Jarrow March
The Jarrow March of 5–31 October 1936, also known as the Jarrow Crusade, was an organised protest against the unemployment and poverty suffered in the English town of Jarrow during the 1930s. Around 200 men, or "Crusaders" as they preferred to be called, marched from Jarrow to London, carrying a petition to the British government requesting the re-establishment of industry in the town following the closure in 1934 of its main employer, Palmer's shipyard. The petition was received by the House of Commons but not debated, and the march produced few immediate results. The Jarrovians went home believing that they had failed.
Jarrow had been a settlement since at least the 8th century. In the early 19th century, a coal industry developed before the shipyard was established in 1851. Over the following 80 years, more than 1,000 ships were launched in Jarrow. In the 1920s, a combination of mismanagement and changed world trade conditions following the First World War brought a decline that led eventually to the yard's closure. Plans to replace it with a modern steelworks plant were frustrated by opposition from the British Iron and Steel Federation, an employers' organisation with its own plans for the industry. The failure of the steelworks plan, and the lack of any prospect of large-scale employment in the town, were the final factors that led to the decision to march.
Marches of the unemployed to London, termed "hunger marches", had taken place since the early 1920s, mainly organised by the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, a communist-led body. For fear of being associated with communist agitation, the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress leaderships stood aloof from these marches. They exercised the same policy of detachment towards the Jarrow March, which was organised by the borough council with the support of all sections of the town but without any connection with the NUWM. During their journey the Jarrow marchers received sustenance and hospitality from local branches of all the main political parties, and were given a broad public welcome on their arrival in London.
Despite the initial sense of failure among the marchers, historians have subsequently recognized the Jarrow March as a defining event of the 1930s. It helped to foster the change in attitudes that prepared the way to social reforms after the Second World War, which their proponents thought would improve working conditions. The town holds numerous memorials to the march. Re-enactments celebrated the 50th and 75th anniversaries, in both cases invoking the "spirit of Jarrow" in their campaigns against unemployment. In contrast to the Labour Party's coldness in 1936, the post-war party leadership adopted the march as a metaphor for governmental callousness and working-class fortitude.
National Background
Unemployment in Britain between the wars
In the period immediately after the end of the First World War, Britain's economy enjoyed a brief boom. Businesses rushed to replenish stocks and re-establish peacetime conditions of trade and, while prices rose rapidly, wages rose faster and unemployment was negligible. By April 1920 this boom had given way to Britain's first post-war slump, which ushered in an era of high unemployment. Britain's adoption of generally deflationary economic policies, including a return to the gold standard in 1925, helped to ensure that the percentage of the workforce without jobs remained at around 10% for the rest of the 1920s and beyond, well above the normal pre-war levels. During the world recession that began in 1929 and lasted until 1932, the percentage of unemployed peaked at 22%, representing more than 3 million workers.Unemployment was particularly heavy in Britain's traditional staple export industries—coal mining, shipbuilding, iron and steel and textiles—all of which were in a slow decline from their Victorian heyday. Because of the concentration of these industries in the north of England, in Scotland and in Wales, the percentage of unemployed persons in these regions was significantly higher, sometimes more than double, than in the south throughout the interwar period. The decline of these industries helped to create pockets of long-term unemployment outside the normal cyclical variations. Some workers had no work for years.
Hunger marches
In 1921, in reaction to the rising levels of unemployment, the newly formed British Communist Party set up the National Unemployed Workers' Movement. From 1922 until the late 1930s, under its charismatic leader Wal Hannington, the NUWM organised regular marches in which unemployed workers converged on London to confront Parliament, in the belief that this would improve conditions. These became known as "hunger marches", reviving a name coined by the press in 1908, when a group of London's unemployed marched to Hyde Park.The 1922 marchers sought a meeting with the new prime minister, Bonar Law, who refused to see them because of their undemocratic leadership. The march leaders were denounced in The Times as "avowed Communists ... who have been identified with disturbances in their own localities". The Labour Party and the TUC kept aloof, fearful of being tainted by association with the communist organisers. The same pattern was followed with subsequent NUWM marches; successive prime ministers—Stanley Baldwin in 1929, Ramsay MacDonald in 1930 and 1934—declined to meet the marchers' representatives, and the Labour Party and the TUC continued to keep their distance.
In 1931, MacDonald became head of a Conservative-dominated National Government that imposed a means test on unemployment benefits. Anger at the means test was the rationale for the 1932 hunger march, in which a series of rallies and demonstrations across London broke out into considerable violence; the leaders provoked clashes with opponents and police in Hyde Park, Trafalgar Square and Westminster, which led to the arrest and imprisonment of the march's leaders. Although women were not allowed to march on the Jarrow march, women's contingents were present at other hunger marches across the 1930s. These women, who were often the wives of unemployed men, were often faced with restrictions, such as being forced to stay in workhouses if the local Labour Party would not accommodate them.
Two additional national marches were held in 1934 and 1936. By this time the country had made a substantial recovery from the worst depression years of 1929–32. Unemployment was significantly down, annual growth was averaging 4%, and many parts of the country were enjoying a substantial boom in housing and consumer goods. The increasing prosperity was not uniformly spread, and there were sharp contrasts between economic conditions in the south, and those in the north-east, South Wales, Scotland and elsewhere, where the rate of recovery was much slower.
At the same time, the national mood was changing. External factors such as the rise of fascism in Europe helped to unify the British left, and there were more supportive voices in parliament on behalf of the unemployed. The idea of marching as a means of expressing political or social grievances had by now become an accepted and well-established tactic, and there was a growing awareness of the problems complained of, which counterbalanced their exploitation by the Communists. The historian A. J. P. Taylor considered that the hunger marchers had "displayed the failure of capitalism in a way that mere figures or literary description could not. Middle-class people felt the call of conscience".
Local background: Jarrow
Town history
, situated on the River Tyne in County Durham, northern England, entered British history in the 8th century, as the home of Bede, the early Christian monk and scholar. After Bede, little changed in the remote rural community for a thousand years, although his monastery was dissolved under Henry VIII in the 16th century. The discovery of coal in the 17th century led to major changes. Mining on an industrial scale began in the early 1800s, resulting in the population of Jarrow more than doubling between 1801 and 1821 to around 3,500, largely from the influx of mineworkers.The town's years as a coalfield were unhappy. Living conditions in many of the hastily erected cottages were insanitary, lacking water and drainage. There was a serious outbreak of cholera in Jarrow and northeast England in the winter of 1831–32, as part of an epidemic that spread from Europe and resulted in more than 200 deaths in Newcastle alone. Relations in Jarrow between employer and employee were poor; workers were held by the "bond" system whereby they were tied to a particular employer for a year, whether or not that employer could provide work.
Working conditions in the mines were dangerous: there were explosions in 1826, 1828 and 1845, each with large loss of life. Attempts by workers to organise into a trade union were fiercely opposed by the employers. Miners conducted lengthy strikes in 1832 and 1844, each ending when hunger forced them back to work. After the easier seams of coal were exhausted, the Jarrow pits became less profitable, and in 1851 the owners abandoned them altogether.
Shipbuilding
Jarrow began its development as a shipbuilding town with the establishment in 1851 of Palmer's shipyard on the banks of the River Tyne. The first ship from the yard was launched in 1852, an iron-built and steam-powered collier. Many more such carriers followed. In 1856 the yard began building warships, and was soon supplying many of the world's navies. With its associated iron and steel works, it became the largest shipbuilding centre in the country, employing thousands of men. Jarrow's population, at around 3,800 in 1850, had increased nearly tenfold to 35,000 by 1891. Palmer's was central to Jarrow's economy, both for the numbers employed there and for the ancillary businesses that served the needs of both the yard and town.The shipyard generated high employment to Jarrow, but the industrial works created a harsh environment. Ellen Wilkinson, the town's historian and member of parliament from 1935 to 1947, quotes a newspaper source from 1858: "There is a prevailing blackness about the neighbourhood. The houses are black, the ships are black, the sky is black, and if you go there for an hour or two, reader, you will be black". According to Wilkinson, the yard's founder, Sir Charles Palmer, "regarded it as no part of his duty to see that the conditions under which his workers had to live were either sanitary or tolerable".
In the 1890s, Britain held a near monopoly of the world's shipbuilding, with a share of around 80%. This proportion fell during the early years of the 20th century to about 60%, as other countries increased their production. Palmer's remained busy, and during the years of the First World War built many of Britain's warships: the battleship, the light cruiser, and numerous smaller vessels were all built in Jarrow. During the brief postwar boom of 1919–20, orders remained plentiful and Palmer's prospered. However, the firm's management had not anticipated the conditions that developed in the 1920s when, as Wilkinson says, "every industrial country that had bought ships from Britain was now building for itself". The firm made over-optimistic assessments of future demand, and invested accordingly. The anticipated demand did not materialise. By the mid-1920s, Palmer's was incurring heavy losses, and was close to bankruptcy. It was temporarily reprieved by a short-lived boom in 1929, when orders rose and the town briefly enjoyed the prospect of an economic recovery.