Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  The resurgence of some of our modern cities often stems from some strange or unexpected seed. Manchester had the IRA bomb which kick-started a long overdue civic regeneration. When the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra appointed the youthful, brilliant Simon Rattle as its conductor, it gave the city new cultural clout and kudos as well as the best concert hall in Europe. Leicester has the discovery of the body of a long-dead much-maligned ‘crookback’ under a car park near Costa and Poundland to thank for boosting its profile and prestige. The sensational rediscovery of Richard III’s burial site in the centre of Leicester, where he was unceremoniously and hastily interred after being dragged from Bosworth Field, has brought tourists and historians to the town and revitalised and smartened up a part of the city that several Leicesterians tell me was once very shady and shabby indeed. ‘You would not have wanted to hang around the cathedral after dark ten years ago,’ being a typical comment I heard.

  Richard III, the final ruler of the Plantagenet dynasty, was killed on 22 August 1485 at the last major battle of the Wars of the Roses. Afterwards, his mutilated body, slung across the saddle of a horse, was taken to Greyfriars Friary in Leicester where it was buried in a crude, shallow grave. After Henry VIII, poster boy of the new Tudor order, dissolved the monasteries and Greyfriars was demolished, the burial place was lost and forgotten. Some said Richard’s bones were tossed into the River Soar. The Richard III Society, indefatigable enthusiasts who’ve long campaigned to alter our negative opinion of the monarch, set in motion an archaeological project called ‘Looking For Richard’, which set out to find his remains on the old friary site, now a car park. On the very first day of the dig, a human skeleton was uncovered with both a severe curvature of the back and dreadful skull injuries consistent with a fatal blow from a halberd, which had sheared off the back of his skull and exposed the brain. After extensive tests, it was concluded that this poor fellow was indeed Richard III.

  Leicester City Council purchased an old school building next door, empty since the grammar school moved out in 2008. This was to create a centre that would tell the story of the remarkable search for – and at that point unconfirmed discovery of – King Richard III. The resulting complex is a triumph for the city. Superbly done, it has just the right mix of gravitas and reverence with modern technological and cultural savvy. The audio-visual recreation of the battle is thrillingly impressionistic and there’s a smart overview of both Richard’s contentious reputation and longevity as a cultural trope, from Kevin Spacey to Laurence Olivier to Johnny Rotten, who’s said to have based his onstage persona on Larry’s twisted misanthrope on film. I urge you to visit it if in the area. I’d have spent longer but I had an appointment with some other guys who’d put modern Leicester on the map. Not a king this time, but King Power, the stadium where Leicester City, shock champions of English football, were playing this afternoon.

  This wasn’t just that I fancied a bit of footie. Honest. It was very much part of my plan to take in cultural or historical aspects along the route to compare Britain then and now; concerts, churches, restaurants, pubs, a theatre show, and very definitely a football match. Football was a vital, integral part of British culture then too, and the happy coincidence of me being in Leicester on a Saturday when the new Premier League champions were at home was simply too providential to ignore. There was just the small matter of getting a ticket for the sold-out clash with Crystal Palace. Thanks again to social media and a lovely woman called Lara (who once shared a squat with my old art editor at NME), I was put in touch with her friend Mark, equally terrific and equally generous. As a season ticket holder, he could get me a ticket and I was to meet him and his lad Sam at the ground. Which is how, by 2.30, I was sitting with Mark and Sam sipping a very decent IPA in the Fosse Lounge, a suite inside the splendid new stadium.

  Much has changed in English football since I first went to the cowshed that was Springfield Park to watch Wigan Athletic wrestle – sometimes literally – with the likes of Goole Town and Gainsborough Trinity in the Northern Premier League back in the muddy, violent 1970s. Over the next three decades, plucky little Wigan climbed all the way up the tiers of English football to the very top of the Premier League, then won the FA Cup, and are now sliding joylessly back down again. That top tier is now called the EPL, formerly the Premiership, formerly the First Division. Times change, kick-off times change, but for some of us the thrill as three o’clock on a Saturday approaches never ages or fades.

  Much of the barely believable money now sloshing around English football came in the wake of Sky’s involvement and the setting up of the Premier League in the early 1990s. But even in the day of the Jarrow march, there were Cassandras and naysayers bemoaning the national obsession with football, the amounts of money in the game and the subsequent erosion of the pure ethos of amateurism. ‘Shamateurism’, as it was called, was rife, especially among the bigger clubs. Martin Pugh cites the case of Manchester United’s Frank Barson who would routinely expect an envelope stuffed with cash waiting for him in the dressing room with his kit. ‘Where’s the doins? I’m not tekkin mi bloody coat off till I get it.’

  The depression of the interwar years, particularly in the industrial north, made football even more popular and more important, a source of both romantic escapism and social cohesion in the face of the long dehumanising economic slump. Unfortunately, it also created an insularity. England were to go through the 1930s wrongly believing themselves to be world leaders at the sport, a notion they were to be humiliatingly disabused of after the Second World War.

  When the Jarrow marchers came to their town, Leicester City, ‘the Foxes’, were top of the Second Division and heading back up having been relegated the year before. Many of the Jarrow men would have been able to tell you this since football was already a major part of working-class social life, much debated and discussed, if not the unhealthy, maniacal obsession it is for some now. The money involved in the game today has grown to an insane degree that no one in the 1930s would have found believable. The game’s appeal now, while still strong in traditional working-class and industrial Britain, is far more classless these days. Purists and traditionalists complain the sport has become gentrified and detached from its parent culture. In 1936 though, the ravaged industrial north east was arguably the football hotbed of England, home to champions Sunderland who had just won the title for the sixth time. There’d been football at that summer’s Olympics in Berlin, but it was a miserable tournament dogged by cheating and the baleful presence of Hitler and Goebbels at some of Germany’s matches. Britain sent a team who were put out by Poland but who took a principled stand by refusing to give the Nazi salute despite being told to do so by the British authorities and thus enraging the German hosts. Italy eventually won beating Austria in the final.

  Mark’s nine-year-old son Sam has been following football for one year, and in that year his team Leicester City became champions of the Premier League – the richest, most globally watched, most celebrated league in world football. ‘I keep telling him, this isn’t normal,’ says his dad, ruefully. ‘This isn’t going to happen every year, you know. I don’t think he realises quite how special and incredible it was.’ Against all odds and defying the hegemony of the big glamour clubs such as Arsenal and Manchester United, or the bottomless cash reserves of Chelsea and Manchester City, Leicester City won the Premier League and the hearts of all neutrals with a brand of football that was fresh and exhilarating played by largely unknown players under the stewardship of the impish and genial Claudio Ranieri. Previously mocked in the UK as ‘the tinkerman’ for his ever-changing tactics when manager of Chelsea, Ranieri, smiling, bespectacled, was a refreshing contrast to the sullen, scowling self-importance of some of his managerial peers. He seemed to embody the club’s self-effacing underdog charm. As Sam passed through JFK returning from his ninth birthday treat, a trip to New York (I think I got a Spirograph, by the way), one of that airport’s notoriously sour immigration officials called, ‘Hey, Leiceste
r City! Well done you guys!’

  Though Leicester are perhaps a more homespun club than their glitzier rivals in London and the north west, their well-travelled Italian boss still marshalled a team drawn from around the globe, from Japan to Mali and Austria to Argentina. Listening in the Fosse Lounge to a blazered Leicester City official read the team sheet and struggle with some exotic surnames, it is clear this new cosmopolitanism brings novel difficulties for the old guard.

  ‘Number 19, Islam Salmani … Slam … Salami …’

  ‘SLIMANI,’ roar back the crowd in amused exasperation.

  ‘Sorry, Slimani … Riyad Mah … raz.’

  ‘MAHREZ!’

  ‘Mahrez … and finally, the referee, Mr … ah, who cares.’

  Mark runs construction companies across the Midlands and is Leicester born and bred, although he now lives in the countryside between his home city and Market Harborough (my next destination). Mark has been Leicester City through and through, since he was Sam’s age. ‘My first game was the old Filbert Street, late seventies, Keith Weller, Jimmy Bloomfield, sitting on the wall. Then a season ticket in the family enclosure. I was there for Gary Lineker’s debut. New Year’s Day 1979, Oldham Athletic in the old Second Division. But last season was something else. There was a real buzz around the place. A spring in its step.’

  By dint of the Premier League victory, Leicester are now in the Champions League, Europe’s biggest and most glamorous competition and have made a good start with nine points, which is more than they have managed in the League in a miserable start to their title defence.

  ‘It’d be funny,’ says Sam, ‘if we won the Champions League and got relegated in the same season.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t,’ says Dad quickly.

  For today’s match against mid-table Palace, Sam predicts that Leicester will win three nil and the unpronounceable Slimani will get a hat trick. We drain our glasses and take our places in the stand. This is always a thrilling moment, especially if you watch most of your football on TV; the sense of space, the vivid green of the turf, the crackle of noise and expectation generated by thousands of expectant fans. Leicester decided to augment this atmosphere by giving away cardboard clappers before every home game. It was a stunt they tried at a fixture with West Ham when they were bottom of the Premier League in 2015. They won and that was the turning point from which came last year’s title, so it’s a talismanic ‘tradition’ that persists. There’s one on my seat and on every seat for the 30,000 home fans. Some think this barrage of percussive noise, like the rattle of an ack-ack gun, has been Leicester’s secret weapon. Others grumble that it’s yet another contrivance of contemporary football. Mark says that it’s rumoured that they have paid more for the clappers than they did for bargain Algerian star striker Riyad Mahrez.

  Before kick-off, there’s another illustration of the changed modern game. Since 2010 Leicester City have been owned by the Srivaddhanaprabha family from Thailand, who run the King Power duty-free empire. That week the Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej had died. Where once, the booming Tannoy announcements before matches would ask the owner of the maroon Vauxhall Viva blocking the hot dog stall to move it, the one before this match goes like this:

  Can we ask that you all join us in respectful appreciation of a truly significant figure in Thai history? The directors, management, players and staff of Leicester City Football Club extend its deepest sympathies to the Thai people during this period of mourning. The world’s longest-reigning monarch, his Majesty the King was widely loved, revered and admired in the homeland of the Leicester City owners and we now ask that you help us mark the occasion with a show of unity and support for our owners and the Thai people with a minute’s applause.

  The Palace fans are in good voice, aiming some good-naturedly abusive songs at the new Leicester faithful (‘where were you when you were shit?’), who respond with a defiant, ‘We know who we are, we know who we are, we’re the champions of England, we know who we are.’ The match itself is fast and free flowing. Leicester start poorly, with new signing Musa particularly ineffectual. Palace are clearly on top with former England man Andros Townsend looking sharp. But after Palace’s Benteke heads powerfully against the bar, Leicester are stirred into action. The formerly inert Musa shoots home from the edge of the penalty area, Shinji Okazaki grabs one and a terrific left-foot volley from Fuchs completes the Leicester tally before Palace get a consolation goal in the last minutes. Three–one to Leicester. On social media, my presence is jokingly seen to be as talismanic as the clappers. ‘You can come every week,’ says one Foxes fan on Twitter.

  We walk back along the main road with the delirious throng now augmented by Leicester Tigers fans leaving the rugby union stadium. Mark has never been to the rugby union ground and in his village pub there is a clear distinction between the two camps; football on the telly in the bar, rugby in the more comfortable lounge. Stacey Pope of Durham University chose Leicester to study class differences in sporting allegiances since the city has support fairly equally split between the two professional football and rugby union clubs and with their grounds barely half a mile apart. She interviewed 85 fans and their comments were enlightening. ‘It’s just such a class thing. I’m working class, that’s why I go to the football. Posh people go to the rugby … I think in this village there’s an “in crowd” that goes fox hunting and played rugby. And then there’s, like, the other people that work in petrol stations and things … Now I look back on it I can see there is this kind of rugby and class divide.’

  Interestingly, a small number of rugby fans asserted that their own ‘local’ attachment to the club was rooted much more in the shires – to the county of Leicestershire – rather than to the city where the Tigers played. As one put it: ‘I love Leicestershire … I hate Leicester city centre, but I love Leicestershire.’ And another, ‘I don’t feel as though I’ve got an allegiance to Leicester, the city. I don’t equate the city itself with Leicester Tigers so much. Leicester Tigers for me is Leicestershire Tigers, not the city … they’re not just playing for the city, they’re playing for Leicestershire … Like the cricket, it’s county cricket, it’s not city cricket.’

  I have to say that I can’t share interviewee R15’s antipathy to Leicester city centre. As afternoon gave way to night, it began to throb with life and good humour. By nine it was positively jumping as I took my regular little solo promenade. A cheery East European bouncer tries to get me to come into his dingy-looking club for ‘two for one shots’ and ‘great DJ. You like grime? Me neither. Awful. We play Katy Perry, Justin Bieber. Classy stuff’. Girls spill out of the Bossa bar on vertiginous heels and in sheer shiny tops to vape furiously, their elaborately piled hairdos wreathed in watery smoke. The Barley Mow pub is deserted though, perhaps because of the dentist-drill drum and bass music that is making the windows bulge. Two girls in micro skirts play balloon volleyball in the doorway of Fenwick’s department store, in whose famous Newcastle sister outlet I bought the socks and flat cap I’m wearing. Removing the former, I have an American hot pizza and a big glass of Rioja in a restaurant down by the cathedral. The young waitress is originally from Skipton and loves Leicester but is jealous of my sojourn in North Yorkshire. ‘My folks, my local, my dog … I miss ’em all.’ England is small but sometimes, she says, a hundred miles can feel a long way. I know, I say, ordering another Rioja and thinking back to Harrogate and Northallerton, and further back to Ferryhill and the dog walker, and further back, to Fenwick’s on that bright morning that feels like years ago. It was three weeks.

  I decided to make sure I was back in my room with a warming whisky – autumn was beginning to bite across middle England – to watch the game I’d been at on Match of The Day, and also to see what kind of mood presenter Gary Lineker was in. One of Leicester’s favourite sons was ending a turbulent week in which he’d incurred the wrath of the Sun newspaper for having the unmitigated gall to show some sympathy for the refugee kids in the Jungle camp in Calais. The Sun, the paper
that defamed and wrongly accused Liverpool fans of pick-pocketing the Hillsborough victims as they lay dying, was now calling for Gary Lineker to be sacked from the BBC.

  ‘Getting a bit of a spanking today,’ he tweeted, ‘but things could be worse: Imagine, just for a second, being a refugee and having to flee from your home.’ The Sun’s splash of the previous day, ‘Out on His Ears’, splurged, ‘Calls for BBC to sack Lineker after he peddles migrant lies.’ Of all the mendacious and slippery tricks of shoddy journalism, alleging there’ve been ‘calls’ for something or other is one of the most irritating. It means either ‘we are calling for it’ or ‘nobody is calling for it, but our jobs depend on producing this stuff’. Or often both. It is part of the flotsam of cliché, half-truth and banality that passes for news today, it seems.

  Taking a long circuitous way back, via the Jewish Museum and the railway station, I experience two different Leicesters – the same dichotomy I guess I’d see in any big English city today. On his patch between the taxi office and the station I give some cash to a guy selling The Big Issue who happily tells me his real name but let’s call him William. He is gaunt and red-eyed; about 30 I’d say but it’s never easy to tell when people live lives this precarious and draining. His story is typical I imagine. He came here from Coventry with an ex-girlfriend, struggled to get by, dabbled in heroin, became addicted, lost his job, house, girlfriend and, he says, access to his kids who’ve been adopted by their stepdad. ‘I want to fight it in court. But there’s no legal aid. So my only chance of getting access is to go on Jeremy Kyle.’