WHAT I SAW IN JARROW

which the 'hunger marchers' had on him fifty years ago

WHAT left a mark on my mind at the time was the dignity of the 200 Jarrow marchers, by contrast with the antics of many eager to exploit them. It is consoling to find that impression confirmed by one or two of my clippings from the staid columns of the Morning Post.

Old men forget, and the last quarter of 1936 gave a reporter a lot to do and to remember. October 1936 was also the month in which Sir Oswald Mosley's Brit- ish Union of Fascists attempted the most violent of their forced marches. The battle of Cable Street occupied 3,000 policemen and a long, bloody Sunday. It took 5,000 police to control the disorder created by 10,000 anti-Fascist demonstrators a week or so later. Another bloody Sunday. It was the quarter in which King Edward VIII, visiting South Wales, moved by what he saw, uttered the words (forever afterwards quoted out of context), 'Something must be done. . .' He had only weeks to run before the Abdication was upon us.

Charles Dickens opens A Tale of Two Cities with the words: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' This was the worst of times. Looking back, I feel slightly ashamed to have been transported in a hired car, a hefty limo, to a staging point north of London towards the close of the Jarrow march. The idea was to march a little with them, behind the banner of Ellen Wilkinson, get the tone and make sure of filing colourful copy early. As they neared London, the pilgrims became outnum- bered by observers, well-wishers and peo- ple like me.

In subsequent months I was to spend some time in all the distressed areas, Tyneside, West Cumberland and South Wales. At the time of the Jarrow march I was without that experience, and so did not fully comprehend what these men had marched away from. They had in truth marched from hopelessness. Just before they arrived, Mr P. Malcolm Stewart, in his valedictory report as Commissioner for the Special Areas of England and Wales, issued a report which I had to condense into three columns. There was space for only five lines about Jarrow: . on balance the economic position of Jarrow offered sufficient advantages to warrant the erection of a modern steelworks, the opportunity for which has been lost.' That was the immediate pretext for the march.

Malcolm Stewart was alarmed by the rapid expansion of industry in Greater London. He wanted it controlled, even arrested to secure a fairer share for Jarrow and the like. He was whistling in the dark.

So they marched. My recollection is that the marchers were mute, but as they drew closer to London their impressive silence was broken by people most anxious to speak for them. They aroused sympathy at every point in their journey. At staging points, halls were open and rather clumsy efforts were made by locals to offer com- fort. Vicars were much in evidence.

They bore no resemblance whatever to the sort of men and women who march ritually through London now. They were spectres. I cannot trace my piece written en route, but this is what I wrote at the time in the highly Conservative Morning Post ab- out the 'hunger marchers' as we called them then, in London:

Alone, the unemployed marchers would have made an impressive and moving de- monstration. They were the most silent of all the crowd, marching steadily and quietly to their appointed places, with packs swung squarely across their. backs and the stain of many miles of travel on their clothes.

It was apparent that the strain of daily marching had told upon the physical strength of some. But all were erect, and every man marched in step. Their faces and physiques told the reason for their coming and of the places from whence they had come. They presented the most genuine picture of Eng- land's distressed areas that London has yet seen.

The Morning Post was, after all, a high Tory newspaper and it clearly felt it neces- sary to put my next passage in black type:

But they were not alone. Their presence had been made the cause or excuse for a political demonstration, and they were obscured by those whose business it was to ensure that such a demonstration was big enough and noisy enough to attract attention.. .

Elsewhere I observed that many of the women sympathisers had dressed as smart- ly or ostentatiously as they could for the occasion; the young men, representing student political organisations, wore red ties and uncut hair. Uncut hair, forsooth and this in the 1930s, not the 1960s.

Baldwin, then Prime Minister, was pressed to allow the Jarrow men to appear at the Bar of the House. He declined. Attlee put it to a vote, which he lost. As a compromise the Government then arranged for the Minister of Labour, Ernest Brown, to receive local MPs and a delegation of the Jarrow marchers. They stated their case.

Whatever the accompaniment, whatever the motives, the Jarrow marchers achieved what they set out to do. There was no television in those days. Pictures of places like Jarrow were negatives in the mind's eye of London and the South. Before that quarter ended, I was in Jarrow, among other places, with orders to discover and report what drove men on a march like this. The Morning Post, in a modest but well-intentioned effort, contrived to send that Christmas every child of unemployed parents throughout the distressed areas a present, delivered anonymously and by a postman.

Middle-class guilt, we would call it now. In the course of my travels, I learned enough at first hand to be a degree less surprised than some when, a decade later, Labour swept into power.

One day I went to talk on Tyneside with a woman school-teacher, senior, wise and remarkably calm. She spoke about her girls who left home without breakfast and would return to a thin tea of jam on bread. `Of course,' she said, 'some of them take to the streets later on. You can hardly blame them. They bring in something.' Then she looked at me, wondering how far to go with a newspaper reporter. She went on: `But I find it hard to bear when they go on the streets while still in my form.' The school-leaving age was lower then, habits less promiscuous. A school girl having sex for money and family-keep struck this sheltered reporter from the Morning Post more forcibly than all the chilling stillness of the Tyne banks.

Oh, that march was genuine enough, which is why it left its mark. No doubt those now seeking to reproduce it believe they can make a corresponding mark. Not on me, they won't; not like the school- teacher on Tyneside in December 1936.