The memory of the Jarrow marchers of 1936 has been traduced by the petrol blackmailers of 2000, writes Peter Crookston.

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. I was fortunate enough to know Sammy Rowan, the man smoking a  cigarette in the centre foreground of that defining picture taken as the rain-soaked marchers arrived in London in 1936, after 291 miles and three weeks on the road.

My father, who was a friend of Sammy, took me to meet him when I left school in Hebburn-on-Tyne hoping to get into journalism. For someone who had been the administrator on a crusade to find work for 8,000 men in the year I was born, Sammy was in an appropriate job when I met him in 1952. He was the youth employment officer for Jarrow and Hebburn.

He couldn't help me directly, for his skills were deployed mainly in placing boys in the shipyards or engineering factories that were then booming on Tyneside. But he was a kind man, and his knowledge of how the press worked - gleaned from the hours he had spent briefing them during the march - enabled him to give me some good advice. I should write to the news editor, not the editor, of the local newspaper, and I should enrol in evening classes for shorthand and typing so that I could mention it in my letter.

His advice must have helped, for I got the job and I'm now able to pay tribute to the late Sammy Rowan. I want to put on record that he would be dismayed and angered at the way the ethos of the Jarrow March has been hijacked and traduced by the hauliers and the farmers who set out on their drive from his town on Friday.

Sitting in the warm cab of a lorry with country and western on the radio and a Yorkie on the dashboard is so far removed from the ideals and experiences of the Jarrow marchers that it's almost obscene. The haulier is not leaving behind him children who have rickets or who are so undernourished that they don't have the stamina for a full day at school. I doubt, too, if he leaves behind a wife getting thin, unintentionally, because she apportions more food to her man and her children than she does to herself.

The farmer in his four-wheel-drive has never known the humiliation of spending 15 years without work, unable to support his family, which was the experience of many Jarrow workers who joined that march in 1936.

Even if every haulier and every farmer went bankrupt, the Government they vilify would not let them go hungry. 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 the day, and founder of the Rowntree Trust, calculated that the bare necessity for survivalfor 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 1931, 74 percent of all the workers in Jarrow became unemployed.

Grass grew over the launching ways. The enforced idleness of the men on the street corners was like an indefinite prison sentence. To try to 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.

In thinking of the late Sammy Rowan and what the Jarrow marchers did then compared with what the fuel protesters are doing now, I'm reminded of David Dougan's definition in his history of the march: 'It did not represent a faction or a dissatisfied segment of society. It represented all the people of Jarrow, irrespective of political party, religion or position, acting together for their common good.'

The hauliers and farmers could argue that the objective of their drive from Jarrow to London is also for their common good. But the fuel protest is against a tax that only diminishes the quality of their life. The marchers of 1936 were appealing for work so that they could sustain life itself.

The Observer, 12th November 2000