When I mentioned this in the pub in Luton, Rachel, Kelvin and the councillors had been impressed, delighted and a little moved I thought. ‘That’s fantastic. Do you know her from the media?’ No, not at all, I replied a little confused. ‘She’s an actress,’ laughed Rachel. ‘Didn’t you know? She was in Coronation Street. She’s just become an MP because, well, it felt right. It was a brilliant, amazing thing for her to …’
‘Sorry?’ I say. Maybe it was the three pints of Centurion but I genuinely wasn’t following this.
Rachel looked closely at me ‘You haven’t realised, have you? Tracy was a friend of Jo Cox. Tracy Brabin is the new MP for Batley and Spen.’
Batley and Spen is a political constituency in West Yorkshire created in 1983 and unremarkable until the summer of 2016 when a far-right extremist killed its MP, Jo Cox, outside her office. Thomas Mair, 52, stabbed and shot Jo, a Batley girl and the mother of two young children, whilst yelling ‘Britain First’. There was no doubt what Mair’s motivation was, nor his affiliations to white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, or his fascist sympathies, but the majority of the British press chose to ignore these, describing him as a lone lunatic. This was an approach in sharp contrast to these papers’ treatment of murders by Asians and Muslims, who were uniformly presented as radical Islamists. No newspaper called it an act of fascist or extreme right terrorism, which it quite plainly was; one presumably perpetrated in twisted response to Jo’s support for the Remain side in the EU referendum. While the immediate reaction was dismal, there was worse to come from spokesmen of the far right. Nigel Farage attacked Jo’s widower in a radio interview saying, ‘Well, of course, he would know more about extremists than me, Mr Cox …’
Others of a similar cast of mind soon joined in. ‘When are we allowed to say that Brendan Cox is a total arse?’ tweeted Spectator and Breitbart fulminator James Delingpole. UKIP bankroller Arron Banks contributed, ‘I’m sorry about his wife but he chose to massively politicise it. Who does that?’ Even in the enormously debased political discourse of 2016, these remarks represented a new low. It took either monumental stupidity or sheer wickedness to not acknowledge that the murder of a Member of Parliament by a neo Nazi shouting ‘Britain first’ seemed to have quite a political dimension already. So it was with a mixture of anger and pride that I picked up the pace as I left Luton. Whatever happened in the next few days, I would be there to meet Tracy at the Houses of Parliament on 31 October.
That Farage, Delingpole and Banks’s remarks were contemptible was beyond doubt. But beyond that given, the situation in Batley and Spen was complex, awkward and revealed much about the chaotic and febrile state of our political culture in 2016. At Jo’s memorial service in London, husband Brendan Cox’s words were broadcast live back to Batley.
Across the world we’re seeing forces of division playing on people’s worst fears, rather than their best instincts, trying to divide our communities, to exploit insecurities, and emphasise not what unites us but what divides us. Jo’s killing was political, it was an act of terror designed to advance an agenda of hatred towards others. What a beautiful irony it is that an act designed to advance hatred has instead generated such an outpouring of love. Jo lived for her beliefs, and on Thursday she died for them, and for the rest of our lives we will fight for them in her name.
In a brilliant piece in the New Yorker though, British writer Ed Caesar went to Batley to gauge the response. Many wept in the streets at the mention of Jo’s name, but in the main room of the Conservative Club,
Two members, named Darren and Stuart (they declined to offer their surnames), sat at the bar discussing how they had both voted Leave. Darren knew Jo Cox from school and said she was ‘a lovely lass’. But both men spoke repeatedly about how they had been let down by politicians, particularly on the issue of immigration. Their complaint did not just concern the recent migrants from the E.U. but the older Muslim residents of Batley. Darren put his wish to leave the E.U. partly down to ‘the change in the town and the feeling in the town. There are certain people who don’t integrate.’ Stuart said that, ‘it’s a sad thing what happened last week,’ but added, ‘we just want our country back.’
Both drinkers thought that the ‘Jo Cox thing’ would have some influence on the result. But both thought, unlike the professional pollsters and commentators, that Batley’s region of Kirklees would vote to leave the EU. They were right, professional informed opinion was wrong, and as I walked along old Luton’s streets of its famous blue Victorian brick – now highly desirable for the townhouses of Hampstead and St John’s Wood – the fallout from that detonation was still settling gently on Britain, a cloud of unknowing that obscured the familiar and made the way ahead difficult to see.
The Jarrow marchers and I were now crossing over in the heart of the home counties, from one England to the next. The stretch between Luton and St Albans is only ten miles but it feels more, at least culturally, as the polyglot urban sprawl of a railway and car town falls away and a different England comes into view; older, leafier, smarter, richer. My drinking mate in the Tarkus T-shirt had said that most people thought Luton was ‘a hellhole’, which was not strictly true and certainly not the impression I had taken away. But no one would ever say it of St Albans, rightly or wrongly. We are not quite in Betjeman’s Metroland yet, but we are moving into the ample bosom of the affluent commuter belt; golf courses, tankards, roses, stripped-pine gastropubs and garden offices.
Betjeman wrote some of his defining verses in the mid-1930s often rooted in very English locales, as in ‘Death in Leamington’, ‘Distant View of a Provincial Town’ and ‘Slough’. The latter shows something of how untouched and untroubled by hardship some lives were. Drafted while the marchers were on the road, it says much of Betjeman’s privilege and pursed lip that while the Jarrow Crusade held the attention of most, bringing the plight of workless men and their towns to the nation’s conscience, Betjeman’s major poem of the period was an etiolated sneer at one town’s drab aesthetic and lack of pastoral charm. ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough, it isn’t fit for humans now,’ he pleaded; not because of slums, hunger or poor sanitation, but because he didn’t like the vulgarity of its Tudor houses, sports cars and hairdos. It is snobbery – much anthologised snobbery, but snobbery none the less. If any town deserved friendly bombs to fall on it because it wasn’t fit for humans, it was Jarrow, not Slough.
Fortunately, Betjeman in this unappealing register was far from being the typical voice of the most exciting decade of the twentieth century for British poetry. Those voices belonged to writers who were altogether tougher, more colloquial, more engaged. ‘Even before they were quite over, the thirties took on the appearance of myth,’ as critic Robin Skelton put it. The architects of that mythic significance were young poets like Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day Lewis, William Empson and Wystan Hugh Auden.
I have my battered copy of Skelton’s classic paperback Penguin anthology Poetry of the Thirties in front of me for reference now as I write, but I could probably quote accurately from memory. This 1971 edition of the 1964 original with its striking red and white modernist cover design by Stephen Russ carries a recommended retail price of 35p, but I am ashamed to say that it cost me nothing as I stole it from an English Lit store cupboard at St John Rigby Grammar School when I was 12. It has come with me to college, back home again and through every flat and house move over four decades. It fired my love of poetry and in particular the poetry of the thirties. I’d go on to love the poetry of Larkin, Gunn and Hughes and the generation of poets who followed after the Second World War, but I’d never have got there without Skelton’s slim, dense volume, as packed with explosive force as a hand grenade.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no poems of the period specifically about Jarrow, but the best of them address and explore the world and the systems that made Jarrow poor and the world more dangerous. This was a time when, as Skelton remarks, ‘mass movements were in the air and quite explicably.
Hunger marchers were out in England. The militant unemployed were reading the Daily Worker. There was a need and a clamour for social justice’.
The media loves a movement; from Bright Young People to Britpop. They fill supplements and make good copy in high art as well as low culture, in the salon as well as the streets. The ‘Auden Group’ was something of a journalistic creation but there was something meaningful there too. The poets who have come to embody the spirit of the 1930s were of roughly the same Oxbridge generation and shared a demotic, forceful style and a vaguely leftwing outlook. Four poets were central to the ‘group’; MacNeice, Auden, Spender and Day Lewis, satirically lumped together as a single fictitious hydra-headed beast called MacSpaunday by the Franco-sympathiser Roy Campbell, who was no friend of the group. (Campbell is an interesting figure; one of the few poets of the time to support the fascists. Some apologists like Joseph Pearce and Roger Scruton deny that he was one himself and say that he merely loathed Marxism. But a line like ‘The chill, webbed handclasp of the Jew’ suggests a deeper, darker affiliation to the far right.) MacSpaunday was a sardonic dig of course, and in truth the ‘Auden’ group never held meetings, were probably never even under the same roof and had no shared agenda beyond making poetry more vital and connected with the world. But there were connections between individual writers, as friends, travellers and collaborators. They had something else to bind them too. What shocks me now about Skelton’s collection is that while many of the writers were gay, not one was a woman.
Spain loomed large in the lives and work of this group as it did in the newspapers of late October 1936. The Civil War caught the romantic imagination and fired the verse of the thirties poets but it spurred some to more direct action as part of the International Brigade. Auden and Spender both went, the former as an ambulance driver and stretcher bearer, the latter as a radio reporter, and Auden returned from Spain more philosophical and nuanced in his views than he had gone. His poem ‘Spain’ – which Orwell described as ‘one of the few decent things to be written about the war’ – with its notorious line about ‘the necessary murder’, later fell out of favour with its writer. He removed it from future anthologies on the grounds that it was ‘dishonest’, espousing views for effect that he did not really hold. But many of his poems from this time and later do embody the period and stand as brilliant individual works. He had begun 1936 with the celebrated ‘Night Mail’, a poem written to the music of Benjamin Britten and the visuals of Humphrey Jennings. He would end the decade with the doom-laden and valedictory ‘1st September 1939’, written at the fag end ‘of a low dishonest decade’ and on the eve of a devastating war.
That was a few years away still though. On 26 October 1936, as Franco’s troops approached the southern and western suburbs of Madrid, the Jarrow marchers neared the rather more placid outskirts of St Albans. As I made the same progress, uneventfully (with all due respect to Harpenden) following the old Roman road of Watling Street through Hertfordshire’s undulating chalk downs and vales, flat pastures, and eventually its well-tended gardens and neat hedges, I wondered if the change in the country had been as apparent to the Jarrow marchers as it was to me.
A journey south through England via the route I’ve taken at least is one through increasing prosperity and growing attractiveness. St Albans greets you with the contentedness of a town in the heart of comfortable shires. At least it looks that way if you’ve walked from Jarrow. Perhaps it felt like that in 1936 too, although the enormous, swirling, centrifugal pull of London, its wealth, privilege and real estate, was less powerful then. But I could feel it as a real presence now. For all St Albans’s distinct character and independence, its fine visage is tilted towards the capital, as if turning its face gratefully to the sun.
Once though, when Watling Street was a new transport project, London wasn’t even in St Albans’s league. Osbert Lancaster in his curious 1961 travel guide Here’s England wrote, ‘If you have a pleasant day for the journey to St Albans, you can stand on the bank of the little river and suddenly feel yourself touched, saddened by the great passage of time – Romans and Saxons and Normans and Lancastrians rode across the stream. Galloped up that hill and disappeared into the centuries.’
How steeped in, how packed with history every cranny of this nation is; sometimes the least likely, most prosaic or overlooked crannies. I spent the first 18 years of my life in Wigan but never noticed until a few years back that there’s a chunk of old Roman wall down by a discount store on a town centre back street, or that in the door frame by the bar of the Grand Hotel, there are two bullet holes from a Civil War skirmish (or was it the Jacobite one?) When I walk into Manchester down the Ship Canal from the BBC in Salford, just before the fantastic chip shop on Liverpool Street, I pass a small Roman amphitheatre. As opposed to America, where the Trump Tower counts as an ancient monument, in Britain, we have history to burn, and we often do.
Unruly ancient Brits razed St Albans to the ground in AD 61. But eventually the Romans subdued them and rebuilt it. This time they wisely did this in stone not timber and named it Verulamium, one of the first places in Britain to be identified by its own name. The titular Alban is thought to have been a Roman-Briton of the third century who gave shelter to a Christian priest on the run, the religion still being outlawed then. When the authorities came for the refugee priest, Alban changed places with him, which turned out to be a bad move in every respect – except for his claim on posterity. Alban in disguise offered himself to the authorities and was taken to the pagan temple at Verulamium and presented to the judge. Enraged, the judge demanded that Alban renounce Christianity and offer sacrifices to the gods. At this, Alban spoke the words quoted in the prayer still used at St Albans Abbey: ‘I worship and adore the true and living God who created all things.’ Again, not the wisest of responses. Alban was scourged and sentenced to death. On his way to the place of execution, Alban had to cross the River Ver and, to speed things along, prayed for a quick death. At this the river dried up, allowing Alban and his guards to cross on dry land. When Alban’s executioner witnessed this he baulked at carrying out the deed, so both he and Alban were beheaded. But as Alban’s head fell to the ground, the eyes of the second executioner fell out too. The judge was so moved by all this – it must have been quite a morning after all – that he ended the persecution of Christians and began honouring saints. In perhaps the only nice touch to this grisly tale, the fullest and most definitive account of Alban’s life and death was recounted by a famous son of Jarrow, the Venerable Bede.
St Albans Cathedral now stands on the very site of these gory and outlandish events, and is still the big draw in town, even if it is surprisingly easy to lose or never find, shyly hiding behind obscuring thickets of the everyday; cafés, pubs, delis. Prince Charles once opined that the clutter around St Paul’s was like a carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend. The architecture of St Albans is not a carbuncle but it is a fairly effective mask. I approach listlessly, summoned by bells through the town’s back streets, which are fine as back streets go, but confusing. I pass Empire Records and Chaos City Comics – which amuses me since whatever St Albans may be, Chaos City it certainly isn’t – until there it is, suddenly and gloriously. Osbert Lancaster was a little sniffy and backhanded in his compliments: ‘St Albans is interesting, if not as grand as some of the other more famous English cathedrals.’ Well, Osbert, I thought it was tremendously impressive and so it appeared did the genial babel of German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian tourists who had flocked to it.
In a little basement room, a choir is rehearsing a lovely version of ‘Amazing Grace’. Inside the cathedral itself, a clearly supremely gifted organist is playing one heck of a flashy toccata (my notes read ‘this dude can play’) and the effect is cumulatively amazing. Of course, there will be some who say that this tremendous edifice is built on nothing but fairy stories and superstition. But, and I speak here as an agnostic, the mischievous part of me thinks that might make it all the more magnificent. Here are la
yered centuries upon centuries of history, human stories, politics, hubris, layered like geological strata, or the butter cream and jam in a Victoria sponge; Briton, Roman, Viking, Anglo–Saxon, Norman, Tudor, Civil War, Regency, Georgian, industrial, technological.
The marchers arriving in chill, heavy rain must have been cheered by the warmth of the welcome. A civic delegation was there waiting on the steps of the grand white town hall, including the Chief Constable and the mayor, eager to show the king Saint Alban’s shrine, even then the town’s main tourist attraction. Though the people of St Albans shared little of Jarrow’s plight and discomfort, they knew of it and even the sceptical changed their minds and were moved by the men’s testimony. The porter at the town’s workhouse said, ‘I had heard about Jarrow but quite frankly I was inclined to put the stories down to exaggerations. Now I know that what I thought could not possibly be true does in fact exist. If you can only convince everyone of those terrible conditions, as you have convinced me, I do not think that anyone can refuse you the work you ask.’
Also in the crowd was an old woman who had lived in Jarrow 20 years earlier and had come here with her son to find work. ‘I have visited the old town several times in the last few years and I have tried to tell my friends how terrible things are in Jarrow but it’s no use. They can’t understand.’ Much debated and pored over today, the ‘north/south divide’ was as real and unbreachable as the walls of St Albans Abbey in 1936. Baldwin was no ‘one nation’ Tory and he presided over a shockingly divided Britain.
Long Road from Jarrow Page 32