Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  Nonconformism also made towns like Darlington rich. Prohibited from entering the military, church or university by the powers that be, Quakers in England threw themselves into business and commerce, albeit with a caring and positive attitude to their workforce that set them apart from much of capitalist enterprise. Quaker family businesses created some of our best loved brands, brands redolent of Englishness itself; confectioners like Rowntree, Cadbury and Fry’s, Clarks the shoemakers, banks such as Barclays and Lloyds. And in Darlington, Quaker industrialists and bankers like Jonathan Backhouse and Edward Pease supported Stephenson in the creation of the modern railways and a world transport revolution.

  Making a TV film about Quakerism a couple of years back, I attended a meeting at the Friends House on the Furness Peninsula that is George Fox’s old haunt and the crucible of Quakerism worldwide. Quaker meetings are not like church services; there’s no leader, no palaver, no incense or droning, no ‘vast moth eaten brocade’. Attendees sit in silence until someone feels moved to speak, and if no one does, that’s fine. At mine, some 25 minutes of silence in, a man chirped up with a fairly anodyne remark about world peace and that was it for the whole hour. The film crew said they found it uncomfortable. I thought it was the most relaxing and nourishing hour I’d had in years. And I enjoyed my second visit to a Quaker House here in Darlington even more, especially as they were playing ‘Brick House’ by the Commodores thunderously loud when I arrived and someone speedily handed me a 7.6 per cent strength New World IPA.

  I am indebted to Twitter correspondent Judith Sykes who led a chorus of similar voices in steering me to The Quaker House, Darlington which, as you may have guessed, is these days a pub. In fact, one of the finest pubs I’ve ever set foot in, and as you may have guessed yet again, there’ve been a few. It’s tucked away in the Mechanics Yard, one of the maze of little alleys and ginnels that bisect the town. When Google maps proved wanting, I just let myself be lured by the throb and clamour of music.

  ‘Brick House’ by the Commodores was quickly followed by ‘Ace of Spades’ followed by the Isley Brothers’ ‘Behind a Painted Smile’, to which most of the glamorous, beaming female bar staff and their adoring clientele cut various kinds of rug and threw a range of alluring shapes. It is hard to say just what the pub’s chief selling point is, be it the staff, the beer, the live music, the attitude or the home-made onion bhajis. It is even harder to say after a few pints of the 7.6 strength New World IPA. But let us consider them one by one.

  Shelley has run the pub for three years and worked here for seven. She heads a team who clearly love their pub and their job. Tonight the music is recorded rather than live – I have no problem with this at all I should say – and is played by DJ Rob who’s seated at the ‘wheels of steel’ in a rather cramped and ungainly fashion in a corner of the bar as one leg is encased in plaster (‘Don’t ask’), jutting out at an angle designed for a sitcom mishap. However, this in no way affects his performance this evening. The eclectic opening musical salvo is followed by a selection of infectious northern soul tunes that coax some hard-looking middle-aged blokes in Ben Sherman and Farrah on to the postage stamp of a dance floor. The looks of rapture worn by men who’ve spent lives doing tough jobs in tough towns, whilst dancing to songs of unrequited love, devotion and heartbreak, is one of the many things I love about soul music and soul fans.

  It’s Friday night and this is the beginning of a weekend of gigs across the country (I had no idea until Shelley and Rob told me) called WSO or We Shall Overcome and designed to raise awareness and money for charitable causes all centred around the notion of ‘anti-austerity’. ‘Austerity’ and ‘austere’ used to be words I liked. I applied them to the bleak beauty of upland moors and the poetry of R S Thomas. I hadn’t realised that ‘austerity’ apparently means closing libraries and stopping vulnerable people’s benefits. The staff at the Quaker House, in keeping with the traditions of their name, are amongst those generous, decent souls not accepting that the weak should suffer most when times are hard, especially when little of it is their fault.

  ‘This is our second WSO anti-austerity weekend,’ explains Shelley. ‘There are 260 WSO gigs going on across the country this weekend but there has been no coverage in the press. Help spread the word. We want food for the food banks, sleeping bags for the homeless. Darlington has been massively affected by “austerity”. We’re a working-class town and the cuts have hit us hard. People simply not capable of work are being told they have to.’ Here is another quietly smouldering impetus for Brexit that many commentators have either failed to notice or chosen to ignore: after the economic crisis of 2008, one largely brought about by the wickedness and greed of bankers, it has been ordinary people who have borne the cost, in reduced services and savage cuts. Rightly or wrongly, the EU is seen as aligned to that protected cabal of affluent and seemingly untouchable financiers. Brexit was an attempt, however clumsy and misguided, to land a punch on them.

  Battling against the joyous racket of Frank Wilson’s ‘Do I Love You’ (if you’ve got one on the Soul label, congrats, it’s worth about 25 grand), I chat with a clutch of gregarious regulars. Marty’s been drinking here for 17 years and has missed just six live bands in all that time. I’d heard that Darlington was becoming a boom town, with some people commuting to London. ‘A boom town?’ He takes a thoughtful sip. ‘Well, there are now 12 pubs in the city centre serving real ale,’ he says, this clearly being Marty’s quality of life index. Francis is a beaming Indian man who is clearly loved by all. ‘I am Francis! I am the Curry King! I ran a restaurant in Darlington for many years. I’m 72 years old and I’ve been here 45 years. In 1972 I came to run a building company, then I did a job for a restaurant and he asked me to come and partner him. When someone first say you should go to Quaker House I say, ‘Oh no, I’m not religious,’ but then I found out it is a pub. And they soon converted me! I have embraced it well! Now it is my religion!’

  Francis’ long squealing laugh at this is ridiculously infectious, especially if someone seems to be continually filling your glass of 7.6 strength New World IPA. ‘I’m retired now but I always come and hand out onion bhajis all over pub. For free of course! And if they want curry I cook curry. For nothing. Everybody enjoys it! This is a great pub! This is a great town!’ And through a warm enveloping, caressing fog of loud music, strong beer and aromatic bhaji, I hear myself agreeing, woozily but heartily, as the evening slips gently away from me.

  STAGE FOUR

  DARLINGTON TO NORTHALLERTON

  8 October, 16 miles

  I wake, much later than intended, with a red rubber band emblazoned We Shall Overcome on my wrist and a carefully wrapped but now damply flaccid onion bhaji on the bedside table. Gifts from the previous night; I smile at the foggy memory. It turns out though that smiling hurts my head so I assume an expression of dazed blankness – which isn’t hard – as I proceed with my preparations for embarkation on day four.

  After about an hour under a shower as volcanic as the clanking pipes of my odd hotel can muster, I am ready to leave. I spread my OS Landranger 34 on the floral duvet. Today will take me into my third county of the walk. Yorkshire, or more specifically North Yorkshire, since despite a shared, uniquely Yorkshire cast of mind – shyness, modesty, a certain easy-going frivolousness – I consider the Ridings of this big county to have subtly different temperaments.

  Northallerton is North Yorkshire’s county town and it’s my destination today. I’ll head loosely south following the new A road, crossing the Tees at Croft and then down towards Great Smeaton where the marchers rested a while and Con Shiels Snr and Cuddy Errington rustled up another al fresco Irish Stew. Before my tracing finger gets this far south though, it passes through several villages of North Yorkshire that set me off playing the game that’s amused me on many a long car journey; spotting any English villages or hamlets that could believably be the names of English supporting film actors of the 1940s and 50s. I will pass by many today and they are always a deli
ght; Hutton Bonville, Lazonby Grange, Appleton Wiske. (‘And now on ITV 4, a Rank Organisation classic from 1948, The Vainglorious Heart, starring Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave and Appleton Fiske as Group Captain ‘Sniffer’ Daniels).’

  This nostalgic reverie of a classier, more courteous age of stiff upper lips and perfect manners is abruptly curtailed by a quick dip into the morning’s papers over tea and toast beneath the clock tower. The Republican US Presidential nominee Donald Trump, by his every utterance further revealing himself an odious human cocktail of self-regard and idiocy, has apologised – albeit in a graceless, insincere manner – for some vile and coarse remarks about women. I won’t repeat them here, you will surely recall them. With the blustering disdain typical of his kind of man, he’s dismissed them as ‘locker room’ chatter, as some British men seek to excuse their nastiness as ‘banter’ or, worse, ‘bantz’. Many commentators of a liberal bent have sought to sum up Trump’s essential nature but none so succinctly as Alan Bennett who has called him ‘a lying, bellicose vulgarian’. This has just the right blend I think of elegance and scorn. Watching Darlington go quietly about its Saturday morning business of bakeries and newspapers, it is baffling and more than a little terrifying that Trump could conceivably be the next president of the USA and thus the leader of the free world. Surely not, one’s rational self thinks, but then one remembers that alongside the brilliance, vigour, sophistication and dynamism of Americans is a corresponding trait of sometimes behaving like overgrown and wilful children.

  America was also about to go to the polls back in October 1936 as the Jarrow men marched south. The Great Depression was entering its eighth year and this giant of a country was still on its knees. But Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, a progressive programme of relief and social security, had inspired the country, giving it hope and even a kind of unity that was reflected at the polls. The election, held just as the Jarrow Crusade arrived at the gates of their own political capital in Westminster, proved to be the most one-sided in US history: a landslide in which only Maine and Vermont didn’t go with FDR. It’s staggering that the American political system can have gone from fostering FDR to Donald Trump in 80 years, but then it’s just as difficult to conceive that it’s gone from Barack Obama to Trump in a matter of months.

  However, as FDR won that pivotal election, Ellen Wilkinson, the Jarrow men and the British political class were looking not to events in America but Europe. Russia’s Communist regime and its consolidation of power divided opinion here amongst the intelligentsia. From Spain, stories of fascist outrages committed by Franco and his army against their own people were beginning to emerge. Also on the agenda (literally) was the Middle East. Wilkinson was still in Edinburgh where she spoke to the Labour Conference on the subject of the fraught Arab–Israeli relations. There was a general strike in Palestine which the conference failed even to mention, let alone support. Wilkinson attacked this timidity. She then went on to excoriate the party’s line in instructing local Labour Party branches not to support Jarrow and other hunger marches on the grounds that communists were involved. She openly mocked the TUC General Secretary saying, ‘When Sir Walter Citrine gets to the Pearly Gates, St Peter will be able to reassure him that there are no communists inside.’ In retaliation, Labour apparatchik Lucy Middleton said that Wilkinson had sent ‘hungry and ill-clad men on a march to London’. This was a downright lie in every regard that angered the marchers greatly.

  As the marchers passed along the lanes between Darlington and Northallerton, locals from the surrounding villages came to meet them with baskets of apples and pears. Brompton is as lovely as I had been told. It’s early on a Saturday afternoon and there’s just the low murmur of occasional traffic as a van, saloon or country bus pass the big triangular village green overlooked by a couple of attractive pubs, the Crown and the Three Horseshoes. St Thomas’ church has stood on this green for a thousand years. Brompton is one of those quietly enduring English villages, like Adam Thorpe’s fictional Ulverton, that offers a compacted nugget of the English story in miniature and microcosm through waves of history; Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Civil War, Enclosures, Industrialisation, Mills, Suburbanisation.

  A sign erected by the Brompton Heritage Society nearby promises two alluring delights; the Linen Workers Memorial Seat and the Anglo–Danish Hogback Stones. The latter sounds to me like a UK–Scandinavian tribute to Jagger and Richards but are apparently a historic artefact that ‘draws visitors from all over the world’. This visitor from Wigan via Jarrow couldn’t get in, sadly, as the church was locked but the elusive stones and the Linen Workers Memorial Seat will always remain a brief and tantalising memory of my Sunday sojourn in Brompton. (The stones, by the way, are remarkable examples of Viking settler sculpture that are apparently well worth seeing. But pick the right day.)

  On the outskirts of Northallerton, a plum-coloured vintage car passes me sounding – from the spluttering and wheezing of its antique engine – to be in a spot of bother. It’s a Vauxhall of Luton (a town which awaits me further down the long road), registration DS89 34 and made in 1928 and so very likely to have been on the road, maybe this road, when the marchers passed by. ‘Nice car,’ I shout as the driver pulls up aslant the roadside, gets out and disappears under the bonnet. ‘Can I have a word with you about it?’

  ‘Now isn’t really a good time,’ comes a disembodied voice accompanied by a furious percussive burst of hammering, some ominous clanks and the occasional vivid swear word. ‘Grand car that,’ remarks a stout Yorkshire fellow in a flat cap passing by slowly and regally on a mobility scooter. ‘Worth more than these modern ones,’ he states solemnly. Not at the moment, I think, as I cross the road into the centre of Northallerton.

  By 1936, the car was king of the road. Horse-drawn carriages had practically disappeared from our streets, confined to the odd brewery wagon or coal cart. Trams, once popular and mooted as the transport of the future, had been largely abandoned; a trend that would be successfully if expensively reversed in the 1990s. There was a tragic human cost of the new ubiquity of the motor car though. The powerful road lobby were keen to assert the primacy of the car over pedestrians. Under pressure from the AA and the RAC, the government had abolished the 20 mph speed limit and there was a huge subsequent rise in road deaths (The Listener claimed that more people were killed on the roads in the first two years of the 1930s than in the entire Napoleonic wars). In response, Tory MP and ‘colourful’ character Colonel Moore-Brabazon huffed, ‘What is the point of such concern over 7,000 road deaths a year? Over 6,000 people commit suicide a year and no one makes a fuss about that.’

  Despite walking down busy roads for the most part, none of the marchers fell foul of a speeding motorist or lumbering lorry, although presumably Colonel Moore-Brabazon would have shed no tears if they had. It seems the spirit of Top Gear was already flourishing in Britain in the thirties.

  In Northallerton, Rosie, Ruth and John, here on a shopping trip from nearby Stokesley, have been watching the car’s erratic progress too and are waiting for me at the pelican crossing. ‘Is he having some trouble? Do you think he should get a new one? You can get a Ford Focus as a runabout very reasonable on finance in Northallerton.’ None of the trio has ever heard of the Jarrow march but all are warmly enthusiastic about Northallerton. ‘It’s a lovely place. You’ll have a fine time. Plenty of nice pubs up those little streets.’

  Those little streets radiate in a series of yards off a grand central boulevard. In the heyday of coaching and droving, this street would have thronged with traders coming down from Northumbria and Scotland. There were four annual fairs a year where you could sell your mother’s prize cattle for magic beans and get a thick ear when you went home, or celebrate driving that hard bargain on a crate of cauliflower in one of the four inns along this main street. They’re all still here though the names might have changed and all are busy on this fine market day. My room is at the Golden Lion where, under my window as I go through my unpacking ritual, I he
ar a broad Yorkshire voice attempting to lure the ladies of Northallerton to part with their hard-earned brass. Never an easy task in Yorkshire.

  ‘Eight bunches of bananas, all for a pound, sweet juicy strawberries, luscious pineapples,’ and from further down the street, ‘Chinese spare ribs, lamb chops, twenty pounds for all them lamb chops, missus, gammon, bacon joints, make a lovely Sunday dinner, love.’

  This is the prime time for bargain hunters as we’re approaching the end of the long market day. The stalls are packing up, the trestle tables are being folded and the big white vans loaded and I am watching the clock for a very good reason. My home town rugby team Wigan Warriors are playing in the Grand Final of the Rugby Super League, essentially the highlight of that sport’s year. Whoever wins this can rightly claim to be the best team in the land, or rather lands, since in another modern development – along with words like ‘Warriors’ and ‘Super Leagues’ and ‘Grand Finals’ – French and Spanish teams now take part as well. The match kicks off soon and I know that on a Saturday in the football season and in the posher ‘county’ end of Yorkshire where they hunt, shoot, fish and play a different (inferior) kind of ‘rugger’, I will have my work cut out finding a pub that has the game on. But I have a plan. I will adjourn to a curry house – with a kindly and obliging maitre d’ I hope – and, in return for a guaranteed hefty spend at a corner table for one, will hop on to their wifi network. Then, whilst working my way through a lamb dhansak, I’ll watch the match on my iPad which will be propped against the first of several pints of lager. It is a plan almost beautiful in its elegance and simplicity.