Matt Perry, "Globalising the Jarrow Crusade: chronology, geography and the making of a myth".
Paper presented at the New Socialist Approaches to History seminar, Institute of Historical Research, November 4th 2006
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The Jarrow Crusade has become part of the historical landscape of twentieth-century Britain, the enduring symbol of the 1930s, a source of regional and even national identity. It was part of J.B. Priestley’s threefold division of the country, it was a foremost symbol of the depressed, special or distressed areas in official categorisations. This article seeks to address how the Crusade came to such prominence, to examine representations of the Crusade, and to disentangle representations from the reality. The historical record has elevated the Jarrow march above all other protest of the 1930s. It is important to understand why this march of 207 men from a small Tyneside town overshadows all the other efforts of the unemployed to achieve recognition in the history books. The Jarrow Crusade had been used to reinforce the idea that the 1930s were an essentially consensual decade in British politics. Most historians seem to assert, uncritically, the idea of contemporary publicity as the criterion of success. As regards the press coverage itself, two qualifications should be sounded: the press had its own agenda and publicity should not be the sole measure of success. The myth of the crusade has been constructed from particular themes: religion, its non-political character, wee Ellen, and its dissimilarity to other hunger marches. It is intriguing how the crusade became such an intrinsic part of our physical and more importantly cultural landscape. Finally, the article examines the challenge to the dominant representation posed by the public reminiscences of the crusaders themselves in particular the last surviving crusader, Con Whalen. The construction of the myth can best be understood in chronological phases with specific geographical domains occurring through individual initiative, institutional receptiveness and cultural production. After a period of silence and folk memory, the Crusade myth became institutionally consolidated and nationalised from 1976 onwards. By the 1990s, the Crusade a new epoch in which its reach was becoming truly global.