By the 1840s there was a regular body of nomads who frequented
the casual wards of the workhouses. The tattered figure of the regular tramp
was for many years to come a familiar figure by the English roadside: today
[1979] he has all but disappeared . . . That vagrancy was the nursery of crime
was accepted as axiomatic: habitual tramps became first beggars, then thieves
and finally convicts. Today a beggar is a rare sight in England, and a whole
generation has grown up scarcely knowing what the term means. (p60)
I wondered about this, because although I have scarcely been
aware of any people who I would describe as vagrants or as beggars (as
ubiquitous, varied, and colourful as they were in the nineteenth century) I have
been aware of tramps, from the 1960s up to the second decade of the present
century. However, as an historian, Harrison is very careful to warn against
making assumptions, and extrapolating ideas from the limited data which is all
we have to go on when attempting to make conclusions about times when we were
not alive (or even, it might be said, when we are alive—because most of what we think we know is necessarily
based on testimony). So what I have to say about tramps relates only to those
places I have happened to live in; and what the situation might have been in Bradford,
Glasgow, Exeter, or any other place where I have not lived, I cannot possibly
say (without at least undertaking the work of a scholar in the field of social
history).
I have no recollections of tramps in 1950’s
St–Leonards–on–Sea where I was a junior, but I'm fairly sure that they were
around. I do remember a sad woman who had St Vitus Dance – a form of chorea – who
my father unkindly called “bigger–banger” (as a result of the uncontrollable stamping
of her feet on the pavement).
It was not until I lived in Camberwell in the 1960’s that I became
fully aware of tramps. I remember that there seemed to be a kind of noontide (of
just two or three) of them every day, passing from Brixton to Camberwell Green.2 And I'm not sure if my
memory serves me correctly, but I remember them as wearing brown great coats,
and sporting matted beards. But these people were not criminals – even if
occasionally petty thieves. From my observations they simply lacked any energy
to put into the work of crime (because crime is a form of work). They were
truly lost souls, tramping the streets year in year out. I imagine that they
sometimes slept rough and sometimes sought shelter at a Salvation Army hostel
(or even a “spike”). These were I think some form of the common lodging houses
of Victorian Britain, and still seemed to be around post–ww2—judging at least from a conversation
I had with a down and out in Newcastle in 19643: he involuntarily shuddered when I mentioned the word. But the kind of tramp I'm talking
about seemed – perhaps from the 1970s on – to metamorphose into “the homeless”
(and in the eyes such people I would occasionally see a terrible despair—whereas
in the tramp’s eyes there was nothing to read).
Having moved from London to Cambridge
in 1988, I didn’t give much further thought to tramps until I was volunteering one
evening at the Cyrenian Centre, giving food to the homeless.4 There I met two tramps who
(so I felt) were definitely in what I would describe as the “London mould”. One
of them told me he had been on the road for thirty years and the other for
forty years—though how they could keep track of time it was difficult to say. However,
that they had been tramps for an unconscionable time was quite clear; one of
them had decidedly lost his sense of reality, and – to borrow a term from pseudo–psychology
– was living on a different plane to
the rest of us.
My last sighting of my classical “great coated, heavily bearded” tramp was in Hastings in 2013. I was staying in the town because my mother was in hospital. And one evening I decided to look around the town centre. It was during the winter, and was dark—though a fair number of young people were out and about. I came across the tramp in the doorway of a large shop, and just as I reached him he let out an incoherent roar, and scattered a handful of the shop’s leaflets to the four winds. And he was as wild as some creature we might imagine emerging out of the incomprehensible pages of the Book of Ezekiel (or a drawing struck by William Blake as illustration to one of his more obscure imaginings). He was a man tramping over the earth as if it did not belong to him. How lucky we are with our roofs over our heads and our comfortable beds!
Notes
1/ The course is on art
history, but I have a feeling that art – as with so many subjects – cannot be
studied in a vacuum.
2/ One winter’s day, when
snow was on the streets, I saw a tramp sitting on the wall outside of the house
I was living in. I made some sardine sandwiches, and took them down to him. Not
a word was said—no word needed saying. Back upstairs I had the satisfaction –
pleasure, really – of seeing him eating them. It was such a small thing – a
small moment – but I never forget it.
3/ I was in Newcastle,
because I’d discovered the pleasure of (the uncertainty of) hitchhiking: where
would it take you? I saw more of the north of England than I ever have since. I
stayed in Youth Hostels.
4/ I had, as it were, been “roped in” to do this voluntary work. A student from Cambridge University was also there, and she seemed quite frightened by some of the men who turned up. One of them fell into a drunken stupor, and we had to call the police to remove him!
