Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  So after I’d checked into my Leeds hotel, I did what any modern person would do with this righteous anger. I tweeted about it. I fired off a raging 100 characters or so condemning Michael Gove’s philistinism. Then I thought nothing more of it. Instead, I took to social media again to ask for suggestions of something artistic or cultural I could do in Leeds that evening. I was determined that my Jarrow march, and this book, would show that ‘ordinary’ working people and their kids do appreciate art and culture and that any healthy nation provides the tools for the enjoyment of it.

  The cultural delights on offer in Leeds on that one October night were many and varied. Steve Howe, the guitarist of prog rockers Yes, was playing an intimate acoustic set at the lovely old City Varieties Theatre. French electronic legend Jean Michel Jarre was at the big new arena in the city. At the theatre there was a play about the Brontës and a revival of the classic twohander Sleuth, from which Morrissey pinched some of his best lines like, ‘A jumped up pantry boy who never knew his place’.

  After some sifting, I narrowed it down to two events which in their different ways seemed unmissable. At the old Yorkshire TV building, there was An Evening with the Chuckle Brothers, Paul and Barry, whilst at the Howard Assembly Room in the Opera House, there was a recital of early twentieth century French piano music. Now, I have a lot of time for the Chuckle Brothers; I’ve always enjoyed the simple comedic elegance of their ‘to me, to you’ exchanges. Also, at an awards ceremony ‘after show’, I once found myself dancing with the moustachioed siblings and the model Sophie Dahl on a podium in a London nightclub, still possibly the most glamorous few minutes of my life. But the Debussy piano preludes, which would form part of the piano recital, have a very special place in my heart. Two scratchy vinyl albums of them in a battered box set from Wigan Library were my introduction into classical music and these haunting, limpid, sensual pieces still make my head swim. I found the invitation tweet from Rowland at Opera North and hit the DM button to message him.

  In the meantime, I took to the streets of Leeds to soak up its brisk vibe of brass and bravado. Leeds established itself in the late 1800s as the global capital of the wool trade. Unlike some of their kind though, the civic fathers spent their money on art, learning and fine buildings for the Leodensians as assiduously as they lined their own pockets. Whether you come via Westgate or The Headrow, down Calverley Street or up Park Row, all roads in Leeds lead eventually to its Montmartre, its Buckingham Palace, its Kremlin. The city’s fabulously imposing town hall was described by historian Asa Briggs as ‘a magnificent case study in Victorian civic pride’. Architecture Today called it ‘the epitome of northern civic bombast’, which sounds altogether more snidey and grudging and perhaps a little jealous.

  Bombastic or magnificent, Leeds town hall welcomed the Jarrow marchers with open arms of municipal and architectural splendour. Not till they got to London and the Palace of Westminster would a building this grand open its doors to them again, and the welcome there would be ambivalent, unsatisfying and disingenuous. Leeds had no such qualms. They were treated to a reception and a slap-up feed in the hall’s crypt with uniformed staff asking solicitously, ‘beer or tea, Sir?’ By most accounts, it was the finest night of the whole march, lingering long in the marchers’ memories. Bob Maughan had worked for six months in the ten years up to October 1936. Sixty years on, he remembered their night in Leeds as, ‘A bit of a holiday, a grand night. Roast beef … Yorkshire pudding … a bottle of pale ale … we were well looked after.’ Even Paddy the dog was served his dinner in a silver tureen.

  All of this was paid for by a local Tory grandee with the blessing of the Conservative council. They even invited along officials of Leeds Trade Union council to tuck in. Quite why they did this might seem baffling. But I’d guess it was to ‘show up’ the lily-livered nature of the Labour Party’s attitude to the march and, even more importantly, a cussed demonstration of civic pride and independence. Whatever the Tories of Westminster may have thought, the Tories of Leeds were their own men and women (though sadly mainly men).

  Flanking the grand doors of the town hall are a pride of stone lions. Designed by sculptor William Day Keyworth, local legend has it that, if the town hall clock should ever strike 13, time will stand still, the people of Leeds will freeze and the lions will come to life and silently stalk the streets of the city. Call me a purist in these matters but as the lions have only been there since 1867 I baulk at that term ‘legend’, as I do like my folklore to at least predate, say, fridges. But if you do fancy a bit of magic, the lions will talk to you, fairly amiably, if you download the app, scan the code into your mobile phone and put your headphones on. (The voices sounded suspiciously like Brian Blessed to me.)

  With only the slightest hankering for the Chuckle Brothers across town, I negotiate Leeds’s early-evening throng on New Briggate and arrive at my seat in the beautifully restored Howard Assembly Room, Opera North’s chamber space for Steven Osborne’s piano recital. Tonight’s programme is of piano works by Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc, all of whom had written masterpieces and established their enduring reputations by the time of the Jarrow march. Debussy had died two decades before, Ravel would die the year later, Poulenc in 1963. None of those names would have been known to the Jarrow men, not merely because their class or education would have kept them in ignorance, but simply because of a widespread suspicion against ‘modern’ music that still persists into our era. Back in the 1930s, even when enlightened ideas like subscription concerts or the Proms sought to bring classical music to the ‘masses’, it would inevitably be the established repertoire of various long-dead Europeans.

  In the year of the Jarrow march several staples of the modern repertoire were being composed or premiered. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 3, several early pieces by the young Benjamin Britten. Alban Berg premiered his darkly brilliant Violin Concerto, still the most famous and popular piece from the ‘difficult’ serialist school. Perhaps most relevant, Paul Hindemith composed his Trauermusik, a plangent requiem for King George written in the single day after his death. The death of the king was a deeply felt personal human sadness that would then usher in a national crisis as the Jarrow men marched toward London.

  Hearing the Debussy preludes and short pieces brings back the same thrill that I felt when I played those scratched and much borrowed editions from Wigan Library. The shivery, spectral washes of Footprints in the Snow and The Drowned Cathedral, the kooky wit of Golliwog’s Cakewalk, the sheer loveliness of Claire de Lune and The Girl with the Flaxen Hair. My love of classical music was fostered not by my parents or through buying records (I couldn’t have afforded them) but through Wigan Library, Radio 3 and the music department of Edge Hill University. Thus, like so many other joys in my life I have the state to thank for it. Or the Nanny State, as its detractors have it. In my experience, however, the people who sneer at the nanny state are usually people who had nannies.

  Steven Osborne’s performance is brilliant, played from memory with no sheet music and with most pieces prefaced by a little illuminating introduction putting them in context and pointing out things to listen out for. This should be standard procedure at all classical concerts; it’s sheer snobbery not to do so. But for all Steven’s fabulous playing it is his remarks after the interval when introducing the second half that stick in the mind. (Earlier, I had mentioned to Rowland and my friends at Opera North that I had chosen this event from a range of delights on offer in Leeds that night.)

  ‘Thank you all for coming this evening. I hope you’ve enjoyed the music so far. In a moment, I’d like to carry on with Ravel’s beautiful Menuet Antique but before that, it’s come to my knowledge that there’s a gentleman in the audience who had to make the difficult decision whether to come to hear me play or watch the Chuckle Brothers. Well, I can only hope you feel you’ve made the right decision, sir.’ The hall breaks into laughter, in which I heartily join, looking around with all the rest pretending to wonder wher
e this bloke can be and what on earth he must be like.

  There is odder to come. Back in my hotel room, I scroll through texts, tweets and emails before turning in. There is a message from Michael Gove. In it, he tells me that the scrapping of art history A Level has nothing to do with him. ‘I Heart Art History’ he tweets, with an actual little emoji heart (rather apt I think). So I reply to the effect that I stand corrected if he isn’t to blame and I apologise. He replies, ‘Thank you Stuart – a genuinely fair-minded thinker.’

  ‘A genuinely fair-minded thinker’ – Michael Gove. Is that a recommendation for the book jacket I wonder?

  I look again at Twitter before turning off my phone. Someone has already seen the exchange and replied, ‘Get a room, you two.’

  STAGE EIGHT

  LEEDS TO WAKEFIELD

  14 October, 9 miles

  On the morning of 14 October, with some reluctance, I pack up and check out of Leeds. In the lobby of my hotel is one of those giant screens that are permanently and silently tuned to Sky News. The image looming down at me appears to be a reanimated Douglas Fairbanks Junior with a Little Richard Pompadour and dark glasses. This turns out to be Bob Dylan, he of the asthmatic wheezing on the old mouth organ whose words, it transpires, have been considered marvellous enough to impress a group of spoony old fanboys at the Swedish Academy. The scrolling news ticker informs us that Bob Dylan has been given the Nobel Prize for literature by virtue of, as the citation has it, ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’.

  I roll my eyes and pull my ‘what a world we live in today’ face. Whilst acknowledging his colossal influence on popular music, I would no more give him the Nobel Prize for Literature than I would the gong for Physics or Economics. Or give Harold Pinter a grammy for The Caretaker. Silly old Stockholm. Leeds would never do anything as daft and soft, although they have put up a statue to Billy Bremner and they might give David Batty the Nobel Peace Prize as a black joke.

  As is now customary, the day’s other news is uniformly ‘Brexit’, an event which seems to have thrown every conversation and interaction, every normal daily event into an uncomfortable kind of relief and shine a strange, harsh new light that refracts the world differently. Packing and shouldering my rucksack draws the attention of two friendly Polish girls in the lobby, Elenya and Lana. I tell them about the Jarrow march, about how the hungry men went to find work and how (spoiler alert) the Prime Minister refused to see them. ‘That is very sad but at least they had a passion, a purpose in life, and are you going to see the Prime Minister?’ I tell them I hope to get into the Palace of Westminster. ‘Well, we wish you luck.’

  Not long after this, making my way up the unattractively named Swinegate, I have a similar conversation by the doorway of Bibi’s Italian restaurant, this time with a young Russian woman called Julia who works there. She’s been here three-and-a-half years and has heard of the Jarrow march as it’s one of the aspects of British history her six-year-old daughter Alexandra has been studying. ‘She has learned about Florence Nightingale, all the Victorian people, the Titanic. Do you know how many people there are on the Titanic? Two thousand two hundred and twenty eight people! Very sad. My daughter is expert on it.’

  Julia is originally from St Petersburg, though she hasn’t been back there for two years. ‘It is very beautiful,’ she says wistfully. ‘The Hermitage. The Amber room. But very cold in winter. You should go in the summer. Oh yes, go in June. Ah, the White Nights. But –’ and she gives my pack a little pat ‘– it is too far to walk.’

  At a coffee stand in Leeds, I find myself wondering if in perhaps a year or two, or maybe ten, when the much talked of Article 50 has been long triggered and we have undergone our slow painful divorce from the rest of the continent, whether I will be having these everyday conversations with lovely people from Krakow and St Petersburg. I hope so. But there seems to be a chill wind abroad even in these happy, busy streets and I don’t like the feel of it. The novelist Ian McEwan has recently been even more jittery. ‘It’s reminiscent of Robespierre and the terror of the French Revolution. The air in my country is very foul.’

  I tear myself away from Julia and the lure of Bibi’s, which is possibly my favourite restaurant in Leeds along with Tharavadu, the heavenly Keralan opposite the station. But in Leeds, the gourmet, the hedonist, the culture vulture, the epicure are all spoiled for choice. Every time I come back to Leeds it’s a little more swaggering, bolder and busier, a touch more glamorous in a blousy, cheeky, ‘come and get me’ way, and every time I love it a little more. The city’s sheer appetite for fun and profit will rock you on your heels. Every grand street is packed shoulder to shoulder these days with ‘twisted street food’, ‘kitchens’, ‘canteens’ or even ‘cantinas’, and while you may not like the words, who does not the love the thrill of a great city with an almost unseemly dedication to dressing up, getting out and having a good time.

  It helps that Leeds has such a thriving student population, a number of whom come for Britain’s best and most prestigious modern jazz courses, and consequently Leeds is the world capital of what’s known as ‘muscle jazz’, a wild, technically daunting mix of rock and jazz. Four-hundred-and-eighty-three Leeds Uni students are lodged in the former Montague Burton clothing works. It’s student accommodation now, but back in 1936 when its sewing machines hummed with industry, the marchers breakfasted here on porridge, bacon, sausage and tomato on the morning they left Leeds. Before they did, they were given the results of a whip round at the factory that raised over thirty pounds, a sum that would help enormously in the days ahead. Perhaps embarrassed at the party line, some Leeds Labour Party members stitched tattered clothes and brought new boots for the marchers. Leeds RSPCA inspected Paddy the dog and declared him fit to go on (although by this time four marchers had had to be sent home due to ill health). All contemporary coverage mentions this cute canine companion, perhaps to soften any political edge to their reports. But the Guardian writer who’d accompanied them since the Ripon road into Harrogate did find time for some other observations too.

  This is not a hunger-march, but a protest march … There is no political aspect to this march. It is simply the town of Jarrow saying ‘Send us work.’ In the ranks of the marchers are Labour men, Liberals, Tories, and one or two Communists, but you cannot tell who’s who. With the marchers goes, prominently carried, the Jarrow petition for work, a huge book with about 12,000 signatures, which Miss Ellen Wilkinson, M.P. for Jarrow, is to present at the bar of the House of Commons on November 4 … It was interesting to watch motorists who passed us on the road recognise her and lean out of windows as they went by. Like us all she made friends with Paddy, the Labrador dog who accompanied the procession uninvited for five miles from Jarrow before anyone realised that he intended to go all the way. When the marshal’s whistle goes he goes too and there is no holding him. It is interesting, too, to watch men employed on the road rest on their spades to watch men unemployed but also on the road go by. Their eyes spoke their thoughts … At every stopping-place there is such a meeting so that the world shall know of Jarrow.

  It would be a wild exaggeration to claim that the world knew of my march but some do, mainly friends or family or through social media. And as I’m crossing the river that bisects the city along the now fashionable Calls district, the ‘wide majestic Aire’ as the great song by local jazz folk rockers Trembling Bells calls it, I hear the ping of an incoming text. It’s a message of good wishes from my friend Gary, a Sikh taxi driver from Manchester, filled with his usual bewildering array of emojis, hashtags and indecipherable acronyms. Gary is pushing 40 but his texts can make you feel very old. I tell him that it’s going well, that I’m headed for Wakefield today and that I’ll probably stop off around Hunslet or Dewsbury for an early lunch. ‘Cool. Don’t forget u shd go to a Gurdwara #curry licking lips emoji.’

  Of course. The perfect idea. Their own cooks notwithstanding, the Jarrow marchers relied on the hospitality of other
s for food and shelter and they endeavoured to prove themselves worthy of this by sobriety and self-discipline. One of the central tenets of Sikhism is hospitality to strangers and travellers and the Gurdwara and its kitchens are open 24 hours a day for the sustenance and welcome of travellers, providing they are well behaved and have not taken drink. If the orange flag of the Gurdwara had fluttered over English cities in 1936, the Sikh community would have welcomed and fed the Jarrow men. And what a delicious change it would have made from beef paste sandwiches and porridge.

  It would have been theoretically possible too, had their route taken them through Shepherd’s Bush, site of England’s first Gurdwara established in 1911. This coincided with the first real wave of Sikh immigration to the UK, although Britain’s links with the Punjab stretch much further back. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards many Punjabis served in the British army and Sikh soldiers fought in elite regiments seeing active service in both world wars. A memorial in Sussex honours the Sikh dead who fought for the UK in the First World War. Partition of their homeland and labour shortages here encouraged large scale Sikh migration from the Punjab and by the late 1940s, there were substantial Sikh communities settled across the land; Cardiff, Bristol, Ipswich, Peterborough, Doncaster, Birmingham, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Southampton, Portsmouth and Manchester. In the Black Country, Sikh men formed a large part of the workforce in the hot and physically demanding forges and foundries. Elsewhere they went into medicine, IT and commerce. There are currently around half a million Sikhs in the UK and they have become the leading ethnic minority in business.

  After a quick consultation with Google maps, I turned south-west, through the rugby league heartland of once-proud Hunslet who still play at the South Leeds Stadium. I’ve never been to that sporting crucible but as a kid I’d made several trips to Elland Road because of my perverse obsession with Don Revie’s maligned ubermensch. This provided a heady change from the rough and guileless non-league football on offer at Wigan Athletic’s Springfield Park, or the Cowshed as it was known, where muddied oafs would hack at each other in the winter twilight. It was towards Elland Road that I turned now, headed for the industrial suburb of Beeston where a small detour would take me to one of Leeds’ three Sikh temples, the Guru Nanak Nishkam Sewak Jatha Gurdwara on Lady Pit Lane.