not be available for work if he was on the road — a requirement of drawing benefit) she would march instead, since she was also unemployed. The first day out from Derby
we walked sixteen miles … we found that sixteen miles is quite a distance for people not used to marching. And if like me you were in a new pair of shoes, it wasn’t funny … We never did sixteen miles again. The next day it was twelve miles. And then we cut it down to eight … We had black stockings which we were asked to wear all the time … they frowned on bare legs. No bare legs on the Hunger March … There was a wee bit of puritanism there too, but it was that they wanted to avoid at all costs any bad publicity — women marching with bare legs … There were long hours of walking and nothing really happened, passing through villages, people coming out to look at us, curious, interested some of them, not very curious, some of them not very receptive … But where we did have receptions, it was great. We had the Co-operative Guild women, some Church Guild women, Labour Party women and Communist Party women. They had made up reception committees for us … sometimes they had brought in home baking, and they got us bedded down in halls etc. for the night. In one place they anticipated we wouldn’t be very well fed the next day because they knew the area through which we were going. And they made us big bowls of hard-boiled eggs. We had to stuff our pockets with them because it was on the cards that we wouldn’t eat next night. And they sent in basins with Lysol — that was the old disinfectant for your feet … we were very kindly received.
Like the men, the women always marched in step when they got to a town. ‘You march better when you’re tuned in with other people,’ thought Marion Henery. And it looked more organised and purposeful. As with the men, it was sore feet that were the main problem for the women: ‘The Lancashire women wore clogs. You heard the clatter of the clogs but they never had any trouble with their feet … but a lot of other women had problems with heel blisters.’ The women ‘had to sleep in workhouses quite a number of times … we had always to give our names. The women on the March didnae take kindly to this. So a lot of fictitious names were given — Mary Pickford [the American film star of the silent screen] and names like that.’
Although the Labour Party and the TUC leadership continued to label the NUWM as the Communist party in disguise and to reject attempts to build a ‘United Front’ against unemployment (though the ILP, which had recently disaffiliated from the Labour Party and would wither henceforth, heeded the call), there was more support among the rank and file this time. The South Wales contingent, for example, had the support of almost all the Labour MPs in the area and many of the local union branches and trades councils for the 1934 march. Reception committees were more likely to turn out as the marchers neared towns, and were more prepared to offer food and accommodation. Many committees included a clergyman who might offer his church hall, or even his church, for the night. However, the reception en route was mixed: as the marchers tramped through Windsor, servants working at the castle threw them money, but at Reading, where there was no reception committee, they had to bed down on used straw in a cattle market.
As the marchers neared Oxford they found ‘students were standing on the side o’ the road with bundles o’ walking sticks and handin’ them to us as we passed again after the police [who had confiscated the marchers’ sticks] was away. They were sympathetic students, no’ Communists or anything like that. But they’d seen what we were goin’ through and they decided we needed sticks for walkin’,’ recalled Frank McCusker. Duff Cooper, who was Financial Secretary at the War Office, was appalled, and said in the House of Commons that he hoped that the university authorities would know how to deal with these undergraduates who fell into step with the Hunger Marchers. When he came to speak at the Oxford Union few weeks later Cooper was challenged about his remarks by Anthony Greenwood, known in Oxford as the ‘young Adonis of the Labour Party’, the son of Arthur Greenwood, who had been Minister of Health in the 1929 Labour government, but had declined to join the National Government. ‘It is a vile thing,’ Cooper replied, ‘to encourage these poor people, under-fed, ill-clothed, to set out in bad weather, marching the roads to London, knowing perfectly well that they would get nothing when they got there. In a university with traditions, it was a suitable case for the authorities to interfere with the young fools who lost their heads and their sense of proportion.’
The Labour politician George Lansbury was the other speaker, and he disagreed, welcoming the fact that ‘Christian charity’ still existed among the undergraduates. It was capitalism that had failed to do anything for its victims, ‘and that is the greatest condemnation of the system that can be offered’. The President of the Union, the socialist Frank Hardie, questioned the right of Oxford undergraduates to have £2,000 spent on their education while others were pitchforked into the labour market at fourteen. The motion that ‘This House believes that in Socialism lies the only solution to the problems of this country’ was passed by 316 votes to 247.
The ‘young fools’ of Oxford were not the only less obvious supporters of the Hunger Marchers. Fifteen-year-old Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill, who was a pupil at Wellington College and who kept a porcelain bust of Lenin on his study shelves under a portrait of his uncle and next to six copies of The Communist Manifesto, was a fervent, if unfocused, enthusiast too. With his brother Giles he had started a magazine, Out of Bounds, ‘against reaction in the public schools’, which contained attacks on the Officer Training Corps, fascism (though Michael Wallace of Oundle was allowed space for a defence), traditional public schools which were ‘concerned with the production of a class’, as well as informative articles on subjects such as masturbation (‘some form of auto-eroticism is absolutely inevitable’) and progressive schools (including Dartington, which permitted copies of the Moscow Daily News as well as the Times Literary Supplement in its library) plus some rather memorable poems by the schoolboy Gavin Ewart. The Romillys were delighted to announce in the first issue, published in March 1934, that Out of Bounds was ‘Banned in Uppingham — Banned in Cheltenham’, and they could gleefully add ‘Banned in Aldenham, Imperial Service College and Wellington’ (from whence it sprang) by the second. Furthermore, the Daily Mail had picked up the story under the headlines ‘Red Menace in Public Schools’, ‘Moscow Attempts to Corrupt Boys’, ‘Officer’s Son [the Romillys’ father was a colonel in the Scots Guards and had commanded the Egyptian Camel Corps in the First World War] Sponsors Extremist Journal’.
L. Shinnie of Westminster School reviewed the collected Listener articles Memoirs of the Unemployed for Out of Bounds, concluding that ‘members of the public schools can only make certain that they will not suffer the conditions depicted in this book if they join with the working classes to achieve a better society’. Esmond Romilly managed to persuade his mother not only to contribute half a crown to the National Hunger March Committee, but also to pen a letter to the Daily Worker expressing her ‘entire sympathy with the cause of the unemployed who have had their benefits cut and I am glad they are availing themselves of a traditionally British method to voice their grievances’. Nellie Romilly had wished to add ‘God Save the Queen’ at the bottom, but had been dissuaded. However, young Romilly later realised the political capital that could be made out of a sister of the wife of Winston Churchill writing such a letter, and it never appeared.
One afternoon in February 1934 Henry Crowder, a black American jazz musician and the lover of a wealthy and rebellious socialite with a restless social conscience, Nancy Cunard, went to her flat and found her wearing ‘a bizarre collection of garments — a man’s overcoat, an aviator’s helmet and several scarves — which, she told him, were partly for warmth and partly for disguise. She informed him that she was off to join the hunger marchers and he was to tell no one. Off she went with a small movie camera in her hand.’
Much later, Nancy Cunard wrote to a friend: ‘It was at Stamford [that] I met them [the hunger marchers], up that great road … One thought the dog of the Inn had been put in the soup, just as we were all sitting down, in pretty great cold, eating stew on the roadside … Why the hunger march? In protest against the Means Test.’
‘We were on the road when this car drew up,’ remembered Tom Clarke, who was on the march from Dundee. ‘I think it was a Rolls Royce — I’m not very good on cars. This woman got out … [she] was taking newsreels or films. [Peter] Kerrigan said, “That’s Nancy