Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  Perhaps it is because Tempany’s book and Kevin Sampson’s Hillsborough Voices are still fresh in my mind. They are hard to shake, these awful, vivid accounts of the day and the barely believable details. Police prevented fans from climbing the fence to safety, stopped friends helping other friends and allowed only one of the 44 ambulances on hand to enter the ground and so only 14 of the fatally injured ever made it to hospital. The authorities then spent the next 27 years lying or obscuring the truth about what happened and blaming the fans themselves. This beggars belief. But there were some prepared to sink even lower. Bernard Ingham, former press chief to Mrs Thatcher, said in a letter to a victim’s parent that the fault was with ‘tanked up yobs’ and later that people ‘should shut up about Hillsborough’. Similarly, former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie lied and smeared the dead in the most vile manner in his paper for years to come, only eventually apologising partially and under duress, just before I began my walk.

  That was because in April, a few months before I set off from Jarrow, a kind of victory occurred for the victims of Hillsborough and their families. Thanks to tireless and often thankless efforts, the Justice for the 96 campaign won. At the end of the longest judicial hearing in British history, a jury ruled that every single death that day was an unlawful killing. As I walked down Leppings Lane that October day, the newspapers were humming with talk that prosecutions might finally begin.

  Calling Hillsborough a tragedy feels wrong. It suggests a freak occurrence such as the sinking of the Titanic or the downfall of Othello caused by his own flaws. Hillsborough is actually more akin to what happened at Aberfan in 1966, when negligence meant that a dangerous slag heap collapsed onto a primary school killing 116 children and 28 adults. Later, the National Coal Board was found ‘wholly responsible’ for those deaths. Aberfan and Hillsborough did not simply happen to working-class people; they happened to those people because they were working class. They died because richer and more powerful people than themselves did not care what became of them.

  Hillsborough though has a more sinister dimension than the horror of Aberfan. Though it is little consolation, Aberfan was at least not a wilful act of enmity. It is not too lurid or sensational to see Hillsborough as the final and most terrible battle in a decade of class war, with police used as a tool of government in oppressing those it saw as the ‘enemy within’. That meant essentially the left, the Labour movement and the working classes generally. As the Hillsborough enquiry ended and as I entered Sheffield, a similar event, the police actions and the violence at Orgreave coking plant in 1984, was exercising many and creating calls for an enquiry into that too. Some of the officers on duty at Hillsborough had also been at Orgreave.

  There’d be more to hear about Orgreave as I neared London. For today, after Hillsborough and Leppings Lane, I loosely follow the River Don’s course into the city, passing the new and fashionable Kelham Island Quarter where industrial heritage rubs shoulders with craft beer emporia and the like. If the Jarrow march passed by they’d have found it a buzzing tightly packed district of riverside mills. I say ‘if’ since there’s some confusion about the actual route they took into the city centre. Getting slightly lost, they wrongfooted the small welcoming committee. There was a welcome but a curious one in the form of a single woman who thought they were a fascist march and hurled abuse at them.

  Given the headlines of the day, this doughty lady could be forgiven for being jumpy. Mosley’s Blackshirts might have been given short shrift in the East End and elsewhere but he had enough friends in high places to ensure he couldn’t be discounted just yet. One such ally may well have been King Edward VIII whose close personal friendship with an American woman called Wallis Simpson was becoming very interesting to the press, Westminster and the man in the street. In Germany, the Nazis passed a law forbidding Jews from using parks or public swimming pools and from owning electrical equipment, typewriters or bicycles. Dark clouds were forming across the skies of the world as 1936 moved to a close.

  In other news, as they wouldn’t have said then, there was major civil unrest in India. Britain’s imperial phase was ending and its relationship with the subcontinent had been volatile and problematic throughout the decade. In 1931, when the Lancashire cotton trade was at its lowest ebb, India restricted its imports of cotton goods, hitting the north west of England hard. Gandhi himself came to Bolton to meet the workers and, while sympathetic to their plight, he reminded them that his own people were never very far from starvation. They took him for a night out to the Swan Hotel in Bolton but the ascetic Indian took only bread and water, which unsurprisingly rather dampened any party mood.

  Stanley Baldwin was all for continuing the policy of liberalisation towards India, not wanting another chronic running sore like Ireland to deal with. But the UK’s rule in India was still harsh and draconian. On the weekend the Jarrow march reached Sheffield, 35 people were killed in riots involving Hindus and Muslims in Bombay. All of this weighed heavy on the mind of Ellen Wilkinson who had visited India many times and was a passionate advocate of emancipation and self-rule for India and a fervent Internationalist. ‘To me, the mill girls of Shanghai are as important as the mill girls of Manchester,’ she said in 1936. How would that have been received in Sheffield 80 years later I wondered?

  The Indian question bedevilling Stanley Baldwin in 1936 was long settled by 2016 but that night I had my own Indian question, namely at which one to eat in Sheffield. I’d not even considered other cuisine as Sheffield will always mean to me my first gleeful adventures into Indian food during friends’ student days here in the early 1980s, when David Blunkett’s ‘People’s Republic of South Yorkshire’ rang to the sound of ABC and the Human League, bhajis were 10p and a ‘suicide’ phaal curry came free if you could manage to eat it. Happy days.

  I put the question to the hive mind of Twitter naturally. Marc Webster said, ‘Get yourself to Shapla for a curry. Crappy end of town, but underrated and never had a bad meal yet,’ and many other correspondents agreed. Nadia Shireen suggested the Thali Café and Ian Howie told me, ‘the Mogul Room on Sharrow Vale Road is excellent. You can also have a good drink in the brilliant Lescar as well’. Shabir’s gets several good reviews but in the event I choose a restaurant on Leopold Square which comes to my timeline garlanded with recommendations and testimonials, many sounding almost tearful with jealousy that I find myself nearby on Aagrah buffet night. Purists will baulk at that word ‘buffet’, and I take their point. Unfairly or not, the ubiquitous city-centre Chinese variety always conjures images of glutinous sweet and sours congealing under hot lamps, with pale and flaccid chips lolling unappealing nearby and, 34 times an hour, the bringing out of a small cake to a tuneless chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’. Useful when strapped for cash or pushed for time perhaps, and I have often been both, but happily being neither on this Sunday evening, I make my way briskly to the £12.50 buffet at the Aagrah, the money burning a hole in my rucksack.

  It has been said that I bang on a bit too much about food on my travels, so I will gloss over the gorgeousness of everything to do with the meal; the people, the staff, the tenderness and insinuating warmth of the gobhi gosht or the sweet and pungent murgh sindhi korma or even the gosht Punjabi masala, its succulent lamb steeped in a sauce bright with cardamom and sleepy with aromatic methi. Suffice to say that the whole night comes back to me often. But one comment on Twitter the next day about another Sheffield curry favourite makes me think. ‘Ah … and to think that once upon a time Mr Shabbir just had one small business in Westgate, Shipley. Corporate isn’t always better.’ That tells you a lot about the strangely proprietorial relationship we have with this cuisine of Empire and the people who cook it. The Indian restaurant business in Britain started with a handful of esoteric outlets and grew, in a nice reversal, to colonise us until, according to Robin Cook’s famous speech on chicken tikka masala, it became our national dish. But now, some say unthinkably, it may be declining again in this new uncertain Britain.

  T
he Jarrow marchers could have eaten Indian food if they’d really wanted to but it would have taken as much of an effort as their crusade. E. P Veeraswamy published his seminal work ‘Indian Cookery’ in 1936, but to get it cooked home-style in anything like a restaurant setting here, one would have had to visit one of the handful of curry cafés set up by Indian sailors who’d jumped ship or were dumped at major ports like Cardiff and London. Most of these renegade seamen came from Sylhet – now a mountainous area of Bangladesh – and the ‘Indian’ curry house we know is really usually Bangladeshi. After the Second World War, many of these early Asian entrepreneurs bought up defunct cafés or bombed-out pubs and were the only establishments to open late. The British love of the ‘after pub’ curry was born.

  The brilliant food writer Bee Wilson points out that the naming of British curry houses reflects their vintage:

  If you see one that is called Taj Mahal, Passage to India or Koh-i-Noor (after the famous Indian diamond), it probably dates back to the first wave of curry houses in the 1960s. These eateries appealed to retired Old India Hands, who wanted to eat hot chutney and be treated like ‘sahibs’ again. The names of 1970s curry houses began to shrug off the colonial past and evoke, instead, a vague sense of eastern exoticism: Lily Tandoori, Aladdin, Sheba – glamorous names to counteract longstanding British prejudices that south Asian food was malodorous and unclean.

  I didn’t know it, as I scooped chana and sambar on Leopold Square, but behind the scenes and the kitchen doors, the curry is in crisis. Two or three Indian restaurants are closing every week in Britain. Like the public house, it is a cherished mainstay of our social life that we are in danger of losing. A real shame this, and not just gastronomically, as for years curry houses have been rare islands of independent family enterprise in high streets dominated by chains. They played a vital role in the regeneration of many local economies in the 1980s and 1990s. Now those chains, from the cheap and carby pizza big boys to the ersatz, unconvincing curries offered by the Harvesters and, yes, Wetherspoon are forcing them out.

  The price of our beloved curry has barely changed in 20 years outside of a minor trend for fine dining establishments. But costs are rising fast. The weakness of the pound has doubled the price of spices imported from India. Staples like cooking oil and rice have become more expensive and hiring costs are rising. Staffing generally is a major issue. Thousands of Indian restaurants are critically short of staff and facing a number of problems. Since the Brexit vote, economic uncertainties have hit curry houses (in fact, most independent restaurants) hard in terms of rent and overheads. Young Asians are being lured away from family curry house business into more lucrative jobs, such as in IT, medicine and finance. And of course, the climate with regard to immigration has cooled and hardened.

  In April 2016, a few months before I set out, a new law was passed prohibiting Bangladeshi chefs from coming to work here unless they can earn £35,000 or more a year after living expenses. In effect, this is a ban since few Indian restaurant chefs earn that and everyone knows it. Lord Bilimoria, the Indian peer and entrepreneur behind Cobra beer, called the law ‘ridiculous’ and ‘discriminatory’ adding, ‘I sometimes think we are a very ungrateful nation. You are damaging an industry that provided food your country loves.’

  It’s estimated that one in three British Asians voted for Brexit. Many Indian restaurateurs have told reporters that they cast their vote this way hoping that leaving Europe would bring more favourable terms for south Asian immigrants. The president of the Bangladesh Caterers Association Pasha Khandaker urged his 4,000 members to vote ‘leave’, sentiments echoed by rallying voices like then employment minister Priti Patel, who told British Asians that by voting leave, they could ‘save our curry houses and join the rest of the world’. So far, it isn’t working. You can see this for yourself tonight. Walk down your high street and look in the chain pub, look in the pizza franchise, look in the chippy even and then compare this busyness to the two occupied tables in the little independent curry house.

  Happily Aagrah was still full to bursting when I left; smiling waiters weaving through tables groaning with vast, fluffy naans, chilled Indian beer, bottles of red and their laughing, ruddy drinkers. Sizzling tikkas trailed smoke through the bright and noisy room and the air was heavy with fenugreek and methi and cardamom and pleasure, for now at least.

  STAGE ELEVEN

  SHEFFIELD TO CHESTERFIELD

  18 October, 12 miles

  According to media lore, the former TV sports host Des Lynam was so comfortable on air that his heart rate actually fell when the camera was on him. He was certainly in a relaxed frame of mind with regard to geography when he once announced on Grandstand’s Final Score, ‘Chester nil, Chesterfield nil. No goals there in the local derby.’

  As I prepared to leave Sheffield on the calm, bright October morning of 17 October, I couldn’t be too judgmental towards suave Des though. I too was heading out of my geographical comfort zone, away from the England I know reasonably well and headed for towns and places that are really merely names to me, if famous ones. I know the north east a little; I have travelled in Yorkshire extensively, often making nocturnal incursions over the Pennine passes of Oldham and Halifax, crawling through the moor grass by night, face daubed with mud, a dagger between my teeth and with false papers in my rucksack that claim I’m from Heckmondwike. But where exactly is Chesterfield. North? Midlands? East Midlands? All I know for sure is that from there I will head to Mansfield, through the East Midlands and into the home counties. For both the men of 1936 and for me the second half of the Jarrow march will be as much as it can be in a small, crowded island, terra incognito of a very mild kind.

  Before leaving ‘Sheff’, I take a stroll down to Norfolk Street or at least as good an approximation of strolling as I could manage fully laden. On one side of the road is the Crucible, Sheffield’s famous theatre and sports venue and home of the World Snooker Championships. The two weeks of this baize jamboree are a mainstay of BBC TV’s sporting output, and moreover one of the few major sporting draws the public corporation has managed to cling onto, and it is thus guarded and boasted of fiercely. Ideologically opposed governments and commercial satellite giants like Sky and BT have steadily eroded the BBC’s position as the nation’s most trusted and watched sporting broadcaster, a position it held through most of the twentieth century.

  Back in 1936, the World Snooker Championship was still being held in Thurston’s Hall, Leicester Square, London, and was a far smaller affair than today’s truly global contest of professional skill, but many of the Jarrow marchers would have followed the contest eagerly. This year proved a turning point for the sport seen previously as a more complex yet less skilful variant of billiards, and also the sign of a misspent youth. There were double the number of entrants to the world championships – which was admittedly only a rise from five to 13, but it felt a significant breakthrough. The final between the legendary Joe Davis and Horace Lindrum was the greatest yet seen and signalled snooker’s arrival as a major sport. The Daily Mail Gold Cup switched codes from billiards to snooker and the august Billiard Player magazine changed its name to Billiards and Snooker. For many working-class men, Davis was a folk hero akin to Fred Perry or Stanley Matthews. His home town, whose Billiards Championship he won at age 13, turning pro soon after, was coincidentally where I was headed; even if I still didn’t know whether Chesterfield is north, south or Midlands. All I was sure of was that it is nowhere near Chester.

  Before departure though, my real reason for popping down to Norfolk Street was to visit the building across the road from the Crucible. The Victoria Hall is Sheffield’s major Methodist place of worship; a Grade Two listed building that styles itself as ‘the church in the middle of the city with the city at its heart’. It opens to the public every morning for coffee and I sipped mine as I wandered around the spacious commanding interior trying to visualise the events of last night, 80 years ago, when the marchers held yet another famous public meeting
. Great swathes of Sheffield’s citizenry came to see them, as well as the Mayor of Jarrow who’d travelled down by train, the Bishop of Sheffield and 20 other clergymen of various denominations. The Bishop of Sheffield’s presence infuriated the men’s own local bishop, the unsympathetic cleric Henson who had denounced the Jarrow march as ‘revolutionary mob pressure’. He would have been very uncomfortable at the rhetoric warming the Victoria Hall that night. The chairman of the Sheffield branch of the Transport and General Workers Union took to the stage and was cheered mightily when he hailed his ‘comrades from Jarrow’ adding, ‘You represent to me a tremendous tragedy, the tragedy of unemployment … There is a certain section of people who regard the unemployment problem as something to be forgotten. They do not want to think about it. But there are also those who do think of you.’

  I finish my coffee and browse the second-hand books, hoping to start a conversation to divine whether anyone still thinks of them now. Affecting interest in a battered James Herriot, I ask the two older women dividing the Georgette Heyers from the Catherine Cooksons whether the Jarrow march means anything to them. Helen frowns and initially confuses it with the General Strike (understandably) but then finds her thread and knows her stuff. ‘They’d closed the shipyard hadn’t they and then promised them help that never came. So they marched down to tell them what for. Did they meet here? Well, that must have been something. And that’s something to be proud of, isn’t it? Are you a Methodist, love? No? Well, here in this church, we work with refugee families. We support them, we try and find them homes and jobs. Well, not always jobs as there are funny rules about that. They’re not allowed to work some of them. But that’s what we should be about. That’s what the Church should do. Help the needy, help the vulnerable. I can’t abide those folk who think the Church should be just clapping and holy water and—’ and at this she clasps her hands and makes a wounded pious face tilted heavenward. I laugh and wonder what Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham would have made of Nonconformist Helen of Sheffield.