Jarrow - Haway Man! JB Priestley Give Ower Man!

Jarrow: extract from English Journey by JB Priestley, 1934

There is a plaque to JB Priestley in Deal, Kent

"The most remarkable giant liner in the world is probably the
Mauretania. for she is nearly thirty years old and is still one of the
fastest vessels afloat. Her record, both for speed and safety, is
superb. We are proud of her. Now the Mauretania was launched at
Wallsend, just across the river from Jarrow; and she has lasted
longer than Jarrow. She is still alive and throbbing, but Jarrow is
dead.
As a real town, a piece of urban civilisation, Jarrow can never have
been alive. There is easily more comfort and luxury on one deck of
the Mauretania than there can ever have been at any time in Jarrow,
which even at its best, when everybody was working in it, must
obviously have been a mean little conglomeration of narrow
monotonous streets of stunted and ugly houses, a barracks
cynically put together so that shipbuilding workers could get some
food and sleep between shifts. Anything – strange as it may seem
– appears to have been good enough for the men who could build
ships like the Mauretania. But in those days, at least they were
working.
Now Jarrow is a derelict town. I had seen nothing like it since the
war. I put a derelict shipbuilding town into Wonder Hero and called
it Slakeby. Some people thought I overdid it a little in my Slakeby
chapter. I assure those people that the reality of Jarrow is far worse
than anything I imagined for Slakeby. It far outran any grim
expectations of mine. My guide-book devotes one short sentence to
Jarrow: "A busy town (35,590 inhabitants), has large ironworks and
shipbuilding yards." It is time this was amended into "an idle and
ruined town (35,590 inhabitants, wondering what is to become of
them), had large ironworks and can still show what is left of
shipbuilding yards.'
The Venerable Bede spent part of his life in this neighbourhood.
He would be astonished at the progress it has made since his
time, when the river ran, a clear stream, through a green valley.
There is no escape anywhere in Jarrow from its prevailing misery,
for it is entirely a working-class town. One little street may be rather
more wretched than another, but to the outsider they all look alike.
One out of every two shops appeared to be permanently closed.
Wherever we went there were men hanging about, not scores of
them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked
as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath. The men
wore the drawn masks of prisoners of war. A stranger from a
distant civilisation, observing the condition of the place and its
people, would have arrived at once at the conclusion that Jarrow
had deeply offended some celestial emperor of the island and was
now being punished. He would never believe us if we told him that
in theory this town was as good as any other, and that its
inhabitants were not criminals but citizens with votes. The only
cheerful sight I saw there was a game of Follow-my-Ieader that was
being played by seven small children. But what leader can the rest
of them follow?
After a glimpse of the river-front, that is, of tumble-down sheds,
rotting piles, coal dust and mud, we landed in Hebburn, where we
pursued, in vain, another man we wanted. Hebburn is another
completely working-class town. It is built on the same mean
proletarian scale as Jarrow. It appeared to be even poorer than its
neighbour. You felt that there was nothing in the whole place worth
a five-pound note. It looked as much like an ordinary town of that
size as a dust-bin looks like a drawing-room. Here again, idle men
– and not unemployable casual labourers but skilled men – hung
about the streets, waiting for Doomsday.