The romance that I felt in the stands at the King Power stadium that Saturday afternoon, dissipated swiftly in February when eight months after the greatest achievement in club football, manager Claudio Ranieri was sacked by Leicester City’s billionaire Thai owners. These are the ones whose royal family we had dutifully clapped in October like the saps we are amidst some homily about respect and tradition. Fenwick’s in Leicester closed too, though the one in Newcastle where I bought gin, socks and a flat cap still thrives. The happy and hardworking Santaniello family of Bedford have appeared on the Hairy Bikers, cooking spaghetti bolognese and touring the Stewartby brickworks. Perhaps emboldened by our Twitter exchange, Michael Gove was granted an audience with the new US President. Rupert Murdoch sat in, just visible in the shadows, baleful as the Mekon.
Three-and-a-half weeks. Three hundred miles. Roaring arterial highways that arrowed to the horizon, B roads that snaked down the shallow tray of a valley; up ahead, the bulk of a city or the silence of trees; the growl of haulage, silent lanes under canopies of leaves, abandoned railway lines, village inns lighting up at four, market days, candlelit cathedrals, darkened tunnels, steamy restaurants, the bright lights of the fairground, blue remembered hills, angry men in bad pubs, limpid French impressionist music in intimate salons, vast flat fields haunted by rooks. Britain in 1936 was a land of beef paste sandwiches and drill halls. Now we are a nation of vaping and nail salons, pulled pork and salted caramel. Some things have returned though; old-fashioned barber shops and hot towel shaves, allotments and baking.
I walked from the top to the bottom and into the heart of England. I looked it in the eye from morning till night and I never grew tired of it. Like the marchers, I learned something from those long days, evenings and nights that no amount of TV news or opinion pieces or well-meant documentaries could have given me. I learned about England now, about England then, and about England’s secrets, its scraps and footnotes. I hope I have done it justice. Sometimes it baffled me, sometimes it irritated. But I came to know that, to quote that old maxim, yes, it is my country right or wrong. It seems to be wrong about something almost every day now, but I understand some of its discontent, it’s bristling dissatisfaction with how it has been ignored, patronised and marginalised.
When it is right, it is still cheery and industrious, generous and tough, patient and dependable, rugged and gentle, mysterious and fascinating, charming and funny. It is not yet become solely the ruddy faced, shouting, unpleasant enclave of This England magazine, Piers Morgan and Nigel Farage. No, it is still the England of the warm, lovely Santaniellos and Inderpal the earnest, decent young Sikh in Beeston. It’s the England of generous Mark and his little lad Sam in the stands at Leicester and kindly ladies like Lynn in the Bunyan Museum.
On leaving choral evensong at Ripon, after a few glasses of good Italian red, I took a turn around the town in the gathering gloom and found myself down by the bus station where I recognised two members of the congregation. They had seemed incongruous among the Barbours and tweeds and headscarves then; his raincoat too shabby and trousers too short, her coat too thin. He had pushed her out of the cathedral in a wheelchair, a worn plastic supermarket bag dangling from the arm. Now they were sheltering from fine drizzle under the plastic roof of the shelter. She was coughing violently and he was crouching to comfort her. They both peered at the illuminated yellow ticker that told them to ‘await further information’ about their bus home.
Seeing that couple, not young, not strong, ill-looking and sad in a chilly bus shelter as dusk began to fall, made me wonder; who is speaking for them? Who is fighting their corner, the weak and insecure and vulnerable? Who will make their lives better? Not bullies and narcissists like Farage or Trump for sure, nor Corbyn, scuttling in fear from every journalist’s question. Maybe it is no bad thing if that consensus has been shattered if that is what makes the comfortable of left and right easy in their superiority. Maybe it might make them wonder what the lives of others are really like, whether they like them or not.
That last full marcher Con Whalen said that the Jarrow march had made ‘not a ha’porth of difference’ to the town’s fortunes or its people and had been ‘a waste of time’. But, according to Tom Pickard in his book Jarrow, a Sir Charles Allison, a politician of the north east, was asked about the Depression and the Jarrow march in 1965. He said, ‘It’s not bloody well going to happen again. There is a feeling, yes, a feeling in the minds of those who have experienced it that it could happen again. But if it did, there would be an armed revolt. Men would not go in supplication to the lord. They would take what they wanted.’ Perhaps next time then, Geordie actually will go and burn them down.
Was 2016 like 1936? Will 2017 be like 1937? And so on and so on until disaster awaits a few years down the line. I saw and heard chilling echoes, not from the Jarrow march route but not too far away, that made me think. Domineering men telling lies, big lies, and snarling at the judges and journalists who try to hold them to account. Contempt for women. Contempt for decency. Banter instead of wit. Cruelty in place of compassion. The age of the troll and the snowflake, people reduced to stereotypes, and the newspapers once again denouncing ‘enemies of the people’ and printing their names and pictures. In 2016, for the first time for me, it was not glib chatter or student drivel to think that something very like fascism was arising again out of the depths of history, a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
Looking at the toxic venom and gainsaying between right and left today, you might despair. But don’t. In 1936, Mosley’s Fascists moved comfortably around the towns of England assisted by the police, championed by the press and tacitly supported by the aristocrats and royals. The Jarrow marchers, now fabled and romanticised, were spied on and bullied by the police, abandoned by the Labour Party and the TUC and mocked by the church. They were lied to and cheated and eventually ignored. It was ever thus. There may well always be people who lord it loudmouthed and self-satisfied: whether leering bullies or dreary puritans, over-entitled man-babies, privileged pub bores or ineffectual commissars, they are brothers under the skin, self-absorbed and impervious.
But they are not the best of us. The Jarrow men and Red Ellen were. Like her, like them, we are a mess of contradictions, a desperate, striving hotch-potch who are flawed and human and try our best to make the best of things. I’m not sure I want a nation entirely at ease with itself. We’re not altogether the peaceful and compliant land we appear. We’ve cut the heads off kings and taken axes to each other in the streets and pastures. We’ve done wicked things to ourselves and to others. So no, not a nation at ease with itself. Better a nation always arguing amongst itself, civilly but passionately and endlessly restless in brilliant, angry, loving, vital cities and hard, defiant little towns, in market squares in the long afternoons and empty fields at evening under a huge, darkening sky of clustering, darting swallows or teeming with starlings. And in the distance, out of the past, the ghostly clatter of boots coming again down the long English road.
FURTHER READING
Jarrow Protest and Legend, Matt Perry, University of Sunderland Press (2005)
Jarrow, Tom Pickard, Alison & Busby (1981)
The Thirties: An Intimate History, Juliet Gardiner, Harper (2011)
We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars, Martin Pugh, Vintage (2009)
The People, Selina Todd, John Murray (2015)
Britain in the 1930s, Andrew Thorpe, Historical Association (1992)
Britain in the 1930s, Noreen Branson and Margot Heinemann, Panther (1973)
THANK YOU …
… to the following generous and lovely people, largely in order of appearance:
Matt Perry
Tom Kelly
Joanne Hackett-Smith, all at Jarrow Council Fun Day Rowland at Opera North
Clare Hudson
Inderpal and all at the Gurdwara, Beeston
Nadia Shireen
Rowland at Opera North
Da
n Jackson
Ian Stringer
Lara Skinner and Foxes fans Mark and Sam Pausey Peter, Veda and Amanda at Chesterfield Museum Mansfield Museum
Kev and Jake at Windsor Windows
The Chuckle Brothers
Tracy Brabin and George
And everyone who kept me company and made valuable suggestions via my blog of the journey or social media.
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Quote from ‘Brexit is the only way the working class can change anything’, here, © Mckenzie/Guardian News & Media, used with kind permission.
First published by Ebury Press in 2017
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Long Road from Jarrow Page 36
