die rather than work or wash, and wants nothing but to
beg, drink and rob hen-houses. This tramp-monster is
no truer to life than the sinister Chinaman of the
magazine stories, but he is very hard to get rid of. The
very word "tramp" evokes his image. And the belief in
him obscures the real questions of vagrancy.
To take a fundamental question about vagrancy: Why do
tramps exist at all? It is a curious thing, but very few
people know what makes a tramp take to the road. And,
because of the belief in the tramp-monster, the most
fantastic reasons are suggested. It is said, for instance,
that tramps tramp to avoid work, to beg more easily, to
seek opportunities for crime, even-least probable of
reasons-because they like tramping. I have even read in a
book of criminology that the tramp is an atavism, a
throw-back to the nomadic stage of humanity. And
meanwhile the quite obvious cause of vagrancy is staring
one in the face. Of course a tramp is not a nomadic
atavism-one might as well say that a commercial traveller
is an atavism. A tramp tramps, not because he likes it,
but for the same reason as a car keeps to the left;
because there happens to be a law compelling him to do
so. A destitute man, if he is not supported by the parish,
can only get relief at the casual wards, and as each casual
ward will only admit him for one night, he is
automatically kept moving. He is a vagrant because, in
the state of the law, it is that or starve. But people have
been brought up to believe in the tramp-monster, and
so they prefer to think that there must be some more or
less villainous motive for tramping.
As a matter of fact, very little of the tramp-monster
will survive inquiry. Take the generally accepted idea
that tramps are dangerous characters. Quite apart from
experience, one can say a priori that very few
tramps are dangerous, because if they were dangerous they
would be treated accordingly. A casual ward will often
admit a hundred, tramps in one night, and these are
handled by a staff of at most three porters. A hundred
ruffians could not be controlled by three unarmed men.
Indeed, when one sees how tramps let themselves be
bullied by the workhouse officials, it is obvious that they
are the most docile, broken-spirited creatures imaginable.
Or take the idea that all tramps are drunkards-an idea
ridiculous on the face of it. No doubt many tramps would
drink if they got the chance, but in the nature of things
they cannot- get the chance. At this moment a pale watery
stuff called beer is sevenpence a pint in England. To be
drunk on it would cost at least half a crown, and a man
who can command half a crown at all often is not a tramp.
The idea that tramps are impudent social parasites
("sturdy beggars") is not absolutely unfounded, but it is
only true in a few per cent. of the cases. Deliberate,
cynical parasitism, such as one reads of in Jack London's
books on American tramping, is not in the English
character. The English are a conscience-ridden race, with
a strong sense of the sinfulness of poverty. One cannot
imagine the average Englishman deliberately turning
parasite, and this national character does not necessarily
change because a man is thrown out of work. Indeed, if
one remembers that a tramp is only an Englishman out of
work, forced by law to live as a vagabond, then the tramp-
monster vanishes. I am not saying, of course, that most
tramps are ideal characters; I am only saying that they are
ordinary human beings, and that if they are worse than
other people it is the result and not the cause of their way
of life.
It follows that the "Serve them damned well right"
attitude that is normally taken towards tramps is no
fairer than it would be towards cripples or invalids. When
one has realised that, one begins to put oneself in a
tramp's place and understand what his life is like. It is an
extraordinarily futile, acutely unpleasant life. I have
described the casual ward-the routine of a tramp's day-but
there are three especial evils that need insisting upon. The
first is hunger, which is the almost general fate of tramps.
The casual ward gives them a ration which is probably not
even meant to be sufficient, and anything beyond this
must be got by begging-that is, by breaking the law: The
result is that nearly every tramp is rotted by malnutrition;
for proof of which one need only look at the men lining up
outside any casual ward. The second great evil of a
tramp's life-it seems much smaller at first sight, but it is a
good second-is that he is entirely cut off from contact with
women. This point needs elaborating.
Tramps are cut off from women, in the first place,
because there Are very few women at their level of
society. One might imagine that among destitute people
the sexes would be as equally balanced as elsewhere. But
it is not so; in fact, one can almost say that below a certain
level society is entirely male. The following figures,
published by the L.C.C. from a night census taken on
February 13th, 1931, will show the relative numbers of
destitute men and destitute women:
Spending the night in the streets, 6o men, 18 women.'
In shelters and homes not licensed as common lodging-houses,
1,057 men, 137 women.
In the crypt of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields Church, 88 men, 12
women.
In L.C.C. casual wards and hostels, 674 men, 15 women.
It will be seen from these figures that at the charity
1 This must be an underestimate. Still, the proportions probably
hold good.
level men outnumber women by something like ten to
one. The cause is presumably that unemployment affects
women less than men; also that any presentable woman
can, in the last resort, attach herself to some man. The
result, for a tramp, is that he is condemned to perpetual
celibacy. For of course it goes without saying that if a
tramp finds no women at his own level, those above-
even a very little above-are as far out of his reach as the
moon. The reasons are not worth discussing, but there
is no doubt that women never, or hardly ever,
condescend to men who are much poorer than
themselves. A tramp, therefore, is a celibate from the
moment when he takes to the road. He is absolutely
without hope of getting a wife, a mistress, or any kind of
woman except-very rarely, when he can raise a few
shillings-a prostitute.
It is obvious what the results of this must be: homo-
sexuality, for instance, and occasional rape cases. But
deeper than these there is the degradation worked in man
who knows that he is not even considered fit for
marriage. The sexual impulse, not to put it any higher, is a
fundamental impulse, and starvation of it can be almost as
demoralising as physical hunger. The evil of poverty is not
so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him
physically and spiritually. And there can be no doubt that
sexual starvation contributes to this rotting process. Cut
off from the whole race of women, a tramp feels himself
degraded to the rank of a cripple or a lunatic. No
humiliation could do more damage to a man's self-
respect.
The other great evil of a tramp's life is enforced idleness.
By our vagrancy laws things are so arranged that when he
is not walking the road he is sitting in a cell; or, in the
intervals, lying on the ground waiting for the casual ward
to open. It is obvious that this is a dismal,
demoralising way of life, especially for an uneducated
man.
Besides these one could enumerate scores of minor
evils-to name only one, discomfort, which is inseparable
from life on the road; it is worth remembering that the
average tramp has no clothes but what he stands up in,
wears boots that are ill-fitting, and does not sit in a chair
for months together. But the important point is that a
tramp's sufferings are entirely useless. He lives a
fantastically disagreeable life, and lives it to no purpose
whatever. One could not, in fact invent a more futile
routine than walking from prison to prison, spending
perhaps eighteen hours a day in the cell and on the road.
There must be at the least several tens of thousands of
tramps in England. Each day they expend innumerable
foot-pounds of energy-enough to plough thousands of
acres, build miles of road, put up dozens of houses-in
mere, useless walking. Each day they waste between them
possibly ten years of time in staring at cell walls. They cost
the country at least a pound a week a man, and give
nothing in return for it. They go round and round, on an
endless boring game of general post, which is of no use,
and is not even meant to be of any use to any person
whatever. The law keeps this process going, and we have
got so accustomed to it that we are not surprised. But it is
very silly.
Granting the futility of a tramp's life, the question is
whether anything could be done to improve it. Obviously
it would be possible, for instance, to make the casual
wards a little more habitable, and this is actually being
done in some cases. During the last year some of the
casual wards have been improved-beyond recognition, if
the accounts are true-and there is talk of doing the same
to all of them. But this does not go to the heart of the
problem. The problem is how to turn
the tramp from a bored, half alive vagrant into a self-
respecting human being. A mere increase of comfort
cannot do this. Even if the casual wards became positively
luxurious (they never will)' a tramp's life would still be
wasted. He would still be a pauper, cut off from marriage
and home life, and a dead loss to the community. What is
needed is to depauperise him, and this can only be done by
finding him work-not work for the sake of working, but
work of which he can enjoy the benefit. At present, in the
great majority of casual wards, tramps do no work
whatever. At one time they were made to break stones for
their food, but this was stopped when they had broken
enough stone for years ahead and put the stone-breakers
out of work. Nowadays they are kept idle, because there is
seemingly nothing for them to do. Yet there is a fairly
obvious way of making them useful, namely this: Each
workhouse could run a small farm, or at least a kitchen
garden, and every able-bodied tramp who presented
himself could be made to do a sound day's work. The
produce of the farm or garden could be used for feeding
the tramps, and at the worst it would be better than the
filthy diet of bread and margarine and tea. Of course, the
casual wards could never be quite selfsupporting, but they
could go a long way towards it, and the rates would
probably benefit in the long run. It must be remembered
that under the present system tramps are as dead a loss to
the country as they could possibly be, for they do not only
do no work, but they live on a diet that is bound to
undermine their health; the system, therefore, loses lives
as well as money. A
1 In fairness it must be added that a few of the casual wards have been
improved recently, at least from the point of view of sleeping
accommodation. But most of them are the same as ever, and there has
been no real improvement in the food.
scheme which fed them decently, and made them produce
at least a part of their own food, would be worth trying.
It may be objected that a farm or even a garden could
not be run with casual labour. But there is no real reason
why tramps should only stay a day at each casual ward;
they might stay a month or even a year, if there were work
for them to do. The constant circulation of tramps is
something quite artificial. At present a tramp is an
expense to the rates, and the object of each workhouse is
therefore to push him on to the next; hence the rule that he
can stay only one night. If he returns within a month he is
penalised by being confined for a week, and, as this is
much the same as being in prison, naturally he keeps
moving. But if he represented labour to the workhouse,
and the workhouse represented sound food to him, it
would be another matter. The workhouses would develop
into partially self-supporting institutions, and the tramps,
settling down here or there according as they were needed,
would cease to be tramps. They would be doing something
comparatively useful, getting decent food, and living a
settled life. By degrees, if the scheme worked well, they
might even cease to be regarded as paupers, and be able to
marry and take a respectable place in society.
This is only a rough idea, and there are some obvious
objections to it. Nevertheless, it does suggest a way of
improving the status of tramps without piling new burdens
on the rates. And the solution must, in any case, be
something of this kind. For the question is, what to do
with men who are underfed and idle; and the answer-to
make them grow their own food - imposes itself
automatically.
XXXVII
A WORD about the sleeping accommodation open to
a homeless person in London. At present it is impossible
to get a bed in any non-charitable institution in London for
less than sevenpence a night. If you cannot afford
sevenpence for a bed, you must put up
with one of the following substitutes:
I. The Embankment. Here is the account that Paddy
gave me of sleeping on the Embankment:
"De whole t'ing wid de Embankment is gettin' to sleep
early. You got to be on your bench by eight o'clock,
because dere ain't too many benches and sometimes
>
dey're all taken. And you got to try to get to
sleep at once. 'Tis too cold to sleep much after twelve
o'clock, an' de police turns you off at four in de mornin'.
It ain't easy to sleep, dough, wid dem bloody trams flyin'
past your head all de time, an' dem sky-signs across de
river flickin' on an' off in your eyes. De cold's cruel. Dem
as sleeps dere generally wraps demselves
up in newspaper, but it don't do much good. You'd
be bloody lucky if you got t'ree hours' sleep."
I have slept on the Embankment and found that it
corresponded to Paddy's description. It is, however,
much better than not sleeping at all, which is the alter-
native if you spend the night in the streets, elsewhere
than on the Embankment. According to the law in
London, you may sit down for the night, but the police
must move you on if they see you asleep; the Embank
ment and one or two odd corners (there is one behind
the Lyceum Theatre) are special exceptions. This law
is evidently a piece of wilful offensiveness. Its object, so it
is said, is to prevent people from dying of exposure;
but clearly if a man has no home and is going to die of
exposure, die he will, asleep or awake. In Paris there is no
such law. There, people sleep by the score under the Seine
bridges, and in doorways, and on benches in the squares,
and round the ventilating shafts of the Metro, and even
inside the Metro stations. It does no apparent harm. No
one will spend a night in the street if he can possibly help
it, and if he is going to stay out of doors he might as well
be allowed to sleep, if he can.
2. The Twopenny Hangover. This comes a little
higher than the Embankment. At the Twopenny Hang
over, the lodgers sit in a row on a bench; there is a rope
in front of them, and they lean on this as though
leaning over a fence. A man, humorously called the valet,
cuts the rope at five in the morning. I have never
been there myself, but Bozo had been there often. I asked
him whether anyone could possibly sleep in such
an attitude, and he said that it was more comfortable
than it sounded-at any rate, better than the bare
floor. There are similar shelters in Paris, but the charge
there is only twenty-five centimes (a halfpenny) instead
of twopence.
Down and Out in London and Paris Page 23
