Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at the
corners of the square. Something very sensational had been flashed upon
the transparencies. Forgetting for a moment his penniless condition, he
made his way over a bridge to buy a paper, for in those days the papers,
which were printed upon thin sheets of metallic foil, were sold at
determinate points by specially licensed purveyors. Half over, he
stopped short at a change in the traffic below; and was astonished
to see that the police signals were restricting vehicles to the half
roadway. When presently he got within sight of the transparencies that
had replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read of the Great March
of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the West End, and
so without expenditure he was able to understand what was coming.
He watched, and his book describes this procession which the police
had considered it unwise to prevent and which had been spontaneously
organised in imitation of the Unemployed Processions of earlier times.
He had expected a mob but there was a kind of sullen discipline about
the procession when at last it arrived. What seemed for a time
an unending column of men marched wearily, marched with a kind of
implacable futility, along the roadway underneath him.
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