If you’ve looked at The Canary, you’ll know that what this translates to is pretty straightforward leftwing agitprop but with a garish modern vibe. It’s somewhere between the Socialist Worker and Heat magazine online with the clenched rectitude of the former and the relaxed chattiness of the latter (‘Trump just dropped his stupidest tweet yet … and the Internet is in stitches!’) This is a neat trick if you can pull it off and should you want to. Writers give up the certainty of payment and are paid according to the traffic they generate, which seems to me about as nakedly capitalistic as you can get and might even make Rupert Murdoch let out a low whistle of admiration. It also means the quality of the writing is wildly variable and generally partisan. But it is an alternative certainly. And there are adverts for skiing holidays.
Tom from Real Media is next and starts with a few colourful anecdotes about how he used to go drinking as a youth in Nottingham city centre, this presumably to soften us up a little for the fairly indigestible stuff to come. Indigestible to me anyway. The small audience lapped it up but then I wouldn’t exactly call them a ‘tough crowd’, as comics say. Tom makes one or two good points, such as that conspiracy websites are ‘disempowering’ and that the structures of the modern media concentrate power amongst the rich and the middle classes. This is certainly true, but you came all this way to tell me that? It’s in paragraph one, page one of every GCSE textbook on the sociology of the media. Then there is some stuff about ‘horizontalism’ that I simply do not follow whatsoever, so I have to acknowledge that it might have been searing stuff.
A few phrases brought out the worst in me, it has to be said. Firstly, there’s a mention of Karl Marx followed quickly by a snort of ‘I’m not a Marxist of course’ as if only a prize chump would have any time for the most influential and insightful economic analyst of the last 200 years. (Well, that about wraps it up for poor old Karl, I thought, now that he’s been dissed above a record shop in Nottingham.) Tom also mentioned those of his kind working at ‘the coal face’. Perhaps it was having spent some time around pits and miners recently but I doubted very much if anyone here with their zesty IPAs and cupcakes had ever been within a postcode of a coal face, least of all Tom, or for that matter me.
Then, in the midst of some diagnosis of the ills of the modern media, he says ‘… as much as I hate the BBC …’ Until relatively recently, I had rather innocently assumed that hatred of the BBC was the preserve of the swivel-eyed, foaming demagogues of the right. This then brings home to me how little I have in common with their rabid counterparts within the modern left. Tom is every bit as driven an ideologue as Paul Dacre. I would say that in the end, the best, if not most passionate defence of the BBC is that it is viewed by the right and left alike as supporting the other side. I would say that such flak from both flanks means the corporation is doing a fairly decent job of being impartial, but then both Russell Brand and Guido Fawkes would probably snigger at that. Also, given my time in the BBC’s employ, they may respond, ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’
In much the same way that woolly old geezers and fresh-faced youths are forever telling me that Jeremy Corbyn is a saintly man with his heart in the right place, I will assume, if not entirely convinced, that Tom and Nancy are similarly good eggs. But I found their vision of a new, better media no great improvement on the one we have; certainly every bit as partial philosophically and theoretically. Feeble initiatives like giving a quarter of the licence fee to independent creatives (like Tom) to make their own news and documentaries are fine, as long as you acknowledge that that dosh and platform must also be given to UKIP and maybe even the EDL. Freedom is indivisible. If you don’t think that, at least have the honesty to say that it isn’t actually free speech you want, but your speech and paid for by people who don’t agree with you.
It may seem mean but it also needs to be pointed out that there were 18 people in that room, at least one of whom was very much not in agreement. The rest definitely were but I felt this isn’t a launching pad, it’s an echo chamber. Like the reception at Corbyn’s rallies, it may feel awfully nice to be part of, but it tells you nothing about support in the cold, wider world, where real people have to be housed, real kids have to be fed and educated, the really sick have to be cared for and sometimes real wars have to be won against some real bad guys. I don’t think the people at The Canary or Real Media or Jeremy Corbyn or any of their ilk are bad guys themselves but I think they might be making it easier for the ones who are.
We left during the Q&As. (It’s always a bad omen when you hear ‘it’s not so much a question, more a statement really’.) Nottingham had some venerable and famed boozers that I was keen to try and two enthusiastic guides. The people’s struggle is thirsty work after all. We made our way through streets awash with students running politely riot through the streets. I couldn’t work out why. It was a bit late for freshers’ week, and there seemed no logic to any of the costumes but a definite lunatic gaiety about the various smurfs, zombies and cowboys; togas, bear outfits and onesies. They swarm over Brian Clough’s statue and by the time I get there, only a few girls remain snapping themselves with the bronzed figure in a tracksuit arms aloft. ‘Who is this bloke?’ asks a girl in a baby’s bonnet to her friend taking a selfie. ‘No idea,’ comes the reply. To the side of them, a supremely posh ginger kid in a sombrero is explaining to his upset girlfriend that, ‘Look, he just bumped into you because he’ s swaying because he’s very, very drunk and you are just so, like so, over-reacting Daisy’.
According to the article I was reading earlier (‘Riotous Times in Nottingham’), the people of Nottingham – and these are very much edited highlights – rioted in 1754 over an election, in 1755 over bread and in 1756 over the price of cheese, during which they started lobbing huge Cheddars and Stiltons about at the Goose Fair. In 1779, 1783 and 1787 they rioted over wages for knitters and in 1795 over the price of butter. It was the cost of meat that incited them in 1788 and 1792. In 1793, keen to liven up a quiet patch, Nottingham’s supporters of rival sides in the French Revolution rioted. Next it was a rigged election, then bread and meat again. In 1831 they rioted over the Reform Act, and then in 1839 it was the Chartists. In between and along the way, there was generally a riot every couple of years over meat, bread, butter, cheese or knitting. Had you had a watch, you could have set it by the impressive regularity of Nottingham’s riotous townsfolks appetite for disorder.
I missed out 1811, a very serious disturbance, when the Luddites smashed and burned through the city culminating in the razing of the castle itself. Their leader was Ned Ludd and in some cities, his name would be blackened and shamed forever more. In Nottingham, they named a pub after him. Since I was passing, I went in and raised a quick glass of whisky to the old troublemaker and then was on my way.
STAGE FOURTEEN
NOTTINGHAM TO LOUGHBOROUGH
21 October, 5 miles
Above the mirror in my Nottingham hotel, stylishly painted, rendered as if in the writer’s flowing hand, is a quotation.
‘Don’t let the bastards get you down!’ – Alan Sillitoe.
This variant on the old wartime witticism, Illegitimi Non Carborundum, is one of many quotable lines uttered by Arthur Seaton in Sillitoe’s brilliant Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, played equally brilliantly by Albert Finney in the film: Elvis-Presley-as-lathe-turner, all feral proletarian glamour. This morning, toothbrush in hand, wrapped in towel, I’m amused and irritated to see Seaton/Finney’s growl of plebeian defiance turned into a motivational quote for the ambitious Midlands middle-manager.
Thursday night has become Friday morning, and a very Nottingham-style riot is sweeping through the streets of my head. We had moved on after the ‘Real Media’ meeting from the Ned Ludd to the Malt Cross, an old Victorian music hall still with stage and balcony, now a fashionable bar selling botanical gins, cakes and swanky porters. There we had gone over the meeting, Liam, Gordon and I, and found that we were largely of one mind. Yes, there was much wrong with
the modern media, an issue that seemed to preoccupy the new left, but a little more attention paid to the future of Liam and Gordon’s students, their parents’ jobs and homes and the traditional working-class communities of the post-industrial north and Midlands would be nice too. A trend toward this within the Labour Party, christened ‘Blue Labour’ by Jon Cruddas, was influential a few years back, but this realignment seems to have been overlooked once more in favour of more theoretical concerns, such as identity politics and endless handwringing and internal wrangling, post Corbyn. Anyway, as soon as this pub closes, the revolution starts.
In truth, by closing time we were in Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem. Many pubs in England, even several in Nottingham, lay claim to be the oldest in the land. The Porch House in Stow-on-the-Wold claims to have had the towels off since the end of the first millennium BC. Ye Olde Salutation, which we’d passed on our way here, also makes the claim as does Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans which still awaited me down what G K Chesterton called the rolling English road, made by the rolling English drunkard. But Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem has as strong a case as any, established in AD 1189, the year Richard the Lionheart became king and responded to Pope Gregory VIII’s call for a new, third crusade to the Holy Land. This is how the pub got its name. At least, that’s one theory.
The pub is literally built into Castle Rock on which Nottingham castle stands and, unsurprisingly for a pub this old, it has accrued legend and rumour like a battleship gathers a crust of barnacles. In the upstairs lounge is ‘the cursed galleon’ a little wooden ship that must never be dusted. All who ever made this mistake died soon after and now it is kept in a glass case, thick with inches of grime. There is a very old chair that it’s claimed any woman who sits in will become pregnant and has been so well used that it is now very fragile.
The pub’s queerest and best feature though is its network of caves carved out of soft sandstone, creating strange and secret chambers perfect for conspiracies, assignations, trysts, secret meetings and plotting the overthrow of the government. In one of these caverns, a young man approaches who tells me that his best friend is Matt, the radio reporter who interviewed me in Mansfield. At this stage in the evening, this astonishing coincidence is certainly reason enough to call for another round of drinks.
Attempting to leave some time later, we get sucked into a group of drinkers at the bar playing some kind of game. A chain hangs from the ceiling with a small hoop at the end and on the opposing wall a small brass spike, curved like a mini rhino horn, is fixed at about head height. The game consists simply of swinging the chain like a pendulum and attempting to hook the horn. One old boy is undisputed pub champion at this, even doing his own versions of trick shots such as swinging the chain over his shoulder. (When not thus occupied, he goes table to table doing close magic with cards and matches.) No red-blooded games fan from out of town could refuse the challenge of course, and certainly not one as deep in his cups as I am. Thus it seems important that we join in the game for another couple of halves and single malt chasers. Eventually, I succeed and it is then of course necessary for an extended analysis of my successful shot at the bar over another round. (The game by the way, I later find out, is called Ringing the Bull and has been successfully exported from Ye Olde Trip to pubs all over Britain and the Caribbean.)
A gregarious chap at the bar with a braided ponytail says that buildings like Ye Olde Trip containing labyrinthine innards are common in the city. ‘Nottingham’s like a piece of cheese – full of holes. They run from here straight into the castle, these tunnels, and that’s how the castle was burned to the ground by Ned Ludd.’ We move on to the forthcoming US election and I wonder aloud, probably waving my pint about for emphasis, how any sane person could genuinely vote for Trump instead of Hillary Clinton and why she is so mistrusted. A chap from Crewe at the bar interjects, ‘Ah, well, that’s because she’s a mass murderer.’ He then goes on to describe the international cocaine smuggling ring the Clintons were helping to run out of Mena Airport, Arkansas and the dozens of people they have personally killed in order to keep the evildoing quiet. At this, we all fall silent, look at our shoes and shift our weight awkwardly. ‘My, is that the time?’ I hear myself saying, and Liam, Gordon and I head out into the night where, after some frankly ill-advised explorations of the castle’s battlements, we say our farewells, and I head unsteadily up Maid Marian Way.
Next morning, a little bleary, I looked up Mena Airport online. There’s quite a bit on there about the drug ring that was apparently based there, some of it exhaustive and plausible, but most of the Clinton murders stuff is on sites which also carry stories on how the moon landings were faked and the Illuminati are embarking on a mass world depopulation programme. Most of these carry a lot of scorn about ‘the mainstream media’, and have mottos like ‘THE REAL NEWS YOU WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO SEE’. Well, it certainly is an antidote to the mainstream media I suppose. One of the wisest things I ever read about conspiracy theorists was that they never believe just one conspiracy theory. They believe them all.
Hapless stooge and dupe that I am, I took an armful of MSM and a pack of Nurofen down to Old Market Square for a coffee and a browse of the papers. Hillary Clinton still has a slender lead in the polls, presumably amongst people who don’t believe yet that she’s a shape-shifting lizard. Or maybe people who do think that, but still believe her to be preferable to Donald Trump. Trump himself says that if he loses he may contest the election result.
The big ‘celebrity’ news story of October 1936 was certainly the subject of a cover-up. A major one too involving all of the press, the government and the royal family. But even with the best efforts at subterfuge by the most powerful in the land, a scandalous royal love affair was rapidly becoming the worst-kept secret in Britain amongst the high and mighty if not the hoi polloi. As the Jarrow marchers left Nottingham, Stanley Baldwin was meeting the new king to try to talk some sense into him about an American woman called Wallis Simpson.
Today we have a picture of King Edward VIII formed largely by his indulgent lifestyle, dandyish dress, vanity, admiration for Hitler, dereliction of duty and long, indolent, luxurious seclusion in Paris with the woman he abandoned his country for. But for most of 1936, between accession and abdication, he was regarded as a man of the people, a friend of the working class, and by government as a potential troublemaker. Throughout 1936, it was rumoured that he would soon be visiting Jarrow and though this never happened, he did take a tour of the depressed Welsh steel town of Dowlais. Here he was met by malnourished kids, unemployed men, ruined factories and a sense of desolation and misery which seemed to genuinely affect him. Some in the crowd held up banners reading ‘Hunger Marchers Ask The King To Abolish The Means Test’. Edward was heard to turn to an official accompanying him and say ‘something must be done’. It was an innocuous aside. But to some in government, it sounded as incendiary a revolutionary sentiment as anything being cried from a barricade in Barcelona or committee room in Moscow. Prime Minister Baldwin was not best pleased with Edward’s habit of making visits to coalfields and steel towns or his sympathetic noises towards the poor and the unemployed. Perhaps this might explain why Baldwin showed little sympathy to Edward when his romantic entanglements started to become a complication for the state.
Edward Windsor had met Wallis Simpson in 1930 and soon became infatuated, calling on her for cocktails at her Bryanston Court home most evenings, whether her husband was at home or not. By May 1936, the affair between them was causing serious concern in official circles, especially when it became clear that Wallis Simpson and her husband intended to divorce. Edward wanted to charter a yacht and take her to Venice but was persuaded that this would appear to be tacit approval of the Mussolini regime. Instead, he contented himself by pootling around the Mediterranean in what fellow sailor and socialite Duff Cooper described as ‘spick and span little shorts, straw sandals and two crucifixes on a chain around his neck’. On his return, he declined to open a new hospital in Aberdeen
on the grounds that he was still in mourning for his father, which is a difficult look to pull off in tiny shorts, and especially when the same day he was seen collecting Mrs Simpson at Balmoral in an open-topped sports car. Tory MP Chips Channon wrote in his infamous diaries, ‘Aberdeen will never forgive him’.
While the affair was common knowledge amongst Channon’s circle (bafflingly so, as most agreed with Channon, that Mrs Simpson was ‘jolly, plain and unprepossessing’), the ordinary Briton knew nothing, kept in the dark by closed ranks and the deferential, sycophantic nature of the press. American magazines carrying the story were censored, leading the indefatigable Ellen Wilkinson to ask in the Commons, ‘What is this thing the British public is not allowed to know?’ Even the Archbishop of Canterbury’s secretary complained, ‘So far our English press has been effectively muzzled by a gentleman’s agreement secured by Lord Beaverbrook.’
As the marchers neared Nottingham, Prime Minister Baldwin went to see the King in order to try to get Simpson’s divorce at least postponed if not abandoned. Edward insisted that the matter was ‘the lady’s private business’. Baldwin then suggested that Simpson be packed off abroad for six months to take the heat out of the current situation (and it was fervently hoped that, as historian Juliet Gardiner put it, ‘in her absence his puppy dog passion would cool somewhat’). Edward was unmoved. He informed Baldwin of his intention to marry Simpson but was prepared to enter into a ‘morganatic’ marriage under which the couple could wed but Simpson would not become queen. This had some support among the Establishment, not least Oswald Mosley who thought the young and unorthodox Edward would be ‘Fascism’s ideal king’, but most thought it a bad idea and an admission effectively that Simpson was not fit to be queen. Edward replied that if he could not marry Simpson and be king, he would abdicate.
Long Road from Jarrow Page 23
