And South African poet Roy Campbell was aggressively pro-fascist. Evelyn Waugh said he knew Spain ‘only as a tourist … but if I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for Franco’. Graham Greene and George Bernard Shaw dithered.
Some of the Jarrow Crusaders went to fight in Spain the year after the march. They were amongst 60 men from the north east stationed at Albacete as members of the English Battalion of the International Brigade. It would not be surprising if their experience on the Jarrow march hadn’t galvanised some into more direct action, especially after the march had met with such lily-livered support from the official British left.
Ellen Wilkinson made several trips to Spain in the run up to the war, being deported to France at one point. After Jarrow, as Franco’s forces tightened their grip on the benighted country, she went again at the head of an all-woman delegation visiting hospitals and schools and meeting POWs and political leaders in Barcelona and Madrid. On her return to Britain, she appealed to the British people to support the Republican cause as a ‘fight between right and wrong’ and an international struggle against fascism. She set up the Milk for Spain scheme to help civilians – people bought cardboard tokens at their local co-op to fund essential supplies – and helped transport stricken Spanish families to Britain.
Long Road from Jarrow Page 20
