From time to time a politician feels the need to experience head-on what it’s like to be poor, and so he sleeps rough for a day or two. A quick run through the papers reveals that at least half a dozen have tried it in the last year.
It’s good for the image, and may even provide an insight into what living on the street is really like. Then a nice hot shower, a late supper and it’s back to the day job.
Few, however, have taken the idea as far Frank Gray did in the 1920s. The newspaper proprietor and MP for Oxford dug out his worst clothes, disguised himself as a tramp and went off in search of the casual wards of the county’s workhouses.
The results of Gray’s researches appeared in print in 1931, and is something of a classic of workhouse literature.
One of Gray’s encounters with the trampers, however, proved a different point entirely, namely that one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
Among the casuals Frank Gray met on his travels was a man by the name of Harry Southall-Owen.
He hailed from Bilston originally, but had been finding it hard to cope with life in the Black Country and had taken to the road. Gray met him in about 1930 and spent three weeks in his company.
Over the course of those weeks Harry’s remarkable story unfolded. He had formerly been in the Army and serving in Palestine under the British Mandate. But in 1927 he had cracked under the pressure of Army life and discipline and deserted.
For some time Harry tried to eke out an existence in the desert, attaching himself to groups of nomadic Arabs.
Eventually Harry fell among thieves and was captured by a party of Bedouins, who sold him to the Foreign Legion. A boat trip later, and Harry was a fully-fledged legionnaire, fighting for France in North Africa.
Harry stuck it out for almost two years, before deserting yet again and finding his way back to Palestine. Here he handed himself over to the British consulate, was formerly court martialled for desertion and imprisoned for 12 months.
Only then could Harry return to England, yet still, in his heart, as nomadic as his Arab friends.
* Dr Chris Upton is Reader in Public History at Newman University Birmingham
