I’m learning hangul. Why’s that? No, stop. WHAT is that?
It’s a writing system. It’s the Korean writing system. And it didn’t just evolve over the years as so many do. A Korean King, Sejong devised it in 1446. He realised that the classical Chinese script used at the time was unsuited to the sounds and grammar of the Korean language, so sat down and invented something more suitable.
It’s a writing system so appreciated by the Koreans that they even have a day off to celebrate it. Hangul day is in October every year.
I don’t appreciate it much. I find it quite tricky. But learn it I must, and Malcolm too, preferably before September.
Why though? Because in September we’re going to visit daughter Emily. You may remember she’s working in South Korea for a year, and how could we not go to the other side of the world to visit her in a place she’s so enjoying, where she’s seeing and experiencing so many new things (raw octopus anyone?)?
And if we want to read a menu outside the few tourist areas, if we want to read a few street names, and catch the right bus, and not wander into the gents if we want the ladies, reading hangul might be a good place to start.
There are 40 characters. Some of them aren’t too bad.
Can you see the ‘n’ sound? Well, that sort of looks like a nose. And the ‘h’? That sort of looks like a man wearing a hat. And it’s easy enough to get your head round the ‘s’ sound looking like a ‘moustache’.
And once you’ve got the single consonants sorted, their doubles are a doddle. Though I can’t for the life of me see how they sound different from each other.
That only took a couple of weeks to get to grips with – please ignore all those internet videos called things like ‘Learn hangul in two days’, which begin by chattering over-excitedly about how easy it all is. It’s just … not.
Then came the vowels:
Honestly, these vowels are a nightmare. I test myself on Memrise every day, and every day I get my yaes, my yeos, my yes, my wos and my wis, to name but a few, totally, totally muddled.
And it doesn’t end there. Some versions of the script are neat, thin computer strokes, the Korean equivalent of ‘Ariel’. Others, like the ones shown here, are more painterly, and yet others are positively ebullient. Shall I even recognise my painfully memorised lessons?
And then, these symbols don’t trot from left to right across the page. Each word is organised in groups ….
….. like this. This is ‘hello’ by the way.
So as to learning the language. I think that may be an effort too far. We’ll have to survive on ‘hello’, ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’. And throw ourselves on the mercy of the people we meet. Emily says everyone is friendly, courteous and eager to help. They haven’t met us yet.
We understand the way forward is to pack a quantity of card and some chunky felt tip pens. Then, when we want to catch a bus, or ask directions, we write our proposed destination in hangul on the card, thrust it in someone’s face, and hope for the best.
All the same, I can’t wait. I’ll be sure to send some ‘Postcards from Korea’ on my blog.
Old Grange Road, Jarrow, c. 19502(?) (geordstoree.com)
What image comes into your head when you think of Jarrow? If, like me, you’ve only really heard of it in the context of the Jarrow March, it may be a depressing one. Grimy desolate streets, a down-trodden and abandoned population, with little hope of change for the better maybe.
Well, Robert Colls, who walked with us on our Jarrow March Mark 2 for ‘Ramblings’ won’t entertain such images He’s irritated by those commentators, often from the south, who see nothing but the negative. He could do without the likes of George Orwell painting such depressing, hopeless images about the Industrial North. He was raised in nearby South Shields. His memories of the town are of a place that was gritty, maybe dingy, but where there was a rich cultural life, and a warm and supportive community where it was good to grow up.
Jarrow, in the North East of England, had been dependant on shipbuilding since the 1850s, but demand for ships fell throughout the 1920s and became worse during the 1930s. The main shipyard, Palmers, once the source of Jarrow’s prosperity, closed in 1934 after years of steady decline . By 1936, there was 70% unemployment in the town.
HMS Duchess, the last ship to be launched from Palmer’s shipyard, July 1932 (Imperial War Museum)
Town councillors planned a march to London to present a petition to Parliament highlighting the desperate conditions in Jarrow and towns like it. They secured cross-party support. They involved local churches and the business community. They fund-raised. Socialist medical students volunteered to work as medical attendants along the route. Nobody in town wanted yet another communist-inspired ‘hunger march’. No, Jarrow people planned a respectable event, one that would win widespread support.
It rained on and off the day we walked last week. I suggested to Robert that those marchers, with shabby, worn-out clothes would have had a thin time of it. I was wrong. The organisers insisted the men who were chosen to march – and yes, they were chosen – should wear their ‘Sunday best’, look smart and conduct themselves well. They had medicals, and only the 200 fittest men were chosen to march, accompanied by a second-hand bus carrying cooking equipment and ground sheets. A successful fund-raising campaign ensured the march was well-prepared and equipped, and that the men had a little pocket-money.
They started marching at 8.30 each morning of their 25-day journey (with Sundays as rest days). Many marched army style – 50 minutes to the hour with 10 minutes’ rest. A mouth organ band was a great success, ‘keeping the men swinging along all the time’, according to a report in the Shields Gazette, and there was singing – led sometimes by Ellen Wilkinson. Local papers apart, the only national paper to give the Jarrow Crusade wide coverage was The Manchester Guardian. Copy was supplied by the journalist Peter Richie-Calder, who walked much of the way with them.
Photograph of J McCauley, a Jarrow marcher, singing to his co-marchers on their walk to London, taken in October 1936 by Edward G Malindine for the Daily Herald. The caption read ”Croonin’ J McCauley, who helps to keep his co-marchers’ spirits high, has been out of work for 5 years’ (National Media Museum)Ellen Wilkinson, by Elliott & Fry, 4 June 1940 (Wikimedia Commons)
Ellen Wilkinson was one of only four women MPs at the time, and she represented Jarrow. Though from a poor background, she was well-educated – she won a scholarship to Manchester University – and built up an impressive career both in the unions and in parliament. By the age of 24 she was already National Women’s Organiser for the Cooperative Employees union, and only nine years later, an MP – one of only four women in parliament. She was a terrific orator, she was passionate, and she believed in the Jarrow marchers and their cause. She walked with them whenever she could, distinctive with her fiery red hair. Towards the end of the march, Ellen broke away in order to address the Labour party conference and, with tears streaming down her face, exhorted delegates to ‘…tell the government our people shall not starve!’ She failed, however, to win special attention for her cause.
Ellen Wilkinson addresses the Jarrow Marchers (History Today)
The lack of political affiliation helped those marchers. They were fed and watered and given places to sleep all along their route. Harrogate, for instance, just south of Ripley, then as now is a true blue and prosperous sort of place. But the civic authorities greeted them warmly, the Rotary Club fed them, and they were given sleeping quarters by the Territorial Army.
Jarrow March (BBC)
I depend on good boots when I’m walking and wondered about how the marchers were shod. They had decent shoes, Robert said. And what’s more, when they arrived in Leicester, the Cooperative Society’s bootmakers stayed up all night to repair all their by now thin-soled shoes, and did so without pay. The story of the Jarrow march is peppered with such examples of support and kindness.
Ellen Wilkinson marches with the men (Fox Photos)
They arrived in London. They presented their petition in Parliament, the petition that had 11,00 signatures. It prompted only the briefest and most complacent of discussions. And that was that. The disillusioned marchers returned to Jarrow by train, their fares paid by benefactors.
Astonishingly, many men finished the march healthier than when they had started. Boosted by regular exercise – and the decent food and accommodation they had received along the route – many put on weight. This was just as well. For the duration of the march, their unemployment benefit had been suspended as they were ‘unavailable for work’.
A few modest attempts to bring work to the town resulted in jobs for a few hundred people, but only with the start of World War II did work once more surge back into the shipyards and factories of Jarrow. For the duration only.
Ellen Wilkinson continue to be a thorn in the side of the Labour party, though she worked tirelessly at home and abroad against fascism. Perhaps her greatest achievement was in 1945, when as Minister for Education in the Labour Government, she was instrumental in having the school-leaving age raised to 15. No wonder Helen is an enthusiast for this most dynamic, charismatic and troublesome woman.
So there we are. One – no two – history lessons, all parcelled up in an agreeable package of a long country walk, following, if not exactly by the same route, in the footsteps of those Jarrow Marchers.
Clare Balding, Lucy Lunt, Helen Antrobus and Robert Colls in the steps of the Jarrow Marchers.
Clare, Lucy, Helen and Robert pose for a group photo. None of us asked for selfies-with-Clare
I came in the other day to find a message on the answer phone. The BBC. Clare Balding wanted to talk to me. Well, not Clare actually. She’s one of Britain’s favourite broadcasters and a bit busy I dare say. Her research assistant Lucy finally got hold of me, and asked me if I’d be able to lead Clare and team on a walk from Ripon to Ripley for ‘Ramblings’, a popular programme on BBC R4 about walking.
Why me? Because I’m Hon. Sec. of Ripon Ramblers, our local walking group, and our details are out there, if you care to look. Yes, but why ME? Lucy thought, after our chat, that I’d be OK on the radio.
OK then, why Ripon? Because, it turns out that in October 1936 the Jarrow Marchers walked from Jarrow, through Ripon to Ripley and beyond, all 280 miles to London. In October, ‘Ramblings’ plans to broadcast a programme to celebrate its 60th anniversary.
Perhaps you don’t know much about the Jarrow March. Neither did I. Not till I met Clare and Lucy, cultural historian Robert Colls, and Helen Antrobus, who’s a real Ellen Wilkinson enthusiast from the People’s Museum in Manchester. The five us walked and talked our way along our eight mile route from Ripon to Ripley, and we barely noticed the rain which threatened constantly, but only delivered occasional short sharp showers.
This is a blog in two parts. The first is our country walk, the second about the Jarrow March. But Friday wasn’t in two parts. Every step we took, we remembered those marchers. Robert and Helen told us the story. Together, we drew comparisons between their march and our own hike.
I’d already dutifully planned and walked a route. The marchers went entirely on main roads, but if you’ve ever driven on the A61, you’ll know this is no longer a good idea. Country paths were the way to go.
‘Do we go this way?’ Lucy records Clare getting directions.
As we set out together from Ripon, we got our instructions. Lucy had her furry-muff-on-a-stick. You’ll have seen those, as reporters rove round town centres talking to likely passers-by about some event that’s happened locally. When recording, Clare’s always on the right of the person she’s talking to, and Lucy’s there on the left with her recording gear. It was slightly odd to walk alongside Clare as she formally introduced to the programme, telling listeners where she was, why she was there, and who we all were. But soon we forgot about that muff. We all chatted together easily, about that March, about walking, about each other. Sometimes we had to repeat what we’d said, in a spontaneous ‘I’ve just thought of this’ kind of way, because some passing noise – RAF jets overhead for instance – had ruined the recording.
This was the scenery of the early part of the walk.
In many ways our walk was a scam. The A61 passes through rolling hillsides, productive farmland, cows in the pasture, and pretty villages. It’s all bucolic England at its best. Our route presented a more hidden countryside. Isolated farmhouses with dilapidated barn roofs, ancient pastures, secret dark, damp woodlands, and tiny rather remote hamlets.
If it survives the cut, you’ll hear Clare painting a word-portrait of this farmhouse during the programmme.
At first though, we were on a road. Badly maintained, rather narrow and with tall hedges it’s a bridle path these days, but it is still tarmacced, and perhaps the kind of highway those marchers would have recognised. Later, on grass-trodden pathways, we passed Markenfield Hall, a 14th century moated country house.
We saw Markenfield Hall nearby as we walked. The Jarrow marchers didn’t.
Those marchers didn’t. We went through the village of Markington. Apparently the marchers were welcomed here too, though we couldn’t imagine why. It’s more than a mile or so from the main road and history doesn’t record why exactly they made a detour. We strode along the edges of barley fields, on woodland paths and across gorsey heath, all without meeting a soul. Not what the marchers experienced.
This is farming country.
And we talked. That’s what I’ll remember most. The sheer pleasure of walking and talking with a group of people thrust together for the day who quickly found themselves to be friends – just for a day. Thanks you Clare, Lucy, Robert and Helen for a very special occasion. It was a real privilege.
Clare strides away into the woods.
And the Jarrow March? More about that in my next post.
Look. Here was the scene in the field near our house, in January this year. Fields and roads flooded, impassable pathways, rocks and earth tumbling into the River Ure.
Near Old Sleningford, January 2016.
This was the same field yesterday. Barley, barley everywhere, all fattening up nicely for the harvest. Nearby, fields of poppies. Really hopeful, cheery sights on a sunny and blustery day.
The same field, July 2016
Will all our present political crises end so well? I wish I could feel more optimistic.
I want to share this post. It says more about raw grief, and about sustained love through good times and bad than anything I have ever read. The writer has asked to remain anonymous. But if you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll know very well who wrote it.
See if you can read it without it making you cry. And when you’ve read it, you might want to read some of her other posts. Maybe not all at one sitting though, they’re scarcely escapist reading matter. Oh … and ignore the swearing. The writer has plenty to swear about.
We went to a party on Saturday night. It’s not the first time we’ve been out, the boys and I (or indeed I on my own,) since D-Day, and although I mainly want to stay at home curled up in a ball, I know it’s A Good Thing to go out and I need to make the effort. We need to socialise, and I’m determined that my hubby doesn’t just slip into obscurity, and become some legendary bloke who we all vaguely remember. No. He has a name, and we use it often. Still, I’m pretty selective about who I feel up to partying with, as the fixed social smile often gets wiped away by tears. For the most part, the small talk I used to be so good at makes me feel a bit nauseous, and I don’t want people to ask how I am because they won’t like the…
We went for a walk from Leighton Reservoir this week. It’s in many ways a bleak, bare, sometimes boggy landscape, and this suited our mood in a bleak, bare post-Brexit week. The view is softened at the edges by the rolling, green, stone wall-skirted Yorkshire Dales which lie beyond the heathery moors.
But look what we found as we consulted our Ordnance Survey map. These were the places we passed, or could see at a distance:
Sourmire Moor
Gollinglith
Baldcar Head
Jenny Twigg and her daughter Tib (Two natural stone stacks towering out of this boggy moorland landscape. We didn’t get as near to them as we’d have liked this time)
Grewelthorpe Moor
Benjy Guide
Sievey Hill
Horse Helks
Cat Hole
Jenny Twigg and her daughter Tib (Wikimedia Commons)
Really, where else could we be but Yorkshire?
Postscript: Just at the end we met this little chap, a just-fledged thrush. We hope he (she?)’s ok, because he just about managed to fly rather stumblingly off to a safer place than the track where we spotted him.
Nothing else seems to matter at the moment. It’s hard to focus on life outside the post-referendum nightmare, hard to believe that after securing only 52% of the vote (and just 72% of the electorate voted), leaving the EU seems to be universally accepted in the House of Commons – though not out here, not in the wider community I know. Like just about everyone I come across, I’m angry, upset and feeling pretty impotent. Then I read this. It pretty much sums up how I feel. Please read it.
I had hoped after Friday’s absolute catastrophe of a day that the country might somehow magically rally over the weekend. I mean, when you plunge your country into possible ruin on the promise of a golden future that will allow it to rise like a phoenix from the flames, you have a plan, right?
As it turns out, you don’t. The only person that seems to have any plan at all, and be acting on it rather than just spouting meaningless Churchillian rhetoric is Nicola Sturgeon, and I can’t even vote for her.
I was distraught and angry on Friday. I had hoped to feel better by today. Instead I am running on barely controlled rage and getting more enraged by the moment.
Here are a few things I am furious about:
Firstly, leave voters telling me to calm down. I’m sorry…
Thursday night was brilliant. Brilliant in every way. Apart from anything else, it was an evening of simple joy at being part of an evening’s festivities shared with equal pleasure among both friends and strangers.
The next day we woke up to a Brexit-dominated world, and simple joy has become rather hard to find.
We arrived at Harrogate’s Valley Gardens as dusk fell . These gardens are among Harrogate’s treasures – 17 acres of lawns, of colourful flowers, of pinewoods, a small lake, of historic buildings such as the Sun Pavillion, all beautifully managed and greatly appreciated by locals and visitors alike.
Normally, by dusk, there’s only the odd dog-walker around. Thursday was different – Friday and Saturday too. We spotted lines of flaming plantpots strung on simple metal frames. There were smouldering lampshade-like creations. Then we found spherical braziers suspended from stands of mature trees.. There were eccentric bits of machinery, reminiscent of the work of Rowland Emmett, that played with the idea of juxtaposing showers and jets of water with flickering flames and occasional startling fireballs. There were quantities of men’s vests – yes, vests – re-purposed as lampshades suspended over the lake, which became, as darkness fell, an evermore magical and mysterious venue.
Cie Carabosse was in town. They’re a French street theatre company whose specialist subject is fire in all its forms. Its members are a playful band of people who aim to transform a space that may have long been familiar into … something else. Dressed formally in black, rather in the manner of croque-morts (pall-bearers or undertakers), they wandered round the park, illuminating braziers, attending to some of those hand-cranked machines. We ambled round too. Apart from a band of musicians playing atmospherically over in the back corner, there was no event, no ‘happening’. Everyone enjoyed simply exploring at their own pace, visiting and revisiting this installation, that glade of fires, those vests down at the lakeside, savouring the atmosphere as dusk became black night, as fires grew, damped down, and blazed forth once more.
Cie Carabosse travel all over the world. They’ll be in London in September as part of the commemoration of the Great Fire of London, 350 years ago. They’ll be in Seoul, South Korea in October – so maybe Emily could get to see them. And they’ll be in the Ariège, in Foix, in December. One way or another, I hope many of you will have the chance to have your evening set alight by Cie Carabosse before the year is out.
This was a fine day for a walk, and a fine day to have a few history lessons thrown in
This is what we did. Here’s our starting point at East Witton, about 15 miles from home. It’s a lovely small village of about 250 people, where most of the houses were built in the early 19th century round the extensive village green.
East Witton
We passed through fields with views across the Dales. We walked along a green lane, through woods, and eventually reached a wooded gorge through which the River Cover runs, and where we crossed over the charming stone bridge known as the Hullo Bridge. It was quite a climb up the hill on the other side, and we were hoping for glimpses of Braithwaite Hall. Too many trees in full leaf. We hardly glimpsed it.
It’s built on the site of a grange belonging to Jervaulx Abbey. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries it continued as a sheep farm, as it had been under the monks. This is an area where the monks of both Jervaulx and Fountains Abbey extended their influence widely: enormous numbers of sheepall over the region were managed from local granges where the lay brothers who cared for them lived.
The ruins of Middleham Castle.
We were nearly in Middleham now. This is above all a horsey town. The monks of Jervaulx bred horses, and brought them to the Moor to exercise them. When the monks eventually went, the horses remained, as did the training tradition . Middleham these days is home to around 15 racehorse trainers and 500 horses, yet it’s a small town of hardly more than 820 people. It was too late for us to see the horses out on the Gallops this morning, so instead the first thing we saw was the castle, which dates back to 1190 and was the stronghold of the powerful Neville family from the 14th century. Richard Plantagenet, later Richard III was sent here as a young man to be trained in arms by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, his cousin.
The earliest known portrait of Richard III (Wikimedia Commons)
Warwick had the bad habit of changing sides throughout the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) depending on whether the Yorkists or Lancastrians had the upper hand. Eventually he came to a bad end when he was killed by the Yorkist King Edward IV and his younger brother Richard. Edward gave Middleham Castle, and much else to Richard who lived there with his wife, virtually ruling the North of England, for 11 years. When Edward died, Richard seized the throne and reigned for only 2 years before dying in August 1485 in the final battle of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Bosworth in Leicestershire. And there his body remained for 517 years, before being exhumed from a car park in Leicester in 2012.
For us, Middleham was the site for a rather good picnic, followed by a visit to a teashop for an indifferent cup of tea, and even more indifferent cake. But the calories were useful. There were stiles to cross into fields deep in cut grass, waiting to dry off into hay: a fine walled track Straight Lane – to walk along before reaching the River Cover, languidly passing over bleached white stones on its way to meet the River Ure. We briefly touched the road once more as we passed Coverbridge Inn. This dates from 1684, and was owned by the same family – the Towlers – till 1930. Local legend has it that when the monks of Jervaulx were forced to disband in 1537 at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, they shared their secret recipe for Wensleydale cheese with the Towlers. We shall never know.
A final walk along woodland paths, open farmland, fields enclosed by characterful drystone walling and we were back in East Witton. A grand day.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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