Why history will judge us for our treatment of the homeless

The way society provides for the homeless has seen precious little improvement for centuries

After the passing of the Elizabethan Poor Law in 1601, vagrants and beggars were often sent to work in ‘houses of correction’ (Pigment Productions)

Love among the haystacks?

Not exactly. But for years the haystack provided safe repose for drifters, wanderers, tramps, wayfarers, knights of the road, vagabonds. And if a vagabond chose a night in the “spike” (prison), instead, he – usually a he – was expected, after chores and a crust, and sustained only by cold water and one cheese cob, to trudge to a different dosshouse 10, 20 miles distant.

This all sounds rather romantic. But as we went into the postwar era, was “tramping” a noble calling? Was it poetic? Did the image of a bedraggled nomad suit our collective unconscious, burdened with duty towards persons less fortunate?

Well, who better than former rover Philip O’Connor to answer this in Britain in the Sixties: Vagrancy – one of publisher Allen Lane’s topical Penguin Specials? Nobody would accuse the turbulent writer and surrealist poet of using secondary sources.

Jeremy Sandford’s astute foreword sets the tone, taking us to “18,000 beds in kip-houses charging five bob a night for bed and breakfast, conditions terrible – urine-soaked mattresses, blood-stained sheets, washrooms afloat with pee, meths bottles bobbing up and down in an atmosphere of despair. Conditions worse than prisons – a cesspit where the ladder out is missing its bottom few rungs.” No rosy spectacles his.

Sandford introduces us to vagrancy’s pattern and progression, one that is punctuated by a serial dropping-out from orphanage, army or asylum, and characterised by the failure of all attempts at self-belief, integration or respectability.

This nonconformist population was ignored, despised, or rejected – but disappearing no time soon. The Poor Law – the legislation around help for poor people between 1603 and 1929 – always spelled retribution, not beneficence. Vagabonds were considered too embarrassing to merit acceptance; on the contrary, they were shown irritation for their “parasitic” lifestyle, despair at their Bohemianism, condemnation for their criminal potential.

A purportedly Christian, settled country could not tolerate the challenge of a totally alternative lifestyle choice. Quite reasonably, the author questions why followers of Jesus – himself a propertyless vagrant – found it so difficult to abandon or even share their accumulation of wealth.

With its distinctive red cover, Vagrancy cost three shillings and six pennies (Penguin)

O’Connor then advances the controversial but difficult to refute argument that society needs vagrants almost more than they society – “misfits” considered irredeemable, therefore deserving minimum outlay in return for maximum expectation.

Thus when Elizabethans tired of giving out charity and found shortcomings in their “houses of correction”, they simply tied mendicants to horses galloping towards neighbouring parishes where, with any luck, newly appointed guardians might assign any survivors to the workhouse. There, on receipt of meagre bread and gruel and laid upon Spartan “sleeping platforms”, able-bodied idlers were deemed guilty of professional vagabondage.

Here O’Connor is at his most persuasive, charting a relentless War on Beggars to dwarf the present day War on Terror. He realises – as we do now – that whereas war makes heroes of the brave, conflict only intensifies intolerance of the non-combatant, with demand for the right paperwork actually presaging Tony Blair’s thirst for identity cards and Theresa May’s disposal of undocumented Windrush cargo.

The author then directs his spotlight on what we now call workfare – government policies whereby individuals must undertake work in return for their benefit payments or risk losing them. Then, as now, need was not the sole qualification for relief, desire for improvement and amenability to self-help instead emphasised. In the 1960s, this work was repetitive factory employment. The state still had re-establishment centres, pointing to the institutionalised legitimacy of a settled, working existence. Wards took in 1,400 vagrants in 1963, compared with 17,000 in 1932, with a success rate of 10 per cent.

The whole of another chapter is devoted to “Why Men Tramp”. Here some incredibly sensitive field interviews greatly enrich and enlighten the text. Men: once rich, now poor; once loving, now misunderstood; sacked; suffering nervous breakdown; slipping into crime, gambling, alcoholism. Interviewed in “posh” surroundings, several interviewees flatly turn down fine food, each man clinging onto his pride.

O’Connor concludes that wayfarers are not visionaries or deepthinking philosophers; rather, they are restless labourers anxious to sell their brawn to whoever might hire them. Critically, they are men not ready to settle down in the “steady employment” society considers essential for the able-bodied. With this in mind, the author recommends a model of natural cooperation as opposed to a harsher alternative – compulsory competition.

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Fast forward 55 years of noteworthy progress followed by steep reverse and regression for rough sleeping adults, here is a 2018 snapshot. Social Security initially fostered claim and entitlement, not “application” and obstacle. Successive rough sleeping initiatives culminated in Labour’s 1999 setting up of a remarkably high-profile and effective Rough Sleepers Unit – offshoot of its equally novel Social Exclusion Unit. Multi-pronged, multi-agency, intervention became orthodoxy, aided by homeless shelters bulging to capacity. At the same time, the charity Crisis at Christmas, among other operators, encouraged potential donors to remember those “coming in from the cold”.

Government figures indicate 4,130 rough sleepers in England in 2016, an increase of 16 per cent over 2015 – rising to 4,750 totally homeless in 2017: 89 per cent male, 11 per cent female, a quarter dossing down – in contravention of the Vagrancy Act of 1824 – in the capital, London.

Nearly 40 per cent of homeless people nowadays have no qualifications (Godfrey Holmes)

Specific figures for the northwest are far worse, having doubled in two years and quadrupled since 2010. Elsewhere, Oxford, Southend-on-Sea, Hastings, Eastbourne, Thanet, Medway, Peterborough and Reading are hot spots, cool spots, for vagrancy greatly enhanced in daylight hours by those hidden homeless forced, or directed, to reside and beg in the nation’s doorways and on its streets.

Some 38 per cent of modern vagrants have no educational qualifications, while one third struggle with alcohol, one third take non-prescribed drugs, and one quarter have dual or triple dependencies. Most are aged 26-49, with 10 per cent being 25 or under. Care leavers and ex-prisoners are heavily overrepresented in the absolutely homeless population and often overlap. One quarter of all rough sleepers are sexually abused while outdoors. Crucially, life expectancy on the street is age 47, thirty years short of normal lifespan.

And why this plight – this blight? Abolition of the Greater London Council, widespread closure of hostels, local government austerity; an astonishing cut of £7bn housing benefit; abandonment of “social” or “affordable” housing; a disastrous introduction of new “benefits”, such as the employment support allowance and universal credit; mechanisation; computerisation leading to demand for workers with advanced IT skills; relatively high levels of separation and divorce; the invention and distribution of methamphetamine hydrochloride, spice and other psychotic drugs; mass closure of adolescent, mental health or drug rehabilitation units; above all, a removal of safety nets.

Philip O’Connor did not foresee food banks, or reopening church crypts to the destitute. He certainly didn’t imagine a government turning away so many asylum seekers and refugees. Nor anti-tramp benches, anti-tramp studs, anti-tramp clearances, anti-tramp cameras, anti-tramp job centres. He might puzzle over the same Oxford Street, Trafford Centre or Bull Ring dedicated to affluent consumerism also boasting inert, hooded souls sitting on the bare pavement extending a plastic cup.

There has been little change in society’s approach to vagrancy since the Black Death. If his analysis was bleak, ours must be bleaker.