Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  I mooched about the cold darkening town looking for a likely spot to thaw out with the match. A thin, sluggish river runs through one end of the High Street and by it sat a couple of wheezing elderly men drinking from cans of cheap lager and a few kids kicking a plastic bottle around outside B&M Bargains. The church bells were still tolling and mixed in with them was the muted throb and drone of a mobility scooter, a very melancholy English evensong.

  The tweedy gents and affluent commuters that The Times writer had found were nowhere in evidence. With my new enthusiasm, I tried the local Wetherspoon, and whilst it was warm, crowded and welcoming, it had no TV. I walked a little further up the road past a few similarly purist boozers until I found one from which the crackle and blare of televised sport with all its concomitant ‘idents’ and ‘stings’ was clearly audible above the low-level growl of male drinking. The pub was packed with loud men, most with their heads tilted upwards towards an enormous screen which had been secured to the wall just high enough to be uncomfortable. In the window, a table of drunk women was having some kind of shrieking contest. Close by, a partially demolished giant Stilton had been given a table to itself and various drinkers would weave and wobble over to it, carve off a chunk, balance it on a cracker and then return to their various perches leaving a trail of crumbs and cheese. It was like a corny comedy sketch set at a medieval banquet.

  This was one of those pubs where a new face excites a surly kind of interest everywhere except behind the bar. There, a tough-looking woman with a severe ponytail studiously avoided my gaze. Eventually, by elbowing a couple of people aside and waving money ostentatiously I secured a pint as well as a hard look from a pugnacious little bloke in a tracksuit. He notices my recording device and regards it and me as if I’d brought a Luger or an egg whisk into his local.

  ‘It’s for making notes,’ I explain, ‘I’m researching a book. Maybe I could get a word with you. You could tell me what you think about Market Harborough.’

  He nudges his mate, a tall thin chap with a shaved head.

  ‘After a few more pints, I might tell you what I think about you.’

  ‘Why not tell me now?’ I say, way more aggressively than I intended to, and there’s a weird, awkward, tense impasse broken only by loud cheering as Pedro scores for Chelsea. This confirms all my worse suspicions about the pub.

  The back bar has a telly too so I decide to base myself at a table in there. It is just as unwelcoming as the main bar but in a different way. Soulless and spartan, there are two other occupied tables. At one, a mournful man with some kind of dossier is sipping an enormous glass of red wine. At the other are four young people, three lads and a girl, students I would guess, each with a different flavour of fruit cider. They are discussing British cities and the topic moves to Newcastle. ‘Have I ever been to Newcastle?’ says the girl. ‘No. I’d get a nose bleed.’ Chelsea score three more times. The Sky Sports panel begin a prolonged debate about Jose Mourinho who is pictured sulking, bottom lip thrust out like a toddler.

  There was no analysis, no slo-mo, no goal-line technology or satellite television in 1936 but the boffins at Alexandra Palace were gearing up to begin the TV era. In late August of that year, 7,000 people had queued to see the first talking pictures on a television set at an exhibition at ‘Ally Pally’. The broadcast featured announcer Leslie Mitchell looking sweaty and awkward and Paul Robeson singing ‘Ole Man River’. The first TV sets went on sale soon after costing around a hundred pounds at a time when the average wage was three pounds a week. Even if you could afford one of these luxurious, high tech items with its walnut veneer and twelve-inch screen, you could only pick up the snowy, flickering image if you lived within roughly 20 miles of the transmitter. This led the Spectator to opine that it was ‘a mere toy or hobby for the well to do and will make little change to social life’. It also had the dire warning that as well as being able to enjoy ‘Hammond bat and Larwood bowl’ you would have the comfort of your front room invaded and ruined by ‘rebellions in Spain, concentration camps in Germany, misery in the depressed areas’.

  The men of one of those depressed areas would probably not own a TV for another 20 years at least and they took little cheer in Market Harborough. In contrast to the new world being ushered in at Alexandra Palace, Market Harborough was the old England; hierarchical, agricultural, conservative, the domain of parson, squire, labourer where all knew their place, and I felt that a sense of that remained. The marchers got a cool welcome here; the worst of the whole journey they said. Not one member of the council or representative came to meet them. There was no reception, no public meeting and they were given the bare stone floor of an unfinished workhouse to sleep in. This was of course Market Harborough’s prerogative and perhaps explicable by the fact that the industrial downturn that had blighted Jarrow had not touched them. Your child was three times more likely to die in childhood in Jarrow than in Market Harborough. The people of this market town were by comparison well off, well fed and healthy with little natural kinship with the men of the north. Local papers took offence at any slur on the town’s good name and claimed the men had been warmly welcomed and shown great hospitality.

  I can’t say that I or the Jarrow men could claim that about our visits, although in fairness some nice people from round about did extend the hand of friendship to me via Twitter. Perhaps the marchers and I caught them on a bad day. If I were advising the marchers now, I would tell them to go to Wetherspoon, whatever their views on Brexit. Market Harborough, incidentally, voted to leave in contrast to its large urban neighbour Leicester where the majority voted to remain. A lot can change along those 14 miles of English road I had found. For the first time, I felt in a different part of England, an England I didn’t know and wasn’t at home in. I was reminded of a famous anecdote about the absent-minded writer G K Chesterton who once sent a telegraph to his wife: ‘Am at Market Harborough. Where should I be?’ To which she replied, ‘Home.’

  STAGE SEVENTEEN

  MARKET HARBOROUGH TO NORTHAMPTON

  24 October, 17 miles

  At the end of yesterday’s big match, the one I’d watched with the aggressive cheeseniks and forlorn vinophiles of Market Harborough, I’d spotted (along with a couple of million intrigued others) the new Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho whisper something in the ear of Chelsea boss Conte. A few minutes earlier, the latter had been visibly encouraging the crowd into making more noise at the end of their four– nil drubbing of United (drubbing, like adjudged, is one of those words only ever heard in a football context). Mourinho apparently said to him, ‘You shouldn’t whip them up like that at four nil. It’s humiliating. You should do that at one nil.’ Incredibly, Mourinho’s wounded feelings took up nearly as much space in the morning papers as reports of the ‘Jungle’ refugee camp in Calais which was cleared by French police last night amidst flames, tear gas and violence.

  Eighty years ago, the vexed question of refugee movements across a dangerous and fissile world was a global preoccupation too. British colonial powers in Kenya were dealing with a huge influx of Ethiopians as Mussolini waged modern war on a third-world country in an act of grandstanding machismo designed to distract from his incompetence domestically. Essentially, it was a conflict between modern weapons technology and men armed with spears, bows and antiquated rifles. The Ethiopians were soon overrun and Emperor Haile Selassie driven into exile as his countrymen fled into neighbouring countries.

  In Jaffa, rioting and clashes between Jews and Palestinians forced 6,000 people from their homes, many reduced to camping in public parks. In Oklahoma, drought across the dustbowl displaced thousands of poor Americans, events which John Steinbeck would soon write about in The Grapes of Wrath. Within months of the Jarrow march, 4,000 Basque children would arrive at Southampton docks fleeing the violence of the Spanish Civil War. They were housed at the rapidly built Stoneham Camp on land donated by a local farmer.

  As the horror of Nazi rule worsened and became more apparent, the first
Jewish refugees began to come to England. But as Louise London showed in her book Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948, the same reluctance and indifference shown by politicians and press now was prevalent at the time of the Jarrow march. The Liberal politician Viscount Samuel said, ‘out of that vast reservoir of misery and murder only a tiny trickle of escape was provided.’ The government feared the usual catalogue of problems, real or imagined, such as depriving the native population of jobs, and social unrest. Lord Rothermere’s titles were generally most hostile to the refugees. The Mail, one of whose more memorable 1936 headlines was ‘Hooray for the Blackshirts’, said, ‘the way stateless Jews are pouring in from every port in the country is becoming an outrage’. Eighty years on as I marched, the Sun was still giving Gary Lineker ‘a spanking’ for his support for refugees.

  I’ve left some kit behind in Gary’s old stamping ground of Leicester so this morning I double back the ten minutes on the train to pick them up before setting off for Northampton. (It’s both amazing and slightly dispiriting how slowly the miles go on foot, and what a distorted sense of distance trains, planes and automobiles give you). I get talking with a friendly young couple who were in Leicester last night watching a band. They’re only vaguely aware of the Jarrow march (‘Was there a song about it?’) and when I mention Market Harborough she pulls a little face and comments merely ‘Good charity shops’. Of today’s destination, Northampton, they tell me to look out for one of the oldest churches in Britain and the Otis Lift Tower.

  The couple came from Corby which is just down the road from here and home to the famous steelworks newly built when the marchers passed by. Ironically, it was partly the success of Corby that brought hardship to Jarrow. The plan for a new steelworks in Jarrow collapsed because competition was deliberately suppressed by the British Iron and Steel Federation to protect towns like Corby. Even worse, the BISF was part of an international cartel whose members included Germany, whose industrial strength was at this time still being propped up by some financiers and industrialists as a balance to Soviet might. All these factors conjoined to mean that in the summer before the march the Federation itself admitted, ‘it is considered very unlikely that the scheme (the proposed Jarrow steelworks) will be proceeded with’.

  I would be making my way to Northampton via the route of a defunct transport network where nature was slowly reclaiming the land from the technology of man. After a slightly confusing start with signage hidden in dense undergrowth around Britannia Walk and Scotland Road (where I ended up in a very surprised lady’s front garden), I finally found myself on the Brampton Valley Way, which heads arrow-straight across the 14 miles between Market Harborough and Northampton. The walk literature promises pubs, local attractions like Kelmarsh Hall, Brixworth Country Park and Lamport Steam Railway but most intriguingly of all, ‘two marvellously spooky tunnels’ – surely a phrase that no one who has read Dickens’ ‘The Signalman’ could possibly resist.

  Many of the trails like this that you find now across the British countryside owe their origins to the infamous Doctor Beeching ‘axe’. In 1963, in cahoots with a transport minister with commercial interests in road haulage, British Rail chairman Beeching began the process of closing a third of British branch lines, becoming a bona fide folk devil in the process. But the Northampton to Market Harborough line, built by George Stephenson’s nephew to ferry ironstone, survived remarkably until 1981. Then in 1993, it was opened again as what the council call ‘a linear park’. After only a few hundred yards Market Harborough is left behind and the path becomes a gentle climb through open country. It’s half term but even so, the way is quiet and unfrequented; the occasional family on bikes pass like a family of ducks gliding by, eyeing my enormous pack pityingly.

  After the bitter, biting evening in Market Harborough, today feels like spring. The mild afternoon is full of birdsong, hazy sunshine and far-off children’s laughter. I pass a small lake, and a lone fisherman raises a hand in greeting. I imagine his keep net, packed with fat carp and glistening tench and feel suffused with wellbeing at the simple pleasure of being out and alive and putting one foot in front of another on a country path in England. But then in quick succession, a man in upsettingly frank lycra aimed his bike at me, and soon after in the distance comes a sight that causes a small ripple of trepidation, like the rumble in the basses in the Jaws theme, like something worrying glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. A few hundred yards along the path, where the embankment narrows and the trees hunch over, is a small dark hole where the path disappears into blackness beneath the hillside.

  Kelmarsh is the first of two tunnels, the other being Ovenden, that will bring up short any walker on the Brampton Valley Path. They’re 322 yards and 462 yards respectively, and if you really don’t feel like the long, dark, slow trek along the dank and darkened first tunnel with its dripping walls, you can take a diversion that promises pleasantly, ‘Kelmarsh via woods and spinneys’. That, though, would add several miles to an already long day. So, loins girded, in I went for what seemed like a dripping, echoing eternity, stumbling occasionally, cursing regularly and trying to get the torch facility of my phone to project something more useful than a pale circle of milky light the size of my hand. Every hundred yards of so, a ventilation shaft soaring up above one’s head provides a pool of welcome sunlight. This though can be a mixed blessing. On YouTube I’d watched a solo walker bask in the shaft’s light and film it on his phone turning slowly around as he did to get a nice shot, and then not be sure which was forward and which was back, and whether he was progressing or retreating and would have to do the whole thing again. I don’t think you ever find out what happened to him. Unless you fall down, or get hit by an unlit cyclist, or perhaps snatched by a hideous formless creature lurking in the shadows, you will probably emerge from the tunnel unscathed, but it is certainly an eerie experience (or rather two) and the old adage about the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ will take on new and vivid meaning when you have watched the small disc of sunlight grow from a pinprick, promising the way back out into the very welcome fresh air and sparkling light of an October afternoon.

  Between the tunnels I’d passed a middle-aged couple on a bench eating their sandwiches, sipping from their flask and clearly recovering from either Kelmarsh or Ovenden (I forget which). It was she who’d suggested I use the torch facility on my phone, unaware that my particular device possessed a weaker wattage than an ailing glow worm. As was customary now, I asked them about the Jarrow march and received the now customary response; a vague recollection of some struggle or protest. ‘They came down the road, didn’t they, past here? Weren’t they coal miners? From Newcastle? I’m not clear as you can tell, but it was during the great Depression, wasn’t it? This line would have been working then though.’

  Though this is agricultural Britain, and its character ‘parson and squire’, heavier industry like those the Jarrow men knew had a presence here. The Midlands ironstone field stretched from Lincolnshire through Leicestershire, Rutland and Northamptonshire to Oxfordshire and the materials were moved from quarry to factories by many narrow-gauge railways like this one. The still and benign fields and pastures I’m now crossing, dotted with stiles and crossed with cow parsley hedgerows, would have once been a pitted and smoking industrial workshop. As the Nene Valley narrow gauge website has it, ‘It is now hard to envisage that the pleasant rolling countryside in the East Midlands has been host to opencast ironstone mining on such a grand scale.’ The quarries themselves are now nature reserves or landfill, or even suburban housing estates. Steel gave men work here for much longer than it did in Jarrow, but even here it disappeared as Britain abandoned its industries and began to lose its industrial culture.

  I leave the track at Draughton Crossing bound for Maidwell village, halfway between Market Harborough and Northampton, and where the marchers took a break in 1936. It’s deserted and silent; its residents all presumably hard at work at computers and counters in one of the above two towns. As it’s half t
erm, even the smart new school, built in 2000, according to its foundation stone, is shut up and quiet. There are pumpkins for sale in a neat garden but no one about to sell them. A phone rings unanswered in the rectory and the village has a newness and an unreality about it that’s queer. The Old Barn is nothing of the sort, rather a newbuild a rock star might live in. Despite this, the village apparently has a long history; it has nine listed buildings and the church boasts ‘interesting cupolas’, but as in Bunny, I get the feeling that I’m being watched by suspicious eyes behind Laura Ashley curtains and so I pass quickly through and head along the mile or so to the main A road. It’s been a good morning’s walking, but a long one, and I can feel a tiredness in my legs and even a little sunburn on my face. The map shows a pint glass symbol just where I’ll emerge, and I’m very much hoping that will mean a late lunch for me in a sun-dappled beer garden.

  It didn’t. A very apologetic young woman locking the door of the Stags Head tells me that if I’m prepared to wait for two hours, they’ll be open and serving food again. But I doubt that the Marie Celeste-ish Maidwell could keep me occupied that long so I dump myself and the pack on a bench dedicated to Bob Lilley (‘his favourite walk’) and write a couple of postcards. While I’m thinking through my next move, which may involve foraging for nuts and berries and weeing in a hedge, a passing van pulls over and stops in the layby.

  Kev and Jake of Windsor Windows of Northampton have been following my progress on Twitter as they’ve done their daily rounds and, knowing I’m behind schedule, hungry and tired, offer to help out with a lift or a mile or two to the outskirts of Northampton. I jump in and they prove to be fine company. Kev is a 6Music fan and listens to my shows. ‘This is that bloke,’ he says to Jake, the younger of the two and in his early twenties I’d guess.