I’m interviewed for local radio by a young lad called Matt who asks very intelligent questions about the nature and efficacy of protest marching as a political tactic, in the news since Corbyn’s re-election, whilst later Jeff and Liz the curator tell me all about Mansfield’s musical pedigree which is small but fascinating. Mansfield’s most famed musical son was perhaps Alvin Stardust. Born Bernard Jewry, he renamed himself Shane Fenton when he took over as lead vocalist with the Fentones from the original Shane Fenton who had recently died. If this seems a little creepy, then bear in mind that much about Alvin’s seventies’ image was exactly that to be honest. Even as a child I found the leather glove, the queer praying mantis stance and the line about going back to his flat to ‘lay down and groove on the mat’ deeply upsetting. Looking back, he was a sort of Gene Vincent for Arthur Scargill supporters I suppose, had I but known it; the Elvis Comeback Special restaged at Orgreave. He was also by all accounts a ‘gentleman’ who did much to support the museum.
‘Oh, and we’ve got something for you,’ says Jodie as I’m about to leave. ‘Gosh, have you?’ I say, pretending to have forgotten. And it’s a lovely thing. Amanda, an archivist at the museum, has put together a framed front page of the local paper the Mansfield, Sutton and Kirkby Chronicle of 23 October 1936 (price: three halfpence) carrying a contemporary report on the march passing through.
The Jarrow marchers, many of them drenched to the skin, who marched through here at tea time on Monday, found Mansfield’s liberal hospitality a welcome contrast to pitiless rain and wind through which they had tramped from Chesterfield. True, the men were bronzed and weather-beaten, and most of them looked fit enough but then, as Miss Wilkinson, the Jarrow MP put it – no doubt with perfect truth – ‘these men have been better fed during the last fortnight than they have been for years!’
This excellent present under my arm, I stop off to sip a pint in the warm, dozing snug of the Brown Cow. Mansfield Brewery closed its doors in 2002 and its remaining operations moved to Wolverhampton so I make do with a nice drop of Everard’s Ascalon, a ‘traditional chestnut ale brewed with British-grown Challenger and Admiral hops. Orange, zesty flavours are complemented with chocolate, earthy flavours, leaving a perfectly rounded finish,’ according to the beermat. I prop up the framed front page on the bar in front of me and study that.
‘There must be easier ways to read paper, lad,’ says a plaster-splattered man at the other end of the bar with his folded tabloid in front of him, and, ice broken, I tell him about my day. ‘Aye, we made some stuff here, beer, shoes, knickers, hats … did they tell you they even made sand for golf bunkers here? Perhaps he buys it for his Scottish ones,’ he says and points to a familiar brutish orange face on the front of the Mirror. It is of course Donald Trump. It’s the third and final presidential debate tonight and while some are still saying ‘too close to call’, most reasoned analysis says that Trump will lose even despite a deep-seated antipathy towards Clinton that is hard for us Brits to really fathom. Can any reasonable, sane human being, however much they distrust the shifty and dynastic Clintons, really consider voting for a man like Trump? Surely not. Common sense and humanity will prevail, I conclude, as I take another long pull on those zesty chocolatey depths and wait for the perfect rounded finish.
STAGE THIRTEEN
MANSFIELD TO NOTTINGHAM
20 October, 14 miles
From the BBC News Website, March 2016:
The closure of the DH Lawrence Heritage Centre in Eastwood has been described as ‘tragic’ … Durban House, which explored the writer’s life, was closed to save £80,000 a year. The authority said the service had not stopped and would merge with Lawrence’s birthplace museum in the same town. Malcolm Gray, chairman of the DH Lawrence Society, said it was a ‘frustrating’ decision. But Alex Khan, cultural services manager at the Conservative-led council, said: ‘I actually find it quite exciting – it puts the focus of the DH Lawrence Heritage service back somewhere it has a very strong link …’ Mr Khan denied the closure was ‘a slap in the face’ following Nottingham’s status as a Unesco City of Literature, awarded in December.
Walking the miles of the dreary Nottingham Road from Mansfield in the squalid, damp, overgrown margin of grass where there should really be something to stop foot travellers being knocked into the ditch by the backdraft of passing tankers, ankle-deep in Red Bull cans and fag packets and lord knows what unspeakable detritus flung from some passing window by a git, I remembered some words of D H Lawrence’s quoted by Matt Perry that I’d read the night before:
‘The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely, the man-made England is so vile. I know that the ordinary collier when I was a boy had a peculiar sense of beauty coming from his intuitive and instinctive consciousness which was awakened … the human soul needs actual beauty more than it needs bread.’
In many ways, D H Lawrence was a pillock and there’s a hint of that here. But his heart was in the right place. Whether the demise of the ‘ugly’ pits of Nottingham at its great human cost in community and livelihoods would have cheered the comfortably-off novelist or not is moot, since both are with us no more. But Lawrence was the first British novelist of the industrial age to have what we might call ecological consciousness, condemning mechanisation for what it did both to the human spirit and the British landscape. It did, however, help to pay the young Lawrence’s family’s rent as it exploited. It’s a thorny one, and I’m not sure either DH or myself have any, let alone all the answers.
Until the lorries and the unnavigable undergrowth made it too risky, I had in my ears as I walked the churning road the beginning of the Second Movement of Alan Bush’s Nottingham Symphony. Its limpid but subtly astringent loveliness turned even this dismal trudge into something vaguely meaningful and uplifting. But then my spirits were already high with the thought of an evening in Nottingham. I don’t know it as well as I might but I’ve always liked its independent cast of mind. From D H Lawrence to Alan Sillitoe to Ned Ludd (possibly) to Samuel Fox the philanthropic abolitionist Quaker to Games Workshop to Ray Gosling to Lord Byron to his daughter the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace to Brian Clough (adopted) to the hardcore metal label Earache Records, Nottingham produces people who do things their own way.
Alan Bush wasn’t from Nottingham, but it was just like the city to ask Britain’s most outspokenly Marxist composer and Communist Party stalwart to write them a symphony for the week of celebrations commemorating the quincentenary of its Royal Charter in 1949. Bush was held in real suspicion by the powers that be. When the BBC placed a ban on Bush and composers of his political persuasion, Vaughan Williams refused broadcast rights for his new work in protest. He didn’t share Bush’s views but he loathed such high-handed treatment, telling the BBC in a telegram ‘Well, you’re not having my stuff either’, at which they relented. Commissioned by the Nottingham Co-operative Society, Bush’s Nottingham Symphony was first performed on 27 June in the city’s Albert Hall by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s a fabulous piece if, like me, you’re partial to tuneful but interesting twentieth-century English music. Bush himself says the piece ‘ends in a mood of purposeful optimism’ and it put me in very much the same as finally, after several dreary hours, the A60, Nottingham Road, at last lived up to its name and reached Nottingham.
The day started well too. Once again, an interesting invite had pinged into my phone via social media. Whilst its undoubted popularity as a platform amongst world-class morons has made it the object of some scorn, Twitter has thus far proved an invaluable tool on my journey, which I should stress is an actual journey, and not the ones described on reality TV. I have found that social media, like the old Yellow Pages ad used to have it, is not just there for the nasty things in life. Nasty things like trolling women from behind the anonymity of your little egg avatar or perpetuating badly spelt feuds over football. It has also, in my case this trip, been about learning interesting things from interesting people;
history, tips, steers – the kind of ninja knowledge that only locals have. Michael is a lecturer at West Nottinghamshire College who’s been following my progress. Noting that I’m going to be stomping past his door, a mile or so out of Mansfield, he tells me he’ll have the kettle on if I fancy dropping in for a cup of tea and to meet some students.
He meets me outside the bustling bright red campus which even I couldn’t miss. It looks a terrific place to work. As we negotiate the throngs of students, Michael tells me that it’s just had a lengthy, extensive £5 million refit. (Having spent a few happy years teaching further education in my early twenties, I always keep abreast of nice places to work that might give me a job in the future.)
‘That new Health and Beauty Centre stands on the site of an old Mining and Technical College, the place where once you did day release from the pit.’ He catches my smile and returns it. ‘I know. It sounds ironic but it’s not as strange a transition as you might think. A lot of our students, their dads used to be miners and they came to colleges like this and retrained in everything from hairdressing to IT when the mines closed.’
When I get to the refectory (or NutraStation or cantina or whatever they call them these heady days) they’ve made a big backdrop Image Me, with me photoshopped into the Jarrow march, which is sweet and funny. And though I suspect the students don’t have the first idea who I am or what I’m up to or what the Jarrow march was, they sit behind their gleaming big screen Apple Macs and listen attentively as I tell them about the march. After listening thoughtfully, one lad asks, ‘Why didn’t they just get the train?’ There’s a lot of laughter and I join in, but it’s a rather good question, given that lobbying the government for their town was the purpose of the trip to London rather than a sponsored walk. But of course that’s from the pragmatic context of today. Part of the point of the long trek was the romantic endeavour of it all, the heroic endurance that was meant to convince the Establishment that these men were not idle or feckless but determined and disciplined.
Afterwards I take some questions and as usual these wander entertainingly off topic. A petite Indian girl asks me whether I’m going via Birmingham where she’s originally from and I wonder for a second whether she’s about to ask me to drop a parcel off at her mum’s. But no, she just wants to chat about the new-ish Bull Ring and Symphony Hall. By some route that I can’t recall, we establish that one young man is the nephew of the colourful late Welsh actor Victor Spinetti and we have a diverting chat about his friendship with the Beatles. Afterwards, another staff member called Liam, knowing of my interest in esoteric sounds, tells me about his PhD in children’s music and we bemoan the unavailability of the crazy, educational jazz-rock numbers from Sesame Street on CD. More usefully perhaps, Liam thinks that there’s something on in town that night that might interest me. It’s an event at Rough Trade Nottingham called ‘Wanted: A Real Media’, which will attempt to offer alternatives from voices of the new left. Now, we donkeys live a long time, as Orwell’s Benjamin said in Animal Farm, so I’m old and wise enough to know that this title probably translates as, ‘Wanted: A Media That Agrees With Me’. But it sounds like it might chime with some of the things I’ve been thinking about in relation to Jarrow and now.
Of late there have arisen several websites and leftwing media pressure groups who are ‘critiquing’ (as the Americans say) what they call the mainstream media or ‘MSM’. Since Glasgow University Media Group’s groundbreaking 1976 study ‘Bad News’, radical sociologists have been ploughing this furrow, looking at how the structure and language of press, radio and TV news especially serves to reinforce the status quo and the Establishment. While indisputably leftist in stance, these types of early surveys were analytical and sociological in approach. But over the last decade, the media seems to have grown, on its fringes at least, far more fissile and partisan: from Breitbart to Wikileaks to Anonymous to The Canary, from alt-right to new left.
Anyway, I agree to go, as it sounds like fun (of a sort) and the matter of media ownership relates very much to both today and 1936. The interwar years and especially the thirties saw a rapid growth in the mass media and a corresponding concentration of that media in only a few well-connected hands, and the subsequent creation of press empires and barons (to mix my honorifics). This was crucial, since while radio and TV were still very much in their infancy, the British press was, as historian Nick Shepley puts it, ‘how the country talked to itself, its nervous system, it’s arteries of discourse.’
This system, these arteries, were largely and solely in the control of a handful of wealthy and titled men. Lord Northcliffe owned The Times, the Daily Mail, the Weekly Despatch and the London Evening News. His brother Lord Rothermere owned the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Pictorial, the Daily Record, the Glasgow Evening News and the Sunday Mail. Another brother, Lord Harmsworth, was also a major player. Between them, they had the ear of six million readers.
Lord Beaverbrook made the Daily Express the most successful mass circulation newspaper in the world and used it as a mouthpiece for his personal opinions, from appeasement of Hitler (whom he greatly admired) to free trade. These few men wielded extraordinary and unprecedented political power over a mass audience of readers. They advanced their political agendas from the far right of the political spectrum in an age of uncertainty and crisis. They also did it cannily, through a diet of entertainment and a daily concentration on what would now be called celebrity culture, gossip and chat about film stars, comedians and musicians.
That said, press coverage of the Jarrow march was uniformly warm (especially in the then vigorous regional press) if bland and patronising. Put simply, the Jarrow marchers were celebrities and the march was covered as such; as a cheery human interest story involving plucky chaps, adorable dogs and that ‘fistful of dynamite’ Ellen Wilkinson. For her part, she was scornful of both Lord Rothermere’s empire of puppet titles and the newly formed BBC. Many on the left still are 80 years later, as I was to find out.
I check in and unpack in my modern business hotel on Maid Marian Way. I like chain hotels because I know what I’m going to get with none of that unpredictable ‘family run’ or worrying ‘funky and individual’ business, where you might be expected to eat with Tiddles the cat on your lap or have a shower from a watering can. Comfortingly for us busy misanthropes on the move, my hotel is the sort of place where Phil and Jeff from head office meet Mike from the Uttoxeter branch for firm handshakes in the lobby before grabbing a beer and thrashing out rotas.
I strolled down into the town centre which is dominated by the busy, spacious Old Market Square, over which the town hall looks down in a paternalistic, aldermanly way. Here, there’s the ubiquitous street food, a rasta busker playing the sax to a tinny version of ‘Red, Red Wine’ from a beat box and a few entertainingly incompetent skateboarders. Down an alley, I find further evidence of the city’s subversive bent in the form of a properly old-school leftwing bookshop, the sort that you thought had become extinct in the nineties, where you could pick from Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Women’s Voice, the Trotskyist Spare Rib and anarchist pamphlets which always smelt faintly of that unpleasant arrowroot herbal toothpaste.
Nottingham’s Five Leaves is still thriving. Several earnest-looking students of different genders and races leaf through forbidding-looking texts and inspirational postcards expressing solidarity with various South American rebel groups. Or maybe that was my memory playing tricks on me. It was a fascinating place anyway with tons to agree and disagree with. The left has always been a place where passion and sanctimoniousness rub vigorously along together and it always will be. I’m more Bevan and Attlee these days than Corbyn or Brand. But I come out with a recycled tote bag full of stuff old and new; some miners’ strike posters for dewy-eyed nostalgia, a great postcard that says ‘To Make The Rich Work Harder You Pay Them More, To Make The Poor Work Harder You Pay Them Less’ (which I may wave like a ref’s yellow card in future arguments with free marketeers) and a cracking reprin
t of a 1964 Nottingham samizdat magazine called Anarchy 38, ‘A Journal of Anarchist Ideas’, which seems to be nothing of the sort but bristles with energy and brio from the young Ray Gosling on Nottingham and Alan Sillitoe on poverty. It is exactly the kind of thing the teenaged Maconie would have ensured was visible from his Oxfam overcoat pocket, chiefly to impress thoughtful girls.
I leaf through Anarchy 38 in a big lively pub in town called the Major Oak, named after the tree where committed wealth distributor Robin Hood (who would certainly have shopped at Five Leaves) used to hang out with Maid Marian and the Merry Men. I make a few notes on a tremendous piece detailing the sundry riots that took place in Nottingham between 1754 and 1854 which confirms my impression of the city. I don’t impress any girls but an Irish man comes over to me and says, ‘Don’t I know you? Aren’t you in education?’ No, I answer truthfully. ‘Oh,’ he replies, ‘well, who’d have thought it. There’s another fellow alive in the world who’s as good looking as you.’ I nearly bought him a pint but I have a date elsewhere.
I meet Liam along with Gordon, the college’s union rep, outside Rough Trade Nottingham, one of only three branches of the successful indie in the UK, the other being in New York. Downstairs, men with waxed moustaches and girls in black hoodies with magenta hair are leafing through racked vinyl by Laura Marling, Gil Scott-Heron and the Sleaford Mods. Upstairs, there’s a large room with a spit and sawdust feel, a bar stocked from microbreweries around the world and cupcakes under glass. Beers bought, we make our way to the other end of the room where a small stage faces about 30 plastic chairs. After a short while, a man and woman appear along with a ponytailed roadie. There then ensues some mildly hilarious faffing with microphones that intermittently either do not work at all or emit earsplitting shrieks of feedback, all such as you might get in an Alan Ayckbourn portrayal of a fringe leftwing meeting. When this has been sorted to some reasonably bearable degree, Nancy Mendoza of The Canary tells us about the ethos of her website, which she hopes is part of a drive towards ‘greater plurality within the news. Today’s media has become an echo chamber to mainstream ideas and practices, which are not speaking to, or for, the range of groups in society.’
Long Road from Jarrow Page 22
