I’d woken that morning with a new earworm, a song from The Clash’s Sandinista! album called ‘Something About England’. A sort of potted radical history seen through the eyes of an ageing tramp who missed out on the First World War but ‘not the sorrow afterwards’. It goes, ‘They say it would be wine and roses/ If England were for Englishmen again’. (An ideal strapline for This England magazine, I’d have thought.) I liked ‘Something About England’ far more than This England, but though The Clash meant well, they too got Jarrow wrong describing the Jarrow marchers as ‘hunger strikers’. The Jarrow men weren’t on hunger strike; in fact they hadn’t eaten so well in years. But no matter. It was a good song to keep time too as I left town.
As I did, finally I found a Bedfordshire ‘Clanger’, the local pastry delicacy with savoury filling at one end and sweet at the other, thus providing both dinner and dessert for the hungry agricultural worker of yesteryear. These ones came recommended by Jamie Oliver no less and the proprietor’s manner suggested I was highly honoured to be served with one (I was once treated with similar guardedness buying ‘rowies’ in a back street in Aberdeen. I must bring out the worst in regional bakers). Anyway, it was horrible. I can’t remember which of the fashionable filling combos in this new artisan version I plumped for; pulled pork and banoffee must have been there and salted caramel and ricotta too I imagine. But in any event, I couldn’t discern which end was which as both seemed filled with wallpaper paste mixed with Quaker Oats. As I was decanting it into a bin, the delicate, troubled writer’s grandson from last night passed by with a cheery wave and a curious look as I hurriedly disappeared into the transport point/departure hub that Bedford can be proud of.
I was going to take a bus for some of the way to Luton just to buy myself a little time as I had another appointment to make, again thanks to the social media. So far I had been lucky with Twitter; only two trolls and they had been mildly useful, and lots of help, encouragements and offers to meet or walk with me. I’d been touched by many of these but had accepted few in order that I could stay flexible and agile, able to change my mind or act on a whim. But today’s from Rachel Hopkins was irresistible.
‘A Friday in the Brickies (by Luton Station) with a bunch of leftwing types?! A must surely?!’
I had to agree and so I took the 81 out of Bedford via Progress Way and through Elstow, Bunyan’s birthplace and location of the Slough of Despond. On we went via Bunyans Mead to the ‘no cold-calling zone’ of Wilstead and, just after Houghton Conquest (surely the chiselled RAF hero of the wartime love story Wings Over Waterlily Lane) I jumped off in order to walk the A6 for a while.
The A6 café, shuttered and quiet, doesn’t seem to have served a hot sausage bap or milky coffee in a good few years. Before motorway service stations and catering vans, these were the much-loved fuelling stations that broke journeys and marked the miles. I wondered if some incarnation of the A6 café had been here when the march passed by. It was just here that a contingent of Mosley’s Fascists asked to join the march and were given short shrift by the men, although this should be balanced against the fact that the day before marcher Fred Harris had been rather furtively sent home for expressing ‘communistic’ beliefs, proving that a certain forelock tugging fear of giving offence still informed the march organisers, whatever their personal beliefs. Having sent the Blackshirts packing, the oldest marcher, 62-year-old George Smith told the reporters, ‘I’m going strong and the rest of the march is going to be a cakewalk.’ As I pounded the noisy, dirty fringes of the A6, I envied George’s confidence.
From time to time, my path had merged and flirted with this famous old English arterial road, one of the great north– south highways of England. But after Bedford, it generally veers and swerves left and west, thundering up through the Midlands and my patch of the industrial north west headed for Carlisle. It would make a good long walking project one day, I thought, if not a scenic one, as I negotiated the swirling confusion of the Barton-le-Clay bypass fork, a kind of whirlpool as I neared the source of this mighty, dirty river of tarmac; Luton.
Luton did not offer the marchers a grand civic welcome. This was not through any coldness or antipathy, but because the new town hall was only being opened that night by the Duke of Kent. The Duke may well have known what few ordinary Lutonians or Jarrovians did; namely that that afternoon Wallis Simpson had been granted a decree nisi at Norwich assizes and the looming constitutional stormclouds gathered ever nearer. Nothing dampened the enthusiasm of Luton towards the aristocracy that day though. Children’s choirs sang, fireworks roared through the dusk, flags were unfurled and bunting draped. The crowds welcomed the Duke warmly and then many stayed in the streets to cheer the marchers into town as well in a very British display of camaraderie.
I should make clear here though that the reason Luton needed a new town hall was that the townsfolk had burned the other one down in 1919 in a quite astonishing outpouring of rage. Luton Today, the local newspaper website, has footage of the conflagration under the glorious headline, ‘Luton Town Hall burnt down during Peace Day riots’, a sentence as cherishable as the famous line from Doctor Strangelove, ‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the war room!’ The full story is worth recounting, shedding light as it does on how England’s dissenting nature has not only been shown in supplicant crusades. Sometimes we go cap in hand to our superiors. Sometimes we burn down the town hall and try to kill the mayor.
The Peace Treaty concluding the Great War was finally signed in June 1919 and Luton Town Council planned various civic celebrations followed by a sumptuous ‘mayor’s banquet’. This was to be paid for from the civic purse but invitations were strictly limited to the mayor, councillors and close friends, none of whom had seen active service. No ex-soldiers, sailors or airmen were included in the lavish council celebrations. This prompted various veterans groups and their supporters to boycott the council’s celebrations and hold their own event in a local park. The council refused them permission, and so the ex-servicemen’s groups decided to make their anger known.
At first, the protest was quiet and controlled. Maimed and disabled ex-servicemen lined the procession route under a banner that read, ‘Don’t pity us, give us work’. When the officials processed by unmoved, they were followed by the irate ex-servicemen. On arrival at the town hall, the soldiers barracked the mayor’s platitudinous oratory and when he tried to patronise them, the mood turned really ugly. The 20,000-strong crowd suddenly surged forwards, sending the mayor scurrying into the bowels of the town hall as they tore down the doors. Once inside, the crowd wreaked havoc, hurling the contents of the town hall through the windows onto the street and trying to get at the mayor and his party who were barricaded into his parlour. Their lives were probably saved by the arrival of a contingent of police. The townspeople then turned their anger on them and fought a pitched battle with policemen in the street. By now, the rioting and looting had taken on something of carnival atmosphere and 20,000 people gathered at the town hall (with petrol stolen from Hall’s garage) and razed it to the ground singing ‘We’ll Keep the Home Fires Burning Here’. The mayor was spirited away and the police turned savagely on the crowd, beating women and children with sticks. Four days and nights of rioting followed before order was restored leaving the town centre in ruins and looking like a war zone.
The Bricklayers Arms was nothing like this lively, but it was packed and noisy even for a late Friday afternoon. Some kind of speech was being made, and pictures of a smiling man adorned the pub walls. It was evidently some kind of wake and the young woman who pushed her way through the throng to appear at my elbow, explained more. She was crying a little as she indicated another picture of the man, this time above a stool at the end of the bar. ‘My friend Steve. That was his seat. A lot of these people here have come to pay respects to him because of his work and his art. But he was just my mate Steve. I met him five years ago when I first started coming in here. He was just your classic decent bloke.’
&nb
sp; Steve Dillon, a Lutonian born and bred, was one of the biggest British names in the field of comic book art. He began his professional career at the age of 16 on Marvel’s Hulk Weekly before moving on to Nick Fury, Warrior, Doctor Who and 2000 AD. He co-founded the influential Deadline magazine in 1988 which brought comics to the attention of many an indie kid thanks to its pop cultural savvy and hip NME-style credentials. In recent years, he had invented the series Preacher which had transferred successfully to TV and was in New York doing some work for a comics charity when he died suddenly from a ruptured appendix. ‘He was cremated today at 10.30 in New York, which is why we all came here at 3.30 our time to raise a glass to him.’ The pub is full of colleagues, friends and fans, and the range of t-shirts, adornments, hair styles and piercings is impressive.
I might have felt something of an interloper into other people’s grief but Rachel, who’d been following my progress on Twitter, had wanted us to meet up anyway. She’s a Labour councillor, her dad is Luton’s Labour MP – one of only two in Bedfordshire – and she had a Jarrow tale for me. ‘As an idealistic 14-year-old, I went down to the drill hall in 1986 when a group of unemployed marchers were passing through Luton recreating the march and I made them their breakfast. The week after, we were visiting my granddad and I told him this proudly and he smiled and said, ‘Well, guess what, I did the very same thing for the original marchers when they passed though Leicester.’
I’m liking ‘The Brickies’ very much. It’s an old-school boozer in Luton’s ‘High Town’, a favourite with football fans, real ale drinkers and lefties alike. Rachel’s boyfriend, a cheery soul and I think a little less political than her, nudges me and says, ‘All the politburo are in here,’ with a grin. I fall into a conversation about progressive rock with a genial man in a well-filled t-shirt featuring the cover of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Tarkus (the concept album about the war between the robot scorpion and the giant mechanised armadillo. You remember.) I feel I am amongst friends.
Another local councillor, Mark, offers the thought that, ‘Luton is essentially a northern industrial town in the south of England’. Politically it has never been as conservative as the rest of the home counties, although it did return Tory MPs at the high imperial phase of Thatcherism. Drawn to work in the town’s Vauxhall car factories, it has a Kashmiri population of 40,000, a quarter of its population, and is sometimes cited as officially ‘hyperdiverse’, i.e. more than 50 per cent of its population are black or minority ethnic, although definitions of the term seem to differ. Rachel checks her phone. ‘There’s a reception for the Kashmiri consul tonight and my dad’s going to be there. He says he’ll pop in here and have a beer if you can hang around for a while.’ It would be rude not to, I say, as the chap in the Tarkus t-shirt goes to get me another pint of Centurion.
Not long after, I am in the quieter back bar with the only man in the pub wearing a suit. Rachel’s dad Kelvin has been the Labour MP for Luton since 1997. ‘There were 22 of us from the region then but we’ve declined ever since … till now. There were a lot more socialists then. That was exceptional but at each election since then we’ve been cut back, we nearly only had me. The Margaret Moran scandal cost us lots of votes.’ (The former MP for Luton South was convicted of fraud in 2012. Moran’s claims for expenses 2004–05 were £73,198 higher than Kelvin’s.) ‘But we go on. Jeremy’s been elected leader by the membership not by Parliament, thousands of people are joining the party, tens if not hundreds of thousands left because of new Labour. But that’s all history now. I’m in a progressive mood and I think there’s a real chance we can have a progressive Labour government next time round.’
I’m forced to say that I don’t agree, even though I find Kelvin’s positivity and optimism laudable. I also don’t share Kelvin’s view – a widespread one admittedly – that Blair was an enemy of the people and his leadership a toxic one. The Iraq War was a dire misadventure but making mistakes in war situations is not, I suggest, a problem Jeremy Corbyn will ever have. Didn’t Kelvin concede that the Blair administration did a lot of good – like Sure Start schemes and the minimum wage – and that 1997 seemed for a while to mark the rise of the forces of good? He sighs.
‘I have to say I didn’t believe that myself. I felt that the people wanted a Labour government and wanted progressive change but they didn’t get that. What they got was another version of Conservatism. Blair and Mandelson were free marketeers who wanted to privatise and carry on with the neo-liberal revolution. I know many people welcomed it. My wife in fact said, “Isn’t it wonderful, now we can do all the socialist things we’ve always wanted,” and I said, “No dear it won’t happen.” The day I was elected, at the count just down the road, people kept asking me, “Why are you looking so sombre and reserved?” And I said, “Well, I’m very happy to be in Parliament, thanks to all these wonderful people and their votes but I’m contemplating the struggles to come against the forces of darkness in our party,” and now people know what I was talking about.’
Kelvin’s optimism for Jeremy Corbyn’s new leftwing agenda was tempered by one thing. ‘The boundary changes are going to ruin us. We’ll lose 20–25 seats before you even talk about swings. But Scotland’s the real problem. We have to win back Scotland to stand any chance of a majority government. You would hope that the Scottish Nationalists wouldn’t want to sustain a Tory government. But we shall see. That’s four years away.’ (It wasn’t.)
Kelvin’s clearly a man of principle but I put it to him that a jolt of pragmatism is also needed on the left. Competency and power is a precursor of change, and the metropolitan left has lost touch with its working-class base, just as it did in 1936. Marches and rallies are good for the soul, but they change nothing. Ask the Jarrow marchers. ‘But Jarrow resonates still,’ counters Kelvin. ‘It may not have achieved anything directly back then but it has echoes and meaning. Sometimes even a defeat can inspire; the miners’ strike, the general strike, the split in 1931 when we were sold down the river by Ramsay MacDonald who joined the Tories. All those things remind us that we have to fight. Things do change. Take South Africa, I was a campaigner in my youth and we often thought that nothing could ever really be done. But eventually things change although there will always be forces of darkness and conservatism in the world.’
He give me a wry smile. ‘When I was a student I worked in Potters Bar, 1962 it would have been. At the works there was an old man who said, “When those Jarrow marchers came past our town, I went out and jeered at them, the communist bastards.” I could never believe that, that a working-class man could do that.’ Britain’s first troll, maybe, I suggest and remember the statistic that I used to pass on to my sociology students back in Skelmersdale. A third of the working class routinely vote Conservative. Without those working-class Tories, there would never be Tory governments. It is not a peculiarly British condition or even delusion either. John Steinbeck once said, ‘Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.’
I take my leave amongst much kissing, handshaking and laughter. I liked Luton’s rugged individualism, fierce sense of self and ornery distinctiveness. I liked the Brickies and its draught Centurion. Rachel shows me to the door and I thank her, her dad and her friends for a lovely afternoon. I ask her if she’d like to follow in her dad’s footsteps and become an MP. She smiles coyly. ‘Maybe, who knows? It’d be nice to do something for people, ordinary people,’ she says and there’s another hug or two and then I have to be on my way, onward to St Albans.
‘We have to look after our own Stuart,’ she calls to me as I head purposefully up the darkening street.
‘Oh and by the way, Stuart, you’re going the wrong way. St Albans is that way,’ she points behind her and, laughing, disappears into the happy cauldron of warm companionship that is the Brickies.
STAGE TWENTY
LUTON TO ST ALBANS
29 October, 10 miles
As autumn h
ardens into winter, and the dark nights close in, so the mother of Parliaments finally has to go back after the mother of all summer holidays, now as in 1936. On the morning that the marchers left Luton for St Albans, Ellen Wilkinson headed for the Commons and the reconvening of Parliament after the recess. When she got there, she asked Prime Minister Baldwin how many resolutions and messages he had received about the Jarrow march. Quite a few, he grudgingly acknowledged, but he was still refusing to receive them when they reached London. Historian Dominic Sandbrook has said of Baldwin that his ‘emollient and media-friendly’ manner make him in some ways the first modern prime minister. Possibly so, but surely his pointed refusal to meet the men was a PR disaster that a contemporary spin doctor would have advised against, however distasteful he might have found it.
Over the last week or so of trekking, I had decided that I should like to try and succeed where the Jarrow men had failed and be met and taken into the Commons, if not by the Prime Minister herself, Theresa May (elevated unelected after David Cameron’s resignation in the wake of his Brexit humiliation), Jeremy Corbyn, Tim Farron or whoever was UKIP leader on the day I arrived, then at least by an MP. I tweeted to this effect asking if any Member of Parliament would care to meet me. Almost immediately I had received a charming reply from a new MP Tracy Brabin saying that she’d be delighted to meet me when I arrived on 31 October, and to get in touch when I was approaching Marble Arch.
Long Road from Jarrow Page 31