Figen Murray is walking from Manchester to London, aiming to reach Downing Street on Wednesday morning, May 22, on the seventh anniversary of the Manchester Arena suicide bomb. Among the dead were Figen Murray’s son Martyn Hett; a ‘Martyn’s Law, drafted last year as the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill, would create a legal responsibility – in the jargon of the Home Office, a ‘Protect Duty’, on venues to take measures against acts of terrorism. Here Mark Rowe seeks to fit Figen’s 190-mile walk into a longer history in Britain of marches to the capital. Pictured; the lapel badge that Figen presents to those who join her walk.
In one of numerous talks about the proposed Martyn’s Law at the recent security exhibition at the NEC, Figen’s supporter the former senior counter-terror cop now a consultant and an advocate of Martyn’s Law Nick Aldworth spoke of the walk as a ‘march of protest’. It has not felt like that. Unlike the Jarrow marchers against unemployment and hunger of the 1930s, Figen and supporters do not carry a banner. Putting one foot in front of the other is enough without a placard to carry.
What tools does Figen have to hand? The same ones as she has used for years, as used by the Jarrow marchers, Rev Dr Martin Luther King in the southern United States and indeed Martin Luther; words, to express ideas; and walking. Why walk? Figen has accepted the logic of her position as someone who wants something done; which turned her into a political activist, a protest marcher. Martin Luther said: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”
Why now? Figen and her supporters in private security and elsewhere have made all their arguments for the law. The security services and counter-terror police continue to interdict terrorist plots. More or less inevitably (as acknowledged in the UK official terror threat levels) further acts of terror will, regrettably, happen somewhere, some time. The case for such a law (as recommended by the chair of the Arena Inquiry Sir John Anderson, in volume one of three of the Inquiry’s findings, published in 2021) has not altered. Why say more words? Which leaves walking.
Until the railways, then motor cars and motorcycles, and heavier-than-air craft, if you could not afford a horse, if you wanted to get anywhere, for work, pilgrimage or pleasure, you walked. Arguably the most moving historical experience in Britain is to walk in Admiral Nelson’s footsteps, his last on English soil, through Old Portsmouth to the boat that took him to his flagship and to Trafalgar. No taxi hire apps in 1805. While you could travel from the north by ship along the east coast from say Newcastle to London, you still had to reach the port in the first place.
At times Figen has walked the same road as the Jacobites under Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745 (from Manchester to Ashbourne). For all the romance of the ’45, that was an army of Scots invading England seeking the violent overthrow of authority. They famously turned back outside Derby and walked all the way back to (northern) Scotland. All that many of the Jacobites got was a bullet or a bayonet and a mass grave at Culloden, whereas (such are the advances in democracy) the fate of the Jarrow marchers was to be applauded and fobbed off to return home much as before. As Figen nears London so she is more likely to walk in the footsteps of others; more or less anonymous people who went to London to get things done, on business, to start a better life; people who walked there for a living, carters, shepherds taking sheep to market.
They thought nothing of walking. As late as between the world wars, in at least one recorded case a working man from Derbyshire went to Blackpool for the day by train (which might have been his holiday for the year), lost his return ticket, and had no option but to walk home. Already such an act was out of the ordinary enough to be newsworthy, and recorded in the press. For the Jarrow marchers, to have reached London by train, buses, even bicycle (not that the unemployed men and the labour movement could have afforded the fares or bicycles), would not have had the same visual, visceral, power. So it is with Figen.
For all society’s supposed obsession with good health and fitness, people have become incredibly (compared with their forefathers) unused to walking. The evening before Figen passed a newsagent in some unremarkable Midlands town and turned left (uphill – you notice such things far more on foot, than when in a car), a girl came out of the shop, carrying a half pint bottle of milk, stood on a two-wheeled electric – what do you call them? They are simply wheels and a flat spot for you to stand on – gadget and went along the pavement at about walking speed, presumably on her two minute or so journey home. Figen and her supporters have a political goal; they may also find, besides the physical pain of having to endure their long walk, things they did not count on; an awareness of nature, the sheer greenness of much of England, and fellowship.
