Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  When I arrive at the town hall I find a solitary man in his 60s loitering in the disused entrance of what looks to be an abandoned building. ‘Is this … was this … the town hall?’ I ask. ‘I reckon so,’ he says in an accent forged many miles north of St Albans, ‘but they’ve ’ad for’t close it darn cos it’s full of asbestos’. It turned out he and his wife come down to watch the big NFL American football game at Wembley every year, staying somewhere on the outskirts of the capital. ‘Last year it was Hemel Hempstead. This year we’re in Tring,’ he says morosely, suggesting Tring has not been all he might have hoped.

  St Albans’s Saturday market is as busy as Barnsley’s but of a different character. Less cheap Spiderman duvets and Fast and Furious DVDs, more military memorabilia and varieties of marinated olives. An enthusiastic Asian lady approaches me waving a leaflet. ‘When you’ve carved your pumpkin, don’t throw it away. We have lots of ideas here! Sustainable St Albans! Can I interest you in some pumpkin soup?’ Noting that the marchers would certainly have availed themselves of this generosity, and it looking and smelling delicious, I readily accept and someone takes a picture of my benefactor ladling out the pungent, gingery soup into a styrofoam cup for me.

  I’ve been on the road for three weeks now, and as night comes on in the home counties, colder and rawer than expected, it begins to feel like it. Maybe it was the unfamiliar town, or a low-level cold threatening to come on, scratching at the back of my eyes and throat. Maybe it was just the relentless miles with the pack. Perhaps it was the long, full, satisfying but exhausting days, the constant note taking, negotiating and route finding, or the nights at hotel desks or on beds, reading and tapping at the laptop. Whatever it was, as I sprawled in my room at the top of Holywell Hill, (down which St Alban’s head had once rolled, causing the well to spring) I felt weary and disoriented. I wonder how the marchers were feeling at this stage. Was it still a great adventure? Or just cold, hard, tiring graft? They walked every inch of the way, unlike me, and unlike me they couldn’t text, tweet, call or email. Some will say of course that that’s a good thing but I wouldn’t agree. For all its potential for abuse, I know without it my trip would have been harder and less rewarding, and this book would have been thinner, and less well-informed.

  With a supreme effort of will, since the room was warm, the bed soft and the newscaster’s voice on the TV lulling, I got up, showered and headed up Holywell Hill to sample the weekend nightlife of St Albans, or a section thereof. If your name is Victoria, you get a free prosecco every Friday at the Victoria pub St Albans. Mine isn’t and I don’t think I could pretend otherwise, so I push on. I’d actually heard about the Horn when in Luton. It is known locally for its live music, and since I hadn’t heard any of that since choral evensong at Ripon and Debussy at Leeds, I decided to try a new experience on my route. The Jarrow march had an ‘embedded’ three-piece mouth organ and, however keen one is on the braying of the harmonica, by St Albans that must surely have been a pleasure that was wearing thin.

  The Horn is a big, solid pub on the bridge by the station, the one adorned with the mural of St Albans’s favourite sons. This includes Alban himself (still with head), sole English pope Nicholas Brakespear, Stephen Hawking and Stanley Kubrick, the latter represented by a stylised ‘Hal’ and ‘Dave’ interchange from 2001: A Space Odyssey. On the way there, I was delighted to see that St Albans can also boast one of those lovely traditional sewing machine and telescope shops.

  Whilst the Horn is ‘just’ a pub, the back room plays host to bigger names than I’d have guessed. Upcoming attractions included The Bluetones and China Crisis (both sold out) who will be familiar names to any reader who knows their 1980s and 90s British pop. Tonight though, it’s the turn of Maxwell Hammer Smith, a covers band whose name is a rather convoluted pun on an old Beatles novelty track. They promise ‘harmony rock … Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, Queen’ which to me (and this is personal and subjective of course) is a selection that in turn appeals and terrifies.

  A common refrain of the last few years has been the valedictory lament for the English pub. We are losing them in droves across the land it appears, and the pub is now threatened with extinction. But even in the 1930s, a period one might assume was a golden age of the English local, some 1,500 pubs were closing every year and another modern malaise, that of binge drinking, was causing concern then too. In the poorest areas, mothers left their prams outside the pub while they drank, nipping out to placate the baby with a shot of whisky. At the very bottom of the drinking ladder, desperate folk drank Red Biddy, a potent, lethal mixture of cheap red wine and meths. At the top of the social order, Churchill was bet £120,000 by his chum Lord Rothermere that he could not go through 1936 without a drink. He refused the wager, probably sensibly on balance, as Winnie’s drinking day began at 9am with a whisky and soda, continued with a pint of champagne at lunch and then would be topped up with amontillado, gin and brandy through the evening, often ending with the best part of a bottle of cognac at three in the morning.

  English popular music in 1936 was dominated by the sentimental or the humorous in various different registers of class and region. George Formby was cleaning windows with lubricious intent while Noël Coward was picking his way daintily though several arch ditties. But the most illustrative hit song of late 1936 was Sam Coslow’s ‘If You Can’t Sing It, You’ll Have to Swing It, Mr Paganini’. All forms of music, popular and highbrow, were starting to feel the heat of a new music coming out of America. As Jarrow marched, America swung.

  ‘Swing cannot be defined,’ said the American jazz magazine Metronome in 1936. Fats Waller tried though; ‘two thirds rhythm and one third soul’ – which is more impressionistic than useful. Swing was more than just music anyway; it suggested a whole generational culture at least among the leisured and affluent with its own dances, tunes and clothing styles. But while audiences in the States (and increasingly Europe) were being wowed by the new offbeat rhythms and irresistible energy of Benny Goodman and the constantly touring, pioneering bandleaders of the new idiom, not everyone was keen. Novelist Compton Mackenzie said it was ‘the wriggling of a child with an overcharged tummy’. Others were more savage; ‘Musical Hitlerism’ read one review, ironic since jazz, swing and associated music had been banned across all German radio since 12 October 1935. That day, Eugen Hadamovsky, conductor and Third Reich official, announced, ‘As of today, I am placing a definitive ban on the negro jazz for the entire German Radio.’ Swing was unstoppable though, and would have been the music most enjoyed by the Jarrow marchers and their dancing partners had they had time for music. I doubt music was laid on at St Albans’s workhouse that October night in 1936, but the men got a hot meal from the sympathetic master of the institution.

  I treated myself to a big glass of red wine at the bar of the Horn. The band weren’t scheduled to be on till half ten, which felt very late for someone beginning to feel the fatigue of his journey. When they took to the stage of the back room though, there were still only a few of us in there, though I assume things filled up later. I stuck around for the first 20 to get me to stay in the same room as the music for the entirety of ‘Somebody to Love’ by Queen, something no one has ever managed before.

  That’s unworthy perhaps, but tonight I was feeling more road weary than battle hardened. I trooped back up the hill into the centre of St Albans. There were a couple of police cars outside the Slug and Lettuce and a young PC in a body armour gilet was gently trying to keep apart two women in sparkly dresses. A shaven-headed man with a short-sleeved white shirt, presumably the cause of this physical and emotional exchange, sat on the kerb with his head in his hands. My night, like my march, was ending, but there was certainly still some life in theirs.

  STAGE TWENTY-ONE

  ST ALBANS TO EDGWARE

  30 October, 11 miles

  On the morning of 30 October 1936, two days away from journey’s end, the Jarrow marchers woke to find that they were the victim of ‘fake news’ or perhaps ‘alternate
facts’, or as they called them then, lies. Even in 1936 though, the pure and simple truth was, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, rarely pure and never simple.

  A phone call to the St Albans workhouse where they were lodged claimed that two marchers, Jos Bradley and Ralph Smith, had actually spent the night in the Barnet workhouse. This came as something of a surprise, not least to the two men concerned who were in fact with their comrades in St Albans. There may well have been a perfectly innocent explanation for all this; the two men in Barnet may have belonged to a different hunger march or were merely tramps who thought that claiming to be Jarrow men would give them better treatment or celebrity. But, typically fearful and suspicious, David Riley assumed yet another secret plot by communists to infiltrate the Crusade. ‘If anyone attempts to crash in on the march, he will be met with the boot,’ he told the press. There may have been a similarly reasonable explanation for the arrival of a taxi whose driver said he’d been booked to take a marcher to hospital. A simple case of crossed wires, perhaps. But the marchers suspected a plot to kidnap one of them, and both of these sinister explanations were widely featured in the press.

  We don’t know what the word or phrase of 1936 was. They didn’t guess or vote on such things but if they did then, globally, it may well have been one of the words that have echoed through this book; ‘Spain’ or ‘Swing’ or ‘Nazi’. In Britain specifically, perhaps it would have been ‘Abdication’ or ‘Blackshirt’ or ‘Formby’ or even ‘Jarrow’. But in 2016, Oxford Dictionaries chose ‘post-truth’ as the international word of the year, after the contentious ‘Brexit’ referendum and an equally divisive US presidential election saw the word gain global currency. As the Washington Post put it, ‘in this case, the “post-” prefix doesn’t mean “after” so much as it implies an atmosphere in which a notion is irrelevant.’

  I read or heard the phrase almost every day as I walked and initially it gained purchase in the States, during the last days of gruelling and vindictive presidential campaign. ‘We concede all politicians lie,’ wrote the conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. ‘Nevertheless, Donald Trump is in a class by himself.’

  ‘Post-truth’ was selected after Oxford’s dictionary editors noted a roughly 2,000 per cent increase in its usage over 2015 and 2016. But not just in the States. They also talked of the enormous increase in the frequency of mentions in news articles and on social media in the United Kingdom. British intellectuals and commentators, of the right and left if truth be known, still tend to exhibit a snooty, paternalistic high-handedness towards the supposed crassness of American taste and mores. The rise of Donald Trump could support such an attitude, but only as long as one was prepared to overlook the similar ascent to prominence of his friend Nigel Farage. The events of summer 2016 showed that Britain had moved as far ‘post truth’ as anywhere in the world.

  Take, for instance, one of the most visible and emotive central planks of the Leave campaign; a trumpeted promise that the supposed £350 million a week the EU was costing us would be spent on the NHS if we voted out. Both ends of this statement were lies; the figure was imaginary, and the NHS stood to gain nothing. But still it was emblazoned on the sides of buses – buses paid for by millionaire donors – and supposedly respectable politicians such Boris Johnson, Kate Hoey, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage were happy to stand alongside and peddle that untruth. Once the Leave vote was won, all instantly acknowledged that the figures and claim were false and that nothing of the sort would be done. Even by the standards of modern politics, there as something in this brazenness that was new and quite breathtaking.

  By 2016, the word ‘lie’ had all but disappeared from our political lexicon. But extinction had loomed since as long ago as 1759, when Edmund Burke wrote instead of being ‘economical with the truth’. Winston Churchill may be many an Englishman’s idea of a straight-talker, but it was he who invented the euphemism ‘terminological inexactitude’ to cover his own porkies. Lyndon B Johnson was guilty of a ‘credibility gap’ and then with Richard Nixon we enter a new golden age of slippery deceit, of ‘inoperative statements’ and ‘strategic misrepresentation’. Alan Clark wrote shiftily in his diaries about being ‘economical with the actualité’. Hillary Clinton ‘misspoke’, rather than ‘invented’, coming under gunfire on a trip to Bosnia. But in late 2016, Carl Bernstein, who along with Bob Woodward had exposed the lies of Watergate, said that ‘Nixon had nothing on Trump’.

  In Britain, barefaced and gleeful lies like the one about the £350million for the NHS promised by the Brexit lobby are rarer than a kind of ‘building of one’s part’, as actors say. This is often to claim purchase on some romantic and emotive element of our shared past. Thus as I was writing this book, the then-UKIP leader Paul Nuttall got into hot water over claims on his website that he had been at the Hillsborough disaster and ‘lost good friends there’. These claims turned out as resistant to verification as the one about him having been a professional footballer with Tranmere Rovers.

  ‘Jarrow’ has its own murky legacy of half-truth, partial truth and downright falsehoods. The old northern term ‘romancing’ seems appropriate here, as most of these myths are attempts to appropriate the teary romance and sentiment of the Crusade. Brexit minister David Davies said in 2005 that his grandfather had led the Jarrow march from York to Aldermaston. His grandfather was not part of the Jarrow march, which in any case never visited those towns. The Guardian claimed that the leftwing folksinger father of UB40’s Ali and Robin Campbell had been on the Jarrow march. He hadn’t. There’s the incident of the cross in Leicester and the disputed whereabouts of the Jarrow Crusade banners today. It’s easy to judge, or even mock, but as I found as I walked and talked and read, something as drenched in significance and emotion as the Jarrow march will inevitably create false memory, Chinese whisper and hyperbole, and not all of it ill-intentioned.

  Elstree, like Jarrow, carries a certain antique, faded, very English glamour. In our time, Elstree has been home to Muppets, Star Wars, Morecambe and Wise and quiz show phenomenon Pointless. When the marchers passed in 1936, it’s likely that Drake of England, Dandy Dick (starring Will Hay), Invitation to the Waltz or I Give My Heart were being filmed there. The News Chronicle carried a story that as they passed, the men were unnerved by the presence of scores of policemen who turned out to be extras in the making of a gangster movie (the nearest thing to this description I can find is Living Dangerously, filmed at Elstree though set in New York; it seems unlikely to have been McGluskey The Sea Rover). The marchers had every right to be nervous; whether they knew it or not, Special Branch had been tailing them either openly or clandestinely since Jarrow, a fact which only emerged much later.

  When the marchers reached Radlett, halfway to Edgware from St Albans, the town council provided them with a crate of oranges and some welcome, hot mugs of tea at the Congregational Hall. Even then Radlett was comfortable. Now it’s one of the most prosperous towns in the south of England. Lovely too, although we are now deep into that part of the country where the dizzying, lung-grasping, vertiginous height of the house prices make your head swim. A five-bedroom house here will cost you £2.5million, although a little place in Letchmore is a snip at £600,000. But this for a solid suburban house, not a gravel-drived country seat, which I still dozily expect for that kind of money. At the time of the Jarrow march, only a quarter of the British population owned their own home, and whilst sometimes this might have put them at the mercy of unscrupulous landlords or living in hostels, it meant we didn’t have the uniquely toxic obsession with property we have today. From here until London, I will wonder at every estate agent’s window I pass, and there are many, how any ordinary working person can live here, whether they’re a carpenter, a cook, a nurse, a teacher, a roofer, or any of the jobs without which society can’t function but seems to view as valueless rather than invaluable.

  Dusk now, chilly too, and as the lights come on down the main drag, I’m envious of the late stragglers in the well-lit bakeries and b
ookshops, the milkshake bars and delis. In the Red Lion pub, at a scrubbed and notched faux-rustic table filled with food, young Mum and Dad are happily plying their little girl in a high chair with french fries from a battered metal cone. They look cosy, happy and presumably mortgaged to the hilt. The Radlett Centre has a colourful, enticing and diverse list of forthcoming attractions; Mark Steel, Think Floyd, Annie, an H P Lovecraft adaptation, The Wiz and Psychic Sally (Feefo Gold Trusted Service Award; ‘deluded but essentially harmless’ – Guardian).

  On the garage forecourt, a Middle Eastern cabbie called Kerem notes both my huge pack and weary tread and astutely makes the connection. ‘Hey, my friend, you look tired, man. Where you headed, London? I’ll give you good price. You off to find your fortune?’ I tell him that that would be cheating and why, but he is so convivial and funny, and I am so comprehensively knackered, that I accept his offer of a lift to ‘the best kebab shop in Edgware, I should know. I worked there, my friend. There are many, but this is best. Also cleanest.’ Fireworks streak across the sky as we ride the few, dark, hibernal miles to Edgware, a gentle profound reminder of how Britain has changed since 1936. Then those fiery trails could only have meant Bonfire Night. Now they might augur Diwali too.

  ‘Ecgi’s weir’ is the pond where Ecgi the Saxon and his people would fish. By 1422 it had become ‘Eggeswere’ and by 1489, the Tudors had added a T, making it almost the name we have today. There’s no Domesday Book mention but we know that the Edgware Road follows the same line as ancient Watling Street, an important Roman road later used in the medieval period by pilgrims headed to Canterbury. One of Dick Turpin’s most infamous crimes was carried out here on 4 February 1735, when he and five of his gang broke into a farmhouse owned by elderly Joseph Lawrence. Turpin and his louts beat him with their pistols and tortured him by setting him on a fire whilst naked, before pouring a boiling kettle of water over his head announcing that they would amputate his legs. During this ordeal, one of the gang forced a servant girl upstairs and raped her. This is vile stuff, and I include the details for one reason only, to make a point about our national culture. While bemoaning the lawlessness and incivility of the modern world, we’ve sanitised and glorified Dick Turpin, turning a brutal, murderous thug into a Carry On film rogue, a dandy highwayman of pop songs and a tea towel icon. The British capacity for forgetting, let alone forgiving, is boundless. I expect a rosy, joshing article on Dick in This England magazine soon. Perhaps they’ve already done the Krays.