The Town That Was Murdered: The Life-Story Of Jarrow
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: Left Book Club Edition
Condition remarks:
Book: Acceptable
Jacket: No dust jacket - some marks on spine and corners
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Newspaper clipping adhered to rear pastedown. Minimal underlining and markings inside. Text remains legible.
In one of the most urgent and searing political documents of the twentieth century, Ellen Wilkinson — the fiery MP known as Red Ellen — chronicles the slow economic strangulation of Jarrow, a working-class shipbuilding town in northeast England, devastated by industrial collapse and government indifference during the Great Depression. The Town That Was Murdered presents the full, damning anatomy of a community's destruction: the closure of Palmer's shipyard, the mass unemployment that consumed over two-thirds of the town's workers, and the famous 1936 Jarrow Crusade, in which 200 men marched 300 miles to London to petition Parliament for the right to work. Wilkinson writes with the passionate authority of a witness and an advocate, blending social history, political argument, and personal testimony into a narrative that indicts the structural inequalities of British capitalism with unflinching clarity. Her style is direct and urgent, stripping away political abstraction to reveal the human cost borne by ordinary families — making this a foundational text of British labour history and a landmark of progressive political writing. Published as a Left Book Club Edition and not for general sale, it was designed to galvanise a generation; nearly a century later, its central question — who bears the price of economic failure? — remains as charged as ever.
Author: Ellen Wilkinson
Format: Hardback
Published: 1939, Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Genre: British & Irish history
Edition: Left Book Club Edition
Condition remarks:
Book: Acceptable
Jacket: No dust jacket - some marks on spine and corners
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Newspaper clipping adhered to rear pastedown. Minimal underlining and markings inside. Text remains legible.
In one of the most urgent and searing political documents of the twentieth century, Ellen Wilkinson — the fiery MP known as Red Ellen — chronicles the slow economic strangulation of Jarrow, a working-class shipbuilding town in northeast England, devastated by industrial collapse and government indifference during the Great Depression. The Town That Was Murdered presents the full, damning anatomy of a community's destruction: the closure of Palmer's shipyard, the mass unemployment that consumed over two-thirds of the town's workers, and the famous 1936 Jarrow Crusade, in which 200 men marched 300 miles to London to petition Parliament for the right to work. Wilkinson writes with the passionate authority of a witness and an advocate, blending social history, political argument, and personal testimony into a narrative that indicts the structural inequalities of British capitalism with unflinching clarity. Her style is direct and urgent, stripping away political abstraction to reveal the human cost borne by ordinary families — making this a foundational text of British labour history and a landmark of progressive political writing. Published as a Left Book Club Edition and not for general sale, it was designed to galvanise a generation; nearly a century later, its central question — who bears the price of economic failure? — remains as charged as ever.