Big Issue founder Lord John Bird: My 80th birthday message

My 80th birthday came surrounded by ordinariness. No big events. Some eating and drinking. Staying in the Premier Inn in London’s Putney Bridge. Family, just family. The idea of staying in Putney Bridge was so that on my actual birthday, 30 January, I could wander through Fulham with my wife. 

After a slum birth and a Catholic orphanage, I arrived age 10 with my fellow temporarily orphaned brothers at a block of council flats where Fulham met the more exotic Chelsea. We had three bedrooms for eight of us, a vast improvement on the orphanage and the notorious slums of Notting Hill.

I remember Fulham Public Library, the Eel Brook Common, North End Road market: none enshrined in history, other than my own. You could pass through Fulham and not give a toss for it; though once run-down and plebeian, it now resounds with the well-polished accents of the public schools and top universities. Of houses and flats measured in the millions. And an array of SUVs, now an overspill from bourgeoisified Kensington and Chelsea, the sister boroughs that in my early life were financially as mean as Fulham itself. 

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We ended up on the New King’s Road. It passed through Fulham to Putney Bridge. Called ‘New’, it was an extension of the King’s Road that ran in Charles I’s and Charles II’s day from Whitehall and took the monarchs to their hunting grounds at what is now Richmond Park. Passing under what was later the window of our council flat on the third floor, kingly carriages carried the monarch to the pleasure of slaughtering deer in an artificially created wooded retreat, created by closing down Surrey villages and rewilding the farms and fields. 

No sign of this royal history exists as it passes by my childhood home. Nor any sign of the civil war that led to the decapitation of Charles I at Whitehall in 1649. And only a blue plaque is now attached to the church on the other bank of the River Thames from the Premier Inn commemorating the Putney Debates in 1647, wherein the radicals among the captains and army ranks declared that all men were equal and worth as much as each other in the eyes of God. Imagine, opposite the Premier Inn all those years ago they were playing around with the concept of doing away with class. Ridding us of poverty. 

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The king alas a few years later was executed on a cold day, about midday, on my birthday. A great sigh rose up from the crowd at the beheading of this king who believed in his divine rights, allotted by God. 

But Charles came back as the second of that name, in the restoration of the monarchy 11 years later. And one of his acts was to order the digging up of a dead Oliver Cromwell to be taken to court, and found guilty, from his grave by Whitehall in Westminster Abbey, on my birthday in 1661. A sixpenny bus ride would bring you from Fulham when I was a child to the place Cromwell was disinterred from. 

Alas, the Labour government under Tony Blair destroyed for me the place I at times spent my birthday at, thinking about Cromwell and history. A 24-hour outdoor cafe opposite Westminster Abbey, cleared away because it probably looked too proletarianly offensive to the great leaders. Such is history. 

The King’s Road, though, had a new purpose and history thrust upon in it the 1950s and 1960s. Gone was all association with royalty and a new stylish aristocracy abounded, often with cockney, or northern, or flat middle-class accents. Dressmakers, hairdressers, tailors, boutique owners and the impresarios of the Swinging Sixties. Actors strode and parties flowed. And I saw it all, first as a schoolboy and then as a teenager. An outburst of trendiness as I walked, worked, stole and got arrested along this former road for royals only.

Here I stole, from a King’s Road bookshop, Lady Chatterley’s Lover – after it was at last published with all the cunt words returned to their rightful place; the beginning of the end of censorship. Here I got nicked, for receiving money under false pretences, and got three to five years for a few quids’ worth of wrongdoing. I stole Lady Chatterley’s for the best reader in our class in 1960, when we were 14. Sadie Sheen offered me all sorts of blandishments for my theft, all denied once she had counted the ‘C’ words and then thrown the book back at me and run off in high dudgeon, my heart and ambitions injured. 

Also that year I was a butcher’s boy for the Queen’s butchers in Knightsbridge and was relieved of school attendance by my headmaster – because I was a rotten apple. 

Imagine if serious work had gone into the Putney Debates opposite the Premier Inn where I spent my 80th birthday. Imagine there had been an attempt at ending the bitterness of labour that made the poor almost die from their efforts. Where labourers were looked upon as machines for money making, providing the bonnets and dresses and fine fabrics and fine houses. Keeping the better classes warm. 

We ended up with the crass classes that dominated politics and history in subsequent years. That created the political philistines of today who have dominated British politics ever since: inept leaders staggering from one disaster to another. A civil service full of cretinous thinkers who could never get their heads round such a brilliant thing as my Ministry of Poverty Prevention and Cure.

Happy to keep people in the emergency of poverty, rather than stopping it happening; or curing it. More-of-the-same-ism dominating the minds of the decision-makers. Wretched thinkers who are stymied by a history that repeats itself. 

And do take the magazine please when you give money to the vendors. That’s my real birthday message to you.

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