English Journeys: National and Cultural Identity in 1930s and 19 ...

communities were reduced to shells of their former selves, the ranks of the unemployed a terrible indictment of a system that had failed so many people.

Nowhere was this awkward relationship between the England of the history books and the England of the economic slump illustrated more poignantly than in the 1936 Jarrow Crusade—a march to London from the town of Jarrow in the Northeast, where the unemployment rate reached 40 percent in the mid-1930s after the closure of the shipyards. Slowly, but with grim resolution, the ranks of unemployed men, sometimes accompanied by relatives and supporters, wove their way down the spine of England towards the capital, where they hoped to petition the government for a package of economic recovery that would breathe new life into their shattered community. Their march had originated, however, not just in a town blighted by the Depression but in one of the most symbolic sites in England’s past: Jarrow, the home of the Venerable Bede, whose ninth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People was one of the first sustained works of history compiled in the country. Bede, a monk, had seen the history of England as that of a country guided by divine providence, a land ordained by God to play a role in the affairs of humanity. That its current populace should be so impoverished, both materially and (it was felt by many people) spiritually, was the terrible indictment of the modern nation that the Jarrow Crusade brought to the very heart of the empire’s capital city.

At such a time, then, any celebration of England was bound to be fraught with contradictions and anxieties, for the country was by no means assured as to what it was and where it was going. Celebrations of the country village, where the squire was still in his country house and the parson conducted church services every Sunday, seemed at odds with the reality of so many people’s lives. Furthermore, the fabric of the country itself was changing rapidly; the dichotomy between town and country that had underpinned so much nineteenth-century thought was called into question by the rise of a new suburban culture in which the towns were spreading