England expects every man but chiefly George V to do his duty. Last week the great "hunger march" of jobless men & women from all over the United Kingdom converged ominously on London. One hundred miles away at Sandringham the King & Queen were enjoying a rural autumn. Unhurried and to all appearances unworried, Their Majesties tarried in the country until at least 3,000 footsore and surly marchers had trudged into their capital, then dutifully they returned to Buckingham Palace. They knew among other things that London's bobbies had just taken a 5% wage cut.
Scottish hunger marchers arrived in the pink of condition, striding along unwearied after spanning the length of the British Isles on foot, mostly in the teeth of wind-whipped rains. One Scottish detachment had a bagpiper who mournfully skirled the subversive "Internationale." Miners from the boarded-up coal pits of Wales, shipwrights from the silent Tyneside, locked-out weavers from the Midlands arrived with some show of spunk and morale, but the weak & weary contingent from Henry Ford's plant at Dagenham (now working at a fraction of capacity) were a disgrace to their comrades. Exhorted to parade around Hyde Park, they squatted down as soon as they reached the greensward, exerted themselves no further than to join in chanting the British Hunger March. Chorus:
But now's the day of reckoning,
No longer we'll endure;
Starvation we will conquer now
And victory is sure.
We are a strong determined band
Each with a weapon in his hand (brandish stick).
We are the hunger marchers
Of the pro-le-ta-ri-at!
We are the hunger marchers
Of the pro-le-ta-ri-at!
Most marchers frankly admitted that on their way to London, local charity folk gave them more to eat than they have had in many months at home. Among the suburbs of the capital, schoolhouses, suburban railway stations and district lodging houses offered shelter for the night, but London itself was different. In London the hunger horde came up against that frigid Old Etonian, one-armed Sir Edward Hilton Young, His Majesty's Minister of Health, who was wounded at Zeebrugge Mole in 1918—a fact of which he is so proud that like Admiral Nelson he pins his empty right sleeve forward on his chest.
"These people," said Sir Edward Hilton Young when questioned as to what provision he was making for their health, "have been induced by a Communist organization to leave their homes. Very well. It is up to the Communists to take care of them."