been "unavailable for work" had any vacancies arisen. The historians Malcolm Pearce and Geoffrey Stewart suggest that the success of the Jarrow march lay in the future; it "helped to shape [post-Second World War] perceptions of the 1930s", and thus paved the way to social reform. According to Vernon, it planted the idea of social justice into the minds of the middle classes. "Ironically and tragically," Vernon says, "it was not peaceful crusading, but the impetus of rearmament which brought industrial activity back to Jarrow". Wilkinson published an account of Jarrow's travails in her final book, The Town that was Murdered (1939). "Jarrow's plight", she wrote, "is not a local problem. It is the symptom of a national evil". International and domestic concerns In November 1934, as a representative of the Relief Committee for the Victims of Fascism, Wilkinson visited the northern Spanish province of Asturias to report on the crushing of the Oviedo miners' uprising. She was forcibly ejected from the country. Despite being banned from Germany as an undesirable, Wilkinson continued to visit the country covertly, and as a correspondent for the Sunday Referee was the first to report Hitler's intention to march into the Rhineland, in March 1936. Spain, however, came to occupy a special place in her opposition to the spread of fascism. When a section of the Spanish army under General Francisco Franco attacked the elected Popular Front coalition government to precipitate the Spanish Civil War, Wilkinson set up the Spanish Medical Aid Committee and the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief. She later argued in parliament against the British government's non-intervention policies which, she insisted, "worked on the side of General Franco". She returned to Spain in April 1937 as a member of an all-women delegation led by the Duchess of Atholl, and afterwards wrote of feeling "a helpless, choking rage", as she witnessed the effects of aerial bombing on undefended villages. On a further visit, in December 1937, she was accompanied by Attlee, now leader of the Labour Party, and Philip Noel-Baker, a fellow Labour MP. Having observed the near-starvation of schoolchildren in Madrid, on her return to Britain she set up a "Milk for Spain" fund, together with other humanitarian initiatives. Although she had long broken her formal ties with the British Communist Party, Wilkinson retained strong links with other communist organisations at home and abroad. Her association with leading communists such