Ellen Wilkinson and the Jarrow March

Seventy four years ago today, on October 5th, 1936, 200 able-bodied men from the north-eastern town of Jarrow set off for London. Over the next few days, they marched 300 miles, accompanied by a second-hand bus which carried their cooking utensils and bedding. Whilst marching, they sang songs and played mouth organs to keep up morale, and carried an oak box with gold lettering, containing a petition, signed by 11,000 citizens of the town. Signatures were  also collected on a second petition from the numerous sympathetic people they passed on their way down to London. The march was hard, but medical care was provided by the Inter Hospital Socialist Society's students. 

Why were they marching? What did their protest hope to achieve?

About a year previously, the main employer in the town - Palmer's shipyard - had been closed down. In Jarrow, as with many towns in the north-east, employment rates were at 70%. The men of Jarrow were dependent on their wives' or daughters' wages (themselves hardly substantial), which was not something that was culturally acceptable at that time. The town itself was in dire shape. In the words of the local MP, Ellen Wilkinson, it was 

"... utterly stagnant. There was no work. No one had a job except a few railwaymen, officials, the workers in the co-operative stores, and a few workmen who went out of the town... the plain fact [is] that if people have to live and bear and bring up their children in bad houses on too little food, their resistance to disease is lowered and they die before they should." [source]

Wilkinson herself is a very interesting figure. Born in 1891, she won a scholarship to the University of Manchester, never married, was briefly a member of the Communist Party, often visited Spain (during the Civil War there) and Germany to protest against Fascist groups - especially the rise of Hitler - and as Minister for Education during the post-war Labour government, managed to get the school leaving age raised to 15, despite the huge demand for extra buildings and teachers this would require. All in all, she was an amazing woman, achieving more in her lifetime than most people could in several. I would very much like to be her.

 

Ellen Wilkinson MP, 1891-1947

She also went on the march with the men of Jarrow, and presented their petition to parliament for them. As the shipyard had been closed, due to the worldwide economic downturn (sound familiar?), the men demanded that a steelworks be built to bring employment back to their town. The government, despite being largely Conservative, were not unsympathetic to their plight - nor indeed the similar plight of other men in the working towns who had been laid off due to the Depression, but there was very little they could do. There was a general lack of response to the Jarrow situation (though a ship-breaking yard was established in 1938), although their policies of  increasing domestic consumption and implementing a cheap mortgage scheme which lead to a house building boom did help boost the economy slightly.

Ultimately, though, it took World War Two, and the need for armaments and the like to give industry the boost it needed, and therefore lift the economy out of depression. I do not pretend to understand economics at all, and will defer to almost anyone's knowledge on how to avoid recessions and depressions, but surely, surely there must be a way of finding enough jobs so that everyone is employed and can afford to put food on the table, without having said jobs involve making weapons to kill others? I hope that that is not just wishful socialist thinking...