‘The night cometh, when no man can work.’

                                                 ST. LUKE

 

‘When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull, wholesome food. You want something a little bit “tasty” … Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll have a nice cup of tea!’

GEORGE ORWELL—The Road to Wigan Pier

THERE has to be some selectivity in disaster. A small part of it has to be personalized as a first move towards an accurate comprehension of the whole. It was Anne Frank’s Diary and not the Eichmann trial statistics which measured in valid terms the monstrous perversions of Hitler’s Germany. The calcined human shapes discovered at Pompeii are final in their eloquence and say all that there is to say on the pathos and horror of natural disaster. The casualties of the First World War were so great that grief itself became cloudy and amorphous and had to be focused on a single anonymous victim before it could be understood.

All the events of the inter-war years took place against a huge, dingy, boring and inescapable backcloth—unemployment. By 1935 it had existed for so long and had proved to be so irremediable that it came to be regarded as a normality. The chronically unemployed had learned how to make a pattern of idleness and had become conditioned to hopeless poverty. The streets in which they lived breathed an apathy which in the worst areas was a kind of nerveless peace. Paint flaked from woodwork, doorsteps were ritualistically whitened, delicate undernourished children in darned jerseys and clothing-club boots flocked to see Shirley Temple and Tom Mix on Saturday afternoons for twopence, young men, many of whom had reached their mid-twenties without ever having a job, walked or bicycled in groups over the neighbouring hills and meadows; older men crouched on benches on their allotments and gossiped. The women suffered in a different way. It was they who were exhausted by the constant preoccupation with mean economies, they who under-ate so that the children had sufficient, they who answered the door to the debt and rent collectors, the Means Test spies and seedy touts of all kinds—for the extreme scarcity of money and the meaninglessness of time filled the slums with hawkers and spongers—and they who preserved the maleness of their menfolk when everything conspired to turn them into so many little cloth-capped negatives in the dole queue.

The strange thing is that it was both their plight and their salvation that no one came to their aid. Humiliated, degraded and intimidated by the Labour Exchanges, the Means Test, the Poor Law and the police, the British unemployed were a vast malleable force which only needed a leader for it to become a threat. When it marched on London, as it frequently did, like a dark, singing worm, there was an immediate but quite unnecessary tension. The worm, grudgingly allowed its civic rights, would be met and escorted through side-streets if possible to Hyde Park by foot and mounted police, where it would chop itself up into smaller—and safer—pieces and listen to Wal Hannington or Aneurin Bevan. Occasionally it was entertained by Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, a predominantly middle-class movement which was big enough on November 1st, 1936, for its leader to boast that it would put up a hundred candidates at the next general election. But the unemployed remained unbeguiled. The oblique violence inherent in the B.U.F. movement offered nothing to those who had been hurt enough without wishing to hurt others, and as for the B.U.F.’s other main ingredient, jingoism, this was quite ludicrously unappealing. So the unemployed resembled a torpid hippo sinking deeper and deeper into the silt left behind by outdated industries and the refuse of a defunct economy. Sometimes a Shinwell or a Bevin would prod the vast beast and it would quake—would even rumble—and mayors would search hurriedly for the riotous assembly act. Sometimes an irritant such as the hated Means Test would make it turbulent and dangerous. But always, inevitably, it would slip back into its acceptance sloth and the first estate of the realm would breathe again.

The curious thing is that the one man whose understanding of, and compassion for, the unemployed were founded on the richest patriotism was himself the victim of inertia. Stanley Baldwin’s indolence was a miracle in his own day and is a legend in ours. His languor was contagious. How much it influenced his Cabinet colleagues it is difficult to say. He made it all too plain that once a man had received his seals of office he would be the last person in the world to say how they should be used. ‘His Majesty’s ministers are co-equal,’ he maintained, adding, ‘Luckily they are not coeternal …’ before slipping off to sleep on the Treasury Bench. He lost no sleep even at the height of the two main crises of his career, the General Strike and the Abdication. He shrank from new thought, particularly new thought which had by-passed the Attic groves. ‘The intelligent are to the intelligentsia what a gentleman is to a gent,’ he said. The hustings left him in such a state of mental nausea at the vulgarity of it all that he always settled his mind with Horace before retiring. His idea of a busy day, says G. M. Young, his friend and biographer, was not to read the official papers, not to talk to politicians during luncheon and to write his personal letters in the Cabinet Room during the afternoon. All this would have been scandalous had he not almost broken his heart at the sight of two millions of his fellow countrymen reduced to rags and bones. He brooded on ‘unemployment which was eating away the energies of the nation and breeding dangerous thoughts’. The British belief that war must only be declared when the nation is least prepared to wage it may have had something to do with Baldwin’s belated reaction to the Fascist dictators, but the stagnant remedies he brought to heal the terrible disease of unemployment were shameful and, considering his quasi-mystical passion for England’s green and pleasant land, enigmatic. It was in his nature to find Hitler too frightful for words and Europe a bore, but he loved England as Shakespeare loved it. Yet he let it rot.

Wages began to fall and prices to rise in 1920. ‘In April, 1920, all was right with the world. In April, 1921, all was wrong,’ said R. H. Tawney. Trade unions were forced to stop their idealistic schemes for nationalizing industry which had received such an exultant shot in the arm through the success of the Russian Revolution and turn their energies towards getting pay rises for their members. Strikes began to paralyse the antiquated coal industry and the plain economic issues of the times were clouded by the sentimentality of the miners on the one hand and the barefaced greed of the coalowners on the other. Neither could see the need for change in the industry. When, in 1920, the miners demanded a reduction in the price of coal and increased wages the Bishop of Durham declared that ‘England has ceased to be a constitutional monarchy and is making its first advance towards the dictatorship of the proletariat.’

Class issues which had lain dormant all through the necessary brotherhood of the war and which in many instances might have withered away were viciously revived on both sides. The triumph of Bolshevism heartened the Left in the same way that the French Revolution heartened Wordsworth. The Right sought old remedies for new fears, and these shocked and sickened the disbanded soldiers who had been promised everything, from fair shares to a demi-paradise. Instead, they found themselves herded once more into the back-to-back ghettoes of the Industrial Revolution. They saw vitality and style return to middle-class life and their own lives reduced to a bewildering prospect of human negation.

Throughout the twenties the number of unemployed in Britain never dropped below the million mark and the sight of seedy men wearing scraps of uniform, tramps surging into the casual wards of country towns evening after evening, thin, worried-looking women and obviously under-fed children, became so common that they caused no more emotion than the beggars do in Egypt. Nor was the blight confined to cities. Agriculture had been declining ever since 1870 but the war had temporarily halted this and things looked actually rosy in 1920, when farmers were offered government protection from the vicissitudes of foreign agriculture. Then, in 1923, wheat, which had reached so high a price as 80s. 10d. per quarter, fell to 42s. 2d. Other prices followed suit. The slump had arrived. The Government now couldn’t afford to honour its commitments and the Agriculture Act of 1920, so full of hope and promise, was repealed. Farm labourers’ wages fell from 42s. a week to 30s. and less. The land was neglected and hikers would wander through shaggy fields and enjoy the picturesqueness and false peace of dilapidated barns. Hedges thickened into copses and copses into small woods. Field verges broadened until the patches of corn and sugar-beet were islanded by the last rich opulence of wild flowers, birds and insects the countryside was to know before mid-century sprays were to make such things legendary. There was tragedy in the tied cottage, a different type of tragedy from the terrace house in the Distressed Areas. The farm labourer had been used to having part of his pay in kind—house, milk, wood, fruit, vegetables—and these things vaguely continued. Also his relationship with his employer and all classes in his village was intimate and personal, and these things did not change greatly, even if his wages did. But the unemployed miner or shipyard worker was in a very different position. The economics of these trades made it necessary that such men should be employed in small armies, that they should be housed in packed lanes of slums and that their relationship to the bosses should be one which was dominated by a fearful respect. The knowledge that there could be ten or more thousand idle men a mile or two from his house unnerved many a coalowner, who often behaved heartlessly out of fright.

The average unemployed man could not relate his personal sufferings to the economic condition of his time and he felt betrayed. The years passed and in some areas a generation of young men grew up which had never known work. The North and South of England became curiously divorced and when marchers from the coal counties came to London in futile protest after protest at the terrible neglect which denied them their very existence as men, they seemed like foreigners. One of the few people who tried to fill this artificial and cruel breach with warmth and understanding was the young Prince of Wales. His actions were seen as unconstitutional criticism of the government and were much condemned. The first march of the unemployed on London took place as early as October, 1920, when a multitude of workless ex-servicemen attended a group of Labour mayors who were petitioning Lloyd George. This demonstration was broken up with great violence by foot and mounted police.

In 1921 it became obvious that unemployment insurance benefits based on the assumption that a man would only be out of work for a few weeks would have to be subsidized and the Unemployment Fund was allowed to borrow £30,000,000 from the Treasury. This became the ‘dole’. From the dole there sprang the bureaucracy necessary to administer it and from this bureaucracy, a regiment of nosy little clerks who were to be the Torquemadas of the most resented inquisition the British working-class was ever to suffer—the appliers of the Means Test. The Means Test was a policy of economic prurience which degraded both victim and administrator alike and the moral distress it brought innocent people was out of all proportion to its usefulness. Nothing was more perfectly designed to goad otherwise reasonable men to revolution and it was only because of the outsize decency of the ordinary man that it never did.

The family Means Test was imposed in 1931, after the financial panic of that year. It meant that, after an unemployed man had exhausted his insurance stamps he was turned over to a Public Assistance Committee which demanded to know details of all monies going into his house. Even if his son had a 3s.-a-week paper-round or if his wife had managed to put a few pounds by into the Post Office, he had to declare these details and the Public Assistance man would vary his dole accordingly. The family Means Test was enforced with great exactitude and its officers would stand in the front rooms of poverty-stricken homes asking endless deeply personal questions, while their prying eyes flickered over the furniture, the clothes, the pets and the food of the family being interrogated. Talebearers thrived. A child from a ‘Public Assistance’ home might be seen with a new overcoat or a bicycle, and the Means Test man would arrive to ask where these things came from. Resentment of the Means Test caused some of the most inflammable working-class demonstrations of the thirties, and even at the dread hour when Churchill took control of the nation in 1940 one of the first demands the Labour leaders made as a condition for joining the war-time coalition was that the family Means Test should go. It partly died in the Determination of Needs Bill of 1941, and thanks chiefly to Ernest Bevin. After the war and the social revolution brought about by the adoption of the Beveridge Report, the Means Test seemed to belong to a far more distant past than the thirties.

In 1930 unemployment figures ceased to be merely bewildering and became terrifying. Up and up they crept, in a high tide of human desuetude, until by the end of the year they reached the unprecedented total of 2½ millions. The Labour Government watched the tide incredulously and then was washed away by it. All the industrial parts of the country were paralysed. The whole of Wales and Lancashire was numb with wretchedness. J. B. Priestley likened Stockton-on-Tees to a theatre kept open ‘merely for the sale of drinks in the bars and chocolates in the corridors’. Walter Greenwood in Love on the Dole, described the nothingness to which life had descended.

During 1932 the dole for a married couple and their three children was 29s. 3d., but this was always liable to be subjected to the Means Test. ‘The test,’ said George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, ‘was an encouragement to the tattle-tale and the informer, the writer of anonymous letters and the local blackmailer; to all sorts of unneighbourliness.’ And ‘it stimulated petty tyranny and insolence on the part of Labour Exchange clerks and managers,’ said Walter Greenwood. ‘The weekly visit to the Exchange would bring the sudden curt announcement by the clerk: “They’ve knocked you off the dole.”’

Eventually, unemployment became a way of life. There was something akin to genius in the manner with which millions of men and women didn’t go to pieces or to the barricades, but settled down, in Orwell’s phrase, to ‘living on the dole’. This peace or resignation wasn’t easily come by. The almost sedate quiet of the distressed areas was the quiet of bewilderment and exhaustion. For more than ten years there had been a ceaseless attempt to catch the government’s eye, as it were. And to capture the imaginative sympathy of the middle class and to force it into action. Pamphlets, plays, commissions, deputations, letters to the Press, sermons, threats, pleas and, most of all, marches had been employed to make the authorities stir. Vast rallies of men from Rhondda and Glasgow blackened Hyde Park, and on one occasion their irritation led them to darken the carpets of the Ritz Hotel. They sang ‘Tipperary’ and ‘David of the White Rock’ and ‘The Red Flag’. They wore their medals and stood accusingly outside Buckingham Palace. Some contingent or other of them was as expected a sight in the capital as were the Beefeaters. ‘The unemployed …’ people said as they passed, but without deep emotion. For these were, after all, only the latest version of the poor who, according to scripture, would always be with them.

It took Jarrow, an industrial Lidice, to break the deadlock and Ellen Wilkinson to see that it was a clean break.

Jarrow is unique among all the inhabited places of England in that at two distantly separated dates in its history it became identified with the ultimate light and some of the worst darkness known to the human spirit. In the eighth century it was the fulcrum which Bede used to preserve art, literature and Christianity when Britain and all northern Europe were temporarily blacked out by the barbarians. It was the chink in the darkness through which the divine light never ceased to stream. Bede lived at Jarrow for over sixty years. Towards the end of his life his cell was the only place left where the twin flames of Hellenism and Christ’s doctrine of love unwaveringly endured and the hamlet became one of those spots, like Delphi, Little Gidding or the Mount of Olives, which are sacred. Nothing changed at Jarrow for over eleven hundred years, then a mining village grew up on the banks of the Slake. In 1852, by the opening of Palmer’s Shipyard, this harsh village was transformed into the most horrible of all the horrible industrial hells of the nineteenth century.

When Augustus Hare went to Jarrow to visit his friend Edward Liddell and his wife in 1876 he found this saintly clergyman ‘amidst a teeming population of blackened, foul-mouthed, drunken rogues, living in rows of dismal houses, in a country where every vestige of vegetation is killed by noxious chemical vapours, on the edge of a slimy marsh, with a distance of inky sky, and the furnesses vomitting forth volumes of blackened smoke. All nature seemed parched and writhing under the pollution…’

Jarrow during the Dark Ages had Bede and the first stained-glass windows in Britain; Jarrow during the nineteenth century, when the churches were packed to the doors, had Charles Palmer and the first British armour-plate industry. Palmer’s Yard made floating batteries for the Crimea and iron ships, screw colliers and, later, liners for the big shipping lines. Ellen Wilkinson said that Charles Palmer was one of the first men to grasp the idea of making an industrial plant an organized, integrated whole and that the Yard at Jarrow was, in the late nineteenth century, a triumph of planning. To this belching enterprise, from all over the North and from Ireland, came the ‘hands’, the faceless labour, in their thousands. In 1851 the population of Jarrow was 3,500, and in 1921 it was 35,000. All these people lived in stinking darkness, near sickness and obscene poverty. Yet when the slump hit Jarrow in the early thirties and Palmer’s was liquidated the fearful human dereliction which followed caused people to look back to these days with longing. Almost overnight Jarrow became a place which was not only made to feel it was spiritually expendable but also physically non-existent. There were many industrial areas as badly stricken by unemployment but none suffered Jarrow’s unique isolation. It was as though the town had been amputated and cast into the oblivion reserved by history for its enormities. The skies, scarcely seen for eighty years, cleared above Palmer’s Yard and the only sound to compete with the unfamiliar noise of the marsh birds returning to the filthy Slake was the ring of the breakers’ hammers as the cranes and machinery were dismantled. This very quietness was scarifying in itself. A profiteering concern called National Shipbuilding Security Ltd., notorious in the thirties for the way it bought up its slump-hit competitors with no thought for the many thousands of ordinary people involved, and which acted with the cold unfeeling consent of Walter Runciman at the Board of Trade, had moved in. When it moved out Palmer’s Yard, Jarrow’s Moloch for nearly a century, was left stark and useless. Neither the Government nor the businessmen gave any sign of a secret awareness that things might soon be very different and that shipping would soon have to be built at a furious pace. Many of the artisans of Jarrow had invested small savings in Palmer’s, which was to them the universe, a harsh world but a safe and everlasting one. None of these savings was honoured or returned and some were as much as £300—an enormous sum for a working man to have scraped together between the wars. After National Shipbuilding Security had made its bid, Runciman, the coldest fish in mid-thirties politics, turned down his thumb and then the Government, the country and, some of the Jarrovians thought, God Himself, all behaved as if Jarrow was no more.

‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson, the Joan of Arc of Jarrow, and its M.P., summed it up in a Left Book Club best-seller, The Town That Was Murdered.

‘Charles Palmer started Jarrow as a shipbuilding centre without considering the needs of the workers. They crowded into a small colliery village which was hurriedly extended to receive them. They packed into insanitary houses. They lived without social amenities. They paid with their lives for the absence of any preparation for the growth of such a town. And in 1933 another group of capitalists decided the fate of Jarrow without reference to the workers….’

For the next three years Jarrow was the Ultima Thule of the slump. When the student of human wretchedness reached this place he knew that he had reached the very pit of the Depression. There was help of a kind. Prosperous southern towns took to ‘adopting’ stricken communities in the distressed areas and Jarrow received pastimes for a social club and other small comforts that were on a par with a leper being waved to. Sir John Jarvis, a local industrialist, was more practical. He introduced one or two new trades and established them in part of the gaunt hollow of Palmer’s Yard. He also did all he could to fill the void left by the death of Palmer’s and at first was the only person outside the huge shuffling ranks of the workless who gave them hope and linked them with the outside world. It was Sir John Jarvis who revealed, in letters to the Press, to friends, and in speeches, the lies and distortions behind the greedy policy to make Jarrow defunct. This excellent man failed as anyone must fail who tries to play the good squire to a town of nearly forty thousand people. And, anyway, the rôle of liberator had already been ear-marked by fate for Ellen Wilkinson, a character who might have come straight out of George Bernard Shaw.

Red Ellen rose classically from the nonconformist working-class home to scholarships, degrees, local government, the Communist Party and the Labour Party to the Ministry of Education. It was platforms, platforms all the way, but Ellen seemed to dance on them. She was small, pretty, red-haired and crackerjack with vivacity. She understood the need for glory in life. She had a pert femininity which was almost that of the great music-hall artist and she had no fear at all. She became the Member for Jarrow in 1935 and lost not a moment after the votes were counted before she set-to ringing all the bells of hope in that living grave. In January, 1934, she had led a march of about 300 men and women to the neighbouring town of Seaham, where Ramsay MacDonald was visiting his constituency.

It wasn’t a very long march but the bearding of the Prime Minister in a cosy drawing-room by a throng of polite men and women, some of them far from young, who had tramped over fifteen miles in a great storm just to make him see Jarrow, somehow caught the imagination of the Press, used as it was to unemployed marches.

‘What good do such marches do?’ Red Ellen asked herself after the Prime Minister’s supremely fatuous remark as the deputation trudged from his fireside into the rain—‘Ellen, why don’t you go out and preach socialism, which is the only remedy for all this?’ But although unemployed marches were ten a penny, this particular stolen march on the discomfited MacDonald both amused and interested people. There was another factor also which manifested itself at this time, and this was Jarrow’s cool dignity and dramatic stoicism in the face of protracted disaster. The forsaken town had turned in upon itself like a family in misfortune and its inhabitants had become purged of rancour and even physically cleansed of all signs of the demeaning effects of their rough occupations. The photographs which appeared in the Press reflected a new kind of man and woman, ascetic, contained and enduring. The Greek tragedy of the place caught the popular imagination and at once it was decided to organize the unemployed march of all unemployed marches and shame the Government into action. Before this happened there were further conventional deputations to the heartless Walter Runciman. When Runciman said that Jarrow must work out its own salvation it was the last straw in official cruelty and in July, 1936, plans for the great crusade were put into action.

Big crowds—practically all Jarrow—saw them off. But before they had taken a single step everything possible was done to impress upon the country and upon the marchers themselves that what was happening was unique. This was to be no sorry shuffling rabble of malcontents but a dignified official delegation to Parliament. The original idea for the march came from a Jarrow councillor, David Riley, a descendant of the poor Irish which had crowded into Tyneside during the boom days. This was in the summer of 1936. All through August and September letters were written—on the Town Clerk’s writing paper, so that they were bound to receive proper civic protocol—funds were collected, boots were repaired and a great banner was stitched. The banner stated ‘Jarrow Crusade’ in large unequivocal appliquéd letters. All class, political and religious factions in the town came to varying degrees of temporary truce for the occasion. Candidates for the municipal re-elections agreed to pair and not fight each other’s seats. Two hundred men were chosen out of the many hundreds who volunteered and on Monday, October 5th they set out on the high road for London, nearly 300 miles away. Their objective was to reach the capital by the time the new King Edward opened Parliament. The king’s sympathy for the unemployed was well known. What was quite unknown, at least to all these humble, stricken men who had reason to put more faith in princes than politicians, was that this particularly hopeful king would make his first and last journey to Westminster with a heart so filled with his personal anxieties that there would be little room for theirs and with only a few more weeks of his reign left to go.

Malnutrition and idleness gave the marchers a refined, almost delicate, look. Their slight bodies were covered by dark, clothing club suits and each wore a roll of mackintosh across the chest and over the shoulder like a bandolier. Except for Councillor Riley, who marched the length of England in a bowler hat, the men wore cloth caps. They marched gravely in step to the sound of mouth organs and with the diminutive Ellen Wilkinson at their head. The Mayor and Mayoress of Jarrow led them for the first stage of the journey, a distance of twelve miles. Before setting off they had all attended a huge undenominational service in the parish church and had received the blessing of the Bishop of Jarrow, Dr. Gordon, that most kindly man, an action which was to goad the Bishop of Durham into a fury of criticism. The progress of the marchers was grave, almost sedate. The miseries of the depression had made them unnaturally reserved and reflective. At the rests Ellen Wilkinson and the medical students who had offered their services to the crusade cut away rough home-knitted socks from blisters and nursed bodies reacting strangely to the unfamiliar violence of discipline and action. But both blisters and peakiness belonged only to the initial stages of the march, and not many days had passed before fresh air and the sheer delight of being necessary brought a transformation to the wan faces that was little short of miraculous. By the time the men got to Sheffield they had lost their humiliated look and had instead a certain nervous poise. Some had plodded by the Somme and the Marne. Some would soon be in the Western Desert. Their perky ranks straddled the peace. Their official expenses for a month on the road were £2 a man which, as Ellen Wilkinson said, was more than any of the other marchers had ever had.

Meanwhile, news of this very special march and of all the hopefulness it contained had spread and produced an epidemic result. On the same morning as the men of Jarrow set out, 400 Scotsmen, accompanied by a retinue of cooks, cobblers and tailors, left Glasgow with the intention of linking up with various other large contingents of the unemployed from the distressed areas in order to achieve the biggest yet demonstration against the Means Test. Nor was marching as a form of social protest confined to Britain but broke out in all parts of the world, and on October 6th, 1936, the most tragic and macabre of all marches took place in Manila, when 300 lepers walked out of their hospital and journeyed in grim ranks to the Presidential Palace demanding ‘liberty or death’. Nor were the Mosleyites backward in keeping up with this restlessness and their massive forays into the East End began to take place almost nightly, bringing the strongest objections from borough councillors and priests, whose streets and parishes were submitted to disgusting scenes of violence and Jew-baiting. In Germany, the cult of the Wandervogel, a kind of folk-singing woodcraft society with undertones of homosexual love which had developed among students as far back as the 1880’s, was channelled by Baldur von Schirach into the Hitler Youth. The spirit of the Jugendherbergen, before it took on its sinister Nazi affiliations, drifted to Britain and inspired the more youthful of the workless to take to the lanes and mountains. The huge sales of J. B. Priestley’s Good Companions testified to the enormous romance of the open road. A picaresque literature grew up which contained carefree footloose doctrines. Heroes like Anthony Adverse and the ruffled vagabonds of Jeffery Farnol’s novels made insecurity a virtue and the simple life, preferably alfresco, was extolled by best-sellers like Tales From an Empty Cabin by ‘Grey Owl’. It was the heyday of Hobson’s choice, of learning to actually live—as apart from merely existing—without money. Youth Hostels were founded in 1931 by the National Council of Social Service and by the end of the thirties there were 297 hostels sleeping half a million hikers and bikers a year. This wanderlust occasionally got out of hand, as in the case of the young brothers who stole a little trawler called the Girl Pat from her moorings at Grimsby on April Fools’ Day, 1936, and sailed her for 8,000 miles all over the world with only a school atlas to help them, before justice caught up with them. Their action was a colourful snook cocked in the face of some of the most soul-crippling officialdom ever experienced by ordinary men and women. During this year, too, there took place the first British march against the Dictators, when scores of idealistic young men volunteered for the International Brigade in Spain, while their Nazi opposites in London tarred Epstein’s Day and blued his Rima. The scene was one of personal commitment and decision, general apathy and governmental cowardice and hesitation. This was the climate through which the 200 men of Jarrow marched, carrying in a heavy oak chest, which they took turns to haul, a petition to Stanley Baldwin, that bedtime titan in a world that was gradually finding its feet.

In an article in Time and Tide written by Ellen Wilkinson during rests and halts on the march, she describes the weary column’s arrival in the October evening streets of Chesterfield, Mansfield, Nottingham, Loughborough, Leicester and all the way to London. How,

‘Sometimes we came in from the dark road to beautifully set tables, napery and crockery and bright lights. Immediately the men smartened up. When it was not possible for them to wash before tea, they surreptitiously combed their tousled hair and rubbed soiled fingers on their handkerchiefs. But in those towns … mercifully few … where the tables were bare boards, and tea was poured from buckets into our own mugs, the men who had appeared so smart and alert at the well-set tables, suddenly looked “poor-law”, and just as grubby as their angry M.P. who still had to smile and return thanks for the bread and marge….’

The medical students, supplied by the Inter-Hospital Socialist Society at the rate of two a week, fixed up a clinic each evening in the casual wards, halls, etc. where the marchers slept, and cared for the half-starved bodies and neglected teeth. But some of the Press refused to be beguiled by the general goodness and worthwhileness of all this and commented primly on the Jarrow authorities for ‘exposing the miseries of the men on the road’ and for ‘sending hungry and ill-clad men across the country on a march to London’. Ellen Wilkinson rushed off to the Labour Party Conference in the middle of the march, where she expected sympathy and understanding, and where she got the cold shoulder. ‘I went from the warm comradeship of the road to an atmosphere of official disapproval,’ she said.

The reception of the marchers was varied to the point of being bizarre. In some places it was a case of watch out, the beggars are coming to town, and in others it was the most imaginative love and hospitality. The Co-op boot repairers at Leicester worked all night for nothing in order to mend the men’s decrepit footwear. Territorial officers at snobbish Harrogate looked after the marchers with the utmost kindness and generosity. At Barnsley the mayor ordered the public baths to be heated. The men slept in their clothes and usually on bare floors but they shaved daily and somehow contrived to look fresh and clean. Dinner was cooked by the wayside on a field kitchen and on one particularly dreadful day, during the twenty-mile stretch between Bedford and Luton, it rained without ceasing and the water crept through the mackintoshes until every man was soaked to the skin. The small frail Ellen never faltered through all this.

On the 15th of October, when the marchers had been on the road for ten days and were receiving, contrary to either the Government’s hopes or expectations, a royal treatment from the Press and public alike, the Cabinet decided to discourage all marches as they came very near to being breaches of the peace, but even The Times flared up at this and reminded the Government sharply that the marchers had begun their great journey with the blessing of the Bishop of Jarrow, had attended service in Ripon Cathedral en route and that they were the legitimate deputation of an English town on its lawful way to Westminster.

Two days later an appalled Ellen Wilkinson learned that the Bishop of Jarrow had made a public disclaimer that the march had his support, though he had felt it his Christian duty to pray for God’s blessing on the marchers themselves. The Bishop’s retraction was answered by the Archdeacon of Northumberland in a superb re-statement of the marchers’ purpose published in The Times. And at the same time it was learned that when the Special Areas (Development and Improvement Act) came up for renewal in the new Parliament, the Government intended to include it in the Continuation Bill, which meant that once more the tragic problem of the distressed areas would not be examined in detail, but would be passed over in a general kind of fashion.

The last week of October, 1936, saw a dramatic heightening of the restrained anarchy as the forces of reaction and what looked like the first stages of a great Popular Front movement wooed the torpid politicians. On October 22nd more than a thousand Blackshirts marched through Bethnal Green in state. A drum and pipe band headed the procession and the great company of foot and mounted police which escorted it were noticeably part of the parade. On October 25th two more marches began, one of Means Test protestants from all over South Wales and the other made up of blind men who were angry because the war blind were given preferential treatment to civilian blind. As these huge processions of strangers swept into towns and villages they presented a great many practical difficulties to the inhabitants who, on the whole, behaved extremely well. Rotarians and ex-servicemen’s associations were generous and made up for the near-Dickensian state of mind which still ruled the roost in many workhouses.

Hensley Henson, the Bishop of Durham, and Ellen Wilkinson argued the pros and cons of marching from violently opposite points of view, or so it seemed. However, a close examination of their letters shows that they were both terrified of the same danger, the end of liberty. The Bishop maintained that marching involved substituting for the provisions of the Constitution the methods of organized mob pressure. ‘If generally adopted, as there now seems great likelihood that it will be if it be now encouraged, it may bring us before the winter is out into grave public confusion and danger….’ Ellen reacted violently to this. She told the Bishop and all who thought as he did that to stigmatize as ‘dangerous’ a legal petition to Parliament was perilous at a time when constitutional rights were being threatened on every side. The wrangle cleared the air a bit. Those with only the rudiments of political sense could now see that the Jarrow Crusade was more than an industrial complaint, it was an uncompromising but simple restatement of part of the ancient common law of England.

As the marchers neared London and rumours grew that the Government did not intend to receive them there was a sudden stepping up of public sympathy, most of which reflected a correct patriotism. Bedford was particularly warm and received the Jarrow men with a mixture of official courtesy and personal hospitality which did much to bridge the chasm which existed between the South and North of England.

On November 1st they entered London during a cloudburst and singing ‘The Minstrel Boy’ to their mouth-organ band, while a single drum throbbingly kept the step. Ellen, visibly worn out and helping herself along with a walking-stick, led them through empty Mayfair, down Regent Street, where small groups of spectators and Pressmen stared from shop doorways, past Charing Cross and so to the inevitable soup kitchen. They had arrived. London was neither welcoming nor hostile; it was merely the sprawling immensity which had seen everything and which was incapable of astonishment. After the highly individual towns and cities on the route with their comprehensible reaction, tepid or otherwise, and usually the latter, London seemed negative. As they plodded through the ornate streets of the West End which showed no sign of hard times, the marchers felt the old dread insignificance return to them and began to realize in a dull way how impossible it was for those who lived in such a place to have any conception of what it must be like to be virtually left to rot in a black proletarian warren. A reluctant rearmament programme had severed the North and Wales from the South. The unemployment figures for Middlesex were 4.3 per cent of the working population; in Glamorganshire they were 33.4 per cent. The Government’s refusal to put new arms factories in the stricken areas was little less than a vote of no confidence for tradesmen whose hands were white with idleness. The atmosphere at the soup kitchen in Garrick Street was tense and protective. The men felt like foreigners and now realized how worthless it had been to send all those individual spokesmen, letters from the Town Clerk and even Ellen to speak for them in the past. Not so Ellen. She continued to breathe and flash enthusiasm and optimism and the next day, from the public galleries in the House of Commons, the marchers in their dried-out but shapeless clothes watched her present the petition. The document, in its oak box, had gained a sentimental mystique during its long journey. It contained 12,000 names. In it resided all the dignity, suffering, accusation, hope and longing of what The Times called a forlorn community…. Ellen, metamorphosed overnight from a cheerful dripping vagabond into a pretty woman of considerable importance, rose and spoke. The House smiled indulgently; it liked Ellen and on the whole it liked drama. The bony, weather-reddened faces of the workless stared down like sparse carvings from the gallery.

‘I ask leave to present to this honourable House the petition of the people of Jarrow,’ said Ellen in a clear, slightly irritable voice which soon changed to one of impish charm. ‘During the last fifteen years Jarrow has passed through a period of industrial depression unparalleled…. Its shipyard is closed and its steelworks have been denied the right to re-open. Where formerly 8,000 persons, many of them skilled workmen, were employed, only a hundred are now employed on a temporary scheme. The town cannot be left derelict….’

When she had finished, Sir N. Gratton-Doyle presented another petition, this one signed by nearly 70,000 Tynesiders on behalf of Jarrow. Ellen then asked the Prime Minister how many resolutions he had received from public bodies, corporations and individuals regarding Jarrow since July, that is, since the march was first planned.

The whole thing then sank into a strange unfeeling clamminess as Stanley Baldwin told Ellen that he had received 66 resolutions and 8 letters from public bodies, and 1 telegram, 5 postcards and 8 letters from individuals. The buck was next passed to Walter Runciman and the amazed marchers listened while the President of the Board of Trade solemnly told the House that the unemployment position at Jarrow, while still far from satisfactory, had improved during recent months. When a member protested at this, Runciman shut him up with the remark that if the question was put on the order paper he would consider the matter. The member, who was the Liberal-National Mr. Magnay of Gateshead, wouldn’t stop here and pressed Runciman to say whether the ban on Palmer’s Shipyard prevented the Admiralty building ships there. What was to stop the Government putting two years’ work at the Yard? (This was the real issue—why, when one had a great yard and thousands of skilled workers, and one needed more ships in a hurry, why was Jarrow ostracized?) Everybody knew why, of course. National Shipbuilders Security had bought and dismantled the Yard, and in effect Jarrow itself, for reasons of private profit. When Sir Samuel Hoare pompously talked of the Yard ‘being disposed of’ there was satirical laughter from all over the House. When a Welsh member asked the Prime Minister whether it was in the public interest that a private company should be free to barter away the livelihood of the whole population of a district like this, Baldwin refused to answer. And that was that. The result of three months’ excited preparation and one month’s march had led to a few minutes of flaccid argument during which the Government speakers had hardly mustered enough energy to roll to their feet. But when the bewildered unemployed trooped downstairs they found everything surprisingly changed and jolly, for it was teatime. Ellen did her best to cheer them up and the faces which had registered nothing during the questions now beamed warmth and friendliness as cups and cakes were pressed on the guests.

On Guy Fawkes Day the men left King’s Cross by special train for Jarrow, where a great welcome was awaiting them. But the important little gods at ‘the Labour’ remained implacable and unaffected by all this, and the Unemployment Assistance Board in Jarrow promptly deducted from four to eleven shillings from the marchers’ allowances on the grounds that while they were on the march they could not be available for work, had work turned up.

Ellen’s best-seller, The Town That Was Murdered, which she wrote for Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, came too late to help Jarrow, for it was then 1939, and things were different.