This is not then a book about the Jarrow march as such, in the way that Matt Perry’s excellent aforementioned study is, or the powerful, evocative Jarrow March by Tom Pickard (out of print but findable). What follows here, and what I’m more interested in with this book, is where we have been since then and how we have got here. I’d like to know what the country looks like now from the roads, tracks, streets and riverbanks they walked, and to see the pews, pubs, cafés and halls they visited; a picture of now overlaid with a filter or gauze of 1936. If a journey of nearly a month can be said to be a snapshot, then it is that; a picture of a country with a long history, a volatile present and an uncertain future – vivid and real, if sometimes blurry and breaking out of the frame.
‘THE TOWN THAT WAS MURDERED’
You can tell a great deal about a place and a time by the names it gives to its tower blocks. In the Futurist architectural reverie of the 1960s, when designing the new estates was as much ‘civic art’ as ‘town planning’ and more about ‘cities in the sky’ than reeking stairwells and intermittent lighting, they were given titles as lofty as their elevated walkways.
In the opening shots of the 2011 alien invasion thriller Attack the Block, the names glimpsed on the map of the sink estate where the action takes place (Wyndham Tower, Huxley Court, Clarke Court, etc.) tell us that director Joe Cornish knows his classic British sci fi. The renaming of the Peckham tower block in Only Fools and Horses from Walter Raleigh to Nelson Mandela House cleverly reflects changing British cultural touchstones. This trend was parodied in the Judge Dredd comic books where tower blocks are named with desultory ordinariness after Enid Blyton, Ricardo Montalban, and Rowdy Yates of TV western Rawhide.
When I was a teenager, I hung out with two punk girls with vermilion hair who lived in one of the three 16-storey tower blocks that loomed over my council estate. These impressive edifices were called Dryden, Thackeray and Masefield House respectively and were clearly christened by a council apparatchik with eclectic taste in literature and a touching high-mindedness (in every sense). Similarly, Dublin’s heroin-ridden Fatima Mansions were named after a miraculous visitation of the Virgin Mary in rural Portugal. In the decaying concrete heart of Ordsall, Salford, stood the fabulously misnamed Orchards, comprising Apple, Peach and Pear Tree Court. These sardonic anomalies and juxtapositions were once common and many remain. Unless you live on a Shetland croft or in a thatched Cotswolds idyll, there will be a tower block somewhere in your town called Rembrandt Court, Coleridge House or Johann Sebastian Bach Gardens. It will be covered in crude drawings of genitalia and the lifts will be out of order.
In the centre of Jarrow, by the squat red brick town hall, stand two bulky, neatly kept, cream and red concrete tower blocks. These are small by the standards of my old estate but they still dominate the skyline as the shipyard cranes would once have done. One bears the name Ellen, the other Wilkinson. We will come back to why. But they stand almost in the centre of a tough, embattled town, the sort you find across the north of England, maybe the north of everywhere, maybe everywhere. It carries in its streets and its stones the enduring sense that it has taken hard blows in what was not a fair fight, and, whilst unbowed, is still bloody from the fray.
Some hard facts about a hard, defiant town then. Jarrow sits on the banks of the Tyne, watered by tributaries of the Don, nine miles west of Newcastle along the busy A1058 and A19, or seven stops of the Metro line. In the past, it boasted a nine-hole golf course, squeezed in between Hebburn Lakes and the slag heap, although it did not possess a single set of traffic lights until the late 1960s, when this modern flamboyance was installed at Carrick’s Corner. Even further back, the world’s oldest complete Bible, written in Latin and to be presented to Pope Gregory II, was produced at this monastery – ‘the Codex Amiatinus’, now under lock and key in Florence. Jarrow’s population was 43,431 at the 2010 census, over 97 per cent of which were white British. It is the least ethnically diverse area of Tyneside and its unemployment rates are significantly higher than its neighbours’. Jarrow is not just geographically distant from London (let alone Florence), it is financially, ethnically and culturally remote from the capital’s habits and ways of life and walking from one to the other would show me what Britain had in common and what divided it. Ellen Court and Wilkinson Court, ‘the Jarrow flats’, stand sentinel in the middle of the town at a flat intersection of two main roads. They look down on a Masonic lodge, the town hall, a typically British parade of charity shops and pizza outlets. They hint at no worse and no better than a thousand similar blocks across Britain and look rather smarter than many. Ironically, recent refurbishments were financed by the European Union. Jarrow will not be seeing money like that again any day soon, if ever.
There are other Ellen Wilkinson courts and houses around the country; in Poplar, Dagenham, Bethnal Green and Tower Hamlets for example. Across Britain there are girls’ schools named after her and university halls of residence. But here her memorial is most relevant, most rooted in place. Whenever anyone here in these neat ten storey blocks gives their address, they pay tribute to one of the most colourful, significant and enigmatic figures in post-war British politics, the woman who coined the two most memorable descriptions of Jarrow; ‘the most famous town in England’ and ‘the town that was murdered’.
‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson, as every biographical note including this one mentions, had fiery auburn hair and politics to match. Born into a poor family in Ardwick, Manchester in 1891, she was a bright and dynamic girl who became a socialist in her youth and a communist after the inspirational events of Russia in 1917. An active trade unionist and feminist, she entered parliament in 1924, one of only four women MPs at Westminster. Part of the National Government during the Second World War, she became Minister for Education in 1945 in Attlee’s Labour administration. Always plagued by ill health and bronchial problems, she died of an overdose of medication during the bitter, iron winter of 1947. The coroner declared it an accident but doubts have always swirled around the facts of her demise. She was worried about losing her post in a cabinet re-shuffle and possibly depressed at the end of an affair with Herbert Morrison, intriguingly a stalwart of the party’s right wing.
But Ellen Wilkinson is seared into the popular imagination because of her tenure as the MP for Jarrow and her strong involvement with the Jarrow march. Having become the town’s MP the year before, she symbolically led the march – albeit often dashing away to other engagements – and became an icon of it. If you’re looking for an insightful exploration of the background to the march and the political climate of the time, you can do no better than her little book The Town That Was Murdered. I have it in front of me; a faded red first edition from ‘The Left Book Club’ bearing the stern injunction ‘Not for Sale to The Public’. Wilkinson had a glittering second career as a journalist and her gift for the punchy phrase is evident from the off: ‘Jarrow’s first export was not battleships but Christianity’.
With this brilliant opening line, Wilkinson reminds us of what made the town famous before it became a byword for industrial decline. She’s referring to another of Jarrow’s famous old boys, in fact its original local boy made good, not Palmer the millionaire shipwright or any of the marchers but a writer called Bede, who came to the monastery of St Paul at Jarrow in AD 684 as a boy and long before anyone called him Venerable. ‘First among English scholars, first among English theologians, first among English historians, it is in the monk of Jarrow that English literature strikes its roots … he is the father of our national education.’
She goes on in her brisk entertaining style to describe the ebbing and flowing of different waves of capitalism and industrialisation on the spunky little town; often watched jealously by its large, overbearing neighbour Newcastle. She describes the coming and the going of the pits and mining life. She notes with a narrow, suspicious gaze the arrival of the ‘vain and vigorous’ Charles Mark Palmer the shipping magnate and the various moguls of steel. For Red Ellen, these men we
re not the admirable civic benefactors who now lord it paternalistically from statues and pedestals all over our towns, but avaricious fat cats for whom profit was all, even when they weren’t up to the job. ‘Business men denounce the very idea of planned socialism as inefficient and wasteful. But under capitalism, shipbuilding seems to be as wasteful as could be.’
Palmer’s shipyard gave the town work and a great and dirty deal of it between 1851 and 1933. But Sir Charles was no Titus Salt, no George Cadbury or Lord Lever. He gave his town little in the way of concert halls or public baths, no temperance bars, nurseries, libraries or clinics, no carillons playing merry tunes on Sundays in well-tended parks. He stretched to a tea stand that would sell them a hot drink while they queued for work at five-thirty on freezing winter mornings. Jarrow was no Saltaire, Bournville or Port Sunlight built on decent principles, nonconformist faith and a desire to do right by one’s fellow man. Here the religion was profit and Sir Charles’s god was Mammon.
Wilkinson’s verdict is damning:
There is a prevailing blackness about the neighbourhood. The houses are black, the ships are black, the sky is black, and if you go there for an hour or two, reader, you will be black … Sir Charles Palmer regarded it as no part of his duty to see that the conditions under which his workers had to live were either sanitary or tolerable.
Like many of his peers, Palmer made the task of making a living as hard as the men could stand. ‘Lying like a dockyard clock’ is a phrase you can still hear used by some old timers in the region, referring to those exploitative and unscrupulous owners who would keep the clocks slow to wring more labour out of the men.
Pretty bad even in the ‘good old days’, life was about to get appreciably worse for the working folk of Jarrow. By 1933, profits were down in the shipyards due to overproduction and cheap imports, and Palmer’s yard closed. When Jarrow’s one main industry was destroyed, in Wilkinson’s ringing phrase, the town was murdered. In an attempt to rein in the ‘excess capacity’ in British shipbuilding, 37 other yards were to suffer a similar fate. None though was left so damaged as Jarrow. In a harsh twist that was impressively badass even for big business and government, the shipyards were not only closed and dismantled; powerful vested interests then ‘salted the land’ in a manner that Hannibal and the Assyrians would have whistled approvingly at. Government and bosses colluded to set up a body called the NSS, the National Shipyards Security Ltd, to protect profits by closing and dismantling sacrificial yards like Palmers (the word ‘security’ here carries a certain black humour). The NSS, the government and the shipyard owners decreed that once yards like Palmers were closed, none could be established again there for forty years to keep ship production low and profitable nationwide. The earth was salted. Jarrow was murdered. (Eighteen months later, with war looming, there was a shipping shortage. The orders went to Belgian shipyards who had bought first-rate machinery from yards like Jarrow at knock down prices.)
Unemployment soared to 80 per cent. Houses were overcrowded and infested with vermin. To the misery of unemployment was added the humiliation and degradation of the Means Test, a harsh inquisition intended to determine whether the unemployed deserved any benefit. Government inspectors would come to the house armed with lists and notebooks, spying into the family’s material circumstances in the most prurient and invasive ways. Mothers were checked to see if they breastfed their babies; if they did, their meagre benefit was cut. If one member of a family worked the others received less, so families split up to avoid starvation. So much for the preservation of family values. G K Chesterton, no pinko by any stretch, wrote of it, ‘For the first time within mortal memory, the government and the nation has set out on a definite deliberate attempt to make the poor poorer.’ Forty years later, as a child in the seventies, watching Crown Court or The Cedar Tree with my Nan, any mention of the Means Test would make this reasonably genial old lady scowl and curse contemptuously. I shudder to think what she had seen as a girl.
The future Edward VIII had declared, shocked, that ‘something must be done’ when he saw the plight of the working classes in Wales and Tyneside. When Priestley visited Jarrow just before the march he saw a town ruined and a vision of urban hell on earth:
Wherever we went men were hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath. The men wore the masks of prisoners of war. A stranger from a distant civilisation, observing the condition of the place and its people would have arrived at once at the conclusion that Jarrow had deeply offended some celestial emperor of the island and was now being punished. He 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.
Decades later, Ritchie Calder, one of the journalists ‘embedded’ with the march, recalled the state of the town that they found. ‘In the story of Jarrow, we have the story of the face of hunger … you weren’t seeing it on a poster, you weren’t seeing it on the telly, you know, Biafra or the Congo or something like that. You were seeing the face of hunger in your street. Or even in your own mirror.’
Whatever your politics, it’s hard to conceive of a more perfect stitch-up and sell-out of a community than the one perpetrated in Jarrow in 1934. When a delegation of workers from the shell-shocked town met with the head of the board of trade, Walter Runciman (in Wilkinson’s words, ‘a figure of ice … apparently completely indifferent to the woes of others’) his response to their requests for aid was to coldly announce, ‘Jarrow must work out its own salvation’ – a remark described by historian Ronald Blyth as ‘the last straw in official cruelty’. Runciman’s chilly indifference and callous response ‘kindled the town’, according to Wilkinson.
In July 1936, a packed council meeting convened in the town hall at which Ellen Wilkinson, Mayor David Riley and councillors like Paddy Scullion all spoke. The town should ask again for government help, specifically in the form of a new steelworks, but this time the appeal should be backed up by a petition. Signatures should be collected from Jarrow and beyond. While the meeting debated what to do after this, an unknown voice in the crowded public gallery shouted, ‘Let’s march down with it.’ Within days, plans were afoot to do just that, to the acclaim of Jarrow and to the shrinking terror of the Labour Party, the Trade Unions and the socialist Establishment. The Jarrow march was on.
Hunger marches, as they were known, were very much in vogue in the 1930s. Communists, ex-servicemen, blind communists, blind ex-servicemen, strikers and the unemployed of Rotherham, Sheffield, Bolton and all points north, agricultural workers from East Anglia, all could be found criss-crossing the nation under various banners demanding various reforms and with varying success, i.e. usually none. Though support was immediate and widespread for Jarrow’s march to London, there were a few dissenting voices from within the working-class community, and perhaps for good reason. Councillor Dodds of Jarrow was one of many unconvinced about what merely marching could achieve:
I am not so ready as I was to support an ordinary march to London. I am willing enough to march, God knows, and there was a time when I would have suggested that we put the women and children on buses while the men of the town marched with the Council at their head. But now I think we should get down to London with a couple of bombs in our pockets. Oh Christ, yes, I am perfectly serious. We should go down there with bombs in our pockets. These people of Westminster have no use for us anyway. These people do not realise that there are people living in Jarrow today under conditions which a respectable farmer would not keep swine. Do not put any limits on your demonstration. Get down there. And I think we should go to the absolute extreme.
In more conciliatory mood, and with reference to the other political protests that had gripped Britain, David Riley later admitted that he felt that, ‘Hunger March would not be a very nice name to have and Crusade would be better. And of course we adopted the idea; called it a Crusade instead
of a march. At the time, there was quite a number of marches being held all over the country and they weren’t being too well received in many places.’
Riley was a decent and principled man but his words show how, right from its planning stages, the organisers of the Jarrow march were obsessed with public relations and fearful of offending or antagonising the media or Establishment. ‘Crusade’ also struck the right churchy note of piety and godliness. Perhaps it’s understandable that the marchers should have worried about how the Conservative Party and its press would receive them. In fact, they should have been more concerned and dismayed at how the Labour Party would react. Essentially, Labour washed their hands of the march, as they did its predecessors, panicky about possible infiltration by communists. The Trades Union Council actually issued a circular denouncing it. Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader, begged by Ellen Wilkinson to offer support, said wanly, ‘Ellen, why don’t you go and preach socialism, which is the only remedy for this?’ She called this bland response ‘sham sympathy’.
And so Jarrow marched, and stitched itself into the warp and weft of British history. Questions on the march or ‘crusade’ have been included in the British Citizenship Test and it remains a central module of the GCSE syllabus and the Learn English network. In Jarrow: Protest and Legend, Matt Perry cites some of the crazily varied array of items the march can be said to have inspired:
Long Road from Jarrow Page 3