LONG before homelessness became the Big Issue on every street corner,
I had seen the vexed problem personified in the shuffling figure of the
man I knew only as Frank.
You would see him wandering between Argyle Street and George Square,
Glasgow, a tall, red-haired and bearded man who seemed to find the
setting of Queen Street station as the safest haven of all in which to
play out the musings of his distant and private world.
People like that stir your curiosity. What is their background? Are
they down-and-out through drink or mental illness? Are there relatives
who care at all about what has happened to them? What guides the random movement of their aimless days -- and where do they spend the night?
Suddenly homelessness became a clearer issue, given voice in fact by a
fortnightly publication called the Big Issue, which confronts you a
dozen times on a short walk through our city centres.
The vendors are the homeless themselves, varying in their sales
approach from the shy and modest to the slightly pushy, whose
impassioned pleas to ''Help the homeless!'' are hard to ignore if you
wish to live with your conscience. Personally, I tend to by-pass the
more aggressive, who could surely find a commercial role in this age of
the hard sell, and buy my copy from those who are clearly ill at ease
with their lot.
The definition of homelessness, I have to say, has bothered me since I
watched one of those investigative television documentaries, which took
you under the arches of London's down-and-out land, cardboard boxes and
all, and spoke to an assortment of human flotsam who, like southern
trade union spokesmen, seemed to come almost exclusively from Scotland.
A policeman who saw the same programme, and who was well acquainted with the floating population of central Glasgow, told me he had identified one after another of those London ''homeless'' who had
perfectly good homes to go to in their own city.
They had merely joined the boxcar trek to the metropolis, drifters who
found, for a time at least, a certain glamour in the notion of sleeping
rough in the wider world.
Such programmes distort the issue of homelessness, which is real
enough without exaggeration and is said to involve more than 40,000
people in Scotland alone.
Some of those who were begging on the streets not so long ago have now found a more self-respecting role as vendors for the Big Issue, an
American idea brought to this country by Scotland's Gordon Roddick,
chairman of the Body Shop. They keep 30p of the 50p selling price,
gaining a sense of doing something for their money.
Half-way house
The fact that it is a kind of half-way house to rehabilitation is
confirmed by magazine director Tricia Hughes, who says: ''Many of our
original vendors have changed out of all recognition and some have gone
on to find permanent accommodation and work.'' That's great.
The magazine itself deals not only with the problems of the homeless
but extends to some interesting general features. Reaching Dundee for
the first time this month, the latest issue has a very professional
interview with that city's most famous actor, Brian Cox, back home with
a production of Ibsen's The Master Builder.
I also learned that Scotland's best-known, privately-owned dosshouse,
Glasgow's Great Eastern Hotel in Duke Street, has been housing the
homeless since 1907 and charges #54 a week for bed and breakfast. One
lodger has been there for 30 years.
In the current issue there is even a defence of Jimmy Hill, the sports
commentator most Scots love to hate. Writer Simon Pia points out very
properly how often Jimmy the Chin's criticisms have proved to be
justified.
In conversations with the magazine's vendors, I have found a recurring
explanation of why they were homeless. Their parents had thrown them
out. But there must have been a reason. Eventually we get to the heart
of the matter: drugs. So once more this modern evil is playing havoc
with the social structure and creating problems well beyond its own
immediate misery.
But to get back to Frank, the lonely wanderer of Queen Street station
. . . come to think of it I haven't seen him for months. And the reason,
I now discover, is that poor Frank died recently of pneumonia. He was
45. Frank Tinney was his name, believed by some to have been a
professional man for whom the world went wrong.
Contrary to appearances he was not an alcoholic but he was a
schizophrenic. He did have a family, who had done their best for him,
and they were there at the funeral, along with friends from the Talbot
Centre, where Frank would find shelter of a night.
He was a quiet and popular man, a lost soul in a troubled world. I had
always intended to speak to him and feel sorry now that I didn't. I'm
told that one man who did was artist John Kilmartin, who went one step
further and actually painted his portrait not long before he died.
So the image of Frank Tinney will live on when others are long
forgotten, a strangely haunting face giving hint of a potential which,
by the pattern of his destiny, was not to be fulfilled.
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