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Long Road from Jarrow: A journey through Britain then and now
In the autumn of 1936, some 200 men from the Tyneside town of Jarrow marched 300 miles to London in protest against the destruction of their towns and industries. Precisely 80 years on, Stuart Maconie, walks from north to south retracing the route of the emblematic Jarrow Crusade. Following history’s footsteps, Maconie is in search of what Modern Britain is really like today.
Travelling down the country’s spine, Maconie moves through a land that is, in some ways, very much the same as the England of the thirties with its political turbulence, austerity, north/south divide, food banks and of course, football mania. Yet in other ways, it is completely unrecognisable; highstreets peppered with pound shops and e-cigarette vendors, smoothie bars and Costas on every corner.
Maconie visits the great, established and yet evolving cities of Leeds, Sheffield and London, as well as the sleepy hamlets, quiet lanes and roaring motorways. He meets those with stories to tell and whose voices build a funny, complex and entertaining tale of Britain, then and now. Written in Maconie’s signature style, this is a fascinating exploration of a modern nation that, though looks and sounds strangely familiar, has been completely transformed.
Travelling down the country’s spine, Maconie moves through a land that is, in some ways, very much the same as the England of the thirties with its political turbulence, austerity, north/south divide, food banks and of course, football mania. Yet in other ways, it is completely unrecognisable; highstreets peppered with pound shops and e-cigarette vendors, smoothie bars and Costas on every corner.
Maconie visits the great, established and yet evolving cities of Leeds, Sheffield and London, as well as the sleepy hamlets, quiet lanes and roaring motorways. He meets those with stories to tell and whose voices build a funny, complex and entertaining tale of Britain, then and now. Written in Maconie’s signature style, this is a fascinating exploration of a modern nation that, though looks and sounds strangely familiar, has been completely transformed.
368 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 20, 2017
45 people are currently reading
331 people want to read
About the author
Stuart Maconie
31 books186 followersStuart Maconie is a TV and radio presenter, journalist, columnist and author.
He is the UK’s best-selling travel writer of non-TV tie-in books and his Pies and Prejudice was one of 2008’s top selling paperbacks. His work has been compared with Bill Bryson, Alan Bennett and John Peel and described by The Times as a 'National Treasure'.
He co-hosts the Radcliffe and Maconie Show on BBC Radio 2 every Monday – Thursday evening, as well as The Freak Zone on 6Music on Sunday afternoons, and has written and presented dozens of other shows on BBC Radio. His TV work includes presenting the BBC's On Trial shows, Pop on Trial and Style on Trial, as well as Stuart Maconie’s TV Towns, a popular gazeteer of major British cities and their roles in modern cultural life for ITV 4 and The Cinema Show/The DVD Collection on BBC 4.
As well as a popping up in Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights, and on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Stuart was a favourite on hit TV series such as the BBC's I love the 1970s' , I love the 1980s , and is now in variously Grumpy... . His other books include the acclaimed official biographies of both Blur and James. He can name GQ Man of the Year and Sony Awards Radio Broadcaster of the Year amongst his accolades. He has regular columns in The Radio Times and Country Walking and writes for WORD magazine and The Mirror.
He is the UK’s best-selling travel writer of non-TV tie-in books and his Pies and Prejudice was one of 2008’s top selling paperbacks. His work has been compared with Bill Bryson, Alan Bennett and John Peel and described by The Times as a 'National Treasure'.
He co-hosts the Radcliffe and Maconie Show on BBC Radio 2 every Monday – Thursday evening, as well as The Freak Zone on 6Music on Sunday afternoons, and has written and presented dozens of other shows on BBC Radio. His TV work includes presenting the BBC's On Trial shows, Pop on Trial and Style on Trial, as well as Stuart Maconie’s TV Towns, a popular gazeteer of major British cities and their roles in modern cultural life for ITV 4 and The Cinema Show/The DVD Collection on BBC 4.
As well as a popping up in Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights, and on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Stuart was a favourite on hit TV series such as the BBC's I love the 1970s' , I love the 1980s , and is now in variously Grumpy... . His other books include the acclaimed official biographies of both Blur and James. He can name GQ Man of the Year and Sony Awards Radio Broadcaster of the Year amongst his accolades. He has regular columns in The Radio Times and Country Walking and writes for WORD magazine and The Mirror.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 93 reviews
June 25, 2017
Although Stuart Maconie had no particular connections with Jarrow, he ‘fancied going for a really long walk,’ and decided, in 2016, to retrace the 1936 Jarrow march. Over three and a half weeks, he planned to walk the nearly 300 miles from Jarrow to London. This march has taken on something of a mythic quality in British minds. These men, walking to London in order to deliver a petition to parliament, hoping to find employment. In a way, as Maconie muses, this is due to our love of ‘heroic failure.’ The last survivor of the march later admitted it, “had made not one ha’porth of difference,” although others felt it created a desire for change.
Maconie is an interesting and entertaining guide and I have enjoyed his previous books. This is a guide across a still divided nation – a country split by geography and class – and written shortly after the Brexit vote which permeates the pages of this book as Maconie attempts to come to grips with what leaving Europe means (published a year later, it is obvious that nobody is sure even now, including an increasingly divided government).
So, what was life for like in Jarrow in 1936? Jarrow sits on the banks of the Tyne, nine miles west of Newcastle. At the time of the march, the shipyards were closed, there was 80% unemployment, a harsh means test for any kind of welfare benefit and little support from the Labour party (the natural political supporters) for the march. However, hopes were high when the men set out and so was our guide and author.
This book combines a history of the march with modern day comparisons. Although some people he talked to, had not heard of the Jarrow march, others had longer memories and he draws interesting, more modern examples. In Barnsley, for example, Maconie discovers a cab company, formed with the redundancy money from the miner’s strike, with a younger cab driver comparing the original drivers to ‘Japanese soldiers who don’t know the war’s over.’ There are various political, and historical, topics – from Jeremy Corbyn attending a function to national tragedies, such as Hillsborough and Aberfan.
Along with the shock of Brexit, there is the approaching US election. Could any reasonable, sane human being, ‘really consider voting for a man like Trump? Surely not.’ Hindsight is a fine thing and we know what is around the corner… Still, along with the depression (literally, in the 1930’s) and the political depressions abounding in this book, there is also a lot to interest and amuse. Pubs and Indian restaurants are important considerations on the author’s travels, as are evening entertainments, which have to be carefully thought about. Should Marconie go to a classical concert or to see the Chuckle Brothers? Twitter is important in offering suggestions and places of interest, while we read of subjects as diverse as football, Ladybird Books and the abdication crisis.
If you are interested in Britain, then and now, as well as the historical importance of the Jarrow March, this is a very good read. Marconie is a good travel guide, who has an obvious interest and love in the places he travels through and the people he meets. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review and recommend it highly.
Maconie is an interesting and entertaining guide and I have enjoyed his previous books. This is a guide across a still divided nation – a country split by geography and class – and written shortly after the Brexit vote which permeates the pages of this book as Maconie attempts to come to grips with what leaving Europe means (published a year later, it is obvious that nobody is sure even now, including an increasingly divided government).
So, what was life for like in Jarrow in 1936? Jarrow sits on the banks of the Tyne, nine miles west of Newcastle. At the time of the march, the shipyards were closed, there was 80% unemployment, a harsh means test for any kind of welfare benefit and little support from the Labour party (the natural political supporters) for the march. However, hopes were high when the men set out and so was our guide and author.
This book combines a history of the march with modern day comparisons. Although some people he talked to, had not heard of the Jarrow march, others had longer memories and he draws interesting, more modern examples. In Barnsley, for example, Maconie discovers a cab company, formed with the redundancy money from the miner’s strike, with a younger cab driver comparing the original drivers to ‘Japanese soldiers who don’t know the war’s over.’ There are various political, and historical, topics – from Jeremy Corbyn attending a function to national tragedies, such as Hillsborough and Aberfan.
Along with the shock of Brexit, there is the approaching US election. Could any reasonable, sane human being, ‘really consider voting for a man like Trump? Surely not.’ Hindsight is a fine thing and we know what is around the corner… Still, along with the depression (literally, in the 1930’s) and the political depressions abounding in this book, there is also a lot to interest and amuse. Pubs and Indian restaurants are important considerations on the author’s travels, as are evening entertainments, which have to be carefully thought about. Should Marconie go to a classical concert or to see the Chuckle Brothers? Twitter is important in offering suggestions and places of interest, while we read of subjects as diverse as football, Ladybird Books and the abdication crisis.
If you are interested in Britain, then and now, as well as the historical importance of the Jarrow March, this is a very good read. Marconie is a good travel guide, who has an obvious interest and love in the places he travels through and the people he meets. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review and recommend it highly.
September 15, 2018
[3.5] Stuart Maconie is, it turns out, not just a music pundit and BBC presenter familiar since my teens, or the Lancastrian Bill Bryson, but also a seasoned long-distance walker and president of the Ramblers' Association, and a self-declared Marxist. So he's more qualified than some may assume to write a book about a very long walk retracing the steps of the Jarrow March, from Tyneside to central London, on its 80th anniversary. And that being autumn 2016, the book doubles as a snapshot of the post-referendum state-of-the-nation.
Audio seemed the ideal format for a light non-fiction book by someone I'm already used to hearing on the radio. And Maconie absolutely has the sort of animated delivery that means I keep taking in the audiobook while doing other things. So this met my main requirement for an audiobook, to be companionable and interesting in the same way as various Radio 4 shows I like, just longer form. I'm positive I spotted where he'd started a new day of recording with a bit of a cold, which made it all the more human. (I may have only given this 3 stars, but please could he do audiobooks of Cider with Roadies, The Pie at Night and Never Mind the Quantocks... i.e. all of his books that I haven't read and would quite like to.)
There is plenty to like here, if you like the light travelogue thing. About the places he walks through, stops off at, and people he meets. (The walks between stops vary from, I think, 8 to 21 miles a day.) It's the kind of book that tells you new factoids about places you've lived and thought you knew well. Maconie would clearly be a good man in a pub quiz.
He has that thing about Leeds, like quite a few people I've known who've never lived there: "Nowhere buzzes like Leeds, for all you can say about Manchester, Newcastle and Liverpool", whereas I've never really grokked Leeds, the way I do those others; there's obviously more to it than Alan Bennett, hipster shops and finance jobs, but I haven't got a sense of its identity and atmosphere the way I have with other comparable British cities. Apparently it's also a major centre for contemporary jazz - that's the kind of thing you find out here. The people at the Sikh Gurdwara in Wakefield sounded lovely; it seems like a great place to visit, although I hope the book hasn't made them so busy it's a struggle to feed all the visitors.
Hearing about the transition of North to South through the landscape and cities was one of the most interesing elements, and made me really wish I were able to do a walk like this. It's between Sheffield and Chesterfield that he starts talking about where the North ends and the Midlands begins... I reckon it's more somewhere in the middle of Derbyshire than at the Yorks/Derbys border, based on friends. But it's somewhere around Market Harborough that the South seems to emerge, as the superdiversity (and that's a technical term) of Leicester as fades into countryside which has a fair number of locals who still wish it their fields and woods were foxhunting territory. I'd never heard before about the large Italian community in Bedford. Luton was perhaps the biggest surprise, not cliché new town hell, but "a northern industrial town in the south of England", as Maconie describes it after attending a pub gathering with some friendly lefty Twitterers. (His mini rant about John Betjeman's 'Slough' was disappointingly humourless, and missed how the poem can speak to people, especially young people, or anyone who wants to live somewhere buzzier and more characterful but can't afford it - just as much as 'Everyday is Like Sunday' or any number of Smiths' songs Maconie has championed. Has he never met a working class aesthete who's every bit as rude about such places as JB is?)
The book is suffused with history, about the marchers' experiences in the place where Maconie is on each day - as reported in the 1930s British press, and talked about later in documentaries and memoirs by veterans. How the rural Tory towns of North Yorkshire were unexpectedly supportive, but nowhere was more welcoming than Leicester, where men working in the city's traditional shoe industry mended the marchers' boots. (Some touching idealism and naivety there: One boot repairer, pulling to pieces an appalling piece of footwear remarked, ‘It seems sort of queer doing your own job just because you want to do it, and for someone you want to help instead of doing it because you’d starve if you didn’t. I wonder if that’s how the chaps in Russia feel about it, now they’re running their own show." Not that uncensored international news was easy to come by in those days.) Those with a hazy idea of the march (it's not something many school history lessons used to cover), or familiar with Alan Price's Jarrow Song may have no inkling how much organisation and PR went into the march, and that it specifically distanced itself from violent revolutionary sentiments - like the song's lyrics "So the wife says 'Geordie, go to London Town /And if they don't give us a couple of bob, Won't even give you a decent job / Then Geordie, with my blessings, burn them down'". One man was even booted out half way through for expressing Communist opinions. It wasn't simply a bunch of blokes who'd decided they'd had enough and set off a couple of days later after roping in anyone they could find; marchers were selected by organisers from those who nominated themselves; there were medical students travelling with them, and a particularly canny choice, a dog, who, although its name is apparently not consistent in accounts, was frequently mentioned in news reports for that fluffy, family-friendly apolitical angle. (For those who wouldn't take so kindly to hearing about the town's famous radical MP, Red Ellen Wilkinson, who joined stretches of the march, and the brutal regulations that apparently ensured no new shipyard could be started in Jarrow for another 40 years after 1933/4.) All these efforts towards a good media image are why it was the Jarrow March (officially, Jarrow Crusade) which was remembered in public life, and not other 'hunger marches' (there were sometimes several a year) that happened in Britain during the 1930s. Marching a long distance was a way of demonstrating that participants were the 'deserving poor', who could do a job if only they could get one, willing and able to put in the work of walking dozens or hundreds of miles. Jarrow wasn't a singular event, as it can seem now: this was a popular mode of protest in the 30s. Like Twitter mobs are now - but much harder work... though that sounds like some of the glib 'kids these days' jibes Maconie makes at times in the book.
The thing with the history is... there's stuff here which isn't accurate. For example, Maconie says that Philippa of Hainault, Edward III's queen, was of Moorish descent. Even checking Wikipedia these days (it's pretty detailed now on some of these myths, and West European royal bloodlines were well recorded) will show that was specifically not the case about her ancestry, and that this idea stems from an account by a bishop, who described the child Philippa as having brown skin like her father. It looks to me like someone's been doing their research from blogs and listicles. Spotting that sort of lazy error makes me unsure of the things in here that I haven't heard before. I'll give a little benefit of the doubt, because Maconie will have focused his research on the Jarrow March - on that subject he's more likely to be repeating reputable historians than remembering something he read online a few years ago - but overall, errors like this show this is edutainment history, to be taken provisionally. To go back to that Radio 4 comparison, I don't trust it in the way I might an episode of In Our Time - where you'd also hear different analyses of the same event, not only narrative history.
At 55 (at time of the walk, 57 now), Maconie is squarely middle aged. Twenty years ago, he'd have heard Half Man Half Biscuit's CAMRA man when the album it's on was released. (And, no, I can't think of a better way to structure that clause right now, so I give up.) The middle-aged fans of Willie Rushton, Sally James and motorbikes it affectionately mocks are elderly now, and, although Doctor Who continues to be a favourite with geeky forty- and fifty-somethings, and craft beer got popular with ... most people who drink, otherwise a different set of interests and attitudes has now filled that profile. Maconie's indie trivia and outdoorsiness are paradigmatic of the new middle-aged, middle-class stereotype. I like these things, most of my friends like these things, and we're fine with it, because we genuinely like them. But it's still kind of weird these things embodying middle age: it doesn't feel like that long ago they were new. Even weirder than realising your own tastes look a bit middle-aged now, is seeing the mavens of one's youth sounding not only middle-aged, but out of touch. Isn't "the remorseless and bizarre hipsterfication" of British regional towns not some inexplicable contemporary affliction but just y'know, fashionable stuff spreading, like video shops and aerobics classes did in the 80s?
Centrist Dad. That's what I've been getting at. Look, this Buzzfeed quiz shows that Centrist Dad is synonymous, or at least symbiotic, with being a Britpop fan. (Oh man, they even remembered Elastica. I have to like them for that.) I wouldn't have guessed that Maconie was a Marxist from this book. I've never heard him so political as he is here, but he sounds a lot like a Blairite with greater-than-average awareness of the working class: the opinions about Corbyn's unelectability and how Blair may be remembered for Iraq, but Sure Start Centres and Tax Credits were good for reducing poverty. His reports of news for each day in 1936 were compelling - the road to the abdication, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and other historic events roll in, reminding you all this was happening at the same time - but placing them alongside too much 2016 celebrity guff and social media spats turned them into yet another age-old indictment of "these days", even if he does take you back to the minutiae of the final weeks of the US presidential campaigns. On politics, he makes too many glib generalisations of the sort that sound amusing when they're about pop culture and you're banging out a quick album review for a music weekly, but in the 2018 political environment a) are going to annoy a lot of people, and b) by lacking nuance, become part of the problem, not the solution. But the Centrist Dad meme/idea wasn't even around in late 2016. Politics has moved very fast these past couple of years, and it sounds increasingly worse, and more partisan, to say certain things, more so than it did even then. Maconie couldn't know how he would sound two years later, and that even people who agreed with some of his opinions would think he'd phrased things badly: you can say Labour needs to do more to connect with working class people, without also criticising identity politics; you can just not mention it. (Or maybe he's strategically trying to please the more conservative members of his audience, because this is a mainstream book from a mainstream publisher.) A week or so before I listened to Long Road from Jarrow, I read a novel published in 2013 which had aged badly; the most party-political elements of this book, even more recent than that, have aged badly too, and already look more useful as source material for whoever writes the first really good history of Brexit (along the lines of Adam Tooze's Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World ) than as contemporary commentary or entertainment.
Maconie could explain and deconstruct his idea of 'working class' more. The article I linked in the first paragraph indicate he still calls himself working-class because he works for others (and I'm sure his accent is part of his justification too). But he's one of those lefty media types in London, he must be pretty well off, and, as I said, the topics he covers in the media exemplify a certain sort of lefty/liberal middle-classness. (Another GR review calls him 'one of the intelligentsia'; I wouldn't go that far; I don't think someone is just by virtue of being a fixture in non-tabloid national media, but the point is that he doesn't look 'working class' to those with more ordinary jobs out of the public eye.) This book, like most of his others, is published by a commercial-non-fiction imprint of Penguin Random House - not Verso or Zero Books. Set alongside younger left-wing people increasingly visible online, highly principled readers and debaters of hardcore trad theory, and boycotters of capitalist claptrap when possible, his pop-culture punditry doesn't look like Marxism. (However, as he hadn't been this overtly political before, as far as much of the public is concerned. he doesn't have a long history of speaking out against the establishment whilst also being ensconced at the heart of it, one of his long list of - I would have to say accurate - similarities between Jeremy Corbyn and John Peel. He reiterated these in another New Statesman article, which is basically a tweaked extract from the 'Pre-Amble' chapter [see what he did there!] of this book.) His scathing remarks about expensive footwear named Jarrow Marchers' Boots are typical of the sort of soundbite journalism that goes for easy hits rather than real insight. The name might be a bit crass, but this is a book, not a Tweet, and he had space to parse out the complexities of how, these days, quality items made in Britain by workers with decent pay and conditions are also financially out of reach, and therefore end up looking pretentious, to a lot of people. (An actual member of the intelligentsia should have some decent answers to that.) He returns several times during the course of Long Road from Jarrow to state-funded arts education: its history, including beneficiaries like the Ashington Group or Pitmen Painters, who, around the time of the March, were lauded at the Royal Academy; what he got from it personally, and its contemporary decline. He says that Art History A-level was what gave him a taste for the avant garde, criticism and analysis, and led directly to his media career. His take on the working class and high culture is an entirely uncomplicated story of the fall and re-rise of middle and upper-class gatekeeping. It's removed from the complexities I've heard from friends from working-class backgrounds (and definitely working class; Maconie's parents sounded more lower-middle... like a couple of people I knew at university who also liked to present themselves as working-class heroes) - who are into various areas of the arts. As a Marxist, Maconie probably sees class purely in economic terms, but as a cultural commentator it can't have escaped him that a lot of people define class by culture, and that for some, or maybe many, working class people into artsy stuff and/or being highly educated, alienation from some family members and old friends, being seen as stuck up (or as I've heard some say, being into the arts *because* you always felt separate and different anyway) and warned 'that's not for the likes of us' is part of the experience too - as described in this book extract by Lynsey Hanley. I kept waiting to see what Maconie would say about all that, but not a word. Perhaps he addresses it in the book he's writing now, named after a phrase in this one: The Nanny State Made Me.
But one of his strengths is, as far as the politics is concerned, not editing out people with inconvenient opinions - there are poorer, and middle class, people with views across the board, and he makes an effort to understand the apparently illogical, like the Leave-voting customers of a Polish café in Yorkshire who told the proprietor not to take it personally:
Some see this kind of thinking as specious and self-deluding, a mask for ingrained racism. I’m not so sure. Whilst I wouldn’t claim that it’s an intellectually sound position, or to be defended necessarily, I can well believe, from my conversations in towns like Wakefield or Dewsbury or Rochdale or Oldham or Wigan, that some who voted to leave bore no personal animosity to immigrants but harboured some vague and misguided grudge against the EU. This grudge was fed by the falsehoods of UKIP and the right-wing tabloids and acted on out of impotent anger.
Also, these towns have good reason to doubt the word of those infamous experts in Westminster... Tony Blair’s administration estimated that no more than 13,000 of these new Europeans would seek a new life in Britain each year from 2004.
It's difficult to sum up all the topics he's covered in a bright-n-breezy popular-non-fiction way - there's no easy solution to the political divisions, and the publisher probably didn't want a rabble-rousing polemic - I can't say I envied Maconie the task. All he can conclude is that Britain has often been more divided and restless than its traditional image suggests (by 'traditional', I mean Victorian to just before late-20th century football hooliganism). I'm not sure how well it works - though maybe it'll sound better at a different time, when there aren't forecasts of public unrest if a new referendum happens, or if no-deal Brexit happens, or if a number other things happen that don't look unlikely within the next six months - but from the writing point of view I have respect for him just for having thought of something to say here that wraps it up:
We’re not altogether the peaceful and compliant land we appear. We’ve cut the heads off kings and taken axes to each other in the streets and pastures. We’ve done wicked things to ourselves and to others. So no, not a nation at ease with itself. Better a nation always arguing amongst itself, civilly but passionately and endlessly restless in brilliant, angry, loving, vital cities and hard, defiant little towns, in market squares in the long afternoons and empty fields at evening under a huge, darkening sky of clustering, darting swallows or teeming with starlings.
Audio seemed the ideal format for a light non-fiction book by someone I'm already used to hearing on the radio. And Maconie absolutely has the sort of animated delivery that means I keep taking in the audiobook while doing other things. So this met my main requirement for an audiobook, to be companionable and interesting in the same way as various Radio 4 shows I like, just longer form. I'm positive I spotted where he'd started a new day of recording with a bit of a cold, which made it all the more human. (I may have only given this 3 stars, but please could he do audiobooks of Cider with Roadies, The Pie at Night and Never Mind the Quantocks... i.e. all of his books that I haven't read and would quite like to.)
There is plenty to like here, if you like the light travelogue thing. About the places he walks through, stops off at, and people he meets. (The walks between stops vary from, I think, 8 to 21 miles a day.) It's the kind of book that tells you new factoids about places you've lived and thought you knew well. Maconie would clearly be a good man in a pub quiz.
He has that thing about Leeds, like quite a few people I've known who've never lived there: "Nowhere buzzes like Leeds, for all you can say about Manchester, Newcastle and Liverpool", whereas I've never really grokked Leeds, the way I do those others; there's obviously more to it than Alan Bennett, hipster shops and finance jobs, but I haven't got a sense of its identity and atmosphere the way I have with other comparable British cities. Apparently it's also a major centre for contemporary jazz - that's the kind of thing you find out here. The people at the Sikh Gurdwara in Wakefield sounded lovely; it seems like a great place to visit, although I hope the book hasn't made them so busy it's a struggle to feed all the visitors.
Hearing about the transition of North to South through the landscape and cities was one of the most interesing elements, and made me really wish I were able to do a walk like this. It's between Sheffield and Chesterfield that he starts talking about where the North ends and the Midlands begins... I reckon it's more somewhere in the middle of Derbyshire than at the Yorks/Derbys border, based on friends. But it's somewhere around Market Harborough that the South seems to emerge, as the superdiversity (and that's a technical term) of Leicester as fades into countryside which has a fair number of locals who still wish it their fields and woods were foxhunting territory. I'd never heard before about the large Italian community in Bedford. Luton was perhaps the biggest surprise, not cliché new town hell, but "a northern industrial town in the south of England", as Maconie describes it after attending a pub gathering with some friendly lefty Twitterers. (His mini rant about John Betjeman's 'Slough' was disappointingly humourless, and missed how the poem can speak to people, especially young people, or anyone who wants to live somewhere buzzier and more characterful but can't afford it - just as much as 'Everyday is Like Sunday' or any number of Smiths' songs Maconie has championed. Has he never met a working class aesthete who's every bit as rude about such places as JB is?)
The book is suffused with history, about the marchers' experiences in the place where Maconie is on each day - as reported in the 1930s British press, and talked about later in documentaries and memoirs by veterans. How the rural Tory towns of North Yorkshire were unexpectedly supportive, but nowhere was more welcoming than Leicester, where men working in the city's traditional shoe industry mended the marchers' boots. (Some touching idealism and naivety there: One boot repairer, pulling to pieces an appalling piece of footwear remarked, ‘It seems sort of queer doing your own job just because you want to do it, and for someone you want to help instead of doing it because you’d starve if you didn’t. I wonder if that’s how the chaps in Russia feel about it, now they’re running their own show." Not that uncensored international news was easy to come by in those days.) Those with a hazy idea of the march (it's not something many school history lessons used to cover), or familiar with Alan Price's Jarrow Song may have no inkling how much organisation and PR went into the march, and that it specifically distanced itself from violent revolutionary sentiments - like the song's lyrics "So the wife says 'Geordie, go to London Town /And if they don't give us a couple of bob, Won't even give you a decent job / Then Geordie, with my blessings, burn them down'". One man was even booted out half way through for expressing Communist opinions. It wasn't simply a bunch of blokes who'd decided they'd had enough and set off a couple of days later after roping in anyone they could find; marchers were selected by organisers from those who nominated themselves; there were medical students travelling with them, and a particularly canny choice, a dog, who, although its name is apparently not consistent in accounts, was frequently mentioned in news reports for that fluffy, family-friendly apolitical angle. (For those who wouldn't take so kindly to hearing about the town's famous radical MP, Red Ellen Wilkinson, who joined stretches of the march, and the brutal regulations that apparently ensured no new shipyard could be started in Jarrow for another 40 years after 1933/4.) All these efforts towards a good media image are why it was the Jarrow March (officially, Jarrow Crusade) which was remembered in public life, and not other 'hunger marches' (there were sometimes several a year) that happened in Britain during the 1930s. Marching a long distance was a way of demonstrating that participants were the 'deserving poor', who could do a job if only they could get one, willing and able to put in the work of walking dozens or hundreds of miles. Jarrow wasn't a singular event, as it can seem now: this was a popular mode of protest in the 30s. Like Twitter mobs are now - but much harder work... though that sounds like some of the glib 'kids these days' jibes Maconie makes at times in the book.
The thing with the history is... there's stuff here which isn't accurate. For example, Maconie says that Philippa of Hainault, Edward III's queen, was of Moorish descent. Even checking Wikipedia these days (it's pretty detailed now on some of these myths, and West European royal bloodlines were well recorded) will show that was specifically not the case about her ancestry, and that this idea stems from an account by a bishop, who described the child Philippa as having brown skin like her father. It looks to me like someone's been doing their research from blogs and listicles. Spotting that sort of lazy error makes me unsure of the things in here that I haven't heard before. I'll give a little benefit of the doubt, because Maconie will have focused his research on the Jarrow March - on that subject he's more likely to be repeating reputable historians than remembering something he read online a few years ago - but overall, errors like this show this is edutainment history, to be taken provisionally. To go back to that Radio 4 comparison, I don't trust it in the way I might an episode of In Our Time - where you'd also hear different analyses of the same event, not only narrative history.
At 55 (at time of the walk, 57 now), Maconie is squarely middle aged. Twenty years ago, he'd have heard Half Man Half Biscuit's CAMRA man when the album it's on was released. (And, no, I can't think of a better way to structure that clause right now, so I give up.) The middle-aged fans of Willie Rushton, Sally James and motorbikes it affectionately mocks are elderly now, and, although Doctor Who continues to be a favourite with geeky forty- and fifty-somethings, and craft beer got popular with ... most people who drink, otherwise a different set of interests and attitudes has now filled that profile. Maconie's indie trivia and outdoorsiness are paradigmatic of the new middle-aged, middle-class stereotype. I like these things, most of my friends like these things, and we're fine with it, because we genuinely like them. But it's still kind of weird these things embodying middle age: it doesn't feel like that long ago they were new. Even weirder than realising your own tastes look a bit middle-aged now, is seeing the mavens of one's youth sounding not only middle-aged, but out of touch. Isn't "the remorseless and bizarre hipsterfication" of British regional towns not some inexplicable contemporary affliction but just y'know, fashionable stuff spreading, like video shops and aerobics classes did in the 80s?
Centrist Dad. That's what I've been getting at. Look, this Buzzfeed quiz shows that Centrist Dad is synonymous, or at least symbiotic, with being a Britpop fan. (Oh man, they even remembered Elastica. I have to like them for that.) I wouldn't have guessed that Maconie was a Marxist from this book. I've never heard him so political as he is here, but he sounds a lot like a Blairite with greater-than-average awareness of the working class: the opinions about Corbyn's unelectability and how Blair may be remembered for Iraq, but Sure Start Centres and Tax Credits were good for reducing poverty. His reports of news for each day in 1936 were compelling - the road to the abdication, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and other historic events roll in, reminding you all this was happening at the same time - but placing them alongside too much 2016 celebrity guff and social media spats turned them into yet another age-old indictment of "these days", even if he does take you back to the minutiae of the final weeks of the US presidential campaigns. On politics, he makes too many glib generalisations of the sort that sound amusing when they're about pop culture and you're banging out a quick album review for a music weekly, but in the 2018 political environment a) are going to annoy a lot of people, and b) by lacking nuance, become part of the problem, not the solution. But the Centrist Dad meme/idea wasn't even around in late 2016. Politics has moved very fast these past couple of years, and it sounds increasingly worse, and more partisan, to say certain things, more so than it did even then. Maconie couldn't know how he would sound two years later, and that even people who agreed with some of his opinions would think he'd phrased things badly: you can say Labour needs to do more to connect with working class people, without also criticising identity politics; you can just not mention it. (Or maybe he's strategically trying to please the more conservative members of his audience, because this is a mainstream book from a mainstream publisher.) A week or so before I listened to Long Road from Jarrow, I read a novel published in 2013 which had aged badly; the most party-political elements of this book, even more recent than that, have aged badly too, and already look more useful as source material for whoever writes the first really good history of Brexit (along the lines of Adam Tooze's Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World ) than as contemporary commentary or entertainment.
Maconie could explain and deconstruct his idea of 'working class' more. The article I linked in the first paragraph indicate he still calls himself working-class because he works for others (and I'm sure his accent is part of his justification too). But he's one of those lefty media types in London, he must be pretty well off, and, as I said, the topics he covers in the media exemplify a certain sort of lefty/liberal middle-classness. (Another GR review calls him 'one of the intelligentsia'; I wouldn't go that far; I don't think someone is just by virtue of being a fixture in non-tabloid national media, but the point is that he doesn't look 'working class' to those with more ordinary jobs out of the public eye.) This book, like most of his others, is published by a commercial-non-fiction imprint of Penguin Random House - not Verso or Zero Books. Set alongside younger left-wing people increasingly visible online, highly principled readers and debaters of hardcore trad theory, and boycotters of capitalist claptrap when possible, his pop-culture punditry doesn't look like Marxism. (However, as he hadn't been this overtly political before, as far as much of the public is concerned. he doesn't have a long history of speaking out against the establishment whilst also being ensconced at the heart of it, one of his long list of - I would have to say accurate - similarities between Jeremy Corbyn and John Peel. He reiterated these in another New Statesman article, which is basically a tweaked extract from the 'Pre-Amble' chapter [see what he did there!] of this book.) His scathing remarks about expensive footwear named Jarrow Marchers' Boots are typical of the sort of soundbite journalism that goes for easy hits rather than real insight. The name might be a bit crass, but this is a book, not a Tweet, and he had space to parse out the complexities of how, these days, quality items made in Britain by workers with decent pay and conditions are also financially out of reach, and therefore end up looking pretentious, to a lot of people. (An actual member of the intelligentsia should have some decent answers to that.) He returns several times during the course of Long Road from Jarrow to state-funded arts education: its history, including beneficiaries like the Ashington Group or Pitmen Painters, who, around the time of the March, were lauded at the Royal Academy; what he got from it personally, and its contemporary decline. He says that Art History A-level was what gave him a taste for the avant garde, criticism and analysis, and led directly to his media career. His take on the working class and high culture is an entirely uncomplicated story of the fall and re-rise of middle and upper-class gatekeeping. It's removed from the complexities I've heard from friends from working-class backgrounds (and definitely working class; Maconie's parents sounded more lower-middle... like a couple of people I knew at university who also liked to present themselves as working-class heroes) - who are into various areas of the arts. As a Marxist, Maconie probably sees class purely in economic terms, but as a cultural commentator it can't have escaped him that a lot of people define class by culture, and that for some, or maybe many, working class people into artsy stuff and/or being highly educated, alienation from some family members and old friends, being seen as stuck up (or as I've heard some say, being into the arts *because* you always felt separate and different anyway) and warned 'that's not for the likes of us' is part of the experience too - as described in this book extract by Lynsey Hanley. I kept waiting to see what Maconie would say about all that, but not a word. Perhaps he addresses it in the book he's writing now, named after a phrase in this one: The Nanny State Made Me.
But one of his strengths is, as far as the politics is concerned, not editing out people with inconvenient opinions - there are poorer, and middle class, people with views across the board, and he makes an effort to understand the apparently illogical, like the Leave-voting customers of a Polish café in Yorkshire who told the proprietor not to take it personally:
Some see this kind of thinking as specious and self-deluding, a mask for ingrained racism. I’m not so sure. Whilst I wouldn’t claim that it’s an intellectually sound position, or to be defended necessarily, I can well believe, from my conversations in towns like Wakefield or Dewsbury or Rochdale or Oldham or Wigan, that some who voted to leave bore no personal animosity to immigrants but harboured some vague and misguided grudge against the EU. This grudge was fed by the falsehoods of UKIP and the right-wing tabloids and acted on out of impotent anger.
Also, these towns have good reason to doubt the word of those infamous experts in Westminster... Tony Blair’s administration estimated that no more than 13,000 of these new Europeans would seek a new life in Britain each year from 2004.
It's difficult to sum up all the topics he's covered in a bright-n-breezy popular-non-fiction way - there's no easy solution to the political divisions, and the publisher probably didn't want a rabble-rousing polemic - I can't say I envied Maconie the task. All he can conclude is that Britain has often been more divided and restless than its traditional image suggests (by 'traditional', I mean Victorian to just before late-20th century football hooliganism). I'm not sure how well it works - though maybe it'll sound better at a different time, when there aren't forecasts of public unrest if a new referendum happens, or if no-deal Brexit happens, or if a number other things happen that don't look unlikely within the next six months - but from the writing point of view I have respect for him just for having thought of something to say here that wraps it up:
We’re not altogether the peaceful and compliant land we appear. We’ve cut the heads off kings and taken axes to each other in the streets and pastures. We’ve done wicked things to ourselves and to others. So no, not a nation at ease with itself. Better a nation always arguing amongst itself, civilly but passionately and endlessly restless in brilliant, angry, loving, vital cities and hard, defiant little towns, in market squares in the long afternoons and empty fields at evening under a huge, darkening sky of clustering, darting swallows or teeming with starlings.
July 27, 2017
A book that will appeal to all who like a travel book or some political insight into modern Britain.
It is both an historical remembering of the Jarrow crusade when 200 unemployed men from the north marched to London in the hope to influence future decisions and capital investment to tackle their poverty and lack of work prospects.
That happened in 1936. 80 years later, comedian and writer Stuart Maconie retraced the Jarrow march every step of the way along their route, allowing for interesting detours and the odd reliance on more modern transport.
It is a striking account looking at 2016 from the realities of the original walkers; beautifully balanced between a then and now. It details the history of the original campaign, their welcome along the route and the various support on the way. I was amazed and angry by the official Labour party line and inspired by their local MP Red Ellen.
In his own present, Stuart asks those he meets what they know of the events 80 years previously. He delights in the places he visits and recounts the living history of communities then and now. how they have changed, their passing industries and new residents. The writer has seismic events both in the past; the rise of fascism, and the pacifism leading to war., and in his current events of the US Elections, IS and Brexit.
Maconie tries to explain common hopes and fears in all of the people from North to South, the growing divide. The advance of politics and why class may always have been an unbridgable gulf. It raises hopes as well as serves warnings, he marvels at the wonderful people he has met and the intimacy his walking journey has brought him. Not just in the contracts and comparisons over 80 years in political and social history.
What I loved the most after the historical dimensions of this account were the social insights into contemporary life and how so much has changed in the intervening years from the introduction of TV to the ubiquitous iphone and our lives led on social media. A detailed researcher and knowledgeable fellow Stuart makes the most of his twitter followers to enrich his travels and places to visit.
I loved the many learning points his eclectic understanding of the arts and modern culture led us as he commented and shared openly and without reservation.
From the welcome receiption of Sikh hospitality to the pride and values of an Italian community.
A book that will live long in my consciousness and one that pointed to so many more books, writers and aspects of UK life that had previously blurred past me. Sometimes we see so much more when the pace of life slows and we value more when we stop and take time to listen.
It is both an historical remembering of the Jarrow crusade when 200 unemployed men from the north marched to London in the hope to influence future decisions and capital investment to tackle their poverty and lack of work prospects.
That happened in 1936. 80 years later, comedian and writer Stuart Maconie retraced the Jarrow march every step of the way along their route, allowing for interesting detours and the odd reliance on more modern transport.
It is a striking account looking at 2016 from the realities of the original walkers; beautifully balanced between a then and now. It details the history of the original campaign, their welcome along the route and the various support on the way. I was amazed and angry by the official Labour party line and inspired by their local MP Red Ellen.
In his own present, Stuart asks those he meets what they know of the events 80 years previously. He delights in the places he visits and recounts the living history of communities then and now. how they have changed, their passing industries and new residents. The writer has seismic events both in the past; the rise of fascism, and the pacifism leading to war., and in his current events of the US Elections, IS and Brexit.
Maconie tries to explain common hopes and fears in all of the people from North to South, the growing divide. The advance of politics and why class may always have been an unbridgable gulf. It raises hopes as well as serves warnings, he marvels at the wonderful people he has met and the intimacy his walking journey has brought him. Not just in the contracts and comparisons over 80 years in political and social history.
What I loved the most after the historical dimensions of this account were the social insights into contemporary life and how so much has changed in the intervening years from the introduction of TV to the ubiquitous iphone and our lives led on social media. A detailed researcher and knowledgeable fellow Stuart makes the most of his twitter followers to enrich his travels and places to visit.
I loved the many learning points his eclectic understanding of the arts and modern culture led us as he commented and shared openly and without reservation.
From the welcome receiption of Sikh hospitality to the pride and values of an Italian community.
A book that will live long in my consciousness and one that pointed to so many more books, writers and aspects of UK life that had previously blurred past me. Sometimes we see so much more when the pace of life slows and we value more when we stop and take time to listen.
June 14, 2018
Eighty-two years ago around 200 men set off from the Tyneside town of Jarrow to march to London. The reason for this was to protest at the closure of Palmer's shipyard that had affected everyone's livelihoods in the town. Calling themselves crusaders, they were carrying a petition to the government of day asking for a new industry to be created in the town. Back in the 1930's it was nothing like it was today, the world was in a global depression, there was the rise of right-wing political interests, a stark north/south divide, food banks and indifference from the political elite; err hang on…
It is through modern England that Stuart Maconie wants to retrace the march that the Jarrow Crusaders followed stopping in the cities that they did, seeking the places that supported them with food and provisions, seeing how many people know of anything about their story and to take the pulse of a just post-Brexit Britain. Whilst some things remain the same, there is a lot that has changed in the UK in that short period of time; gone are the big industries, mines and manual jobs that the north relied on and in their place are service jobs, disillusionment and high unemployment.
Maconie is one of those guys who can talk to almost anyone and in this book he does, from waiters to mums, healthy debates in pubs and even gets invited to an event with the leader of the opposition. He is prepared to say it how it is, how even now the north still is massively underfunded compared to the south-east of the country, how the London bubble distorts the economy and how there is much more community spirit the further from London you get. As usual, he writes with deft humour and his keen eyes observe the subtleties as he moves through the country at walking pace. As some have complained about the number of times he has mentioned food in previous books, he takes special care to ensure we know exactly what he has eaten. So you will read about a few curries, several beers and the odd dram or three and one of the best pork pies he has ever eaten. This is another thoroughly enjoyable book from Maconie and if you have read his others you will almost certainly like this.
It is through modern England that Stuart Maconie wants to retrace the march that the Jarrow Crusaders followed stopping in the cities that they did, seeking the places that supported them with food and provisions, seeing how many people know of anything about their story and to take the pulse of a just post-Brexit Britain. Whilst some things remain the same, there is a lot that has changed in the UK in that short period of time; gone are the big industries, mines and manual jobs that the north relied on and in their place are service jobs, disillusionment and high unemployment.
Maconie is one of those guys who can talk to almost anyone and in this book he does, from waiters to mums, healthy debates in pubs and even gets invited to an event with the leader of the opposition. He is prepared to say it how it is, how even now the north still is massively underfunded compared to the south-east of the country, how the London bubble distorts the economy and how there is much more community spirit the further from London you get. As usual, he writes with deft humour and his keen eyes observe the subtleties as he moves through the country at walking pace. As some have complained about the number of times he has mentioned food in previous books, he takes special care to ensure we know exactly what he has eaten. So you will read about a few curries, several beers and the odd dram or three and one of the best pork pies he has ever eaten. This is another thoroughly enjoyable book from Maconie and if you have read his others you will almost certainly like this.
October 5, 2017
I have enjoyed all of Stuart Maconie's travel books and, although this one covers familiar ground (the north- south divide, popular culture etc), his decision to retrace the route of the 1930s Jarrow hunger march on its anniversary gives the book an added dimension, coming immediately after the vote to leave the EU. It's a state of the nation book, although leavened by Maconie's sense of humour (village names becoming actors in 1930s British movies) and references to rock music and obscure snippets from history. Despite being a remainder himself, his analysis and understanding of why people (especially the northern working classes) voted leave is as intelligent as anything I have read on the subject.
Reading this is like chatting to the most interesting and erudite man in the pub.
Reading this is like chatting to the most interesting and erudite man in the pub.
August 21, 2017
enjoyed this social history travelogue as the author does the march 80 years after the original one in 1936 and looks at both englands 1936 and present day as he travels from Jarrow to London
September 8, 2018
This felt quite an emotional journey for me in many respects, as my father was a Durham man born in 1913 and a Miner from the age of 13. Even back in 1936 the walk of 200 men from Jarrow to Downing Street, caused so many different reactions every step of the way. From welcoming brass bands, cinema tickets, new clothing and full bellies for the men to places that only offered a concrete floor to sleep on in the cold nights of late October. Snippets of stories have been added on and some of the journey sketchy but the core of this historical event still lives on.
Stuart Maconie took it on himself to retrace the steps of this journey on the same calendar dates as they had, 80 years after these men, calling in staying at the same places. Maconie made comparisons to the then and now of the cities, towns and villages that he went through. He spoke to residents about what they knew and even managed to track down some that saw and even spoke to the men.
I was fascinated with this story, the then and now versions that compared how the places had changed and the reception that he got from locals and how he thought the march would be received in each area now. There were even a few that came out and met him on the route including a bunch of college students taking him under their wing, well for an afternoon with them asking questions.
I knew so many of the places, where I have lived, shopped and have family which at times made me proud of the local people to quite shocked. I feel really quite privileged to have shared Stuart Maconie's journey, which made me feel very humble. I congratulate this author for his undertaking this epic journey and his historical comparisons to his own experiences. Long live courageous and proud men!
I originally received this e-book from NetGalley which I have reviewed honestly.
Stuart Maconie took it on himself to retrace the steps of this journey on the same calendar dates as they had, 80 years after these men, calling in staying at the same places. Maconie made comparisons to the then and now of the cities, towns and villages that he went through. He spoke to residents about what they knew and even managed to track down some that saw and even spoke to the men.
I was fascinated with this story, the then and now versions that compared how the places had changed and the reception that he got from locals and how he thought the march would be received in each area now. There were even a few that came out and met him on the route including a bunch of college students taking him under their wing, well for an afternoon with them asking questions.
I knew so many of the places, where I have lived, shopped and have family which at times made me proud of the local people to quite shocked. I feel really quite privileged to have shared Stuart Maconie's journey, which made me feel very humble. I congratulate this author for his undertaking this epic journey and his historical comparisons to his own experiences. Long live courageous and proud men!
I originally received this e-book from NetGalley which I have reviewed honestly.
July 8, 2017
In the opening pages of Long Road From Jarrow, Stuart Maconie, writing in late 2016, observes that 'A Conservative government recently returned to power with an increased majority. A Labour Party led into disarray by a leader widely seen as divisive and incompetent.' Well. If so much can change in scant months, how much can Britain have changed in the eight decades since that desperate group of men set out from Tyneside on what would become one of the most defining - and mythologised - endeavours of the twentieth century?
Long Road From Jarrow is at once a timely travelogue and an exploration into the psyche of a country which seems more divided than it has been for generations. 2016's shock Brexit vote highlighted those divisions succinctly, throwing into stark relief the differences between the metropolitan elite haves and the provincial have-nots. Maconie delves into these divisions here, as he takes the route the marchers did exactly eighty years previously. The soot-stained heavy industry hubs the marchers would have recognised - and whose bustling activity they would have envied, so long without work as they themselves were - are all gone now; in their places, ghost towns, nail bars, vaping shops. And a sense of loss and, still, all these years on, hopelessness; pit villages with no pit, steel towns with no steelworks. As impotent and irrelevant as the inhabitants of these forgotten places, whose despondency and anger was reflected in their votes to leave the EU.
Of course, the further south Maconie meanders, the greener and pleasanter the land. Here, young residents of idyllic villages and vibrant, prosperous towns do not think of university as a pipe-dream, and house prices are equivalent to a lottery win. These are places which have prospered since the Jarrow men passed through them, buoyed up by their proximity to the capital, and never dependent on those industries long lost in the first place. This is the new face of British industry; the bankers, the call centre workers, the young professionals.
As an adopted Geordie (20 years, marriage to a local lad and bringing up a Geordie daughter qualifies me as such, I think) the ghostly reminders of the north's heyday are familiar, daily sights. The banks of the Tyne, from where coal was sent all over the world on ships built there, now bristles with boutique hotels, exclusive bars and glittering concert venues. But look closely and it's not difficult to spot the remnants of the Tyne's grimy glory days; a ship's anchor here, an old warehouse (likely converted into something smart and expensive) there. Delve deeper into Tyneside, and on into County Durham, as Maconie did on the first leg of his homage to the Jarrow marchers, and the ghosts become ever more palpable, because nothing has been superimposed onto them. No new industry here, no tourism, no Royal Sinfonia, no niche microbreweries. Maconie describes a North I know well, and he does so warmly, with humour and empathy.
I absolutely adored Long Road From Jarrow. Like all the very best books, it educated, entertained and enriched. It also inspired me to do stuff. This, in no particular order, is that stuff:
1. Track Maconie's (and therefore, the marchers') route on Google Maps, which led to much virtual wandering around alleyways and country lanes and several exclamations along the lines of 'Oooh, we MUST go there!'. An August Bank Holiday trip to Leeds is already booked thanks to Maconie's effusions. This could get expensive.
2. Spend an extremely pleasant afternoon referring to my notes and looking up various art, music and books I'd previously, shamefully, never heard of.
3. Go to my local Gurdwara. It was the promise of free curry that swung it, but I was also rewarded with fascinating and lively conversation.
4. Ask Maconie if he still feels the same way about Jeremy Corbyn. He doesn't.
5. Watch a YouTube video for the number 36 Ripon to Leeds bus. Yes, really.
The Long Road From Jarrow is, I think, the finest travelogue I've read this decade (Alan Partridge's 'Nomad' notwithstanding, naturally). Surprising, intelligent, funny and kind, it spotlights the divisions in modern Britain with a warmth and understanding many politicians would do well to take note of. Maconie expertly draws stories and experiences from the people he meets, their backgrounds and views a testament to the varied landscape of Britain today. He even manages to make Bedford sound interesting - having lived there for a year, I can vouch for the fact that this is no mean feat. Clearly, the fault is on my part; I wasn't looking hard enough.
A beautifully written, fitting tribute to those desperate working class heroes who first trod that long road, this is the sort of book you push evangelically into friends' hands - a book which needs to be read, and shared. I cannot recommend it enough - my book of the year so far. All the stars.
My sincere thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Long Road From Jarrow is at once a timely travelogue and an exploration into the psyche of a country which seems more divided than it has been for generations. 2016's shock Brexit vote highlighted those divisions succinctly, throwing into stark relief the differences between the metropolitan elite haves and the provincial have-nots. Maconie delves into these divisions here, as he takes the route the marchers did exactly eighty years previously. The soot-stained heavy industry hubs the marchers would have recognised - and whose bustling activity they would have envied, so long without work as they themselves were - are all gone now; in their places, ghost towns, nail bars, vaping shops. And a sense of loss and, still, all these years on, hopelessness; pit villages with no pit, steel towns with no steelworks. As impotent and irrelevant as the inhabitants of these forgotten places, whose despondency and anger was reflected in their votes to leave the EU.
Of course, the further south Maconie meanders, the greener and pleasanter the land. Here, young residents of idyllic villages and vibrant, prosperous towns do not think of university as a pipe-dream, and house prices are equivalent to a lottery win. These are places which have prospered since the Jarrow men passed through them, buoyed up by their proximity to the capital, and never dependent on those industries long lost in the first place. This is the new face of British industry; the bankers, the call centre workers, the young professionals.
As an adopted Geordie (20 years, marriage to a local lad and bringing up a Geordie daughter qualifies me as such, I think) the ghostly reminders of the north's heyday are familiar, daily sights. The banks of the Tyne, from where coal was sent all over the world on ships built there, now bristles with boutique hotels, exclusive bars and glittering concert venues. But look closely and it's not difficult to spot the remnants of the Tyne's grimy glory days; a ship's anchor here, an old warehouse (likely converted into something smart and expensive) there. Delve deeper into Tyneside, and on into County Durham, as Maconie did on the first leg of his homage to the Jarrow marchers, and the ghosts become ever more palpable, because nothing has been superimposed onto them. No new industry here, no tourism, no Royal Sinfonia, no niche microbreweries. Maconie describes a North I know well, and he does so warmly, with humour and empathy.
I absolutely adored Long Road From Jarrow. Like all the very best books, it educated, entertained and enriched. It also inspired me to do stuff. This, in no particular order, is that stuff:
1. Track Maconie's (and therefore, the marchers') route on Google Maps, which led to much virtual wandering around alleyways and country lanes and several exclamations along the lines of 'Oooh, we MUST go there!'. An August Bank Holiday trip to Leeds is already booked thanks to Maconie's effusions. This could get expensive.
2. Spend an extremely pleasant afternoon referring to my notes and looking up various art, music and books I'd previously, shamefully, never heard of.
3. Go to my local Gurdwara. It was the promise of free curry that swung it, but I was also rewarded with fascinating and lively conversation.
4. Ask Maconie if he still feels the same way about Jeremy Corbyn. He doesn't.
5. Watch a YouTube video for the number 36 Ripon to Leeds bus. Yes, really.
The Long Road From Jarrow is, I think, the finest travelogue I've read this decade (Alan Partridge's 'Nomad' notwithstanding, naturally). Surprising, intelligent, funny and kind, it spotlights the divisions in modern Britain with a warmth and understanding many politicians would do well to take note of. Maconie expertly draws stories and experiences from the people he meets, their backgrounds and views a testament to the varied landscape of Britain today. He even manages to make Bedford sound interesting - having lived there for a year, I can vouch for the fact that this is no mean feat. Clearly, the fault is on my part; I wasn't looking hard enough.
A beautifully written, fitting tribute to those desperate working class heroes who first trod that long road, this is the sort of book you push evangelically into friends' hands - a book which needs to be read, and shared. I cannot recommend it enough - my book of the year so far. All the stars.
My sincere thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
March 17, 2020
Was 2016 like 1936?...I saw and heard chilling echoes, not from the Jarrow march route but not too far away, that made me think. Domineering men telling lies, big lies, and snarling at the judges and journalists who try to hold them to account. Contempt for women. Contempt for decency. Banter instead of wit. Cruelty in place of compassion. The age of the troll and the snowflake, people reduced to stereotypes, and the newspapers once again denouncing 'enemies of the people' and printing their names and pictures. In 2016, for the first time for me, it was not glib chatter or student drivel to think that something very like fascism was arising again out of the depths of history, a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
Any book which quotes my favourite poem in its closing lines is a good book by my standards. This was an interesting and enjoyable book, but I was hoping for more Jarrow and less Brexit. I can see why Stuart Maconie needed to talk about Brexit because when he marched, this was all the nation talked about. It is easy to draw the parallels between the 30s and our current times, but I would have loved more about the Jarrow march. The book does give an accurate picture of Britain at the time when Stuart Maconie marched from Jarrow to London and I enjoyed his descriptions of each of the towns and cities where he stayed.
Any book which quotes my favourite poem in its closing lines is a good book by my standards. This was an interesting and enjoyable book, but I was hoping for more Jarrow and less Brexit. I can see why Stuart Maconie needed to talk about Brexit because when he marched, this was all the nation talked about. It is easy to draw the parallels between the 30s and our current times, but I would have loved more about the Jarrow march. The book does give an accurate picture of Britain at the time when Stuart Maconie marched from Jarrow to London and I enjoyed his descriptions of each of the towns and cities where he stayed.
January 2, 2019
For me, Maconie has taken over from Bill Bryson as the doyen of humorous British travel writing. This title is a touch more serious than his previous ones, but still allows for his warmth and friendliness to come through. Maconie follows the path of the 1936 Jarrow march, when 200ish steelworkers marched to London to present a petition asking for government assistance in creating new jobs after their steelworks closed.
Day by day, the book follows the stages of the march exactly 80 years on from the original. Maconie gives a mix of well-researched history, delving into the reality of a march that many will have heard of, but most only have a vague idea about (like many others, I associated it with mining and the depression of the 1920s), bringing in his own experiences on the walk. The timing of the book is also brilliant as he was able to include reflections on the Brexit vote in the UK and the American election of Donald Trump.
The only downside of the theme of the book is that Maconie does not have as much freedom to do as he wants - he has to stick to the daily schedule - as a result of which, there is rather less humour and social interaction than in his other books - but that sacrifice is well worth it. Whether he is revelling in diverse eating places along the way (Maconie says people complain he talks too much about food, but for me that's part of the charm of his writing), wryly commenting on socialist meetings he attends or reflecting on the Hillsborough disaster as he passes through Sheffield, Maconie is engaging and insightful. It's the kind of book where it's difficult to avoid sharing snippets with others in earshot.
One example of his insight was in his assessment of the reasons for Brexit. With a deep understanding of why Northerners in particular may feel a resentment that spilled over in a response to the Brexit vote that was unexpected from the comfortable metropolitan elite, Maconie is able to say why he is against Brexit - but also tearing apart the attitude of those who label Brexit supporters racist and ignorant. He clearly understands and explains the drivers for this decision.
However, as much as it features, this isn't a book about Brexit, and Maconie brings the story of the Jarrow Crusade alive, with its many unexpected twists and turns, whether it's a warm welcome for them from the establishment Ripon Cathedral (and Maconie's own delight at attending choral evensong) or the varied accommodation and receptions the marchers received along the way, including terrible treatment at Westminster, where their petition was practically ignored. Maconie manages to celebrate multicultural Britain now, while still being strongly aware of the very English nature of the march, the landscape and the social climate then and now. An excellent book.
Day by day, the book follows the stages of the march exactly 80 years on from the original. Maconie gives a mix of well-researched history, delving into the reality of a march that many will have heard of, but most only have a vague idea about (like many others, I associated it with mining and the depression of the 1920s), bringing in his own experiences on the walk. The timing of the book is also brilliant as he was able to include reflections on the Brexit vote in the UK and the American election of Donald Trump.
The only downside of the theme of the book is that Maconie does not have as much freedom to do as he wants - he has to stick to the daily schedule - as a result of which, there is rather less humour and social interaction than in his other books - but that sacrifice is well worth it. Whether he is revelling in diverse eating places along the way (Maconie says people complain he talks too much about food, but for me that's part of the charm of his writing), wryly commenting on socialist meetings he attends or reflecting on the Hillsborough disaster as he passes through Sheffield, Maconie is engaging and insightful. It's the kind of book where it's difficult to avoid sharing snippets with others in earshot.
One example of his insight was in his assessment of the reasons for Brexit. With a deep understanding of why Northerners in particular may feel a resentment that spilled over in a response to the Brexit vote that was unexpected from the comfortable metropolitan elite, Maconie is able to say why he is against Brexit - but also tearing apart the attitude of those who label Brexit supporters racist and ignorant. He clearly understands and explains the drivers for this decision.
However, as much as it features, this isn't a book about Brexit, and Maconie brings the story of the Jarrow Crusade alive, with its many unexpected twists and turns, whether it's a warm welcome for them from the establishment Ripon Cathedral (and Maconie's own delight at attending choral evensong) or the varied accommodation and receptions the marchers received along the way, including terrible treatment at Westminster, where their petition was practically ignored. Maconie manages to celebrate multicultural Britain now, while still being strongly aware of the very English nature of the march, the landscape and the social climate then and now. An excellent book.
January 6, 2018
Reviews in the press, here and on its cover suggested that this was a book of voices of then, 1936, and now, 2016. Don’t be misguided. The dominant voice is Maconnie’s. Whilst he reports facts about the places he visits and provides accounts of the lives of the Jarrow marchers, contemporary north east voices are often silent or silenced. He omits to talk to the “florid middle-aged men in tweeds” (p.103), his garrulous neighbour at the comedy club (p.133), the first non white women he meets whilst waiting at the Chapel Alperton bus stop (p.136), Polish immigrants working in their skleps (p.163), the two tattooed lads in “garish polyester leisurewear” (p. 190) or the men of Pleasely Colliery because these might not be to his taste or convenient to his story. Maconnie also misses opportunities to explore further Julia’s, a Russian woman working at an Indian restaurant (p.145) or the students at West Nottinghamshire College experiences of the North East. This is an observer’s story and not an insider’s thick description of the complex narratives by which an outsider can grasp some meaning of what it’s like to live in the North East in 2016. Exasperated I stopped my journey just over half way, when I got to Nottingham.
April 29, 2019
Stuart Maconie is probably my favourite modern non-fiction author and this book did not disappoint. Tracing the route of the Jarrow Crusade of 1936 exactly 80 years later, Stuart passes through the same towns and cities, including Northallerton and Ripon in Yorkshire, Nottingham and Loughborough in the Midlands and Luton in the south east. On his way he meets some friendly (and a few not so...) people on the way as he expounds on the differences and similarities of life in England in 1936 and 2016. He had no particular reason for this project, apart from, as he put it, he "fancied going for a really long walk"! He is the President of The Ramblers (formerly The Ramblers' Association) so this is not really as surprising as it might first appear! If you like social history then book is probably for you! :)
May 31, 2017
The town of Jarrow was literally built on coal, specifically the north Durham coalfield, but its great expansion from the Victorian era was attributable to the rise of Palmer’s shipyard, which became the second largest shipbuilder on the Tyne. In 1930, however, in response to the Great Depression, the government set up a body which, in order to restore prices by cutting over-capacity in the industry, shut down Palmer’s, plunging the town into mass unemployment. In October 1936, in order to draw national attention to their plight, roughly 200 unemployed men (and a dog) marched over the course of three-and-a-half-weeks, the 291 miles between Jarrow and London, in order to deliver a 10,000-signature petition to parliament. The Jarrow March became an indictment of capitalism and a testament to proletarian suffering and perseverance which still resonates, at least on the Left, today.
In ‘Long Road from Jarrow’ Stuart Maconie recounts his retracing of the footsteps of the original Jarrow marchers on the eightieth anniversary of their journey, although he admits to hopping on “a passing bus if it took their route” in order to enable him “to research and explore” the towns that they passed through.
Maconie’s is “not a book about the Jarrow march as such” as his primary interest lies in “where we have been since then and how we have got here” or, to put it another way, his intention “was to compare the England of now and then, to see if the shadow of 1936 really did fall across 2016, but also to get to the heart of England today first-hand.”
Maconie contends that “the particularly weird, fissile state of England in October 2016 seemed to have … much in common with the England of 1936” noting the following parallels:
“A Conservative government recently returned to power with an increased majority. A Labour Party led into disarray by a leader widely seen as divisive and incompetent. The rise of extremism here and abroad fired by financial disasters, a wave of demagoguery and ‘strong man’ populism. Foreign wars driven by fundamentalist ideologies leading to the mass displacement of innocent people. A subsequent refugee ‘crisis’. The threat of constitutional anarchy with conflict between government, parliament and the judiciary. Manufacturing industries, especially steel, facing extinction. Marches and mass rallies resurgent as popular but questionable forums for political debate. Explosions of new forms of media. Inflammatory rhetoric stoked by a factionalised press. Football a national obsession; its wages, profits and morality constantly debated. A country angrily at odds with itself over its relationship to Europe …”
Many of these alleged parallels are overstrained. For example, in the 2015 general election the Conservatives won 331 seats, giving them an overall majority (their first since 1992) of 12, whilst in the 1935 general election the Conservatives and the National Government, of which they formed the dominant part, actually lost seats compared with 1931 but still enjoyed a parliamentary majority of 242. I also suspect that when Maconie refers to the Labour’s leader who was “widely seen as divisive and incompetent” he’s thinking of the pacifist George Lansbury, when in fact Lansbury had been replaced as party leader by Clement Attlee in time for the 1935 election, when Labour improved upon its 1931 performance.
However, as Maconie’s references to Orwell’s ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ and J. B. Priestley’s ‘English Journey’ make clear, what he’s actually doing is using the “romantic cultural icon” of the Jarrow March as a convenient peg upon which to deliver a state-of-the nation address or, more precisely, to show that England is two nations, divided by class and geography, and to seek to inform one (middle-class metropolitan England) about the other (the working-class post-industrial North).
This book therefore represents a sort of companion volume to the author’s excellent ‘Pies and Prejudice. In Search of the North’, or even forms a loose trilogy with that and his tome ‘The Pie at Night. What the North Does for Fun’. ‘Long Road From Jarrow’ certainly manages, like those other books, to be both entertaining and informative, combining humour, curiosity, shrewd observation and great warmth.
When John Peel lived and worked Stateside in the 1960s he became, for a while, a sort of unofficial ambassador for Merseyside as his roots there were assumed to make him an expert on the Beatles. Stuart Maconie has carved out a similar role for himself, in making sense of the North for his adopted southern neighbours. Like Peel, it is difficult to imagine a more articulate or charming occupant of that role.
In ‘Long Road from Jarrow’ Stuart Maconie recounts his retracing of the footsteps of the original Jarrow marchers on the eightieth anniversary of their journey, although he admits to hopping on “a passing bus if it took their route” in order to enable him “to research and explore” the towns that they passed through.
Maconie’s is “not a book about the Jarrow march as such” as his primary interest lies in “where we have been since then and how we have got here” or, to put it another way, his intention “was to compare the England of now and then, to see if the shadow of 1936 really did fall across 2016, but also to get to the heart of England today first-hand.”
Maconie contends that “the particularly weird, fissile state of England in October 2016 seemed to have … much in common with the England of 1936” noting the following parallels:
“A Conservative government recently returned to power with an increased majority. A Labour Party led into disarray by a leader widely seen as divisive and incompetent. The rise of extremism here and abroad fired by financial disasters, a wave of demagoguery and ‘strong man’ populism. Foreign wars driven by fundamentalist ideologies leading to the mass displacement of innocent people. A subsequent refugee ‘crisis’. The threat of constitutional anarchy with conflict between government, parliament and the judiciary. Manufacturing industries, especially steel, facing extinction. Marches and mass rallies resurgent as popular but questionable forums for political debate. Explosions of new forms of media. Inflammatory rhetoric stoked by a factionalised press. Football a national obsession; its wages, profits and morality constantly debated. A country angrily at odds with itself over its relationship to Europe …”
Many of these alleged parallels are overstrained. For example, in the 2015 general election the Conservatives won 331 seats, giving them an overall majority (their first since 1992) of 12, whilst in the 1935 general election the Conservatives and the National Government, of which they formed the dominant part, actually lost seats compared with 1931 but still enjoyed a parliamentary majority of 242. I also suspect that when Maconie refers to the Labour’s leader who was “widely seen as divisive and incompetent” he’s thinking of the pacifist George Lansbury, when in fact Lansbury had been replaced as party leader by Clement Attlee in time for the 1935 election, when Labour improved upon its 1931 performance.
However, as Maconie’s references to Orwell’s ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ and J. B. Priestley’s ‘English Journey’ make clear, what he’s actually doing is using the “romantic cultural icon” of the Jarrow March as a convenient peg upon which to deliver a state-of-the nation address or, more precisely, to show that England is two nations, divided by class and geography, and to seek to inform one (middle-class metropolitan England) about the other (the working-class post-industrial North).
This book therefore represents a sort of companion volume to the author’s excellent ‘Pies and Prejudice. In Search of the North’, or even forms a loose trilogy with that and his tome ‘The Pie at Night. What the North Does for Fun’. ‘Long Road From Jarrow’ certainly manages, like those other books, to be both entertaining and informative, combining humour, curiosity, shrewd observation and great warmth.
When John Peel lived and worked Stateside in the 1960s he became, for a while, a sort of unofficial ambassador for Merseyside as his roots there were assumed to make him an expert on the Beatles. Stuart Maconie has carved out a similar role for himself, in making sense of the North for his adopted southern neighbours. Like Peel, it is difficult to imagine a more articulate or charming occupant of that role.
August 7, 2017
In 1936, amidst a climate of mass unemployment and economic devastation, 200 unemployed men from the town of Jarrow in the north-east of England marched 300 miles to Westminster in London in a crusade for jobs. This was the fabled Jarrow March – one of the most significant political protests in the history of Britain in the 20th century.
“The Long Road from Jarrow” is the author and broadcaster Stuart Maconie’s attempt to retrace the steps of the marchers. Part-travelogue, part social history, Maconie trudges the same 300 mile route that the men of Jarrow traversed 80 years earlier, seeking to understand both motivations of the 1936 marchers and how English society has changed in the intervening decades.
It is to the credit of Maconie that this isn't a hagiographic or overly sentimentalised account of the original march. Despite the iconic place the Jarrow March has in labour history, Maconie notes that the marchers themselves were scrupulously careful not to appear too radical or militantly socialist, framing their crusade as a cry for help rather than a demand for revolution. This might be one reason that the memory of ‘Jarrow’ lives on; as Maconie writes, "the men of Jarrow came politely and cap in hand without any of the dangerous revolutionary sulphur of other communist-backed hunger marches". Notwithstanding their moderation, the Jarrow Marchers were effectively disowned by the Labour Party of the time, and even failed to win the resounding support of the British trade union movement. The Jarrow crusaders gained widespread public support, but little but opprobrium from the political establishment. Not only did the Tory Prime Minister refuse to accept their petition upon their arrival in London, the marchers had their benefits stopped by the authorities as, during their 300-mile, month-long protest, they were deemed to be
"technically unavailable for work".
As fascinating as the story of the Jarrow March is, “The Long Road from Jarrow” is also Stuart Maconie’s attempt to write a ‘state-of-the-nation’ examination of contemporary England, using the cities, towns and villages he visits as a way of taking the pulse of a troubled land. Having recently read Maconie’s earlier book “Pies and Prejudices” (his 2007 travelogue on the North of England), I was struck by how downbeat and pessimistic “The Long Road from Jarrow” reads compared to that earlier work. Where “Pies and Prejudices” was written in a pre-2008 financial crash spirit of economic growth, urban regeneration and revitalised Northern pride, “The Long Road” charts an England scarred by almost a decade of grinding austerity, trapped in the shadow of the Brexit referendum ("This is the new, weird, febrile, uncertain England I walk through").
Some of the stop-off choices that Maconie makes on his travels can be a little predictable and unadventurous. “The Long March from Jarrow”, at times, settles in to a pattern where Maconie generally pitches up in a town and visits a pub, a pie shop, and an industrial museum.
“The Long Road from Jarrow” is much stronger where Maconie has noticeably done extensive research before visiting the towns and villages on his route. This leads to astute ruminations on diverse topics like the naming of desolate tower blocks after famous English authors, the decline of independent curry houses, the Ladybird books of Loughborough, and the rise and fall of greyhound racing in Britain. And while it might not be particularly original in identifying it, “The Long Road …” is perceptive on the accelerating homogenisation of English town life. This doesn’t just relate to the creeping advance of Boots, Starbucks and Wetherspoons, but the cult of the Hipster; Maconie observes that even the town of Jarrow, once a by-word for deprivation and squalor, is not immune to the hipsterisation of retro barbers, cupcake shops and craft microbreweries.
Like most of Maconie’s previous books, “The Long Road from Jarrow” is accessibly written. He is excellent at using a particular point on his travels as a springboard to talk knowledgably about the political, social or cultural history of that area. “The Long Road …” serves as both a comprehensive account of the Jarrow crusaders, but also as a snapshot of the troubled, divided Brexit Britain of 2016.
“The Long Road from Jarrow” is the author and broadcaster Stuart Maconie’s attempt to retrace the steps of the marchers. Part-travelogue, part social history, Maconie trudges the same 300 mile route that the men of Jarrow traversed 80 years earlier, seeking to understand both motivations of the 1936 marchers and how English society has changed in the intervening decades.
It is to the credit of Maconie that this isn't a hagiographic or overly sentimentalised account of the original march. Despite the iconic place the Jarrow March has in labour history, Maconie notes that the marchers themselves were scrupulously careful not to appear too radical or militantly socialist, framing their crusade as a cry for help rather than a demand for revolution. This might be one reason that the memory of ‘Jarrow’ lives on; as Maconie writes, "the men of Jarrow came politely and cap in hand without any of the dangerous revolutionary sulphur of other communist-backed hunger marches". Notwithstanding their moderation, the Jarrow Marchers were effectively disowned by the Labour Party of the time, and even failed to win the resounding support of the British trade union movement. The Jarrow crusaders gained widespread public support, but little but opprobrium from the political establishment. Not only did the Tory Prime Minister refuse to accept their petition upon their arrival in London, the marchers had their benefits stopped by the authorities as, during their 300-mile, month-long protest, they were deemed to be
"technically unavailable for work".
As fascinating as the story of the Jarrow March is, “The Long Road from Jarrow” is also Stuart Maconie’s attempt to write a ‘state-of-the-nation’ examination of contemporary England, using the cities, towns and villages he visits as a way of taking the pulse of a troubled land. Having recently read Maconie’s earlier book “Pies and Prejudices” (his 2007 travelogue on the North of England), I was struck by how downbeat and pessimistic “The Long Road from Jarrow” reads compared to that earlier work. Where “Pies and Prejudices” was written in a pre-2008 financial crash spirit of economic growth, urban regeneration and revitalised Northern pride, “The Long Road” charts an England scarred by almost a decade of grinding austerity, trapped in the shadow of the Brexit referendum ("This is the new, weird, febrile, uncertain England I walk through").
Some of the stop-off choices that Maconie makes on his travels can be a little predictable and unadventurous. “The Long March from Jarrow”, at times, settles in to a pattern where Maconie generally pitches up in a town and visits a pub, a pie shop, and an industrial museum.
“The Long Road from Jarrow” is much stronger where Maconie has noticeably done extensive research before visiting the towns and villages on his route. This leads to astute ruminations on diverse topics like the naming of desolate tower blocks after famous English authors, the decline of independent curry houses, the Ladybird books of Loughborough, and the rise and fall of greyhound racing in Britain. And while it might not be particularly original in identifying it, “The Long Road …” is perceptive on the accelerating homogenisation of English town life. This doesn’t just relate to the creeping advance of Boots, Starbucks and Wetherspoons, but the cult of the Hipster; Maconie observes that even the town of Jarrow, once a by-word for deprivation and squalor, is not immune to the hipsterisation of retro barbers, cupcake shops and craft microbreweries.
Like most of Maconie’s previous books, “The Long Road from Jarrow” is accessibly written. He is excellent at using a particular point on his travels as a springboard to talk knowledgably about the political, social or cultural history of that area. “The Long Road …” serves as both a comprehensive account of the Jarrow crusaders, but also as a snapshot of the troubled, divided Brexit Britain of 2016.
March 7, 2020
An epic journey in the spirit of the original Jarrow marchers. This was an unknown history chapter for me and an enjoyable, insightful read.
July 20, 2017
I do like Stuart Maconie's books. He is a very intelligent, thoughtful observer, he always has interesting things to say about what he observes, he's often very funny and he's always a pleasure to read.
In this book, Maconie retraces the route of the Jarrow Crusade, largely sticking to the original route the marchers followed on each day, exactly 80 years later. The result is a thoughtful, entertaining and very informative look at exactly what happened in 1936, and at the Britain he finds in 2016. Maconie is very, very good at just talking to people; he is genuinely interested in them so they tend to open up to him. He has a definite political stance and a firm view on Brexit, for example, but is keen also to try to understand those who disagree with him. He also has a delightful willingness to be pleased with what he finds; he will criticise where appropriate, but he approaches places and people in a spirit of looking for things to like about them which is both refreshing and often revealing about his subjects.
Like so many people I had only a vague notion of the Jarrow Crusade: when it was, who took part, the reception it got and so on. Maconie has put all that right while never being over-earnest about it and his humanity and wit are always apparent. He has also given me an entertaining and very interesting picture of attitudes in parts of Britain today.
Most of all, this is a great read. Don't be put off by the apparently worthy and solemn subject matter; it is honest about the conditions of the marchers and penetrating about political parallels in Britain today, but it's funny, likeable, very readable and, in its way, rather gripping. Very warmly recommended.
(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)
In this book, Maconie retraces the route of the Jarrow Crusade, largely sticking to the original route the marchers followed on each day, exactly 80 years later. The result is a thoughtful, entertaining and very informative look at exactly what happened in 1936, and at the Britain he finds in 2016. Maconie is very, very good at just talking to people; he is genuinely interested in them so they tend to open up to him. He has a definite political stance and a firm view on Brexit, for example, but is keen also to try to understand those who disagree with him. He also has a delightful willingness to be pleased with what he finds; he will criticise where appropriate, but he approaches places and people in a spirit of looking for things to like about them which is both refreshing and often revealing about his subjects.
Like so many people I had only a vague notion of the Jarrow Crusade: when it was, who took part, the reception it got and so on. Maconie has put all that right while never being over-earnest about it and his humanity and wit are always apparent. He has also given me an entertaining and very interesting picture of attitudes in parts of Britain today.
Most of all, this is a great read. Don't be put off by the apparently worthy and solemn subject matter; it is honest about the conditions of the marchers and penetrating about political parallels in Britain today, but it's funny, likeable, very readable and, in its way, rather gripping. Very warmly recommended.
(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)
July 11, 2017
This is one of those books that you might not have picked up but will remain grateful you did. It will transcend generations and gender. Maconie is an excellent and witty guide through the rural quirks of England as he recreates the Jarrow march. Like many people, probably, I thought I "knew" things about the Jarrow march but it seems like many what I knew was the myth. I also knew nothing of Red Ellen and I will definitely go away and research her. Maconie walks the route 80 years after the original and seeks out people in various pubs and tea rooms to find out what the areas believe about the march. There are local historians, pub landlords, cafe owners and a disparate mix of entertaining individuals. I thoroughly enjoyed the journey and have new found respect for the community of Jarrow and the communities along the way who helped them. The sadness is that these communities were part of what was lost when the mines were closed and the working class opportunities reduced over the years. It is easy to get nostalgic while reading this book. Recommended for older people who may have vague memories of their family legends concerning the march, young people interested in social history and anyone looking for a good read.
I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.
I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.
November 28, 2019
A compelling read, which isn't always the case with non-fiction. Maconie manages to entwine his own journey retracing the Jarrow marcher's steps with that of the original marchers and, while he finds many things that have changed, there is much that is still the same. For me, it was interesting to read a different and more believable take on Brexit. Nationally this has been seen as a vote of ignorance from the 'stupid' working class, but Maconie discovers this is far from the truth. He found, especially in the North East, a similarity between the working class of 1936 and 2016. Many feel disenfranchised and voiceless, and saw Brexit as a chance to stick two fingers up at the establishment. The fact that the middle classes were horrified at the prospect probably gave them even more reason to vote for it especially as they felt their traditional party, Labour, had shifted away from them and seemed more concerned with the chatterings of North London than the north of England.
I loved this book, which is so well written. Maconie has a knack of making you feel at ease, almost as if you're sat with him sharing a pint. I particularly like the bit in Northampton. my home town, and his chat with Alan Moore.
I loved this book, which is so well written. Maconie has a knack of making you feel at ease, almost as if you're sat with him sharing a pint. I particularly like the bit in Northampton. my home town, and his chat with Alan Moore.
July 19, 2017
This is has to be the best book I've read so far this year....but I might be a little biased...
I was born, and lived in, the North East (County Durham) and the Jarrow Crusade was very much part of local mythology. Both my parents grew up during the 30's and had stories and memories of how harsh those times were.
Marriage took me to South Oxfordshire, a very different world, and now as a widow I have almost come full circle, I moved North but to the North West, not far from Wigan truth be told.
I know first hand many of the towns where both the marchers and Stuart stayed overnight.
I recognise the differences in the reception given to them in these towns.
I recognise the landscapes and the attitudes of the people.
Stuart Maconie has written a wonderful travelogue.
He has empathy, wit, and a keen grasp of politics.
The parallels between 1936 and 2016 came as no surprise to me. The North/South divide is alive and kicking.
As the French would say...."Plus ca change..."
Thank you Stuart for a fascinating read, and for keeping the Crusade alive.
I voluntarily reviewed an ARC of this book, from the publisher via Netgalley.
I was born, and lived in, the North East (County Durham) and the Jarrow Crusade was very much part of local mythology. Both my parents grew up during the 30's and had stories and memories of how harsh those times were.
Marriage took me to South Oxfordshire, a very different world, and now as a widow I have almost come full circle, I moved North but to the North West, not far from Wigan truth be told.
I know first hand many of the towns where both the marchers and Stuart stayed overnight.
I recognise the differences in the reception given to them in these towns.
I recognise the landscapes and the attitudes of the people.
Stuart Maconie has written a wonderful travelogue.
He has empathy, wit, and a keen grasp of politics.
The parallels between 1936 and 2016 came as no surprise to me. The North/South divide is alive and kicking.
As the French would say...."Plus ca change..."
Thank you Stuart for a fascinating read, and for keeping the Crusade alive.
I voluntarily reviewed an ARC of this book, from the publisher via Netgalley.
July 4, 2017
Stuart Maconie's travel journalism is a cut above most of its genre, he can write, he has read and he because of those he can tell you a good tale.
In his telling and tracing of the route of the Jarrow Crusade he often makes reference to how they were somehow soft in not making their long walk political (scared, it seemed of hash reactions). This is oddly counterpointed by the amount in which Stuart's context setting of the contemporary situations and his thoughts are a window into the softest 'both sides are bad, so I must be right' centrism that he is very confident of.
A pity for him then, that the real-world political situation has altered wildly in between writing and publication: his sneering at the left and their 'sandals' and his dismissal of the current leadership of the Labour Party (oddly, when he's criticising the past leadership for not supporting the march), is out of time.
In his telling and tracing of the route of the Jarrow Crusade he often makes reference to how they were somehow soft in not making their long walk political (scared, it seemed of hash reactions). This is oddly counterpointed by the amount in which Stuart's context setting of the contemporary situations and his thoughts are a window into the softest 'both sides are bad, so I must be right' centrism that he is very confident of.
A pity for him then, that the real-world political situation has altered wildly in between writing and publication: his sneering at the left and their 'sandals' and his dismissal of the current leadership of the Labour Party (oddly, when he's criticising the past leadership for not supporting the march), is out of time.
July 4, 2017
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it – George Santayana
Stuart Maconie, author, broadcaster, journalist and commentator on cultural and social history is, by virtue of education and profession, now one of the intelligentsia. Very much a Lancashire lad (Wigan, as he reminds us) he has not lost his roots, and has a pleasing down to earth quality in his writing. Thoughtful, intelligent, warm, humorous, this also shows a lively interest in people in all their diversity.
In the wake of last year’s referendum, Maconie, like most of us, found himself musing on our divided nation. Connections between the 1930’s and the present seemed to be suggesting themselves, as right wing, populist politics, divisive and suspicious of outsiders, seemed on the rise
2016 was the 80th anniversary of the 1936 Jarrow March/Jarrow Crusade, occasioned by the closure of the single employer on which all else depended, the steelworks. Unemployment was rising in the country, and the gaps between rich and poor, South and North, were obvious. 200 men set out to march to London to deliver a petition to Parliament. Jarrow captured the public imagination, and the March has become a legend of dignity,resistance and solidarity on the one hand and uncaring capitalism on the other, a divided nation
Maconie, a keen walker, decided to emulate the 300 mile journey made by the Marchers, following their daily itinerary, ‘visiting the same towns and comparing the two Englands of then and now’
Some of the parallels were very clear:
“The rise of extremism here and abroad fired by financial disasters, a wave of demagoguery and ‘strong man’ populism. Foreign wars driven by fundamentalist ideologies leading to the mass displacement of innocent people. A subsequent refugee ’crisis’. The threat of constitutional anarchy with conflict between government, parliament and judiciary. Manufacturing industries, especially steel, facing extinction….Inflammatory rhetoric stoked by a factionalised press…….A country angrily at odds with itself over its relationship to Europe, the elephant in the nation: Brexit’
This is far more than a purely personal story of one man’s walk. Maconie engages with the people he meets, garners stories of then and now, recounts the history of the places he travels through,, whilst following some of his own interests, football, music – of all kinds, and finding, often conviviality and hospitality around food, reflecting the cultures who have added, across the centuries, to the rich loam of this island .
This is an engaging, fascinating account, sometimes angry, often scathing about those whose manipulations fostered the divisions and uncertainties we now face, populists of the right and of the left. What stands out, again and again, is the richness of a culture, in this country, which has always been eclectic, fed by generations of ‘outsiders’ across the centuries, settling, marrying, having children who have feet in the history and culture of the new homeland, and influences from the old. ‘ Britishness’ develops, as it always has
In some ways, albeit with more humour, this reminds me, in the serious things it is saying, of Joe Bagent’s 2008 ‘Deer Hunting With Jesus’ : Guns, Votes, Debt and Delusion in Redneck America, which looks at the rise of support for the Republican Party which came from those who might have been expected to find the Democrats their home.
This is cultural and social history as I prefer it – humanly, rather than statistically explored, entertaining whilst informing.
I was delighted to be offered this as an ARC, from the publishers via NetGalley, and thoroughly enjoyed this 300 mile walk, with no blisters, and in totally clement weather
Stuart Maconie, author, broadcaster, journalist and commentator on cultural and social history is, by virtue of education and profession, now one of the intelligentsia. Very much a Lancashire lad (Wigan, as he reminds us) he has not lost his roots, and has a pleasing down to earth quality in his writing. Thoughtful, intelligent, warm, humorous, this also shows a lively interest in people in all their diversity.
In the wake of last year’s referendum, Maconie, like most of us, found himself musing on our divided nation. Connections between the 1930’s and the present seemed to be suggesting themselves, as right wing, populist politics, divisive and suspicious of outsiders, seemed on the rise
2016 was the 80th anniversary of the 1936 Jarrow March/Jarrow Crusade, occasioned by the closure of the single employer on which all else depended, the steelworks. Unemployment was rising in the country, and the gaps between rich and poor, South and North, were obvious. 200 men set out to march to London to deliver a petition to Parliament. Jarrow captured the public imagination, and the March has become a legend of dignity,resistance and solidarity on the one hand and uncaring capitalism on the other, a divided nation
Maconie, a keen walker, decided to emulate the 300 mile journey made by the Marchers, following their daily itinerary, ‘visiting the same towns and comparing the two Englands of then and now’
Some of the parallels were very clear:
“The rise of extremism here and abroad fired by financial disasters, a wave of demagoguery and ‘strong man’ populism. Foreign wars driven by fundamentalist ideologies leading to the mass displacement of innocent people. A subsequent refugee ’crisis’. The threat of constitutional anarchy with conflict between government, parliament and judiciary. Manufacturing industries, especially steel, facing extinction….Inflammatory rhetoric stoked by a factionalised press…….A country angrily at odds with itself over its relationship to Europe, the elephant in the nation: Brexit’
This is far more than a purely personal story of one man’s walk. Maconie engages with the people he meets, garners stories of then and now, recounts the history of the places he travels through,, whilst following some of his own interests, football, music – of all kinds, and finding, often conviviality and hospitality around food, reflecting the cultures who have added, across the centuries, to the rich loam of this island .
This is an engaging, fascinating account, sometimes angry, often scathing about those whose manipulations fostered the divisions and uncertainties we now face, populists of the right and of the left. What stands out, again and again, is the richness of a culture, in this country, which has always been eclectic, fed by generations of ‘outsiders’ across the centuries, settling, marrying, having children who have feet in the history and culture of the new homeland, and influences from the old. ‘ Britishness’ develops, as it always has
In some ways, albeit with more humour, this reminds me, in the serious things it is saying, of Joe Bagent’s 2008 ‘Deer Hunting With Jesus’ : Guns, Votes, Debt and Delusion in Redneck America, which looks at the rise of support for the Republican Party which came from those who might have been expected to find the Democrats their home.
This is cultural and social history as I prefer it – humanly, rather than statistically explored, entertaining whilst informing.
I was delighted to be offered this as an ARC, from the publishers via NetGalley, and thoroughly enjoyed this 300 mile walk, with no blisters, and in totally clement weather
December 23, 2023
I do so very much like Mr Maconies' books. Intelligent, interesting, erudite, and more often enough, laugh-out loud. Another excellently written text (wonderful use of words which had me once again looking up a whole clutch of those I was unfamiliar with - always a sign of a good read in my book), that, through the recreation of a bittersweet journey undertaken by a proud, yet forgotten and deliberately made surplus group of men, shines a light on both good and bad aspects of our entrenched English hierarchical society, and the ever present North-South divide, plus applies some reasoned and considered thinking to the greatest national divisive event in modern history, Brexit.
As always, highly recommended.
As always, highly recommended.
April 3, 2021
I picked this up as a random diversion for my lockdown walks and I'm glad I did. I liked Stuart Maconie as a narrator and the rambling (pun intended) narrative, which frequently drifts away from the Jarrow story. There are snippets of social, cultural and architectural history from the towns and cities he visits as well as nice anecdotes from his journey about the people he meets. And, as with all travelogues, it makes me want to take a long walking trip myself sometime soon.
June 2, 2023
Has interesting bits but ultimately fell into the lazy stereotyped description of politics which does not ring true to my experience in East Anglia and in part perpetuates the ideas which he critiques through it.
May 28, 2024
1936. Peaceful protest. Unemployment. Cultural history. Then and now.
May 22, 2025
A really interesting and entertaining read. I like the way Stuart Maconie weaves together his experiences and impressions as he retraced the Jarrow March in 2016 with what happened in the March and more broadly in 1936. I know several of the places he walked through too.
March 16, 2020
Excellent
August 11, 2017
In 1936, struggling to feed their families after the destruction of the shipbuilding industry, the men of Jarrow were desperate, and no one seemed to be listening. So they set off on a march to London, to deliver a petition to parliament. The march was led by one of the first women in Parliament – Ellen Wilkinson, a passionate feminist and socialist.
There are plenty of myths and legends about the march – many unfounded, but what drove those marchers was their desperation, their frustration that they were forgotten, that no one cared. Sadly, many people today feel like that. And what’s really interesting about this book is the insight it gives into the lives of ordinary people today, and the ordinary (and not so ordinary) history and society that often goes unnoticed and overlooked.
This is, in a way, Maconie’s own tribute to the marchers. He retraces the march, following the same route, covering the same miles on the same days. And as he walks he talks to the local, ordinary people, about politics, about Brexit, about the places they live and about life. He also visits some of the more interesting and quirky places in England and the book includes some unusual and really interesting snippets from history.
There is also a lot of background about the march itself, the politics in which it was born, and the terrible conditions the people of Jarrow experienced. Maconie draws parallels between now and then and it’s quite scary how we seem to be locked in a circle where these terrible things are happening again – and there seems to be no will to change them.
I disagreed with a few things and with some of the conclusions that Maconie draws from his experiences – the reasons behind the Brexit vote and a certain political leader (although his view may have changed since the book was written), but that didn’t detract at all from my enjoyment of the book. It’s really well-written, with a friendly, chatty voice – I felt at times that I was walking along beside the writer. There’s so much here – so much history, so much detail about the country, so many strange little tales and strange people. And it’s more than that. I hate it when people say they’re not interested in politics, or that politics doesn’t affect them. Or when people accuse others of ‘politicising’ something. Life is political. Your housing, your wages, your pension, your education, the food you eat, your job. Your life. It’s all political. People are at the heart of politics, and what this book does is give a reminder of that. It’s a tribute to the marchers, a tribute to Wilkinson, something of a tribute to England. It’s history, politics, geography and sociology all rolled into one. And it’s very entertaining too.
There are plenty of myths and legends about the march – many unfounded, but what drove those marchers was their desperation, their frustration that they were forgotten, that no one cared. Sadly, many people today feel like that. And what’s really interesting about this book is the insight it gives into the lives of ordinary people today, and the ordinary (and not so ordinary) history and society that often goes unnoticed and overlooked.
This is, in a way, Maconie’s own tribute to the marchers. He retraces the march, following the same route, covering the same miles on the same days. And as he walks he talks to the local, ordinary people, about politics, about Brexit, about the places they live and about life. He also visits some of the more interesting and quirky places in England and the book includes some unusual and really interesting snippets from history.
There is also a lot of background about the march itself, the politics in which it was born, and the terrible conditions the people of Jarrow experienced. Maconie draws parallels between now and then and it’s quite scary how we seem to be locked in a circle where these terrible things are happening again – and there seems to be no will to change them.
I disagreed with a few things and with some of the conclusions that Maconie draws from his experiences – the reasons behind the Brexit vote and a certain political leader (although his view may have changed since the book was written), but that didn’t detract at all from my enjoyment of the book. It’s really well-written, with a friendly, chatty voice – I felt at times that I was walking along beside the writer. There’s so much here – so much history, so much detail about the country, so many strange little tales and strange people. And it’s more than that. I hate it when people say they’re not interested in politics, or that politics doesn’t affect them. Or when people accuse others of ‘politicising’ something. Life is political. Your housing, your wages, your pension, your education, the food you eat, your job. Your life. It’s all political. People are at the heart of politics, and what this book does is give a reminder of that. It’s a tribute to the marchers, a tribute to Wilkinson, something of a tribute to England. It’s history, politics, geography and sociology all rolled into one. And it’s very entertaining too.
August 14, 2017
I knew of the Jarrow March/Crusade in 1936, but not much about it beyond the fact that men from Jarrow in Tyneside marched from their home town to London to present a petition against the mass unemployment and extreme poverty in the north-east of England. Stuart Maconie has filled in the gaps in his excellent book Long Road from Jarrow: A journey through Britain then and now. In October last year he retraced the route they took, 300 miles, comparing what conditions and attitudes were like in 1936 with those of 2016. The men were accompanied for part of their march by Ellen Wilkinson, who was the MP for Middlesbrough East and it was Ellen who presented their petition to the House of Commons. But despite their protest and all Ellen Wilkinson’s efforts on their behalf it didn’t result in any improvements for employment in Jarrow.
Maconie a writer, broadcaster and journalist, writes fluently and with conviction. The Long Road from Jarrow is a mix of travel writing, social and cultural history and political commentary, with the main emphasis on the current social, cultural and political scene. It’s a thought-provoking book that both entertained and enlightened me. Maconie writes about the past, the history of the places he walked through and the tales and reminiscences of the people he met. He also writes with enthusiasm on such topics as football and music and food. It’s a lively, chatty account that includes the thorny topic of Brexit, the current and past state of the north/south divide and considers what it is to be ‘British’.
I was fascinated and thoroughly enjoyed this walk through England, past and present. My copy is an ARC from the publishers via Netgalley.
Maconie a writer, broadcaster and journalist, writes fluently and with conviction. The Long Road from Jarrow is a mix of travel writing, social and cultural history and political commentary, with the main emphasis on the current social, cultural and political scene. It’s a thought-provoking book that both entertained and enlightened me. Maconie writes about the past, the history of the places he walked through and the tales and reminiscences of the people he met. He also writes with enthusiasm on such topics as football and music and food. It’s a lively, chatty account that includes the thorny topic of Brexit, the current and past state of the north/south divide and considers what it is to be ‘British’.
I was fascinated and thoroughly enjoyed this walk through England, past and present. My copy is an ARC from the publishers via Netgalley.
February 12, 2020
Exactly the high standard of writing that automatically comes with the territory of a Stuart Maconie book. Interesting, informative, engaging, anecdotal, and (as always) the learning of new words - such is SM's grasp of the English language, I was having to access the on-board dictionary of my Kindle at least once every chapter (hence why I always buy SM books in ebook format, not paperback!)
The only thing I would possibly say (more an observation than a criticism) is that although each chapter covers the Jarrow march at a given point of the journey, there's probably more content in each chapter that is non-Jarrow unrelated, such as modern day social commentary or something of a historical nature related to whichever port of call SM finds himself at. Don't let that put you off from buying it though, it's still a cracking read.
Of course, it is impossible for SM to cover anything and everything of significance. However, there was a minor disappointment for me - considering he talks of football and even goes to a Premier League game during his journey, there was a lost opportunity to visit The Home of Football. No, we're not talking about Liverpool, Manchester or any of the big London teams here, we're talking about Sheffield, home to the official oldest club in the World (recognised by FIFA), namely Sheffield FC. The walk from Sheffield to Chesterfield would have taken him straight past their home ground which currently resides in Dronfield (on the Sheffield/Derbyshire border). Hopefully he'll be able to dovetail it into his future travels.
The only thing I would possibly say (more an observation than a criticism) is that although each chapter covers the Jarrow march at a given point of the journey, there's probably more content in each chapter that is non-Jarrow unrelated, such as modern day social commentary or something of a historical nature related to whichever port of call SM finds himself at. Don't let that put you off from buying it though, it's still a cracking read.
Of course, it is impossible for SM to cover anything and everything of significance. However, there was a minor disappointment for me - considering he talks of football and even goes to a Premier League game during his journey, there was a lost opportunity to visit The Home of Football. No, we're not talking about Liverpool, Manchester or any of the big London teams here, we're talking about Sheffield, home to the official oldest club in the World (recognised by FIFA), namely Sheffield FC. The walk from Sheffield to Chesterfield would have taken him straight past their home ground which currently resides in Dronfield (on the Sheffield/Derbyshire border). Hopefully he'll be able to dovetail it into his future travels.
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