Down and Out in Britain

by Jeremy Sandford

Down and Out in Britain Revised Edition

174 pages, Paperback

First published October 21, 1971

About the author

Jeremy Sandford was an English television screenwriter, educated at Eton and Oxford, and a Royal Air Force bandsman during National Service.

He married heiress Nell Dunn in 1957 and they gave up their smart Chelsea home and went to live in unfashionable Battersea where they joined and observed the lower strata of society.

Reviews

[Malcolm Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honest books about homelessness are rare. Where such books do exist they are exceptional works within the collected oeuvre of canonised authors. E.g. 'Down and Out In Paris and London' published in 1933 by a young George Orwell. It was his first full length book, as opposed to the essays for journals that were his bread and butter work up to then. The impact of Orwell's book depicting homelessness was blunted by his later reputation, as a secular saint of literature.

'Down And Out In Britain' is four lectures edited for the page and compiled together. Sandford had a reputation for anger and confrontation, which was write large in the script of 'Cathy Come Home'. That anger serves him well here, where he describes the poverty of the society he saw calmly. His anger also stops him from retreating from describing details that others would flinch from seeing, let alone describing. His anger also makes sure that nothing is left to be described in the passive tense or the third person where there are more direct ways of describing it. I liked the book because of that.

The book comes in four parts. The first part describes 'ordinary' homelessness (pages 13-59), second part the contributions of the police and courts toward homelessness with close reference to 'the single mothers problem' (pages 61-103), the third part details the threats and insecurities that young single mothers can be exposed to (pages 105-119), the fourth part details how to officially break up a family (pages 121-165) with eight pages of footnotes at the end of the book.

The thesis of the book is made most clear in the fourth part. That thesis is that in the Britain of 1972 what makes for an emotionally secure family is a financially secure home, but many families and many homes are financially insecure. Where there is financial security there may still be emotional insecurity, which in turn may destroy a family from within; it is the province of the courts the police and social services to administer the damage. If the phrase 'administer the damage' seems double edged then it is. The courts seemed to Sandford to take those who tried to raise a family without the material security expected of them who would inevitably fall short and make their situation worse. The courts would do anything but be of genuine help to these, literally, poor people who could not do better if they tried. For trying to help, the courts would nearly always make their family situation worse. By implication he was taking aim at how rhetorically patriarchal the 1972 English society was. And with the examples he described he showed how much that patriarchy let down far more families and individuals than it could afford to admit to letting down whilst remaining 'respectable'.

It is an honest book about the unhappiness and unsettledness of a society, where youth don't know how to fit in with what is narrowly open to them. Part of me was relieved to discover a world where mobile phones are inconceivable, illegal recreational drugs don't exist, and given the carelessness of society the most virtuous oblivion has to be cheapest; the habit of drinking meths by some of the homeless does cause their early deaths, often unnoticed until their remains were in a state of advance decomposition.

[Wojtek · Rating 3 out of 5]

This anarchist pamphlet took me by surprise 😅