HOME TRUTHS: MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF HOMELESSNESS
First published in 'Social Policy, the Media and Misrepresentation', edited by Bob Franklin (Routledge 1999)

On the evening of 16 November 1966, an emotional, black-and-white television drama captivated viewing audiences across Britain and shattered the post-war complacency which held that problems of bad housing and homelessness, if not already things of the past, soon would be. The Wednesday Play that evening, on prime time BBC1, was Cathy Come Home. Directed by Ken Loach and produced by Tony Garnett, who had made their names collaborating on a previous social-realist dramatic success, Up the Junction, the play had an impact that would be unimaginable in later, more media-saturated years. At the time, with television still a novelty and just three terrestrial channels (one of them the fledgling BBC2, then barely two years old) to choose from, it seemed as if virtually the whole nation had turned on to watch Carol White's heart-rending performance as Cathy: and that virtually everyone in the country was talking about the issues raised by the drama the next day.

Cathy Come Home told the story of an ordinary young couple, whose love for each other became strained and finally stretched to breaking point by their inability to find a decent home in which to live and bring up their children. Having been reduced to homelessness, the couple were forced to turn to the state for assistance, whereupon they found themselves compulsorily separated by the rules of the social services hostel in which Cathy and her children were accommodated. Homeless families' accommodation at the time often made no provision for husbands and fathers, who were expected to make their own arrangements elsewhere. Indeed, the "no husbands" rule was so strictly enforced that on two occasions in 1965, Kent County Council actually had men jailed for breaking court injunctions prohibiting them from staying with their families at one of its hostels.

Ultimately, as the play's depressing downward spiral developed, Cathy's children were forcibly separated from her and taken into care. The traumatic railway-station scene involving an hysterical Cathy, her screaming children and stony-faced social services personnel as they prised her young baby from her arms capped a televisual tour de force that laid bare the inadequacies of the British welfare state just a few months after Harold Wilson's Labour Party had been returned to power with a massively increased majority and commensurately high expectations. Newspapers the next day spoke of "the play that shamed the nation". Ken Loach and the play's author, Jeremy Sandford, were summoned to meet the housing minister to discuss what should be done.

"DESERVING" AND "UNDESERVING" HOMELESS PEOPLE

Cathy Come Home helped to create fertile conditions for the formation of the housing charity Shelter, which was launched within barely a fortnight of the play's first screening. Describing itself as "a rescue operation", backed by five national bodies in the housing association field, the charity picked up where the television play had left off. Its launch, on 1 December, was marked by the publication of a quarter-page advertisement in the Guardian ("provided by a friend of Shelter"). Appearing in a 22-page newspaper in which the most exciting visual image was a picture of Harold Wilson on board the RAF Transport Command Comet en route to meet the rebel Rhodesian leader, Ian Smith, the advert was both bold and dramatic. Aimed unashamedly at the social conscience of Guardian readers, it used the sort of grainy, black-and-white image of a mother, baby and young child in squalid surroundings that could have been taken straight out of Cathy Come Home. Under the heading "Home Sweet Hell", the text told how: "Mrs T and her five children live in one room and a cubby hole, in an overcrowded, crumbling house. The room is their kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedroom. Sixteen people use the lavatory . . . Look again at the family above. You hold its happiness in the palm of your hand. Will you pick up a pen and return the coupon now?" (Guardian 1 December 1966).

For its part, the Guardian welcomed the formation of Shelter in an editorial that day as "alms-giving made businesslike". This was based on the fact that housing associations (to which Shelter proposed to give the bulk of the money that it raised) could "raise £5 in local authority grants for every £1 subscribed by the public". "£80," the Guardian noted approvingly, "matched by a council loan, will rehouse a homeless Londoner" (Ibid).

The response to Cathy Come Home and the launch of Shelter contained many of the elements that were to become recurrent themes in the media's treatment of homelessness over the next three decades. First, although Loach and Garnett's treatment of the play had been anything but a liberal appeal for charitable intervention on behalf of the homeless, the notion of homeless people as "victims" -- persons for whom things are done rather than who get to do things for themselves -- was to prove notoriously difficult to shift. Second, the idea that "alms-giving" is only a good thing if in some way it is made "businesslike" or conditional has shaded into countless stories about "scroungers" and "waste" in publications less sympathetic towards the homeless than the Guardian. Third, following on from these two approaches, which have their antecedents in Victorian (and earlier) attitudes towards social welfare, there has been a consistent attempt on the part of the media to divide homeless people into "deserving" and "undeserving" cases. The "deserving" homeless, almost invariably in this view, tend to fall into the category of "victims", while the "undeserving", as well as being portrayed as the authors of their own misfortunes, fall into the category of "scroungers" (Rose 1993, p171). And fourth, even in the context of the huge public concern about homelessness raised by the showing of Cathy Come Home, there were clear signs of the seasonal, transient and superficial interest in the subject that has so plagued housing campaigners' attempts to raise media coverage and public awareness in subsequent years.

It is notable, for example, that just two weeks after Cathy Come Home had stormed the nation's consciences, only the Guardian gave serious coverage to the launch of Shelter. Even the Daily Mirror, then still in its campaigning heyday (it even sent off the young journalist, John Pilger, to write at length about homelessness among aborigines in Australia), could spare only two paragraphs for the charity's launch. Other papers ignored it altogether.

The seasonal nature of the media interest is notable, too. Cathy Come Home relied for some of its impact on the fact that it was screened at the beginning of winter, in the run up to Christmas. Shelter made more of a mark on people's purses than it might have done for the same reason. Stories of homelessness, of people without roofs over their heads or living in cold, damp, substandard housing, don't have the same impact on a balmy summer's day as they do when the nights are closing in and the weather is getting colder. As a journalist specialising in housing and social affairs stories for national newspapers and magazines during the 1980s, I could almost set my calendar by the calls from editors looking for pieces on the plight of the homeless. They'd start when the clocks went forward at the end of October, and reach a peak just before Christmas, when almost everyone in publishing seemed to be searching for the classic "No room at the inn" tale through which to tug at their readers' heartstrings during the lean news periods of the festive season. Housing campaigners, not least among them the media-savvy founders of Shelter, quickly cottoned onto this fact. Soon, too, a new generation of direct action-oriented homeless advocates learnt how to exploit the situation to their own advantage.

THE EVENING STANDARD "DECLARES WAR": NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF SQUATTING

Almost two years to the day after its first showing on television, Cathy Come Home was repeated for the second time. A few days after that, in direct response to the repeat screening, a group of about 15 people met in housing campaigner Ron Bailey's house in London, having decided that charitable appeals and expressions of concern about homelessness were insufficient. They set up the London Squatters Campaign, and after a token occupation of a block of empty luxury flats at the beginning of December, on the Saturday before Christmas they and three homeless people from a nearby council hostel occupied the empty All Saints Vicarage, in Leyton, east London. In his account of this new squatters' movement, Ron Bailey recalls haranguing bystanders outside the vicarage through a megaphone: "Is there any room at this inn for these homeless people?" and "Will the church deny families a home, one thousand, nine hundred and sixty eight years after another family could not find accommodation?" (Bailey 1973 p 43).

Squatting was to enjoy a symbiotic -- albeit often viciously antagonistic -- relationship with the media over the next 30 years. On the one hand, it owed its very existence and growth to the media coverage given to those early -- and subsequent -- campaigns. Indeed, at one stage during the 1970s it seemed to be impossible to open a local newspaper without finding stories about squatting and homelessness. On the other hand, that coverage could at times be almost unrelievedly hostile. It was one thing when squatting involved "respectable", self-evidently "deserving" cases of homeless families occupying empty council properties, often as part of a well-disciplined campaign led by people who were not themselves homeless. It was quite another when the squatters were perceived to be less respectable and deserving -- single people, "outsiders", "hippies", "dossers" or drug-takers, people without the same steady eye for how their image might play in the media -- particularly if they turned their attentions towards empty privately-owned properties or were seen to have some sort of wider political agenda.

The initial squatting campaigns organised by the London Squatters Campaign and other groups carefully cultivated media interest and support. "Squatters win support of public", "Canon Collins backs squatters", "Residents support squatters", "Ford workers back squatters" -- the early headlines helped to reinforce the popular perception of squatting as a legitimate response to the coexistence of empty properties and homelessness. But as squatting moved beyond the tight control of a small, well-organised group of activists, the same papers that had lauded the early squats soon turned on the movement that grew up in their wake.

The occupation of 144 Piccadilly and other central London buildings in September 1969 by a group of primarily young, childless people with often unorthodox lifestyles gave the first indication of just how virulent the press was to become in its opposition to certain categories of homeless. "Hippie thugs: the sordid truth" declaimed the People. "Hippies' war lords move in" denounced the Daily Mail. "Squatters told: Now it's war" warned the London Evening Standard. A Times editorial calling for squatting to be made a criminal offence marked the onset of a long press campaign to get the law changed so as to clamp down on not only the "Hippiedilly" squatters but any homeless people taking direct action to meet their need for housing.

It was a campaign that was as hysterical as it was inaccurate, reaching a crescendo in the summer of 1975, when the proverbial visitor from Mars might have been forgiven for thinking that squatting threatened the very survival of society itself. "Innumerable houses up and down the country are now in illegal occupation by organised gangs of thugs, layabouts and revolutionary fanatics," opined the Daily Telegraph. "It has become increasingly clear that the act of squatting is no longer carried out by, or on behalf of, deprived and homeless people," said The Times. "Many thousands -- in all probability the majority -- of squatters are freeloaders and layabouts . . . Strong laws are needed to prevent the forces which are undermining the democratic processes of our country," announced the Daily Mail. For the London Evening News, in a foretaste of the sort of media attention that was later to be applied to refugees and asylum-seekers, squatters were not homeless people but "the world's waifs and strays", "foreign scroungers here for the social security and free accommodation".

Even occupied houses were declared to be in danger from their depredations. The Times published a letter from a Miss Elizabeth Harper, who claimed she had just "had the appalling experience of turning squatters out of our home in Kensington, left locked and secure three weeks earlier. The squatters arrogantly assumed the right to break in, to live in our home with their dogs, to sleep in our beds in our sheets, to daub crude drawings in black on our walls, to use our food, light, heat and telephone, to steal £300 of antique furniture and above all to dispose of all our treasured possessions" (The Times 11 July 1975). According to Miss Harper, the police had refused to take action and she warned that many other Times readers could soon return from holiday to find their homes taken over by squatters too.

Reasonably enough, Miss Harper's letter caused outrage. It heralded an open season for squatter bashing in the press. But, almost a month later, another letter was published in The Times, this time from the Metropolitan Police Solicitor. Miss Harper's letter "was not in accordance with the facts", he wrote. "Miss Harper" was actually a Mrs Such, whose home was in Northumberland, not Kensington, and who had not been on holiday. The telephone the squatters were alleged to have used had been disconnected previously. The house was actually empty awaiting sale, and when police officers had gone there to explain the situation to the squatters, they left "without any incident occurring". The Police Solicitor concluded: "I think you will agree that the facts I have set out . . . present a very different picture from the facts set out in the letter to The Times and that the letter is, to say the least, disingenuous" (6 August 1975).
From the point of view of the squatting movement, however, the damage had already been done. The press campaign against squatters was to achieve its objective of getting the law tightened (although not in making squatting illegal). It had also succeeded in permanently tarring squatters as politically-motivated layabouts and misfits, who jumped local authority waiting lists, moved into people's homes when they were away on holiday, vandalised the houses they occupied -- and weren't even really homeless or in need anyway.

Extensive surveys of squatters at the time -- including a major national survey carried out for the Department of the Environment -- painted a very different picture. Most squatted properties were occupied by people with children; as many as 75 per cent of squatters had no educational or vocational qualifications; they had disproportionately low incomes and savings; and, rather than seeing themselves as part of some ideologically-motivated movement against private property rights, the vast majority gave their reason for squatting as an inability to find anywhere else to live at a price they could afford. They represented, in short, a fairly typical cross-section of homeless people. Their "crime", such as it was, had been to take matters into their own hands and seize for themselves the solution to their housing problems. This was sufficient, in the eyes of large sections of the press, to justify one of the most vicious, scurrilous and sustained campaigns of abuse ever mounted against homeless people in Britain.

It was not just squatters who fell victims to the press's desire to distinguish between "good" homeless people and "bad", or between the "deserving" and "undeserving". The legislation that clamped down on squatting towards the end of the 1970s coincided with the introduction of the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act in 1977, which imposed a statutory duty upon local authorities to provide assistance to the "vulnerable" homeless. The principal beneficiaries of this legislation were people with children, who, in the crude media categorisations of the period, fell in the category of "good" homeless. An amendment to the Act, however, enabled councils to refuse accommodation to anyone who was deemed to be "intentionally homeless". It is noteworthy that this was introduced following an intensive, media-supported campaign led by Calderdale Council, in West Yorkshire (it was known as the "Calderdale Clause" at the time). Among the council's principal targets were squatters, of whom Calderdale's housing committee chairman had declared defiantly: "There is no way that we are going to rehouse these leeches on society."

THE MEDIA, HOMELESSNESS AND POLICY IN THE 1980s.

By the 1980s, the boundaries of what constituted the "deserving" homeless were being pushed further back. A reinvigorated right-wing political agenda, which both found expression in and was furthered by the media, began to question whether even some of the Cathys of the day merited the kind of assistance that had been introduced by the 1977 Act. As squatting receded from public view, the "undeserving" homeless who were most often on the receiving end of media ire were now to be found among the ranks of "new age travellers", single parents (many of whom were alleged to have become pregnant simply to take advantage of housing and benefit entitlements that don't apply to the childless) and the increasing numbers of homeless beggars on the streets of Britain's major cities (Brynin 1987, p25).

The 1980s were characterised by two major changes in the situation facing homeless people. First, the combination of "right to buy" council house sales, introduced as one of the first acts of Margaret Thatcher's new administration after her election victory in 1979, combined with a virtual halt to new council building to greatly reduced the stock of properties available for letting. Second, an ever-tighter benefits regime made it more and more difficult for people on low incomes to find suitable accommodation in the private sector. The result was a big increase in the numbers of homeless people. The figures tell their own story. When Cathy Come Home was first screened, local councils were accepting just a few thousand people a year for help as homeless; by 1991, the total had reached 175,171 households. By 1992, meanwhile, the number of new council homes completed in England had slumped to just 2,575, compared with 133,000 in 1968 (See Burrows et al, 1997, Ch 1).

The media's approach to this was mixed. While there was a great deal of concerned reporting of the burgeoning homelessness problem in the liberal broadsheets (particularly from 1987 onwards, that having been the United Nations-designated International Year of Shelter for the Homeless), other parts of the press played a different role. Some newspapers were at the forefront both in demanding the benefits changes that so greatly increased the numbers of street homeless (particularly among young people -- 16- and 17-year-olds, for example, were stripped of all benefit entitlements) and then in lambasting the begging and "street culture" that these changes produced. And sometimes the link between press coverage and government policy changes was so close as to be almost umbilical.

In the summer of 1989, for example, the Daily Mail ran a story about Ellen Cunningham and her family, who, on 16 July, was reported to be "settling down with her six children for their 59th night in the Park Lodge Hotel, Tyne and Wear, as the bill for bed and breakfast alone rose to £6,785". The use by hard-pressed councils of costly bed and breakfast accommodation for homeless families was one of the undoubted absurdities of housing policy in the 1980s. Barred by government edict from the cheaper option of building new homes, councils were instead compelled to put up families in unsuitable (and often substandard) but vastly more expensive private hotels. The waste of public money and the strains it imposed on the families were the subject of much media attention and comment.

In this case, the absurdity of the situation was even greater than usual. Ellen Cunningham had been rehoused in an £805 per week hotel suite by the same council that had evicted her because she owed £250 in rent arrears. It was a good story -- but why had the Mail chosen to run it on the 59th night of her stay at the hotel rather than any other? And why had it chosen to direct public anger towards her as a "scrounger" rather than towards the council for evicting her over such a small sum? The answer was that the story had been stored up to coincide with the government's announcement that same day of a new plan to cut benefits to people who "make themselves homeless" by moving away from their home area. So, "Luxury on the rates" boomed its banner headline about the "scrounger" Cunninghams, while another highlighted the "£135 million crackdown -- Ministers act over homeless". Again and again, the Daily Mail and other papers sympathetic to the government acted as propagandists on its behalf, explaining away the massive rise in homelessness during the 1980s as the product of homeless peoples' own fecklessness or too-liberal housing legislation and benefit regimes that encouraged "scroungers".

The same sort of argument was deployed in explanation of the increasing numbers of single parents seeking assistance under the homeless legislation. Young homeless mothers found themselves being stereotyped as sexually promiscuous and morally irresponsible; the myth that large numbers of single young women become pregnant simply in order to get council accommodation grew alongside the sort of newspaper coverage exemplified in headlines such as "We'll Stop The Queue Jump Mums" (Daily Mail 19 January 1994).

One story that repeated itself at various intervals in the press seemed to serve the purpose of demonstrating that people sleeping rough -- something that was virtually unheard of until the 1980s outside a diminishing number of mainly middle-aged or elderly men -- didn't have it as hard as it seemed. In 1990, National Sleep-Out Week, in which celebrities such as Esther Rantzen and Paddy Ashdown slept out to draw attention to the plight of the street homeless, served as the catalyst for a whole plague of press "exposés" of begging. The Sun, as ever, had been first in on the act, with a front-page story about a "£200-a-day beggar". The News of the World, Daily Telegraph and Daily Express all sent out reporters that week to see how much they could panhandle. The fact that none of them managed anything remotely approaching £200 -- the Telegraph's reporter collected £6.93 -- didn't prevent them from portraying life on the streets as a soft option for people who didn't want to do a proper job. The London Evening Standard even found a mother who said her son was being deterred from earning his living by the easy pickings he made as a homeless beggar. "Please don't give money to my beggar son," said its front page story.

These stories were not necessarily untrue; nor were right-wing newspapers and politicians the only sources of concern about dependency on begging. Indeed, it was to provide homeless people with an alternative to begging that the Big Issue paper was set up in 1991. The paper is sold by homeless people, who retain a proportion of the cover price, and now has a circulation of around 300,000 nationwide. Its founder, John Bird, is uncompromising in his belief that "begging is bad for you", as he wrote in the New Statesman: "Charity and handouts are no route out of poverty. And those who dole out alms to the needy are doing nothing to help them deal with their problems" (30 September 1994).

"It isn't easy to express such views," Bird continued, " . . . when newspapers and politicians are waging war on 'welfare scroungers' and blaming the poor for being poor and homeless, rather than the system that made them so. But giving alms to the needy has never changed anything. It may salve the consciences of those who do it, but it does nothing to help those who are the recipients" (Ibid).

But Bird's take on the subject was not that of the right-wing press. The fact was that as much as these papers might argue that they were merely distinguishing between people in real or self-inflicted need (the distinction between deserving and undeserving homeless once again), or between the "genuine" homeless and people who were merely taking society for a ride, they were actually helping to create a climate of hostility towards all beggars and all homeless people. Indeed, the Sun failed even to acknowledge the difference between begging and Big Issue selling, when it returned to the theme of its "£200-a-day beggar" with another front-page story in 1996 "exposing" a "£150-a-day Big Issue seller" (Sun 28 October 1998). Sometimes, it seems, homeless people just can't win.

Hostility in the media responded to and reinforced hostility on the part of politicians. In 1994, on a visit to Bristol during the European election campaign, John Major invited citizens "to 'shop' beggars and drive them out of the city" since the sight of beggars was "an eyesore" and "begging for cash is inexcusable and unnecessary" (Bristol Evening Press 27 May 1994). A year later, Jack Straw urged a crackdown on "aggressive beggars, winos and squeegee merchants" as part of a New York-style zero tolerance campaign. In a detailed interview in the Big Issue in 1997, Tony Blair seemed to be joining the chorus of disapproval by announcing his support for "the basic principle" that "it is right to be intolerant of homeless people on the streets" (Big Issue 6 January 1997). Tory politicians such as the then junior minister, David MacLean, took this as a green light to go ballistic on the issue. MacLean claimed that there were no "genuine" beggars in Britain because there were plenty of social security benefits (he also added, for good measure, that the majority of beggars were Scottish). Backbencher Terry Dicks threw in his three ha'pence worth by suggesting that beggars should be hosed from the streets (Guardian 11 January 1997).

Again and again, the language used in the press communicated an almost visceral hatred of certain categories of homeless people. By the early 1990s, a new moral panic about squatters, travellers and the emergent "rave culture" opened the floodgates for a fresh round of scapegoating and abuse. Nor was this limited to the more rabidly right-wing tabloids. The Sun's propensity to overuse of the term "scum" to describe everyone from IRA terrorists to single-parent squatters was matched by the same sort of dehumanising language elsewhere. Thus, for example, the Daily Telegraph, in June 1993, felt no qualms about lumping all squatters and travellers together in an editorial demanding tough government action against this "swarming tribe of human locusts".

More recently, asylum-seekers, refugees and the disparagingly-titled "economic migrants" (as if there is something wrong in people migrating in search of a better life for themselves and their families) have been on the receiving end of this sort of thing. Sometimes the language used in the press would not have been out of place in the Nazis' propaganda sheet, Der Sturmer. "While Labour luvvies dribble on at that most historic of northern pleasure outposts, Blackpool," the Dover Express editorialised about Roma and Kosovan asylum-seekers in October 1998, for instance, "we are left with the backdraft of a nation's human sewage and NO CASH to wash it down the drain." "They are parasites who milk the welfare system, shoplift, pickpocket, hang around insulting women and run brothels," the paper declared.

National newspapers were more circumspect in their choice of words when covering the issue. But the Daily Mail's "special investigation" into asylum-seekers at around the same time ("The Good Life On Asylum Alley" as its final headline put it) had much the same inflammatory effect on public opinion. The Mail had published the details of properties used to accommodate asylum-seekers in Dover. Shortly afterwards the occupants had their windows broken and fireworks thrown inside. "We will burn you out" threatened a sign left at the scene of the attack.

HOMELESS PEOPLE: A "WARTS AND ALL"VIEW

It is unsurprising, in the context of such hostility towards people who do not fit the acceptable face of the deserving homeless, that so much media coverage of homelessness shies away from a properly rounded portrayal of its subject matter. A "warts and all" write-up of homeless people is difficult to attempt, if one's sympathies lie first with the homeless, when the revelation of a single wart is likely to be seized upon as evidence that homeless people are rotten through and through.

Even without such a consideration, there is the problem that the media in general likes to deal in simple stereotypes (Liddiard and Hutson 1998). There is rarely the room here to represent all the complexities of different personalities and human behaviour that mean that the world cannot be divided into straightforward victims and villains, deserving and undeserving. Those sections of the media that start with a more liberal or sympathetic approach to the homeless deal no less in stereotypes than the rest. Reflecting the attitudes of the public at large, they find it difficult to hold onto the fact that someone who is homeless may be both unlikeable and in need at the same time, may be spending too much of their money on drink or drugs and still be worthy of help in getting enough to eat, may have lost their last home in part due to their own actions but still need a roof over their head now. Not all of the homeless are angels, any more than anyone else; not many of them fall into the unambiguously "deserving" category of that holy family who were forced to sleep in a stable because there was no room at the inn two millennia ago.

In George McKay's compilation, DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain, Jim Carey of Squall magazine, which has its roots in squatter and traveller communities, tells the story of how the Squall workers were approached in the mid-1990s by a staff feature writer at the Daily Telegraph. "She was keen to write an article on squatting and wanted to know whether we knew any 'middle-class squatters' she could interview. Asked what she meant by the phrase, she replied: 'People who earn a high wage and squat for fun.' She was told that Squall had never heard of a high wage earner who squatted for fun but that we might be able to put her in touch with some real squatters. She replied: 'Well, er, unfortunately, you know how it is, this isn't what the Telegraph readers want to read about. Do you know any that earn a wage, are articulate and preferably good-looking?'" (McKay 1998).

The other side to this coin is provided by the purveyors of media images of homelessness that have never really gone beyond those grainy, black-and-white Cathy-style pictures from the 1960s. When the short-lived Sunday Correspondent turned over an entire issue of its magazine to the subject of homelessness in early 1990, it did so on the back of a specially commissioned series of monochrome pictures of homeless-as-victims by Don McCullin. "Ignored: Britain's Poor and Huddled Masses" said the headline. The Observer and Sunday Times "colour supplements", the New Statesman and other publications that would normally want to maximise the use of colour in their pages, all did likewise around the same time. Just as the homeless are always with us, so too, it seems, are our preferred ways of seeing them.

Nowhere is this better understood than at Shelter. Few people will ever have heard of Anne Saunders, but anyone with any interest in homelessness during the 1970s and 1980s is likely to have come across her picture. Shelter's magazine, Roof, described her in 1988 as a "homeless megastar . . . without doubt the most famous homeless person in the land. Or, rather, her photograph is the most popular image of homelessness in circulation" (Roof, November-December 1988).

The photo shows Anne, head bowed, with a tatty suitcase in one hand while she pushes a baby buggy with the other, struggling against the wind and rain down some isolated country lane. It was used originally on the cover of a 1974 Shelter report on bed breakfast; then on a Shelter poster under the slogan "Homelessness is Hell". Her image cropped up repeatedly over the next decade -- with the photo itself being cropped to suit local circumstances. For a leaflet in Liverpool, the council cut out the original rural backdrop and substituted a local terraced street; for a report in Hamilton, the designers added some high rise blocks. In 1987, she featured as the British representative in International Year of Shelter for the Homeless publicity material, since when she has continued to appear in countless newspaper and articles, the image of first choice out of the many thousands of possibilities in the Shelter photo library, for picture editors around the globe.

Roof described Anne Saunders' continuing appeal as "a sad comment on people's perceptions of an acceptable image of homelessness". It summarised the key elements in that appeal as follows:

"First, she's seen as literally homeless -- she's out in the open with no roof over her head. People seeing the image don't know that she's en route to the launderette and actually staying in the farmhouse in the background; they see her as trudging down a desolate country lane with nowhere to stay and all her belongings stuffed into one tatty suitcase. She can be seen as homeless in the way the government wants to define homelessness -- as rooflessness -- which is ironic in that most people using this image are committed to a much wider definition of homelessness.

"Second, she's seen as vulnerable. She is pictured without a man to support and protect her and with a dependent child in a desolate and lonely spot.

"Third, she is seen as obviously deserving. She's not pretty and vivacious, she's not a flash piece in miniskirt and leather jacket; she's plump, ordinary and dowdily dressed, as befits her homeless status. As time passes, her clothes look even more dowdy and out of date -- so much the better. The buggy is a Mothercare basic rather than a Maclaren GTi model: it looks as though it might be secondhand -- more brownie points for thrifty, impoverished, deserving Anne. The child looks well cared-for, which is important, and Anne's not puffing on a cigarette, which is very important.

"Fourth, she is seen to be stoical. She isn't taking it out on the child by battering or neglecting it, she isn't protesting, she isn't giving up, she's plodding on in search of somewhere to stay.

"These are the reasons that Anne Saunders remains top of the homelessness pops, and it's a depressing thought. The most popular image of homelessness is a stereotypical madonna and child without a roof over their heads, an image evoking pity and admiration" (Roof November-December 1988 pp 6-7).

As a contrast with this, it is worth examining the response to the Channel 4 documentary No home for Barry, first screened in the summer of 1990. This followed Barry from when he first arrived in London at the beginning of that year and charted his experiences sleeping rough, trying to sort out accommodation and money and dealing with the gradual deterioration in his emotional and physical health as his problems mounted. The fact that he seemed to bring many of these problems upon himself -- not turning up for an appointment at the Job Centre, getting kicked out of his hostel -- meant that he wasn't a natural candidate for public sympathy, and many people felt that someone less "unattractive" should have been filmed to put across the problems facing the homeless instead. One viewer used the Right to Reply programme to put his comments thus: "My concern is not for this individual fortunate enough to have his dilettante dilemma logged by a camera crew. It is for the authentically desperate. Every cliché of prejudice against them -- that they're in a situation of their own making, they're workshy, shiftless and idle -- will have been confirmed by the use of such an untypical and unappetising example of the homeless."

Similar qualms were expressed about BBC2's Video Diaries at the end of May that same year. This gave two young hostel-dwellers the chance to tell their stories free from any consideration of the need to present "acceptable" images of homelessness. One spoke of blowing almost her entire £29.50 social security allowance for the week on a single night out: "£15 for some ecstasy, £8 to get in, £2 for a drink and then just bunk the tubes 'cos I've got no more money." As with Barry, it was all but guaranteed to pull the very opposite triggers to that long-popular photo-image of Anne Saunders.

Any truthful representation of homelessness would have to acknowledge that the ranks of the homeless include the Barrys of this world as well as the Cathys. But any full -- and truly meaningful -- consideration of the subject needs to go beyond the individual. Each person's individual circumstances are different; each person individually may have a greater or lesser degree of responsibility for their own situation. But social, economic and political forces override the individual. Homelessness, when it comes down to it, is a social problem, not an individual one.

With the best will in the world, this presents a problem for the popular media, which is always better at telling an individual story rather than providing meaningful social analysis. Whatever the motives of the storyteller, therefore, there is a compelling need to keep things simple, to keep the story line straight, if for no other reason than that this is what the reader wants. For those who deal in straightforward heroes and villains -- the deserving and undeserving -- there is no dilemma here. For those who would try to represent nuance and complexity, it is much more of a problem.

 

References

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Brynin M (1987) 'The Young Homeless: Pressure Groups, politics and the press' in Youth and Policy no 20 pp24-34

Burrows, R Pleace N and Quilgars G (1997) Homelessness and Social Policy London Routledge

Hutson S and Liddiard M (1986)

Liddiard M and Hutson S (1998) 'Youth Homelessness, the press and Public Attitudes' in Youth and Policy no 59 pp57-70

McKay G (1998) DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain, London Verso

Platt S (1977) Squatters Myth and Fact, London Self Help Housing Resource Library

Platt S (1980) 'A decade of squatting: the story of squatting in Britain since 1968' in Squatting, the Real Story (eds Wates N and Wolmar C, London Bay Leaf Books)

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Shelter (1988) Roof

Watson S and Austerberry H (1986) Housing and Homelessness: A Feminist Perspective Boston Routledge and Kegan Paul