LOCAL historian Paul Perry illustrates the proud history of this Tyneside town using images from his archive of 24,000 photographs of old Jarrow. Here in the 8th century, the Benedictine monastery of St Paul was home for 50 years to the Venerable Bede, regarded as the greatest Anglo-Saxon scholar and the father of English history.
Jarrow remained a small town until the introduction of heavy industries such as coal and shipbuilding. Charles Mark Palmer established a shipyard here in 1851 which, at the height of its production when it extended over an area of 140 acres, employed 80 per cent of the town’s working population. Its closure in 1933 led to the event for which the town is probably best known, the Jarrow March to London in 1936 to protest against mass unemployment.