Jarrow is a trigger word for the British labour movement, detonating emotions, prejudices and false reputations; for half a century it has given nourishment to the misconceptions of Labour politicians. Fifty years ago this month the Jarrow march (it called itself a crusade) set out to bring a petition to parliament from the stricken Tyneside town. It was, to be sure, a moving episode in working class history. now to be celebrated by another march which will climax with the presentation of another petition, worded just as it was in 1936. Most of those taking part will no doubt be sure that they are doing something significant about unemployment and poverty. The crucial question will evade them: why must it happen again, fifty years later?
Labour's propaganda victory of the 1940s was largely based on their asserting that prewar poverty and unemployment was the result of the policies of a heartless Tory government. In support of this, free use was made of photographs of events like the Jarrow march, with nostalgic references to the town's Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson. In this way the Labour Party succeeded in identifying itself with the march and with the idea that, had they been in power at the time, there would have been no reason for it to happen. In fact the march was not a Labour Party demonstration; it was a protest on behalf of the whole town, the petition was carried jointly by the Conservative and Labour agents and at the time a truce was observed in the local elections. Even more: far from supporting the march the Labour Party and the TUC condemned it. At the Labour conference which took place while the march was on the road the NEC representative made a scathing attack on Ellen Wilkinson. The TUC advised all trades councils to ignore the march. Of course not all of them took this advice but when they did hospitality was often provided to the marchers by the local Conservative Party, or the Territorial Army, or businessmen.
Jarrow's established reputation for militancy comes from its mistaken association with the marches of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, which happened regularly in the 1930s and which were larger, more demanding and often riotous. Jarrow was anything but riotous; it would be more accurate to describe it as a company town. As it developed during the second half of the 19th century its central industry — in effect its only one — was C. M. Palmer's shipyard, which took advantage of the change from wooden to iron ships to develop a screw-driven collier. Palmer's financial policies have been described, in retrospect, as "exuberant'. which implies that they were recklessly optimistic but at the time they could have had few critics. By 1860 the company was dominant among the iron ship builders of the Tyne. It had grown into a huge, integrated business with its own ironstone mines, its own port, its own coal mines and steel furnaces. Palmer's workforce included a large proportion of highly skilled men such as boilermakers and ship wrights. the kind who are sometimes referred to as an ''aristocracy of labour". Until 1921 Jarrow was, by working class standards, one of the better-off towns, where wages were relatively high. Its people were confident that things would stay that way.
This was reflected in the way Jarrow voted. Until the turn of the century it was a Liberal stronghold. Before 1907 the Unionists would not even contest the seat and one Labour MP grumbled that "There was never a more hopeless constituency for a Labour candidate to attack than Jarrow in the nineties. Sir Charles Mark Palmer, the sitting member, was the most popular man in the north of England". The secretary of the Jarrow march described the place as "more a Tory town than it is a Labour town". After Palmer's death in 1907 the Labour Party won the seat but it then changed between Labour and Liberal until 1929, when a Conservative won there, inflicting on Labour their second worst result in the North-East. When Ellen Wilkinson won the seat in 1935 the Tory vote was as high as 47 per cent. Wilkinson had been a member of the Communist Party, changing to Labour when the Labour Party made it impossible to be a member of both parties. She accumulated the familiar reputation for fearless militancy but — and this again is a familiar story — her career peaked when she became Minister of Education in the 1945 Labour government, which was continually at odds with the Communist Party over its policies both at home and abroad.
In many ways Jarrow represented the economic changes which were forced on British capitalism during the first half of the 20th century. By the 1930s it was accepted by all but the hardest of die-hards that British capitalism had lost for good many of the export markets which it had once dominated and on which so much of its wealth and power rested. As heavy industry and mining, located mainly in the North, went into decline capital was switched to lighter, consumer-orientated industries in the Midlands and South. Jarrow's dependence on Palmer's made it particularly vulnerable in any such movement; the First World War demand for shipping postponed the inevitable but by 1921 the brief post-war boom was at an end and shipbuilding was badly hit. In December that year 36 per cent of the industry's workforce were unemployed, by the following August in Jarrow 43 per cent were out of work. Palmer's were unable to take advantage of the partial recovery which followed and Jarrow might be said to have led the way into the slump of 1929. In July 1932 Palmer 's launched its last ship and in 1933 the yard was closed. By 1934 there were 67.8 per cent of the town's insured workers unemployed, by 1935 it was 72.9 per cent and by 1936 it had reached 80 per cent.
J. B. Priestley, in his English Journey, described Jarrow as he saw it in 1933: "Wherever we went there were men hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them". The town had long suffered a high incidence of tuberculosis — the result of bad housing, malnourishment and topography — in spite of its relative prosperity. In the 1930s the rate of TB rose to double the national average. In 1934, when the infant mortality rate was 47 for each thousand live births in the Home Counties, in Jarrow it was 114. So alarmed was the Board of Education at the malnutrition among Jarrow's schoolchildren that they sent a request to the council to increase free school meals.
Little wonder that Jarrow should feel, in its desperate plight, that an especially harsh discrimination was being applied to it. If, as the title of the famous book has it, it was The Town That Was Murdered who., or what, did the killing? During the recessions of the 1920s and the 1930s some industries attempted to defend themselves by forming cartels with the object of restricting (they called it "co-ordinating" or "rationalising") production and marketing, in the hope that this would enable part of the industry to survive in profitability. Much the same thing happens now in. for example, the oil industry. The steel industry organised the British Iron and Steel Federation, which set itself to oppose any efforts by non-members to open up production. It was opposition from the BISF which caused the abandonment of a plan for an integrated steel plant in Jarrow — the event which sparked off the march.
The shipbuilders' cartel was National Shipbuilders Security Ltd. set up in 1930 with most of the industry and the big banks as shareholders. The NSS was financed through a levy on its members and its object was to buy up shipyards and then "sterilise” them. By 1934, in this way, it had finished off 137 berths, or two-fifths of the British industry. with a production capacity over a million tons. Among them was Palmer s yard at Jarrow, which went into receivership in 1933 and was sold — delivered up to — the NSS in 1934.
With their dreams and their confidence in tatters, it was tempting for desperate, starving workers to think of Jarrow as being murdered. cut off in its prime, by a small group of greedy capitalists supported by a pitiless government. This is a common enough reaction to unemployment; it goes with the theory that capitalism's problems — its disorder, its crises, its inadequacies — are abnormal and could be avoided by running the system differently. Jarrow, it was said, was the victim of a monstrous crime and crime is. or should be. abnormal.
By the standards under which capitalism must operate, what happened to Jarrow was perfectly normal and reasonable. This society does not produce wealth to meet people's needs, or employ them so that they can be healthy and happy. Its wealth is produced for sale on the market, intended to yield a profit to the minority who possess the means of production and distribution, including things like steel works, mines, shipyards and ships. Workers are employed, that is to say their labour power is bought by the capitalists, in order to turn out that wealth. But it is impossible to predict how the market will behave, to control it. to guarantee that it will always absorb what has been produced. That is why every so often there is a "surplus" of some sorts of goods, however much people may need them. When sales are high, in a boom, "exuberant" investment policies are praised as divine wisdom; in a recession they are condemned as blindly irresponsible. So it was with Palmer's; had things turned differently the company would have been a favourite among the economic experts and the apologists for capitalism as a masterpiece of financial and industrial genius.
Jarrow was badly hit in the slumps of the 1920s and 1930s but it was not alone for the entire shipbuilding industry was in decline. In 1920 British yards turned out over 2 million tons but by 1933 this had fallen to 133.000 tons. In 1932 the industry had nearly 60 per cent unemployment; that was the year when, according to the Home Office, two unemployed men committed suicide every day. There was a similar story in towns which had depended on other branches of heavy industry; Dowlais. Brynmawr and Motherwell, for example, all had unemployment at about 75 per cent in 1934.
Some of this must have been in the minds of the Jarrow marchers, as they assembled for their trek to London. This was one of the smaller of the many protest marches of that time — 200 selected men compared to the thousands who would take part in the demonstrations organised by the NUWM. It did not demand better benefits or more humane treatment for the unemployed; its object was to persuade the government to direct investment into the town. The marchers were generally regarded benignly by the police (Special Branch kept close observation on all demonstrations by the unemployed for no matter how desperate working class poverty may be it could be permitted to arouse only the best-mannered of protests), the press and the government — in contrast to the NUWM marches which were battered with relentless sneers and criticism and, by the police, with unprovoked assaults.
As the Jarrow men made their way to London The Times congratulated them on their stoicism and sympathetically reported their blistered feet and their fatigue. They enthusiastically cheered King Edward VIII. who happened to be passing by in The Mall. The Home Office agreed that, as ". . . the marchers show every sign of being orderly, it would be a good way of encouraging them and placating them" to allow them to be entertained in the Houses of Parliament. Taking tea with the MPs was hardly the way to bring down capitalism, or even to change its course. Even more, friendly Members took them on a boat trip down the Thames, which caused them to be absent from the climax of the march — the presentation of their petition. They also missed the government's response, which was bluntly translated for them by a Jarrow councillor: "It means you have drawn a blank". The next day the Jarrow men caught the train back home, to the end "well disciplined . . . conduct was exemplary" in the words of the police report.
Apart from putting the town's name and that of its MP — into the history books and the laying out of one small public park, there was nothing to show for the Jarrow march. Its objectives were restricted and short term but even at that they were beyond its reach. No government can change the nature of capitalism or divert it from its natural course and that was why they had to refuse to do anything to revive industry in Jarrow. They even stopped the marchers' unemployment pay, on the grounds that they were not available for work for the period of the march (there was, of course, no work in Jarrow for them to be available for. but never mind). Capitalism continued on its troubled way; while Jarrow agonised the excessively rich Tory MP Henry Channon set out in his diary some of the difficulties his class were experiencing in early 1937:
[I] had a large dinner party . dinner was magnificent. Lady Granard could hardly walk for jewels.
And later that
I find a new, unexpected joy at the age of nearly forty, in accumulating money and watching it grow.
Those appallingly smug words illuminate the real social and political issue, in the 1930s and now — the class division of society based on the private ownership of the means of life. As Channon wrote, one per cent of the population owned 56 per cent of the wealth in private hands. The situation is very little different today. The social system which exploits and impoverishes the majority, which forced the men of Jarrow to that moving, fruitless crusade, remains in being. Now. after another post-war boom, we are in another recession which again has affected the shipyards of the Tyne. Unemployment in the area is at 25.6 per cent. This is what brings the people of Jarrow to London once more, to set down their protest at the effects of capitalism but giving no thought to abolishing the system. That the famous march must happen again, fifty years on. is no cause for celebration for it demonstrates how futile it was in 1936 — and how futile today.
Ivan
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