Susannes Folksong-Notizen
 [1970:] The 'horns', as we called the hooters, took the place of alarm clocks in our community. We wakened to the 'quarter to' horn, we stole an extra eight minutes, clinging fast to sleep before the 'seven minutes horn' had us tumbling out on to the cold linoleum; and by the time the eight o'clock horn had gone [we were up]. (Weir 122)
[1972:] For my father, who remembers, and for all the don't knows who don't care until it's too late. (Notes Harvey Andrews, 'Writer of Songs') [1979:] [...] although much of [Harvey's] own beliefs are expressed in his social and political songs these have tended to be less successful as songs, with the exception of 'Unaccompanied'. (Woods, Revival 115) [1980:] They built Chelmsey Wood [in Birmingham]. Do you know citizens of Birmingham have been shot climbing the wire of Chelmsey Wood? By civil servants with specially engineered umbrellas? I wrote a song about what the people of Chelmsey Wood said about Chelmsey Wood when they first moved in. (Intro Harvey Andrews) [1997:] The TUC and the NEC [National Executive Council] advised labour parties and trades councils along the route of the Jarrow crusade not to help the marchers. Local branches were more generous. [Aneurin Bevan] told a welcoming rally in Hyde Park: 'The Hunger Marchers have achieved one thing. They have for the first time in the history of the national Labour Movement achieved a united platform. Communists, ILP-ers, Socialists, members of the Labour Party and Co-Operators for the first time have joined hands together, and we are not going to unclasp them. This demonstration proves to the country that Labour needs a united leadership.' (Patricia Hollis, Jennie Lee. A Life 85) [1998:] [Aneurin Bevan gave] his strong support for the famous Hunger Marches organised by the Communist-led National Unemployed Workers' Movement, particularly those of 1934 and 1936. On both occasions, with a handful of other Labour MPs like Edith Summerskill and Ellen Wilkinson, Bevan was one of the reception committee which met the marchers on their arrival in London, despite the official disapproval of the Labour Party and the TUC, whose timidity shocked him. 'Why should a first-class piece of work like the Hunger March have been left to the initiative of unofficial members of the Party, and to the Communists and the ILP?' he demanded in 1936. 'Consider what a mighty response the workers would have made if the whole machinery of the Labour Movement had been mobilised for the Hunger March and its attendant activities?' The participation of the Communists, from whose embrace the [Labour] leadership recoiled, was for Bevan the most important thing about the marches. (John Campbell, Nye Bevan. A Biography 59)  [1999:] Ford revolutionierte die industrielle Produktion - und das Fließband war nur der Schlußpunkt. [...] Von nun an ging es darum, den Menschen zu normieren. Fords Ingenieure zerlegten den Arbeitsprozeß in immer kleinere Teile. [...] Als das Montageband in Highland Park [in Detroit, Fords Model T-Fabrik] 1915 in vollem Betrieb war, hatte der Mensch seinen Platz am Massenproduktionsband gefunden: zwei Muttern auf zwei Schrauben, kein Blick nach links, kein Blick nach rechts. Nun betrug der durchschnittliche Arbeitsschritt eines Monteurs 79 Sekunden. Das Fließband beschleunigte aber nicht nur den Takt der Arbeit, es veränderte die Gesellschaften der Wirtschafts-Nationen. Nun wurde die Arbeit immer stärker in Kopf- und Handarbeit geteilt, und die Facharbeiter wurden ersetzt durch ein Heer angelernter Hilfskräfte. [...] Der Mensch am Band wurde austauschbar wie die Teile des Autos, das er baute. (Markus Dettmer, Spiegel, 28. Juni)
[2000:] To a Geordie working-class boy growing up in the Fifties, knowing a man who had been on the Jarrow March was the equivalent of a Sloane Ranger knowing a man who once knew a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales. [...]
Many people in Jarrow did go hungry in the Thirties, though the organisers of the march went to great lengths to stress that it was a crusade to bring work to the town and not a hunger march. Seebohm Rowntree, the leading social scientist of his day, and founder of the Rowntree Trust, calculated that the bare necessity for survival for a man with a wife and three children required an income of 53 shillings a week (£2.65 in today's money). But unemployment benefit for such a family was 32 shillings (£1.60) a week.
'There is no escape anywhere from the prevailing misery,' wrote J.B. Priestley, visiting Jarrow for his book, 'An English Journey'. '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 penniless bleak sabbath.' Yet Jarrow had been one of the greatest industrial centres in the world. The Palmer steelworks and shipyard could take in iron ore at one end of its river frontage and turn out battleships and liners at the other. When Palmer's closed in the world slump between 1920 and 1031, 74 per cent of all the workers in Jarrow became unemployed. [...] To try and end this despair the whole town got together behind the idea of the march on London - a unique initiative, for it was organised by the town council and had the support of all the political parties in Jarrow, and all the churches. It was truly a town march, to present a petition to Parliament asking for work. And just in case anyone doubted this, two of the 200 men on the march were chosen each day to carry the box containing the petition, slung reverentially between them on silken cords as if it were the Ark of the Covenant. (Peter Crookston, Observer, 12 Nov)
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