Tramps and vagrants: the disappearance of a class of indigents and down and outs

As background for an upcoming course ¹ I'm reading J F C Harrison’s Early Victorian Britain, 1832–51. Though I should say ‘rereading’, because I first read it in the 1970s when I was doing an evening class on English social history at the Working Men’s College, London (founded by Frederick Denison Maurice in 1854). I have never forgotten Harrison’s book: it is one of those small gems, like Bindoff’s Tudor England, and I find that I am appreciating it even more, some forty–five years later (which I think demonstrates a rare quality of writing, given how often our fond memories seem so flat when revisited!). A particular passage caught my attention, and set me of on writing this piece:

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!