Footnotes

by Peter Fiennes

  This question also bothered Jack Priestley, who was here in 1933, when there was an even more ferocious recession scouring the city and its shipyards. The centre looked ‘busy and quite prosperous’, he found. But Jack was also running a fever for the week he was here, and was drenching himself with a patent medicine, concocted by his doctor, mainly featuring Belladonna (from the deadly nightshade plant), which we now know should be taken sparingly, and certainly not with alcohol (Jack …), and this ‘more than usually disgusting bit of autobiography’ explains why things ‘looked very queer indeed and were a little larger and wilder’ than usual. Basically, Jack was tripping the entire time he was on Tyneside. He was also, being Jack, grumpily irritated by the Geordie accent (‘the most barbarous, monotonous and irritating twang … The constant “Ay-ee, yer b—” of the men’s talk and the never-ending “hinnying” of the women …’). Jack liked local accents, in theory, but he drew a line around the north-east, and that – along with the cold and the drugs – clouded his experiences. But it’s also true that once he’d seen what he’d come to see, and visited Gateshead and North and South Shields, and Jarrow and Hebburn, he never once felt sorry for himself again. Not because of the poverty – or not just – but because there is ‘something bracing about the Tyne’.

  The Tyne and Wear Metro system was opened by the Queen in 1981 (it was Britain’s first light railway system), but Beryl almost didn’t take it because there was no smoking allowed on the trains and not even – the horror – on the platforms. If it’s so efficient and modern, she moaned, why couldn’t they afford to put in some ashtrays and air filters? My days of addiction are once again safely behind me (I may have mentioned), so I’m taking the short journey on a half-full and sparkling train from Newcastle central station to Jarrow. We skirt Gateshead (‘the whole town appeared to have been carefully planned by an enemy of the human race,’ Jack bleared, to vast and enduring controversy once his book was published) and trundle through Felling and Hebburn. I am surprised to see (and I blame Jack for this, as do many others) that Hebburn in particular looks rather fetching on this fine December morning. There are horses browsing in fields, red berries gleaming on the trees and in the hedgerows, and conservatories glittering in trim back gardens under a low, bleached-yellow sun. We pass banks of allotments, vegetables thriving in the mud, Irish, English and even US flags flying from the tops of countless little sheds. No Unionists here. There’s a sign in their midst: ‘Under New Management’. Over and beyond, down by the Tyne, the cranes are leaning into another working day.

  Jack was in Jarrow only three years before the Jarrow March (or ‘Crusade’ as it was once known), when 200 local men set off to walk to London in October 1936, carrying 11,000 signatures pleading for help from the government. At the time, unemployment in the area was running at seventy percent. The only employer in town, Palmers Shipyard, had closed in 1934. Jack arrived just in time to see it lying idle, the surrounding area derelict. ‘Jarrow is dead’, wrote Jack, and ‘the whole town looked as though it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath.’ It was, he said, ‘even at its best, when everybody was working, a mean little conglomeration of narrow monotonous streets of stunted and ugly houses’. At the end of October 1936, when the marchers reached London after a month on the road, their local Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson, said that the town wasn’t just dead, it had been ‘murdered’ by bosses and government ministers. The petition was ignored, of course, but things did happen. After the Second World War, the Welfare State was born, its conception influenced, some said, by newsreel images of the Jarrow Crusaders. And almost forty years after that, Beryl found the town transformed, its shabby buildings razed to the ground, ‘wiping away buildings and traditions and values in the twinkling of an eye’. But who would have thought, she wondered, that after decades of upheaval, nothing would really have changed at all, amounting ‘in the end to no more than a modern version of that earlier, bleak Sabbath of a hole, with a shopping precinct and a dole-office called by another name … the grandchildren of its penniless generation supported by the state’.

  Well, Jack really must have seen Jarrow at its grim worst – and anyway he could blame his fever drugs – but I’m not sure what to say about Beryl. Jarrow today is a compact place of low-rise housing, big skies, plenty of space, solar panels on the roofs, business parks, warehouses and vans. There’s almost nothing dating back to the 1930s, other than the Town Hall, a huddle of larger houses near the centre of town and an old red-brick rectory, opposite a large car park that services the cut-price shops. Even if the rubble has gone, there’s not much money around, just a few people out shopping. When Jack was here, ‘there were men hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands’.

  I wander about and meet a postman, who shouts a cheery ‘good morning’, before pushing through a low white wicket gate and striding up a well-mown front garden with a handful of letters. There’s no one else to talk to. Unemployment levels are still higher here than the national average, but nothing like the catastrophic levels of the 1930s. Even so, I don’t know where everyone is. It’s just me and the seagulls as I wander around, checking out the Christmas decorations in the windows and the occasional statue in the gardens. All too soon, I’m at the edge of town, in a patchwork of streets named after the great poets: Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser.

  Sleep after Toil, Port after stormy Seas,

  Ease after War, Death after Life, does greatly please.

  It is true. The place feels numb. Hollowed out. Slowed down. At rest after the storm. But what do I know? The streets are eerie and there’s no one to talk to.

  Jarrow is looped by a larger road, enfolding a 20mph residential zone. In the east the street names become ecclesiastical (Priory Road, Canon Grove, Hope Street), reflecting the proximity of Jarrow Hall and the ruins of the monastery that was once the home of the Venerable Bede, the seventh-century monk, theologian and historian. So, because I’m starting to feel like a fraud, traipsing around Jarrow for an hour or three and expecting to find someone to interview or something of note to say, dropping in and breezing out like some pie-eyed day tripper, I walk to the Hall, following a trail of very small polished silver crosses in the pavement, and settle into the café where I lunch on curried parsnip soup and a sublime cheese scone in surroundings of elegant simplicity. Jarrow, eh? It is nothing like anything you would expect.

  It is said that Bede invented the footnote.** He was also the first person to describe the English people as a nation. I am very aware, sitting at my ease in this sumptuous café, in a house that would be more suited to a Jane Austen serialization, staring out of the windows at the Medieval Herb Garden, that I may have abandoned my tour of Jarrow town centre rather too quickly. Jack was attacked for his descriptions of Jarrow (and Gateshead, Hebburn, South Shields …), as was Beryl. The fact that they had both travelled from London to hand down their criticisms fuelled the resentment, even if Jack was from Bradford and Beryl a reluctant Liverpudlian. (And I am originally from the wooded badlands of the Kent–Sussex borders.) But I’m as certain as I can be that they described what they saw. Jarrow was scorched by Depression and Recession, and then abandoned. There was no Cadbury here: Charles Palmer seems to have had no thought or concern for the workers who built his ships. The housing was the cheapest that could be got away with. The only amenities were those the people provided for themselves. Jack didn’t think for a minute that the men and women of Jarrow were responsible for the hellhole they found themselves in. ‘A stranger from a distant civilization … would never believe us if we told him that in theory this town was as good as any other and that its inhabitants were not criminals but citizens with votes.’ Beryl blamed Mrs Thatcher for the sorry mess. And Jack reserved his fury for London – the City and Westminster and Fleet Street – where people traded in luxury, and had no idea where their money came from, or what it was like outside their few gilded square miles. And he raged at those who were urging a return to:

  ** This is a
joke I found on a sign near Jarrow Hall. Bede invented the footnote, we are told in a footnote. OK, it’s a rather niche joke, but it resonates merrily with the title of this book.

  sturdy Victorian individualism … I felt like calling back a few of these sturdy individualists simply to rub their noses in the nasty mess they had made. Who gave them leave to turn this island into their ashpit? They may or may not have left us their money, but they have certainly left us their muck.

  The three-mile walk from Jarrow to South Shields should be pleasant, once they stop hammering at the roads and pavements and rebuilding the underpasses. There’s a mix of new industry, or activity of some kind, and the mouldering detritus of the old. Early in my walk I pass tiny Jarrow Bridge, visible from the side of its newer replacement. It was built in the early eighteenth century and used by Johnson, perhaps, on his way back to London, and widened a hundred years later to accommodate the burgeoning industrial traffic. This was just after the opening ceremony for the Jarrow Colliery, when a crowd of 10,000 had watched an artillery display and the colliery’s owner had laid the foundation stones for a hospital, a school, a seminary for young girls and a ‘fever-house’. There must have been so much hope floating up into the clean air. The dark sluggish ooze I am now looking down at is the River Don. It is flowing quietly, I’m happy to report, perhaps enjoying a moment of pastoral bliss before it emerges into the chemical soup of the Tyne basin and off into our harried seas.

  The skies look huge in this southern loop of the Tyne, as it curves round to the mouth of the estuary. I roam across a dual carriageway, and then back again, looking for a pavement. The traffic is constant, set-faced men and women, alone in their cars. I am excited to see I have wandered into ‘Catherine Cookson Country’, or so it says on a decorative oval plaque, behind a wooden fence, just to the side of the blustery road, next to a low iron bridge, alone in a small island of litter and brambles and lacklustre pine trees. She was born nearby in 1906 – younger than Jack – and headed south to marry a Sussex schoolteacher, but most of her novels are set in the area, although (and I’m no expert) I have a feeling that any of her many avid fans, looking to recreate the northern world she conjured, would be bewildered by what they find here today, what with the lines of dirty orange traffic cones and temporary iron fencing and the rumble and wail of the lorries and the torn plastic bags clinging to the sides of the street lights. Later in the day I find myself reading her short poem, ‘Another Face of My Land’, with its evocation of the North’s ‘hidden valleys’, ‘deep lakes’, ‘mountain shadows’ and the ‘sheer clear light’ of the infinite skies, and I can understand why she left Sussex after a few years and returned home.***

  *** I could get used to these footnotes.

  I just thought I should add, for clarity, because of course some people are inclined to sneer at any author with vast sales, that I like this poem, even if her use of ‘homesteads’ is undeniably hokey.

  This short interlude on a grey dual carriageway brings me to South Shields, and things start to look up again. I’m in another area of low modern housing, with familiar displays of well-trimmed front lawns, but there’s more money here than in Jarrow. It feels like the edge of countryside, even though the port is just around the corner. I pass a string of young planted saplings, decorated with Christmas lights. There are dog walkers, hedgerows (and more deep red berries), a low winter sun and long shadows. A mother walks by, singing to her baby. There are gulls in the silvery blue air and, at the far end of a strip of grass, two magpies (joy!) hopping in unison down a narrow path towards a small park. And then more, even newer houses, prettily done (if only they’d thought to add some solar panels to the roofs), and before long I’m in the centre of South Shields on its busy but rumpled high street.

  I never make it to the beach and famous seaside resort, as I had planned (and it was huge in Jack’s day, maybe not so much in Beryl’s), because I become distracted by the South Shields Museum & Art Gallery. You’ll find it in an early Victorian building on the high street and on the day I visited (once I had torn myself away from the stuffed baby alligator and lion and monkey, and the old scale models of sailing ships, and the actual gibbet in which the wrong man was tarred and hanged, and the history of the local collieries – and the boats that served them – and pipes and bottles and toys and spoons and fossils and cases of joyous tat), I found, on the first floor, an exhibition about South Shields in the wars and in particular the role of women in the First World War.

  I can sympathize with Beryl (‘at the mention of the phrase “art gallery” my heart had sunk. I am sick to death of art’), even though she ended up having a marvellous time in the Jarrow museum and art gallery. Local museums are the best. And also, as Beryl said, there’s something very disturbing about photographs from the past. It is unsettling to see whole lives, entire eras, reduced to displays in a glass cabinet case (or a book, I’m starting to think). But the women on show here, in photographs, letters and mementoes, working in the factories and the fields, come bursting to life. There’s also a photo of Ferdinand Foch, the French general, talking to a large crowd in 1919, under a stone cross, when he said, with awful prescience: ‘This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.’ Jack would have read it and wept.

  I do wonder about our obsession with the wars of the first half of the twentieth century. If anything, it seems to be growing. I know we’ve recently had the centenary of the end of the First, but it won’t be long before the next cause for memorial comes along. I was born almost twenty years after the end of the Second World War, and yet my childhood was steeped in its imagery. Films, books, comics, jokes about Germans, television and radio, political speeches, churchyards and cenotaphs, fly-pasts, marches, burnished medals and moth-eaten uniforms. Somewhere in Britain there must have been people talking about it all the time – how to sell it, mostly, or plan the next shindig. Anyone who had actually been there was mute, as a rule. At least, that was the case with my own family.

  My father had been in the retreat from Burma (and never talked about it, or rather he did just once, although he did find me watching The Bridge on the River Kwai at Christmas one year – about halfway through – and he immediately stormed out of the room at the sight of all those well-fed, chirpy prisoners of war, whistling along the road. I tried to tell him that Alec Guinness had done a deal with the Jap commander and that earlier in the film the prisoners had all been malnourished, but he was too upset to hear. ‘It wasn’t like that’, is all he would say. ‘It wasn’t like that.’ I was thirteen and thought he didn’t understand Great Art). My uncle was one of those POWs – not working on the bridge, but in a camp in Palembang – and came home weighing six stone and never said a word. Another uncle was shot down over France and spent the war as a prisoner of the Germans (and returned emptier). My mother’s boyfriend was killed flying a Hurricane. So there is something good, I suppose, about the way our cultural lives are still filled with these wars, although once again it is all of us doing the talking, and not anyone who was actually there, fighting to survive.

  My grandfather was an army chaplain in Jack’s war, the first one, and preached at the Somme. In the second war he lived in a rectory in a tiny village in Rutland and tried to keep pace with the burials from the nearby RAF camp. Jack, meanwhile, had a starring role, broadcasting a series of Postscripts, his famous BBC radio speeches to which one-third of all British adults listened. He’d been brought in as an antidote to the German (Irish) propagandist, Lord Haw-Haw, whose broadcasts from Berlin were proving surprisingly popular with the British people, who were probably bored, or enjoying his absurd accent, but also eager for news of any kind at all. The government wanted someone who would pull in the crowds and Jack was a raging success, with his soothing Yorkshire style and robust patriotism and misty-eyed visits to the enemy-plane spotters in the Downs or his favourite old pie shop in Bradford (bombed, but still defiantly serving its famous pies).

  Jack was so popular that there’s a rumou
r Churchill became jealous, although I think more likely he bridled at Jack’s socialism (Jack had even managed to slip an approving mention of the Communist Manifesto into his 6 October 1940 broadcast). ‘Mr Priestley’s war aims are not my war aims,’ Churchill is said to have growled, and someone in his Cabinet took him at his word and got Jack pulled from the airwaves. There was an outcry, and Jack came back briefly, before he disappeared once again two months later, comparing Conservative Central Office to the Gestapo. In truth, Jack had already had enough, but it also seems to show, I’m sorry to say, that even then, when fighting a national war for survival against a brutal and murderous foreign enemy, a war that united the country in a way it had never been united before (and has never been since), even then our leaders were preoccupied with their other war: the eternal, shape-shifting, one-sided, unmentionable war between the people who own things and the people who have nothing. They were already looking ahead to what would come next, once the war was over, even before they knew it could be won, and they didn’t want it to be someone like Jack who provided the answers.

  Well, maybe. Except in 1933, and I’m pretty sure for the rest of his life, even with his wild talk about the Gestapo, that’s not entirely the way Jack saw it. He had made a friend in Gateshead, a local communist called Bob, who took him on a tour of the town, and although Jack shared his rage at the destitution and the awful waste, he was never one to join a party: ‘The world he [Bob] lives in is not the sad muddle that most of us have begun to recognise, but is a mysterious and melodramatic place of vast sinister conspiracies, in which capitalists and bosses and officials plot together to trick him and his mates.’ It’s the old question, still unanswered. Conspiracy? Or cock-up? Jack left it hanging. ‘I shall not join Bob’s party yet; but I wish I had a party fit for him to join.’