Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

For a moment I think he’s joking. But then I realise that William actually thinks that wretched TV freak show is some kind of court. Which I suppose it is. ‘Still, I’ve been clean now for two months … apart from this of course,’ and he indicates the can of Red Stripe in his shaking hand. ‘It’s tough, because, you know, all those people who sit down and beg, the people you see on the street, they’re not homeless. Eighty per cent of them have got properties. That hurts me. And the foreign people who sell The Big Issue, the Poles and Romanians, they shouldn’t be selling it. It’s British. Why don’t they sell it in their country?’ Blaming immigrants for our ills runs from the top to the bottom of our society, but it all feels worse when it comes from those at the bottom. ‘I just want to tell my story,’ says William shakily. ‘Hey,’ he asks, ‘is that one of those machines you can record ghosts on?’ No, I answer, nothing can, and shove a fistful of pound coins into his unoccupied hand. ‘Come back later, I’ll tell you some more,’ he shouts after me, but by then I’m a few hundred yards away, in a scene typical of the new Leicester.

  At the 2011 census, Leicester was widely tipped to be the British first city with a minority white population, but fell just short of this landmark with 50.6 per cent describing themselves as white. It does have one of the lowest rates of residents who identify themselves as white British, at 45 per cent, and the highest proportion of British Indians, at 28.3 per cent. Narborough Road in the city has been described by academics as the most multinational road in Britain. The owners of the 222 shops along its one-mile length come from four continents and 23 different countries, such as Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia as well as Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. There are shopkeepers from eastern Europe, a fish and chip shop owner from Hong Kong and a book shop run by a Canadian couple. (The Daily Star’s headline read ‘Foreign Nation Street’, which you have to admit is good work by the subs.) Leicester is getting younger as well as more diverse. More than a quarter of Leicester’s population – 27 per cent – is aged 20 or under. At Taylor Road Primary School, in Highfields, Leicester, the children speak 42 different languages.

  Immigration has changed and is changing Britain. Rightly or wrongly, whether based on legitimate concerns or concocted hysteria, it informed the decision to leave Europe. It has led to the rise of certain parties and individuals, along with resentment of a perceived elite class and it is a major turbine in the engine driving the new populism. Impressions matter more than facts and statistics and as I leave behind wretched, sad, embittered William with his can of Red Stripe and his misplaced faith in Jeremy Kyle, I pass by pavement cafés all along a neon-lit strip, where young people from India, Asia, the Middle and Far East, whose culture or faith or taste doesn’t embrace alcohol, playing cards and drinking milkshakes and coffee, eating ice cream and baklava, laughing and flirting and chatting outside in what must surely be almost be zero degrees. Their presence, beautiful and lively, brings real warmth to the street and the night. This is how Leicester looks now; it has as much of the souk of Tehran or Tangiers about it as an old hosiery town of the English shires. The Jarrow marchers would not have believed it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they wouldn’t have enjoyed it.

  STAGE SIXTEEN

  LEICESTER TO MARKET HARBOROUGH

  23 October, 14 miles

  From the Shields Gazette, 12 November 2015:

  A Scottish company has defended its decision to sell ‘Jarrow Marcher’ boots for a hefty £180 price tag. Aero Leather’s website describes the boot as their ‘version of the classic early twentieth century man’s working boot, the type worn across the globe before WW2, made famous by such diverse and legendary characters as Charlie Chaplin and the Jarrow Marchers’. The website also states: ‘While everyone knows Charlie Chaplin, the Jarrow Marchers might not be so well known outside the UK. In 1936, a group 200 men from Jarrow marched the 300 miles to London to present a petition to Parliament, asking the government for work, as the shipyard in Jarrow had closed down in the previous year leaving local unemployment at 70%. Period photos show that almost every last man wore a pair of boots like these; it’s in their honour that we remember these fine men in the naming of our boots.’

  Local historian Paul Perry said that it was ‘disgusting’.

  Resplendent in their resoled boots, smart new flannel trousers and clean underwear, the Jarrow march left Leicester. While the welcome had been warm, the night was less so, spent in the bare stone cells of the Swain Street Institute. I had the luxury of a bed and a bath plus hot chocolate and a complementary Hobnob but still had a bad night. At 2.30 in the morning, with the crazed, disorienting whoop that is the constant subliminal fear of the regular traveller, the fire alarm goes off. I imagine all my neighbours along the corridor making the same vague desultory attempts at dressing, wondering how little anatomical coverage is acceptable and willing the noise to stop before we all admit defeat and troop down the stairs in variously surprising nightwear to stand in the freezing car park until the fire brigade arrive. ‘It’ll be some drunks smoking,’ comes a familiar voice behind me and thus, weirdly, I bump into my old friend the comedian Jo Caulfield, who I haven’t seen for years. She is on her own kind of march, a tour of the UK, and Leicester is always a popular stop-off for comics thanks to the comedy festival here.

  And so in the morning, I wake myself up with something artisanal, hot and caffeine-rich in one of the many stylish cafés of the St Martin district; a maze of little streets down which a man will never want for granola, halloumi or sourdough. Choosing one at random, I refuel cheek by jowl with yummy mummies deep in the family section of weekend papers while their offspring crayon furiously and middle-aged men in expensive knitwear drink macchiatos and earnestly read slim paperbacks. Thus fortified, I set off for Market Harborough.

  London Road climbs steeply past the Lansdowne pub and various large townhouses, once the residences of mill managers and shoe barons, now converted to house financial brokers or nurseries with names like Little Acorns and Tiny Tots. Up past Victoria Park carpeted in autumn leaves with the low sun glimmering through bare trees, on past the racecourse and, after the sprawling suburb of Oadby, the city falls away behind me and the countryside opens up into Leicester’s own Great Glen. Nothing like its Scottish namesake; it would disappoint anyone who’s come equipped with crampons and carabiners, being a wide open tract of flat arable countryside where pretty villages loom up every mile or so. In one, the Pug & Greyhound pub advertises an ‘adults only bonfire’, which seems an intriguing idea.

  I spot a few early poppies blooming on some of the lapels of the villagers in Kibworth Beauchamp, who I feel sure was the handsome but cruel cavalry officer opposite Margaret Rutherford in an early Miss Marple. Unusually, Kibworth’s village trail leaflet mentions the passing through of the Jarrow march. A local blogger comments, ‘The Jarrow marchers halted here on their journey and were addressed by Ellen Wilkinson. I like to think of her standing on the mound making her speech.’ It may not have been the first time inflammatory words were heard here; for all its olde worlde charm, Kibworth was known locally for the fervour of its radical knitting workers, uncommon in this leafy and docile part of England.

  These lovely commuter villages with their cottages covered in ivy, old churches and well-kept gardens suggest the loaded term ‘quintessentially English’. No Conrad Ritblat or Hotblack Desiato boards here. This is Fine & Country country, the estate agents of affluent rural England. I think of the marchers coming through. Was it as delicious and desirable then, or maybe just a simple cluster of agricultural workers’ cottages and a few farms?

  It may have been simple but it would have been a kind of paradise after Jarrow. Agriculture fared far better in the mid-1930s compared to the heavy industry staples such as steel and coal which were beginning their slow decline. The farmer and even his ploughman were more secure in their jobs than the pitmen and shipwrights of the north east, even at the price of deference and a stifling social conservatism, nowhere better seen than in the red jackets
and antique traditions of the hunt.

  Leicestershire is fox-hunting country and Market Harborough stands at the heart of it. It was within Rockingham Forest where William the Conqueror and his successors would chase and kill whatever was about in these royal forests; hare, boar, deer, wolves, game, foxes. In the nineteenth century, the market town became a centre for hunting the latter with dogs. Mr Tailby of Skeffington Hall established a hunt in south east Leicestershire in 1856 and Market Harborough became a centre for the ‘sport’. A hunting guide of 1904 states:

  Somewhat less expensive than Melton is Market Harborough, and, although you can hunt six days if you like, yet it is not considered necessary. The Cottesmore and Mr Fernie’s will be the hunts you would follow. Owing to its admirable train service it is quite possible to spend a business day in London from Market Harborough once or twice a week. It is a charming old-world town, very quiet; the hotels are comfortable, and there are some delightful houses to let in its vicinity.

  Another book stashed electronically in my pack, A Week’s Fox Hunting at Market Harborough by one Louis Dieulafait, written in the 1870s, sings the praises of the town even more fulsomely. ‘It is a pleasantly situated place and a perfect picture of a homelike English market town … a very considerable number of hunting people have made the neighbourhood their permanent home. Market Harborough is not only a pleasant town, it is a convenient one for a man who has other occupations.’ The author goes on to detail how one could be up here on a Friday evening and hunt all day Saturday and Sunday before returning to town, assuming that the gentleman had the inconvenience of a job rather than a private income.

  The Jarrow men would not have been familiar with the stirrup cup and the tally-ho but they would have enjoyed a good day’s sport of their own with dogs. Greyhound racing, though, was never imbued with the same romantic affection as the hunt. Then and now you were unlikely to find dog track scenes on a restaurant’s place mats. The 1930s were a boom time for greyhound racing, though to the consternation of some in authority. They were keen to ban betting at dog tracks but could not, since to continue to allow it at horse racing meetings would have quite blatantly been an act of class prejudice. Betting on greyhounds was legalised in 1934 but strictly controlled. It was only allowed on 104 days a year and then only for four hours a day. Its popularity continued unabashed. The number of women gambling on it was particularly worrisome to some. One Glasgow track provided a crèche. A Harringay stadium had seesaws and sand pits to occupy the little ones whilst mum gambled.

  Market Harborough’s idea of canine sport remains in the field though. Even as recently as October 2013 (well after the ban on hunting with dogs), a travel piece in The Times still found Market Harborough ringing on a Sunday morning to ‘the sound of hooves and barking’. More generally though, a local shopkeeper reported that through the week the town had become very quiet, testament to its new status as a dormitory town in a commuter belt. The trains are even more convenient than they were in Louis Dieulafait’s day. London is only 50 minutes away by fast train and house prices have rocketed. But for a town that was forever sounding the hunting horn, it seemed loath to blow its own trumpet to the Times’s reporter.

  It could have been a display of East Midlands modesty, but when we asked our taciturn cab driver where we should visit in Market Harborough by way of sightseeing, his response was a ruminative silence, followed by the advice that we could always try Leicester, 15 miles away. Eminently commutable … the town is undergoing a kind of personality shift as a result. A new development of smart modern apartments offering ‘landscaped gardens and secure underground parking’ sits next to Frank Hall Tailors, provider of bespoke hacking jackets to the Prince of Wales … but in the town centre tweed-jacketed country gents and their wives now rub shoulders with city-dwellers with weekend homes and a fondness for expensive coffee.

  In his magnificent survey of the nation, English Journey, J B Priestley showed little warmth or enthusiasm for Leicestershire’s rural heartland, or Market Harborough in particular. ‘I did not break my journey to have another look at Market Harborough. Hunting country and hunting people have their own literature and I have no wish to add to it. I have only now and again met hunting people and I do not understand them … All I ask is that they should not pretend to be solemnly doing their duty when in reality they are indulging and enjoying themselves.’ He went on to describe fox hunting as extravagant, cruel and antisocial, and local hunters as oafs. I probably wouldn’t be giving an impromptu reading of Priestley’s book in any of the local pubs where I was headed once I had taken in something of the town.

  All day I’ve had in my head a snatch of a song by Paul Simon, an earworm in the modern parlance. It’s the line in ‘Graceland’ that talks about travelling ‘through the cradle of the civil war’. I know that Simon was singing about the bloody American conflict, but I’d felt the same as I moved along the quiet roads of Leicestershire. When we talk of middle England, we imagine something cosy and well-fed, ample and abundant, content and even self-satisfied. In fact, these shires have seen dire conflict, atrocities and bloodshed, a world turned upside down and torn apart by violence, and sleepy Market Harborough was at the centre of it.

  In May 1645, the Royalists, buoyed by recent victories in the field, laid waste to Leicester, killing hundreds of civilians. News of the pillage and murder soon reached Parliament in London who were appalled and alarmed at the atrocities and by the loss of a strategically vital town in the heart of the English countryside. They set out bent on revenge. The Roundhead Thomas Fairfax lifted his siege on Oxford and the Parliamentary forces marched towards Leicester. King Charles, oblivious, was headed south to protect Oxford, his capital. Exhausted and depleted, he stopped off at Market Harborough to regroup. While here he learned that Fairfax and the Parliamentary forces were on their way. At 11pm that night, Charles was woken from a fitful sleep to be told that the village of Naseby, just over the border in Northamptonshire, had been captured by Parliamentary troops. Naseby thus became the site of the last great battle of the Civil War and a triumph for the Parliamentarians. Afterwards, the retreating Royalists were caught by Parliamentary troops and brutally cut down. Four hundred were killed altogether between Market Harborough and Leicester and some 5,000 infantry were taken prisoner into Harborough for the night.

  It’s a testament to the healing balm of time and the English capacity for turning even the direst calamity to their advantage that there is now, and here I quote the Harborough Mail:

  An eye-catching trail highlighting the town’s links with the Battle of Naseby … The Market Harborough Civil War Trail will describe on six permanent information boards what happened in the town before and after the battle. The boards will be displayed at key sites in the town – in Church Square, Church Street, Coventry Road, Millennium Mile (near Northampton Road) and Welland Park. … John Liddell, of the Market Harborough Civil War Committee, said: ‘We believe that 1645 should rank alongside 1066 and 1940 in our nation’s history. We hope that these display boards will raise awareness in local people and visitors to the town of the importance of this battle to the development of democracy in this country.’

  On the quiet street in the dwindling afternoon, as a few late shoppers load wine and pizzas and loo rolls into their estate cars, I reflect again how bloodsoaked England’s history is and how short memories are. We assume wrongly that human history is an unbroken journey towards peace and perfectibility; a tale of improvement and progress. But the events of 1645 – and Jarrow’s march too – prove otherwise. Starving towns, fascists on the streets, decapitated kings, towns like Market Harborough and Leicester aflame and ringing to the sobs and wails of townspeople butchered by their own kinsmen. That’s our history as much as thatched cottages and courtly coronations.

  In a sense, the shock of the Brexit vote brought this home to many who assumed that a progressive consensus was the natural state of our democracy, and only an aberrant few dissented from this. Political analyst Davi
d Runciman remarked that the Brexit vote was a blow to ‘the benign liberal idea that if you open up things to the public, they are basically OK and will come to the right decision. It’s a myth.’ This is hard to swallow, especially if like me you are someone who travels the country seeking to see the best in people and write about them in a positive and uplifting way. It’s hard to imagine, but maybe necessary to get some kind of perspective, to imagine the Leicester streets where I ate frittata and drank mocha, ablaze, running with blood and choked with corpses. Perhaps we should be a little more calm and reflective about our current schisms and divisions. England has seen worse.

  Mark Bauerlein of Emory University does see in Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, ‘a reaction against the English Majorification of politics, where there’s all this meta stuff about how to express oneself and what you can say. Endless discourse obscures actual policies and emotions. Trump gets this. And he’s like the fool from medieval or Elizabethan drama, an idiot who says the unthinkable and some people like him for it as an antidote.’

  The musician and thinker Brian Eno in a Guardian interview was soberly self-reprimanding. ‘My feeling about Brexit was not anger at anybody else, it was anger at myself for not realising what was going on. I thought that all those UKIP people and those National Front-y people were in a little bubble. Then I thought: “it was us, we were in the bubble, we didn’t notice it.” There was a revolution brewing and we didn’t spot it because we didn’t make it. We expected we were going to be the revolution.’

  Shivering in the gathering gloom of a cold Sunday in Market Harborough, the church clock struck four sonorously and I remembered something that I had to make time for. I wish I could say that it was a civic ceremony or choral evensong or cheese rolling or well dressing or anything rooted in the deep loam of these ancient agricultural shires. But in fact it was Chelsea v Liverpool on Sky Sports One, a top of the table clash that I was loath to miss.