Others were less fortunate: if nothing else could be found, marchers were obliged to seek a bed for the night at the local workhouse (now known as the Institution), where managers had been instructed to accommodate them in casual wards and treat them as tramps or vagrants, which meant searching the men, removing their possessions, insisting on them having a bath while their clothes were disinfected if necessary, locking them in for the night, feeding them a ‘spike’ diet of two slices of bread and margarine and tea, and refusing to allow them to leave until 9 a.m. on the second day after their admission, by which time they were supposed to have done whatever work was required to ‘earn’ their keep. Not all workhouse managers insisted on all these conditions: Coventry Council, which had shown ‘weakness’ in 1930 when it put the marchers up in a school and paid for food provided by the Co-op, was warned that it would be surcharged if that were to happen again.
There were skirmishes along the road, usually over what the marchers were expected to put up with at some workhouses (the Lancashire marchers were seriously batoned by the police at a workhouse in Stratford-upon-Avon, and arrived in Hyde Park heavily bandaged) or restrictions put on their right to hold meetings. Harry McShane, who was in charge of the Scottish contingent, made it a practice that ‘if we were banned from marching along a street, we always went up and down it twice’. Some of the Scottish marchers had come from as far away as Dundee, an eighty-mile walk to Glasgow, where they mustered before setting off on the long march south. The men would march on average for twenty-two miles a day, stopping every hour for a ten-minute rest; the cook’s lorry would go ahead and ‘dish out a good big lunch, usually stew’. Wal Hannington made an effort to march for a stretch with each contingent. ‘He loved to lead a big body of men singing. He used to march at the head of the Scots singing “McGregor’s Gathering” and get them all waving their caps on top of their sticks — with the Welsh it was “Land of my Fathers”.’ Most of the contingents had a band which marched all the way to London with flutes and drums, and sometimes cymbals and triangles too. ‘Flautists — you cannae stop them … they would have played all the way if you’d let them.’ The marchers liked to sing as they trudged along too, and the Scots had their own song:
From Scotland we’re marching,
From shipyard, mill and mine. Our banners raised on high We toilers are in line. We are a determined band, Each with his weapon in his hand. We are the Hunger Marchers Of the Proletariat.
Tom Ferns recalled the unemployed protesters marching through the grounds of Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, ‘with the Maryhill Flute Band … leading the contingent and it was playing Connolly’s Rebel Song, so that was quite an astonishing event going through the Royal territory’. He thought that the songs the marchers sang ‘were very simple. Sometimes something simple can explain a situation better than something a bit more complicated,’ and instanced songs like:
Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go
Shouting out the battle cry for freedom.
Hurrah for Mary, hurrah for the lamb,
Hurrah for the Bolshie boys that don’t give a damn.
The Brighton contingent added a further verse:
Ramsay [MacDonald] had a little lamb
Whose feet were black as soot, Shouting out the battle cry of TREASON.
Some of the women sang (to the tune of ‘Oh why are we waiting’) ‘Oh why are we marching?’ and answered in the last line, ‘The reason is the Means Test.’ Other marchers sang ‘The Red Flag’ repeatedly. While the Greenock contingent on the Edinburgh March in 1933 sang ‘a Russian tune, Budenny’s Cavalry March … the Red Flag [“The people’s flag is deepest red/It shrouded oft our martyred dead/And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold/Their hearts’ blood dyed its every fold”] [it] was a very, very kind o’ hymn thing. It was a bit slow and it wasnae much use for marching.’
But ‘they [presumably the organisers] were strict about what we sang’. Emily Swankie and the women she was marching with ‘were stopped singing one night because it was the wrong type of song — Land of Hope and Glory! Someone started to sing it and just because it was a good tune, we all joined in, and the woman came over and said “Just stop that. We don’t want that”’ It was the same with ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’. One of the Scottish organisers, Peter Kerrigan, ‘blew his top’ when that was sung: ‘Being the puritanical sort o’Scots Communist that he were, Kerrigan put an end to that song. It was a jingo song — pack up your troubles, nothing to worry about.’ Another Scottish marcher recalled that although ‘There wis many, many tunes we played … we never got to It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, we never got asked to play that! It wis too capitalistic — it was associated wi’ the First World War.’ Other marchers ‘didn’t feel it was a bit militaristic because actually most of our men were ex military men’, and sang it a lot.
The marchers carried banners, some with slogans such as ‘We Refuse to Starve in Silence’, ‘No to the Means Test’ or ‘Wales to London’, or simply with the name of their contingent. Those marching from Brighton to London in 1932 carried one that had been embroidered by women NUWM members with ‘Solidarity not Charity’. These banners were heavy, and were mostly carried furled until the marchers drew near a town. Hugh Sloan wondered, as the Scottish contingent battled a blizzard through the Lowther Hills in January 1934, ‘where the only occupants were sheep … why the hell we were carryin’ the banner … the wind was rackin’ the banner around … and we couldnae maintain our balance … it was the main banner. It just said “The Scottish Contingent”. But why we were carryin’ the banner in a place like that wi’ strong winds blowin’, I just don’t know.’
Most of the marchers were in their twenties or thirties, though some younger men went too, such as William McVicar, who had only managed to find work for a few days since leaving school at fourteen, and was sixteen and a half when he set off on the march to Edinburgh from his home in Greenock in the summer of 1933. Charles Teasdale of Blantyre, by contrast, was seventy when he set off for London on the 1930 march.
The marchers travelled light, though the Brighton contingent ‘borrowed’ a wheelbarrow, ‘trusting that we would be able to put matters right on our return’, to transport their food and a pile of blankets — and to give an occasional ride to their oldest marcher, a seventy-five-year-old woman. Archie McInnes, marching from Glasgow, had ‘an old army haversack — surplus equipment. Ye carried your own gear, your knife, fork and plate, and your blankets of course. One tin mug and a plate … A change of underwear [though other marchers insisted “We didn’ wear underwear in those days,” and John Brown, who marched from Glasgow to London in 1932, only took “jist one of everything. I don’t think I washed any o’ ma underwear or socks during the time I was away” — more than a month!] and shirt, a … hand towel, soap, shavin’ equipment.’ Some wore a waterproof cycling cape — useful in downpours — while John Lochore set off from Glasgow wearing his aunt’s old raincoat, ‘which buttoned on the wrong side’. Most wore some sort of head covering, a flat cap or what the Scots called ‘a bonnet’, and carried a stick to help them along. ‘The walking stick was a camouflaged sort of weapon … a sort of symbol it was in a way and it was very, very helpful,’ according to Harry McShane. The police insisted that these potentially offensive weapons must be surrendered on the approaches to London, though some marchers managed to conceal them from the authorities.
On Thursday, 27 October 1932 the marchers arrived at Hyde Park, their ranks of some 1,500 swollen by around 100,000 Londoners, and pressed towards seven carts that had been set up as a platform. They were met by 2,600 police, including 136 on horseback and 758 special constables who lacked the training or discipline of the regular force, and whose presence, in the words of the Police Review, was ‘calculated to cause trouble rather than avoid it … the special is an irritant rather than an antiseptic … the less they