For days Ellen Wilkinson had been suffering from exhaustion and forced to convalesce. The men were publicly hugely supportive of her, but in private they worried that her insistence on leading the march was setting too slow a place. That was a particular concern today as this would be the longest leg of the whole march, 22 miles, and the day had dawned wet, murky and freezing. My day promised to be more clement if just as long.
Once en route, the villages fall away with the miles. Yardley Hastings (‘Just starting on Radio 4Extra, a classic edition of All Pals at the Parsonage from 1955 with Yardley Hastings as the short-sighted rector …’) has four entries in the Domesday Book as well as the new and superbly incongruous Belgian Fries outlet. The first I’d ever seen, it offered a range of exotic sauces from Andalouse to Samurai to Hannibal. Had there been world enough and time, rest assured I would have tried some in the interests of journalistic rigour, and found who knows what backstory of someone’s homesickness for the snacks of Antwerp or Ghent in commuter belt Bucks.
I cross into that county over the lazy, swirling river Ouse where sleepy swans dawdle beneath a bridge and the only sound is the rasp of carrion crows across flat, churned empty fields. There seems nothing but tilled acreage and scraps of woodland between me and the low, blue bar of the Chilterns.
Possibly the most significant thing to occur to the village of Lavendon since the war-torn mid 1600s might well have occurred 80 years ago today when the Jarrow march broke for lunch here. One of the very few pictures of the march on the road was taken here as the huge group, banners aloft, rounded the bend. I come around it myself and instantly recognise the spot. Just a little further on, on the wall of the church, I found the only plaque anywhere outside Jarrow commemorating the Crusade, quite a handsome thing too, erected by local unionists of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staff (ASTMS), Clive Jenkins’s famous old white collar union, now swallowed up into the Unite behemoth. Quite why this village rather than any other should mark an act of northern protest is not clear, but it was an excuse to pause and get a selfie, that new act of commemoration.
The miles between Lavendon and Bedford are a miserable, rough, ankle-turning trek in roadside ditches with merely the occasional pub or post office or bus shelter to break the monotony. Every pub is gearing up for Bonfire Night, ‘fun nights’ and ‘barbecues’ to commemorate a major attempted act of religious terrorism and regal assassination, its foiling by treachery and state forces and the subsequent torture and execution of those concerned. What could be more British? I revel for a while in the sheer delightfulness of Turvey with its water mill and abbey, where a district nurse waved to me as she got into her mini outside the Three Cranes. A Twitter correspondent by the name of Hazel told me that I would enter into Bedford along the Bromham Road. ‘My late mother watched the marchers from outside her home Windmill Lodge on this main route into town. She never forgot the courage and dignity of so many proud impoverished and exhausted men. Her harrowing description remains with me as does the awful irony of relentless social injustice still perpetuated by shameless men in power. Good luck with your march in their memory.’ I imagine that for the most part the marchers enjoyed their trek, its camaraderie and change from routine. But the days were long, tiring and hard, men got ill and they were concerned about their families left behind. Or maybe by now the harmonica band were just really getting on everyone’s nerves.
Listening to the Radio 5 Live news on my headphones as I rearranged my pack in Bromham, I heard a new definition of hardship anyway. The always newsworthy Jose Mourinho blamed his team’s recent poor form on him living in Manchester’s five star Lowry Hotel, which he said was ‘a disaster’. A sympathetic caller said he had lived in a hotel for two years and moaned that he had exhausted the restaurant menu in three weeks. I fought hard not to let glib, judgemental phrases like ‘first world problem’ swim into my head. We are living in the first world after all and unlikely to encounter any other kind of problem – cholera or drought, say – but I did think of the marchers bedding down on straw in drill halls and workhouses, and pressed on.
I was pleased when the road signs and the out-of-town hypermarkets began to promise an entry into Bedford. The marchers, with Ellen at their head again, were met by a Conservative Alderman and a local headteacher, H W Liddle – himself a man of the north east. He had persuaded the local Rotary Club to ‘adopt’ a blighted County Durham village called Eden Pit. Sixty schemes like this were set up across the prosperous south, voluntary acts of admirable civic kindness. Of course, there ought to have come state support or drastic reform, but I found myself wondering if we could count on such generosity and fellow feeling now in the land. Given the sour and bullying tone that had dominated discourse in 2016, I was far from sure.
I’d never been to Bedford before and knew little of what to expect. Inquiries about it would be met with a shrug or some vague reference to John Bunyan, pasties called Clangers or vans. Thirty-five minutes from London by commuter train, it’s the ‘capital’ of one of England’s smallest counties, but even a cursory half-hour of research on the village green in Turvey suggested there was more to Bedford than any of the above, and that the visit of the Jarrow men might be just a part of an old, strange parade of history.
‘Somewhere in England’. It’s an evocative phrase, pressed into service by many. It’s an album by George Harrison and a song by Al Stewart, an online adventure game, a play about the US Air Force bases in Britain and a hairdressers in Farnham. But however imprecise and nebulous ‘somewhere in England’ might sound, make no mistake, it’s Bedford. In 1942, the BBC evacuated from London and relocated here in great secrecy, and began broadcasting entertainment and propaganda from the Corn Exchange in the town. For the duration of the war, in these broadcasts, Bedford was referred to only as ‘somewhere in England’, a neat mixture of pragmatic secrecy and mythic symbolism.
Bedford housed the school where the Bletchley Park codebreakers were trained and the airfields from which Churchill wanted to ‘set Europe aflame’. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Glenn Miller came here to make radio shows. The Czech government in exile ran its official radio station from here and, in perhaps the town’s greatest act of wartime subterfuge and chutzpah (let’s use the Yiddish word, it feels appropriate), a multinational team based in the surrounding villages of Toddington, Aspley Guise and Woburn Sands created radio programmes like ‘Atlantiksender’ and ‘Gustav Siegfried Eins’, designed to convince German civilians that they were listening to a genuine German station, playing the latest German pop hits and American jazz outlawed by the Nazis, as well as giving misleading and contradictory news and instructions. They did this so well that Goebbels raged about them and at least one German U-boat surrendered as a result of Bedfordshire’s black propaganda.
There’s information about all this in various places in the town such as the excellent Higgins Museum and at Holy Trinity Church, which has stood in the centre of Bedford for a thousand years. The bustle of the town goes on around, but encircled by trees and choirs of thrushes and blackbirds it’s remarkably peaceful and a fine place to sip a decent coffee and watch Bedford go by. Dropping by a low green wooden hut adjacent to the churchyard to get my coffee, I was alerted to another strand of Bedford’s rich story.
The name La Piazza Café needn’t necessarily signify anything. Exotic, alluring, ersatz café names are commonplace in England, usually for a chain with its head office in Letchworth or Croydon or owned by a carbonated drinks giant out of Atlanta or Fort Lauderdale. But not La Piazza. Here, asking for your espresso interrupts a conversation between owner and a regular patron in quick fire Italian. A grazie will earn you a smiling prego or ciao bella and you can sip a strong, tiny cupful and nibble a biscotti while you take in the posters of AC Milan’s great side of the late eighties; Van Basten, Gullit and Baresi side by side with Bobby Moore lifting the World Cup. Libby Lionetti has been running the café here since that Milan heyday. He’s here at six every morning for Bedfor
d’s cappuccino and macchiato devotees. He was born in Bedford’s big maternity hospital but did two years’ national service in Italy, and returned twice yearly to Foggia. He and his family – recently featured as typical Italians in a TV ad for Aldi pizzas – are part of a fascinating Bedford story that began soon after Jarrow’s men has passed by here, coming as part of a new Europe rebuilding itself, and a story I would pick up later. First though, I wanted to check in with a son and daughter of Bedford, visionary nonconformists or troublesome zealots depending on your point of view, whose legacy lives on in buildings that face each other across staid and everyday Newnham Road.
Lynn, the lady who greets me at the door of the John Bunyan Museum, is small and twinkling and somewhere between 70 and 80 I’d say. She is wonderfully bright and nimble nonetheless, full of enthusiasm and energy and takes my arm only once at the top of a flight of steps that slowed me up too, especially after 20-or-so miles of Buckinghamshire asphalt. We’ve come upstairs to an exhibition about the life of Bedfordshire’s most famous former resident, much-beloved of some like this lady, who keep alive his most famous book and his spiritual mission at the centre of a global branch of Protestantism. Some earlier Bedfordians weren’t quite so keen on John and, perhaps with one eye on future tourism marketing opportunities, didn’t run him out of town but, in 1660, threw him in Bedford nick for what turned out to be a very long if productive sojourn.
‘I can show you around or you can wander at will,’ chirps my guide and I think I know that the right answer is the former as she leads me gently around the upstairs room. She indicates an impressively severe mannequin of a stern puritan. ‘The great man himself. He was over six foot, big for the time. Do you know his story? Born at Elstow just south of here, his father was a tinker, which meant he repaired pots and pans. John used to say he was born into poverty but he wasn’t really as his father owned his own cottage and could send John to school to learn how to read and write.’ There’s a facsimile of John’s cottage and home life. ‘A fire, so you could stew but not roast and these plates—’ and here a slightly pained expression crosses my guide’s features at the inexactitude, ‘—well, these are pewter but to be honest John wouldn’t have had these. You drop pewter, it bends. If it bends you have to have it repaired. John would have used wooden cups and plates I think. Drop wood, it bounces. Now these barrels … salt fish, possibly corn …’
We move slowly around in this delightful fashion and while there’s not room here to tell it all, highlights included Bunyan’s actual anvil. Like the windlass in Chesterfield, one gets a real charge from seeing an actual object – not a gilded treasure but a working tool – used physically by human hands, Bunyan’s hands, four-and-a-half centuries ago. There’s a violin that he made and a chair he sat on, much repaired. My guide points out on a map of Bedford the various local landmarks that made their way into The Pilgrim’s Progress, all still there, though in various states of ruin and disrepair, such as Houghton House, ‘the house beautiful’ at the top of Ampthill (‘the hill of difficulty’) near the marshy part of Elstow that Bunyan turned into ‘the slough of Despond’.
Joining the army at Newport Pagnell, Bunyan became a Roundhead. (‘People are now fed up with the king, you see, so they chopped his head off’ is Lynn’s admirably brisk summary of the English Civil War.) ‘John had been a bit of a lad in his youth, he swore, he played football on Sundays, he played tricks on neighbours. He was a thorough nuisance actually. But one time he was playing football on the green, he heard a voice saying, ‘Are you going to carry on like this, young man? Are you going to go to heaven or go to hell?’ and eventually, he thought he had nothing to lose so he started to go to St John’s church. The rectory’s still there, St John’s ambulance own it now, you can have a look in but you have to make arrangements.’
People come from all over the world to do just that. Bunyan went on to become one of the great voices of Protestantism with his sermons of ‘plain piety’ and force, which of course were fine while Oliver Cromwell was in charge but after the Restoration, the wilfully obtuse Puritan Bunyan was persona non grata in an England newly back in love with ritual and ceremony. Bunyan wrote the bulk of the great Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress whilst in prison for 12 years in Bedford.
‘The gaol was at the bottom of Mill Street,’ Lynn explains. The family were at the bottom of St Cuthbert’s Street and his blind daughter Mary would walk through the town every day to take him food to the gaol. She smuggled out his books and pamphlets which a printer in London was willing to take a chance and print. An awful lot of pamphlets. I think, and I say this with great affection, John was the sort of person who had something to say about everything.’ Bunyan stands thus revealed as a seventeenth century tabloid columnist forever manufacturing fake outrage and proto-Twitter storms about the irritating bendiness of pewter plates or The Book of Common Prayer.
The Pilgrim’s Progress is still one of the world’s most popular books in history with over 200 translations, making it second only to the Bible. Foreign editions are kept in a glass case here. At a quick glance I spotted Swedish, Afrikaans, Welsh, Indonesian, Hebrew, a Korean manga version and one in Dutch, the first language it was translated into. I’m not sure Bunyan would have been my sort of fellow with his dour piousness and cussed awkwardness, but finding out about him in such a charming way from gentle Bunyanite Lynn was lovely after the relentless drudgery of the road, with my own burden on my back, through underpasses of despond and flyovers of difficulty.
About a century and a half after Bunyan wrote his big seller, a woman called Joanna Southcott was working on her own, scorching religious text. This would prove much less popular, largely due to it being locked up in a sealed box for centuries and thus becoming the centre of one of the strangest of all the global cults. As I left the Bunyan Museum, the museum and headquarters of The Panacea Society was just across the pelican crossing in a comfortable suburban detached house on the other side of Newnham Road. Behind it, backing on to Albany Road, was the Garden of Eden. The actual Garden of Eden.
The lady on reception seems preoccupied in a jolly way. ‘It’s chaos here today I’m afraid! We’re all getting ready for the Children’s Book Festival tomorrow. But the museum’s open. Do you know much about the Panacea Society? Would you like to watch a video? It’s about eight minutes. It’s quite useful.’ In truth, neither an eight-minute video or the space here afforded can really do justice to the tale of Bedford’s Panacea Society. But here’s the bare bones of a bizarre British story.
The Panacea Society formed in Bedford in the 1920s. Mabel Barltrop and 12 female disciples were inspired by the teachings of aforementioned Devonian mystic Southcott who’d attracted some attention a century before with her apocalyptic visions and prediction of the coming of a new messiah, Shiloh. Barltrop adopted the name Octavia and believed, or at least announced herself to be the Shiloh messiah of Southcott’s prophecies. The community in Bedford grew and for several decades, they lived and worshipped in relative seclusion whilst acquiring disciples across the rest of Britain and its colonies. But the Panacea Society – so named for their belief in the universal healing properties of tap water infused with Octavia’s breath – gained national and international notoriety through their campaign for the Church of England to open the writings of Joanna Southcott.
Joanna had left a sealed wooden box of prophecies, usually known as Joanna Southcott’s Box, with the instruction that it be opened only at a time of national crisis, and then only in the presence of the 24 bishops of the Anglican church. This became an obsession of the Bedford Panacea community, attracting international publicity and no little mirth. The Southcott Sealed Box became for a while a cherished and silly meme of English life, appearing in cartoons about Churchill and Baldwin, newspaper ads for shoes and batteries and an early Monty Python sketch.
In 1927, a psychic researcher named Harry Price claimed that he’d come into possession of the famous box and arranged for it to be opened in the pre
sence of one reluctant Bishop. In it were a few irrelevant and random documents, a lottery ticket and a horse-pistol. Octavia and her Bedford community declared this box inauthentic and continued their campaign on billboards and national newspapers through the 1960s and 70s under the catchy, upbeat slogan, ‘War, disease, crime and banditry, distress of nations and perplexity will increase until the Bishops open Joanna Southcott’s box.’
But all the genteel daftness cast darker shadows. In America, rival Southcottian sects, claiming their own Shiloh messiahs, harboured sexually predatory male leaders, some of whom were jailed for sex with minors. At home, Octavia’s Panacea Society, formed in the dramatic, divisive decade before the Jarrow march, were nearer to Mosley than Ellen Wilkinson, implacably right-wing and brazenly inegalitarian. Class distinctions were rigidly observed in the community. Lower-class believers were accommodated as unpaid servants with no status and little time off. Octavia believed that the monarchy, capitalist big business and empire were instruments of God and that trade unions and even the meek Labour Party were in league with Satan. In 1934 however, the society’s confidence took something of a knock when Octavia died, never a good career move for an immortal daughter of God, and the community went into decline. By 1967, it numbered just 30 members and the last adherent, Ruth Klein, died in 2012. Small and marginal though it might have been, the Panacea Society was rich, owning £14million of properties in Bedford, which it was forced to sell when, no longer able to claim to be a religion, it became a charity. The museum is now run by this charitable trust and their remit is to sponsor academic research into the history and development of prophetic and millenarian movements and to support the work of groups concerned with poverty and health in the Bedford area.
Long Road from Jarrow Page 29
