Anarchy 84/Notes on poverty 1: The castaways

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Notes on poverty

1: The castaways

BILL JAMIESON

It was 11 p.m. The bolts were eased back and the doors opened. I stood, near the back of this dimly lit cafe, leaning against a pillar, and feeling very, very scared. There was a rush to the en­trance. From the melee of arms, bodies and legs that prised themselves through the doorway, people shot forward into the room like pips squeezed from an orange.

  Outside, there was a down­pour. Through the sudden burst of noise, I could hear the sound of rain hissing on the pave­ment; and I could smell its rich, wet smell oozing from those strug­gling to get in. They had been queue­ing now for almost an hour.

  Impres­sions tumbled so thick and fast after that instant, it is diffi­cult to piece them together. But I remem­ber vividly the way these men and women clutched onto their grubby, sodden coats as if they were stark naked under­neath. I would say most of them were drunk. The first ones half tot­tered, half stum­bled to various posi­tions round the walls of the room, lying down on the floor or flop­ping into huge, dilapi­dated arm­chairs. Others fol­lowed, singly or in groups, as if to previ­ously agreed posi­tions, sitting down round tables and gradu­ally filling the entire room until the smell and the noise and the crush became unbear­able. I think what struck me most was the appar­ent jovi­ality with which this molten lava of human­ity accep­ted its fate. There was a great uproar of shout­ing, singing and laugh­ter, and a small, grey-haired woman, drunk beyond her wildest dreams, stretched out her arms and

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danced to the general demen­tium of noise. She came bearing down, knock­ing over chairs and pushing past people, towards me.

  “Ah’m no like the ithers,” she ex­claimed loudly, “Ah wis brought up proper. Ah’m elegant. Do ye no think ah’m elegant?” She lifted up her coat with a grand, imper­ial gesture, reveal­ing a pair of hor­ribly de­formed legs. She came closer.

  “Son, you’re a guid lookin’ fella. Can ye gie us a fag?”

  I lied, terribly.

  “Can ye no even gie me a six­pence?”

  I lied even worse.

  “Then ye’re a cunt,” she belched, and pirou­etted on behind me.

  For a while I did not move, but let my eyes flit over the chaotic morass of bodies. I could see faces blurred with drink, faces loose, faces marble with sobri­ety. Behind me, a man from the High­lands, with great bushy eye­brows, put a chanter to his lips and piped a half-remem­bered lyric. It rose, quietly over the sound of laugh­ter and voices, begin­ning to replace them with a still­ness that comes of respect. Not for the first time I was to hear the slow, sad music of the desti­tute.

  Philip O’Connor, in his Penguin book on Vagrancy, quoted a strik­ing remark made once by a social worker. “Archae­olo­gists,” she wrote, “inter­pret past civili­zations by what they threw away. What con­tempo­rary society rejects can be equally reveal­ing to the soci­olo­gist.”

  About desti­tution and vagrancy, very little socio­logic­ally, is known. It is a terrain into which few social scien­tists have ven­tured, and out of which even fewer truths have come. Even quan­tita­tively, the problem has eluded accu­rate esti­mation. The numbers of people sleep­ing rough in Britain each night has been put at 30,000 by a National Assistance Board survey con­ducted on two nights in Novem­ber and Decem­ber 1965; and as high as 90,000 by Anton Wallich Clif­ford, a Proba­tion Officer who has been setting up shel­ters for the desti­tute up and down the country. Twenty thou­sand, he argues, pro­bably sleep rough in the Home Coun­ties alone. In addi­tion to this figure, hun­dreds of thou­sands of men and women are accom­moda­ted in lodging houses, church hostels and rehabi­lita­tion centres. The problem of desti­tution may not be as formid­able as it once was, but it is still eyebrow-raising, parti­cu­larly by modern welfare stan­dards.

  Edinburgh is a city not exactly re­nowned for its desti­tute popu­la­tion. It is a decep­tive city, present­ing to those who do not know it well a culture and a people for whom the prob­lems of life seem to have been well consi­dered and re­solved long since. It is a flat­tering facade. Over 1,000 people, ex-mental pa­tients, epilep­tics, chronic alco­holics, crimi­nals and pension­ers—“down-and-outs” for want of a better descrip­tion—are con­centra­ted in one small square, the Grass­market, over­sha­dowed by the Castle rock, almost in the dead centre of the city. When one

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ap­proach­es it from the east end, it is like being led down into a grim, sinis­ter amphi­theatre. It used to be exactly that, in fact, two cen­turies ago, when Coven­anters in their hun­dreds were taken down and strung up in the Gallows. Their place of execu­tion is now marked—iro­nically if not con­veni­ently—by a gentle­man’s lava­tory.

  As the terrain of the desti­tute and the dis­pos­sessed, the Grass­market has been notori­ous for over a hundred years, but even in the face of this, the area has attrac­ted more histor­ical than socio­logical interest. History, here, however, provides the crucial deter­min­ing factor. The influ­ence of psychi­atry on social work is not always a clari­fying one, since it has an inher­ent ten­dency to treat men as indi­vidu­als with the minimal refer­ence to history. No man can claim such inde­pen­dence, least of all one who is desti­tute. In study­ing the meths drinker or the vagrant in depth, we find in the major­ity of cases that general social disrup­tion—the effects of eco­nomic changes and two world wars—gener­ate pro­found and often tragic dis­organ­iza­tion of indi­vidu­al norms and life-styles. The indus­trial revo­lution is a par­ticu­lar example, and the main men’s hostel in the Grass­market was estab­lished in 1888 to cater speci­fically for the thou­sands who flocked to the city for work and who were driven off the land by the Acts of Enclo­sure. Even before urban­iza­tion, when the Grass­market was a bustling market centre, its proxim­ity to the city gates at the West Port acted as a magnet for tramps, tinkers, pros­ti­tutes and thieves.

  About the destitute, it is diffi­cult to gener­alize, but the problem, if it is anything, is a class one. Of the fifty or so hostel occu­pants I talked to, all were from working class or poor farming back­grounds. For the middle class alco­holic or men­tally dis­turbed, the situ­ation is much differ­ent, and he remains insu­lated to a sur­pris­ing degree from falling down the class ladder. Soci­eties like Alco­holics and Neuro­tics Anony­mous act as a buffer, and often friends and rela­tives, too, can break the fall. In short, it is possible for many pro­fes­sional people to come to pieces without having to stoop to a doss house in a vain attempt to pick them up again.

  Around the square, and in the streets leading into it, can be found no less than seven lodging houses, some of them church and Salva­tion Army hostels some Corporation aided, others private companies, run on a profit and loss basis. They tend, in fact, to be as varied as those who make use of them. The largest men’s hostel, provi­ding acco­mo­dation for an average of 280 men per night, brings in a net profit aver­aging between £500 and £1,000 per year. I checked its share­holders and ac­counts at the City Compa­nies Office. In their annual state­ment for 1963, for example, its Direc­tors had “pleasure in repor­ting that the average number—321—of lodgers per night was the highest for a consi­der­able number of years”.

  Institu­tions like these, not sur­pri­singly, have been con­demned by

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social workers since they were first built. Listen to this Report, made in 1911: “The ‘models’ do not improve men physi­cally or morally. They are des­truc­tive of family life. Once a man is in a ‘model’, no woman can visit him … all sorts of lads who have broken away from home moor­ings find a haven in these places, where the sights and sounds are des­truc­tive of moral tone.”