4 YOUTH ON THE DRIFT

It would be completely wrong to view the West End of London solely in terms of drug use. Drugs attract the publicity, and people outside Soho often assume that our entire work was drug-orientated. In fact, drug problems represent only one facet of an evolving youth culture. In the West End district, in fact, a number of distinct cultures co-existed. My friend and former colleague, Rod Moore, who used to be on the staff of the Rink Project, suggested that there were three major strands of West End youth. First, the 'club culture', concentrated on the all-night clubs, mainly to the north of Shaftesbury Avenue (with the exception of the Gerrard Street district). Secondly, the young vagrant community around Covent Garden, Charing Cross and Piccadilly, extending into some of the Soho coffee bars and amusement arcades. Thirdly, what Rod called 'an area of idealization and rationalization', represented by a more consciously `drop-out' group who would articulate their life-style in language derived from Marcuse, from leaders of student revolt, and the politics of alienation. Those who were involved in work with 'unattached youth' in the West End tried to divide our areas of concern so that there was not too much overlap, and we were able to focus on particular areas. So, during 1968-70, I tended to concentrate on the clubs and coffee bars, while Alistair Cox, Rod Moore, and their colleagues were mainly concerned with the young vagrant community, and Phil Cohen (who, as 'Dr John', led the sit-ins at Broad Court and 144 Piccadilly in 1969) was involved with the activist 'street commune' group.

The small clubs in Soho consist usually of a basement room with a juke box, fruit and football machines, and a bar which sells Pepsi and orange drinks and coffee. The kids who use these clubs include both 'weekenders'—fairly ordinary non-delinquent or 'fringe' delinquent youngsters from most parts of Greater London—and the hard core of disturbed youngsters for whom the West End is 'home', if anywhere is. It is this group with which we have been very much involved pastorally. They were all drug users, many of them were involved with homosexual or 'straight' (heterosexual) prostitution and most of them were former inmates of prisons or borstals. They belong to the club world as to a village, and they move along a regular sad circuit from one club to another. The Soho clubs run on circuits. Thus a small group of clubs in one district might attract the same groups of youngsters at different periods of the night. There were exceptions: for example, one club consisted solidly of black kids who would not frequent the other clubs in the vicinity to the same extent. The young 'gay' (homosexual) boys' club was on a different circuit, which included clubs in Earl's Court and the King's Road area of Chelsea. But on the whole the little group of clubs in the northern part of Soho catered for a common population. I found that if I stayed in one club for half of the night, I would meet a very large cross-section of this population The managements were very cooperative, and at times helpful, and so I and other workers were always admitted to these clubs free of charge.

In the early stages of the work I thought that a clerical collar would be a disadvantage and would inhibit contact. however, I felt that the possible snags were counterbalanced by the need to get known quickly. I soon found that it was a distinct advantage to be seen as a priest. First, because it meant that one became known and identifiable over a very wide area quickly, and many kids whom I did not know would recognize me at a later date. Secondly, because it was the surest way not to be mistaken for a plain-clothes policeman, a danger which many youth workers have had to face. But, thirdly, I found that, far from inhibiting, the presence of a priest in the club had exactly the opposite effect. The usual opening line was, "Ere, you ain't a vicar, are you?' This might be followed up by attempts to shock, 'dirty' jokes and `mickey taking'. These were a terrific help because they enabled me to establish friendships and break down barriers and they also shattered whatever might still remain in me of the 'respectable clergyman' image. There were some memorable comments. "E ain't no bleeding vicar', sneered a young man in an audience at a youth club in Barnet, 'I've seen 'im down the Flamingo'. In the Alphabet Club in Gerrard Street, a girl walked past me in the dark, then swung around and stared, and finally, with a look of relief, said, `Blimey, for a minute I thought you was a vicar!' contacts made in the clubs would often present themselves years later. I met a young man in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, who had last met me in a Soho club. Frequently I have met kids in other parts of Britain whom I originally met in Soho.

The value of making contacts in the clubs, of course, is that you are meeting young people on their own ground. You are not protected by a church, you are exposed to criticism, anger and aggression, and people are free to treat you as they wish. The danger is that you are intruding where you are not wanted, and if the freedom of young people is not respected, club visiting can easily become a form of 'do-goodery', rather condescending 'missionary work' which is strongly, and rightly, resented.

The kids in the clubs loathe the crusaders who come to the clubs in order to convert, rescue and save them from the wickedness of Soho. One has to tread carefully, as well as prayerfully, here. So much harm has been done by individuals who have been attracted by the notoriety of Soho, and have seen the clubs as happy hunting grounds for their zeal. We were very conscious that we were inheriting a lot of the hostility and suspicion which they had aroused. For nearly a year I used to sit drinking coffee, deliberately not speaking to people unless they spoke first, and simply trying to become part of the scenery. Once one is accepted as a trustworthy and reliable person, there are endless possibilities and ways of helping which may arise. But one needs first to establish one's role. For the Christian, this is to carry the love of Christ in one's humanity and by one's presence to enable others to feel his care for them. This is as often achieved in silence as in much speaking.

I referred above to inherited hostility and suspicion. But this is widespread and pervasive and obviously extends well beyond the limits of the Soho clubs. What kind of feelings did I arouse there? First, a certain amount of suspicion of my motives. Why was I there? What was I up to? Many people assumed that there must be some ulterior motive, some need in me which propelled me to the shadier clubs at the darkest hours. 'You must be kinky', one lad told me, 'or you wouldn't go on working here.' Was I a voyeur, a lonely homosexual, a 'grass' (police informer), a drug pusher, or just a naive, well-meaning do-gooder? All these labels were fixed on me. Secondly, there was a feeling of being 'got at', a sense that I must be there in some moralizing and condemnatory role, that I did not, could not, approve of the places, and had therefore come to rescue people from them. Thirdly, there were often feelings of anger against priests and the church, and my presence and the dog-collar evoked memories and detailed accounts of bad experiences at the hands of clergy and churches.

It is necessary not to try to ward off these feelings, but to accept them and absorb them. One can only overcome this hostility and alienation by a growing love and trust. One cannot overcome in one night the accumulated damage of many centuries of churchiness. There is a real danger, however, that one may become over-anxious and assume a 'hearty' or falsely 'with it' extrovert role. This is without doubt the surest and swiftest way to lose respect and one has seen many young well-meaning clergy who have become figures of ridicule among young people because of what they interpret as an assumed 'withit-ness' which smacks to them of the phoney. It is possible to increase the hostility by excessive talk. Clergy talk too much anyway and we often tend to talk at people rather than to them. There is .something really horrible about the clerical voice and approach which often puts people off at once, a sense that people are being seen as victims and are there to be talked down to. I am sure that unless you are a very eccentric extrovert figure (who can get away with anything) it is better to err on the side of silence.

I am a fairly shy person and I therefore found it easier to 'slide' into a coffee bar or club and be absorbed into its milieu without attracting too much attention. This I found paid off in the sense that the more isolated and distressed people would often make their way to me and talk. We need to remember that the dog-collar can be a hindrance to the very people for whom it is necessary: those who are in serious trouble and need to recognize a source of possible help through some visible mark. Yet it still requires a fair amount of courage for a young person to be seen talking with a priest, and it is important to make his path as easy as possible. Again, one should not become over-anxious or too serious about this. For many of the kids in the West End, to talk to a priest—and to 'take the mickey' out of him—was a big laugh, better than talking to a 'fuzz', and it is amazing how much serious talk you can have when you don't take yourself too seriously.

I did feel very often that I was looked upon by young people as a clerical freak, an oddity, and it was taken for granted that for a priest to be in a coffee bar, even at the fairly early hour of 11.00 p.m. was pretty unusual. The image of the conventional clergyman with his sober black suit, keeping respectable hours in respectable company, and carefully avoiding all situations of danger, dies hard. Unfortunately it has too much truth in it to be easily destroyed. The kids in the clubs may have felt embarrassed that I was 'their' priest, but they also felt that I was out on a limb, that the Church as a whole remained far removed from their world, and that to most church people, clergy or laity, they were unacceptable company.

One area in which a large part of my ministry was spent was the homosexual societies. The West End homosexual world is complex in structure. There is a fairly sharp division between the older, pre-war gay bars and clubs, where women are conspicuously absent, mistrusted and sometimes feared, and the younger gay coffee-clubs where it is unusual not to see some 'straight', as well as some lesbian, girls. From about 1969 onwards there has been a very marked shift away from Soho among the younger gay crowd, and new clubs have been springing up in Earl's Court, Kensington and Chelsea. The young homosexual in Soho almost always comes in from elsewhere and rarely lives in the West End. He finds in the West End three areas of social life. First, the exclusively gay clubs which form part of a network and are known and publicised internationally on the homosexual circuit. Secondly, a group of clubs peculiar to Soho, containing a more delinquent population, including a large number of homosexuals, some of whom are involved with prostitution or with drug abuse. Thirdly, the amusement arcades, bars, public lavatories ('cottages') and other locations near Piccadilly, where the 'rent boys' or homosexual prostitutes form a sad, but growing, group.

The West End is more criminalized than most other districts frequented by male homosexuals. The two most famous homosexual pubs in the West End are dangerous and contain many 'rent boys', and this is true also of some of the drinking clubs. The young homosexual who arrives on the West End scene early, as a 'chicken', only usually stays there if he fails to mature. In the world of the coffee clubs, there is a culture with its own language, and words like bona (good), varda (to look), nishta and nanty (no) are used extravagantly. The homosexual language is called Polari, and should be distinguished from Camp language, which is more widely used and less restricted. Also today the homosexual language is becoming confused with the language of the drug culture and of the hippy scene.

Pastoral care of young homosexuals inevitably occupied a good deal of our time in Soho. I believe that we need to be far more honest in our approach to homosexuality. It is quite false to see homosexuals as a sick, disturbed minority. There are disturbed homosexuals as well as disturbed heterosexuals. But there is no doubt that social pressures have helped to make homosexual problems a major element in psychological illness. The clergy, I feel, should be more sympathetic and understanding in this field, if only because it is well known that some of our best and most respected clergy are homosexual. But it is also true that mental illness among clergy reveals homosexual problems as a significant factor. Dr Frank Lake's study of 100 clergy patients showed the 37 had homosexual experience, and an additional 37 admitted to persistent sexual phantasies. In a paper published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 1969, three doctors studied 51 clergy patients and showed that sexual deviations occurred in 21.6 per cent of them. They recommended that more attention should be paid in theological training to help ordinands gain more insight into themselves and their own psychopathology. Certainly this would help clergy not only to face their own inner selves, but also to help others in the different areas of sexuality, where, all too often at present, clergy seem to be uncomfortable and repressed.

During 1970 those who were working in the field of sexual problems in London became increasingly involved with the phenomenon of transexualism. Transexuals are individuals who are born with the body of one sex but who at some stage in their lives come to identify psychologically with the other sex. They are often described by the innaccurate and misleading term 'transvestites' and, even more mistakenly, categorized as homosexuals. The first widely publicised transexual was George Jergensen, who underwent surgery in Denmark in 1953. So far little work has been done in this country on the problems of the transexual, but a good deal has been done in the United States, and in 19701 was able to visit a number of groups and individuals there who were involved with transexual counselling. They included Zelda Suplee who works for the Erikson Foundation in New York, an educational body which with the Albany Trust had sponsored an international symposium on Gender Identity in July 1969. In San Francisco, a police officer—cum—counsellor, Elliot Blackstone of the Community Relations Division, runs an efficient counselling centre on Third Street and is involved with homophile groups all over the Bay Area. The Centre for Special Problems in Van Ness Street, San Francisco, was also seeing large numbers of transexuals and administering estrogen therapy. Estrogen is the primary female hormone, and injections of it will reduce the primary male hormone in transexuals who are biologically male. They will then develop female characteristics such as breasts and wider hips, their body hair will decrease, and libido will be reduced. The Centre found that out of 75 transexual patients seen there in one year, only one was a female-to-male. Curiously, most of the transexuals whom I have encountered in Soho have been female-to-male, and have sought surgery in order to adopt a male role.

A very different world is that of the folk clubs. I was first introduced to the contemporary folk clubs of the West End in the early 1960s by Judith Piepe. In 1965 Paul Simon paid his first visit to England and sang at the Flamingo Club in Wardour Street. Judith met him, and as a result of this encounter she recorded a series of talks on the BBC Five to Ten programme during Holy Week 1965, in which she took one of Paul's songs as a theme each day. These songs provided the basis of The Paul Simon Song Book which was issued as an LP later that year. Judith wrote a preface to the booklet version in which she said:

Paul Simon's songs are personal and individual, the expression of his own thoughts and feelings, but in writing them he expresses the thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, problems and frustrations, of our time, of his generation. In speaking for his generation he says what others feel but cannot find the words to say, and in doing so has a liberating and healing effect.

Earlier Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had produced an LP in the United States, Wednesday Morning 3.A.M., which was not issued in Britain until several years later after their songs had become famous. Paul and Art had a close association with Soho and with St Anne's, and sang at the Open Air Mass on St Anne's Day in 1965. Paul Simon seems to me to represent the alienation of many young people from organized religion and the search of many young people for authentic spirituality. In his song Blessed—written in St Anne's—he expressed some of his own isolation.

Blessed is the land and the kingdom.
Blessed is the man whose soul belongs too.
Blessed are the meth thinkers,
pot sellers,
illusion dwellers.
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?

In Sounds of Silence which (in the appalling version sung by The Bachelors) topped the hit parade, he sings of what theologians call 'the problem of communication' in the technocratic age.

And the people bowed and prayed
To a neon god they made,
And the sign flashed forth its warning
In the words that it was forming.
And the sign said, 'The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls,
And tenement halls,
And whispered in the sounds of silence'.

Songs of this type, about loneliness, rejection, brotherhood, inhumanity, were sung around the Soho folk cellars in 1965 and 1966. Paul Simon's songs were typical of them, and were among the best examples of them.

Another singer who used to have close links with us and has since become famous is Al Stewart. He wrote two important songs of social protest which he sang widely in 1966. One was Pretty Golden Hair, a lament about the suicide of a young homosexual, which Al used to sing in the Soho clubs. The other was Who killed Tommy McGeechy?, the story of a Stepney meths drinker's death (an incident which also received mention in Sally Trench's Bury Me In My Boots). The early folk scene, however, mirrored the problems of Soho and the world. The singers were for the most part only peripherally, if at all, involved in the issues about which they sang, and the clientele in the clubs too was a mixed body of students, folk enthusiasts, and Soho regulars. But the clubs provided a kind of running commentary on the wider West End culture of which they were a small part. As the folk scene developed, it became, like its figurehead Bob Dylan, less concerned with old-fashioned protest songs, and more surrealistic, psychedelic and concerned with the inner world.

During 1968 I became friendly with Chris Simpson, now the lead guitarist and vocalist of Magna Carta. Chris was a theological student at King's College, London, and dropped out of ordination into pop music. Magna Carta, who produced their first LP soon after they had performed at St Anne's Day in 1969, have been described as England's answer to Simon and Garfunkel. Their songs are profound and beautiful mediations on twentieth century decadence. Chris and I have worked together on various ideas about religion and pop culture. The incident that sticks most in my mind was a duologue, with words and music, which we did before an audience of moral welfare workers at Swanwick in 1970. Like Paul Simon, Chris Simpson expresses in words and music the spiritual questionings of many of his generation.

Towards the end of 1968 a movement began to take shape among a section of Piccadilly beats called 'The Commune of the Streets'. The Commune really grew out of a sit-in at the Pronto Bar in Piccadilly Circus on 9-10 November 1968, as a result of which four kids appeared in Bow Street Court on 27 November. Two days later three other members of the group appeared as a result of disturbances at Eros in October, and on 10 December a group was charged with obstruction in Playland, an amusement arcade near to the Pronto Bar. A few days before the case was heard, two committees were set up, a steering committee and a 'direct action' committee. This was the first sign of plans for direct action by the young people around Piccadilly Circus. The Commune had in mind the organization of sit-ins and boycotts against selected cafes and pubs which refused to serve beats, and the provision of 'street guides' and observers of police activity. They also announced plans for a 'beat community centre', with about twenty-five people in residence, with a street newspaper, a poster and music workshop, and a research group, as well as dossing and eating facilities for beats in London. 'The aim in getting a place', said the Commune in a bulletin of 21 November 1968, 'is not to get us off the streets which is what the straights want, but to establish a base from which we can develop a more effective way to control the streets.' The formation of the Commune was reported in the Daily Telegraph, and Peace News, and International Times described the Pronto Bar sit-in. Special cards and badges were announced, and membership of the Commune was to be restricted to those who were under twenty-five or felt it, had left school at sixteen or dropped out of college, and had 'no permanent/straight job or other independent means'.

Most of the Commune's plans never came to anything. Their broadsheets were filled with outlines and programmes for workshops, and extremely detailed descriptions of new magazines which were always about to appear. Thus King Mob Echo 2 would describe 'the English Beats' seen as 'a subcultural front against straight society'. This issue was to contain an analysis of 'English Beats and the Subcultural Revolution', as well as studies of life on the road, prose, poems, songs, and 'a programme for anti-workers' control of the streets'. Later, another broadsheet announced the imminent publication of Street Voice—`a new fortnightly newspaper produced by the Commune of the Streets'. Street Voice was to be 'an instrument of action. . . forging links at street level, between the major subcultural groupings which have already invested the significant points of discontinuity in the process of socialization, in order to construct a united front, a new anti-working class, capable of detonating the key contradictions in the social structure and blockading straight society into a state of callapse.' It was to be a local newspaper for the Piccadilly area, and a pilot issue was to appear in April 1969. Needless to say, it never did appear! Agro, however, did manage to appear in December 1969—a pilot issue—but never appeared again. Klap (in which I was involved) also ran for one issue in July 1970. In 1970 also came announcements of the Mu ggins Trust and of Street Bond, which changed its name to Street Aid in December 1970. Finally, in 1971 yet another 'voice of the West End community', Rubber Duck, was published. The jargon and the style were identical with the broadsheets of 1968.

But the Commune was more significant than its abortive literature. What did it aim to do? In the original broadsheet of November 1968, the philosophy of the Commune was expressed as follows:

We are the victims of discrimination—by the police—by the cafes and bars around Piccadilly. Tonight we have occupied the Pronto Bar (next to London Pavilion) to demand equal rights. Before you judge us, come and hear us—on the steps of Eros—in the Haymarket Arcade now!

They call us Beats. Perhaps they think they have got us beaten. They are wrong. Today our faces are painted because like our brothers in the ghettoes of Brixton and Notting Hill we are protesting against a vicious policy of social discrimination.

The Commune called for the liberation of Eros.

This is what Eros should, could be: an open forum, an academie in the real sense where people can meet and talk and dance and play at reconstructing the basis of everyday life. But thanks to police paranoia all we have got is desolation row. Thanatos suppressing Eros. Tonight we are attempting to reverse this. Eros will be reconstructed. Nameless wildness will emerge from the underground (at last). So come and join us.

At the same time, the Commune began to look for property for a base in London, and it was at this point that they became national news. In August 1969 some members of the Commune squatted in a house in Broad Court, Covent Garden. The property belonged to Charing Cross Hospital, and when, after a court injunction, they were evicted, they moved to a disused school in nearby Endell Street. Here they set up barricades, and there was water and electricity. A poster workshop was set up in the basement, and there was a street theatre group. In fact, Endell Street was kept together well, unlike Broad Court which had become very overcrowded. But in order to prevent further overcrowding and deterioration, some members of the Commune began to look around for another place, and they chose the house which soon became famous as a 'hippy stronghold'-144 Piccadilly.
My first involvement with 144 was on 3 September 1968, when three members of the Commune, Bernard, Bennett and Pete, called to see me at St Anne's House, and said that they had occupied 144 Piccadilly in the name of the 'London Arts Commune'. They asked me if I would visit the house and write a letter verifying that they were in possession. This I did on the same date. A few days later the occupation hit the national press. About fifty people had moved in initially on a Sunday evening, getting in through the basement, and they rigged up a kind of moat, a gap between the house and the street. A security group kept out invaders. One of the Commune described what happened next.

Next morning we put out banners saying we were squatting and the next thing we knew we were in the papers. Then a crowd started gathering and a load of anarchists and the usual power freaks came down hoping to start the revolution of something, you know. So we thought we'd better decide what to do, but there were so many people that nobody could agree on anything. One thing that was decided, however, was that a defence force should be formed. Somebody had invited a load of Hell's Angels down from the South Coast and Windsor Chapter, and they acted as the defence force against the police and the skinheads who had turned up for the agro. As the week went by more and more straight people were gathering outside, along with the reporters and so on. We had to vet people as they came in, to check that they weren't plain-clothes policemen or the Press. Everything was in a bit of a turmoil, what with people trying to become leaders and trying to organize food and so on. Then things like batches of cigarettes started appearing from somewhere and Apple Records gave us some Beatles' records and a record player appeared and there was quite a lot of money there. By this time there were about 5-600 people there.

After a few days, large numbers of skinheads appeared, as well as police. Plastic balls filled with water were used to throw at both skinheads and police. I still have two of these balls which were brought to me after the events. Eventually, however, the police managed to get into the house, and Phil Cohen ('Dr John') was taken to West End Central Police Station. While the 144 events were happening, the school in Endell Street was still occupied, but soon afterwards the police invaded these premises also and took away about sixty people. Most of them were given conditional discharges or suspended sentences.
The reaction of the straight press to the occupations was fairly uniformly hostile. The Church Times was horrified, and exclaimed, in its issue of 26 September:

Sympathy with these young anarchists is misplaced . . . Most of them seem to be simply idlers who expect to live at the expense of other people, who batten on the very society which they condemn and attack, and who are only too eager to follow the lead of a handful of ruthless men with the avowed aim of destroying the whole fabric of society.

With these sentiments the beats of Piccadilly agreed. As the writer quoted above said:

Looking back on it, I think a lot of people got the wrong idea about the Street Commune. It wasn't for squatting homeless families—in fact the whole thing was supposed to be against the family. The commune was for kids on the Dilly, kids on the road, coming into London. Some people did have political reasons for doing it, but most of the so-called politicos who came in to 144 and afterwards were too straight, they didn't understand the scene, they couldn't relate to the kids and people resented them. I think as far as most of the kids were concerned, the main reason for squatting was to get a place to stay and to get a real scene together.

At the end of 1969 the pilot—and only!—issue of Agro tried to mobilize skinhead opinion. The paper ('printed by the Gutter Press'), bore the stamp of the Commune and most of it in fact consisted of an abridged version of 'Project Free London', a small booklet to which I shall refer again. The Editorial claimed that Agro would be produced and distributed, not from an office, but through an informal network of 'skinheads, greasers, heads; in pubs, caffs, clubs and on the streets'. The Commune was worried because skinheads and greasers had mobilized against each other instead of against straight society, and they saw Agro as a way of combining forces as a 'single
subcultural front'. Again, there were extravagant promises of articles, there was to be a skinhead section containing a special report on the East End Scene, a greaser section with a discussion by teds, greasers and angels on changes in their scene, a heads section, a skoll section (the Free Underground Campaign for Kids), and so on. In fact, nothing happened.

The most curious events of all occurred in Summer 1970 when a strange alliance between the Salvation Army and indirectly) the Commune produced the West End Summer Programme, a largely abortive project of which I was chairman. Rod Moore of the Rink Project felt strongly that something should be attempted for the benefit of the `summer youngsters' who usually flooded the West End in the summer months of each year. The majority of these youngsters stayed around for a limited period and were fairly average, adventurous young people for whom the West End offered a limited experience of freedom. The original idea of the Summer Programme was to provide two or three workers from the Rink Project, a detached work project sponsored by the Salvation Army, to observe and participate in this `summer scene', to liaise with other bodies who were involved with these newcomers, and to interpret the significance of the events to official agencies. We did not see the Programme in 'problem' terms, but rather as a means of contact and information. We felt that a newspaper would be the most effective way of maintaining a regular commentary on the events of the summer.

The project was not a success, partly because the expected summer influx did not occur, and partly because of a breakdown in communication between the conventional social workers, clergy and youth workers, and the kids on the Dilly who were producing the paper. The beats associated with the Commune, including Phil Cohen who by 1970 had been taken over by the Soho Project, exhibited aggression and mistrust towards 'social workers' whom they saw as reformists and stooges of the establishment. The more 'established' agencies saw the Commune as thoroughly irresponsible. All in all the Summer Programme was a fiasco. But out of the salvage emerged Street Aid, the first welfare project to develop in the West End which was indigenous to the area and staffed by local youngsters.

The idea of a legal service for the West End community developed out of the Summer Programme. On 15 June 1970, Phil Cohen issued a 'provisional outline of legal scheme'. He claimed that 'the police in conjunction with Westminster City Council have decided to clear the West End and in particular Piccadilly of all the young people who normally make it their base during the summer'. He proposed a scheme to inform kids in the West End of their rights and to provide, in conjunction with the National Council for Civil Liberties, a support structure for those who were arrested. A panel of solicitors would be available, and a twenty-four-hour emergency service was to be established. Later in the year premises were acquired at 29 Frith Street, Soho, and 'The Muggins Trust' was set up to sponsor a series of accommodation, civil rights, education and research programmes. A house was acquired in the Elephant and Castle district which would form a commune for 'the nucleus of the drop out scene around the Dilly over the past two years'. The house would be an experiment in dropping back in a community situation. In November, Street Bond was announced as 'a legal advice centre designed to meet the needs of young people who are on the scene around the West End', and in December the name was changed to Street Aid. In June 1971, Street Aid moved to larger premises in 33 Southampton Street, Covent Garden.
The philosophical position of Street Aid is basically the same as that of the original 'Commune of the Streets' of 1968.

Unlike many agencies in the West End which simply endorse the 'official' solution, Street Aid believes that we have to create alternative structures to the whole 'children's zoo' set up of straight society and to work in and on the scene to improve it, to make it into a real alternative.

Although Street Aid has tended to distort and misrepresent the views of other agencies and to view them as hostile, their criticism of much conventional social work thinking seems to me to be correct. By their tremendous aggression and paranoia they have alienated many of the agencies to whom they turned regularly for help and advice. Yet I am sure the emergence of Street Aid was a very necessary stage in the development of the West End. For the first time the kids around Piccadilly began to take social action and to reject the paternalism of the social work machine.

Throughout the 144 Piccadilly affair, as at other times, the Press referred to the squatters as the 'hippies'. But the West End has never contained a genuine hippy culture which might be compared to that of San Francisco or other areas of psychedelic drug use. The London psychedelic drug culture has been geographically located for the most part in districts such as Notting Hill and Chelsea rather than in Soho. It has been in the streets of 'Scene W.11.' that much of the thinking of the Underground has taken place, and it is here that welfare bodies like Release and BIT have been established. Soho and its adjoining area has at various times provided specific locations for action in the movement: Better Books in Charing Cross Road where many of the gurus have met, UFO in Tottenham Court Road which for a while was the scene of wild psychedelic happenings, the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, and so on. But what is meant by 'hippy' and 'Underground'? The conventional media tend to use 'hippy' to describe anyone with long hair, or whose dress and philosophy deviate from the accepted standards. The term arose in the Haight-Ashbury where it was originally the name of a political group, Haight Independent Proprietors. It subsequently came to be used of those who aligned themselves with the new philosophy which came out of the Haight-Ashbury culture. It was here too, in Haight-Street, that the Psychedelic Shop, the world's first 'head' store, opened in January 1966, and this was followed by the Trips Festival at Longshoreman's Hall. It was the first really big acid convention. The following year came the World's First Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, with Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and other notables in attendance. It was out of these events that the hippy culture grew.

The Underground in its origins goes back further, to about 1964 when the term first came into use in New York. It was used to describe films and magazines which were totally alien to the established media and which used sexual and religious weapons in the attack on the establishment. The Underground writers were concerned about Vietnam and Civil Rights, and they paid homage to protest singers like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Bookshops were opened and happenings took place in various cities. In Britain, the Underground could be seen as a minority growth out of the anti-bomb movement. In the Peace Cafe in Fulham Road and elsewhere, a culture grew up which looked towards the beat generation in the United States for its inspiration. Jeff Nuttall has outlined the historical background very well in his Bomb Culture. The matured British Underground as it appeared after 1967 was a fusion of this older political tradition and the newer ideas of the hippy movement.

The hippy philosophy of 1967 stressed the supreme importance of love, honesty and non-violence, and the value of psychedelic drugs for recreation as well as for spiritual enlightenment, and it rejected the values of capitalist society, the work ethic, and the civil and religious establishments. Unlike the revolutionary, the hippy did not oppose the establishment in a face-to-face conflict, but turned his back on it, preferring to build a new society within the crumbling ruins of the old. So arose the term 'alternative society', a term which in a few years has become a reality. It is important to emphasize that the hippy movement was essentially a moral protest: as Caroline Coon said in a talk at St Anne's in 1968, the hippy is 'the product of a society whose moral spirit is lower than it has been for some time'. To hippy culture, it is the mainstream western society which is materialistic, decadent, unspiritual, and lacking any moral standards or values.

The most significant visible sign of the growth of the Underground has been the spread of such papers and journals as International Times, Oz, Rolling Stone, and more recently, Frendz and Ink. Geoffrey Ashe, welcoming International Times in its issue of 23 August 1968, claimed that it represented 'the voice of a new kind of revolution. . . the beginning of a free creative counter-society, self-generated from the depths in a spirit of love, a clean break, a fresh start.' During the summer of 1969, a small booklet Project Free London began to circulate widely on the Underground scene. It gave information on how to obtain free accommodation, clothes, food, entertainment, travel and social services. I was the third item on page one, and was amused to find that the booklet printed not only my phone number but also the name and address of the Soho coffee bar where, it was claimed, I was most likely to be found! The booklet was later reprinted in Richard Neville's Play Power. It was the first serious attempt at a directory of facilities in the alternative society. Nicholas Saunders followed it with his Alternative London which has now become the standard reference book.

Within the hippy culture and among large sections of young people in our society, cannabis has become the new social drug. It is smoked primarily for pleasure, but its central position in social protest should not be ignored. Dr David Smith, writing of the United States, has pointed out that 'in analysing the various youth protest movements —whether political activists and the Peace and Freedom party, centered in Berkley, or the Bohemians in HaightAshbury—one finds a number of common slogans: 'End the war in Vietnam, eliminate racism, and legalize marijuana'. In Britain, cannabis is used by many young people who stand outside the Underground and the hippy scene, but even here one can see how it symbolizes the gulf between the generations. In the early 1960s the drug was used by some of the young intellectuals in the peace movement, and Peace News, in its issue of 5 February 1965, had been one of the first papers to call for legalization. Soon after this cannabis began to spread among wider sections of youth, and it would be quite wrong today to associate cannabis use exclusively with any particular type of young person.

I doubt whether an objective assessment of cannabis use is possible until the next generation. In the meantime, the view of the Wootton Report of 1968 that long-term consumption of the drug in moderate doses has no harmful effects (paragraph 29) seems to me to sum up the world literature fairly well. It is not true, though it is often said, that there has been little research on the use of cannabis in its social setting. There is an enormous literature, and much of it is discussed in the studies by David Smith, E.R. Bloomquist, Erich Goode and John Kaplan in the United States, and by Michael Schofield and myself in this country. Certainly there is a great deal of research, pharmacological, sociological and medical, which needs to be done. But there is no justification for the exaggerated claims about 'escalation' and 'cannabis psychosis' which are often made, and the constant repetition of which causes youngpeople to lose confidence in any information on drugs emanating from adult sources.

The pressure for a change in the law on cannabis has increased since the Soma Research Association placed a full-page advertisement in The Times on 24 July 1967, claiming that the law was 'immoral in principle and unworkable in practice'. I was critical of the advertisement at the time though I later joined the council of Soma. My general feeling at present is that the harm done by the law on cannabis far exceeds any harm which might result from the drug itself. The Soma advertisement did not argue, as many people have thought, for legalization of cannabis, and I doubt whether legalization is practicable as an immediate measure, but I think it will come in the next generation. It will raise some problems, but my feeling is that such a measure would do more good than harm.

The slogans 'Burn Pot, Not People' and 'Make Love, Not War' indicate that much of contemporary attitudes to drugs and sexuality is related to a rejection of militarism and the capitalist system. The Underground has, since 1967, become more explicitly political. The influence of Marcuse has been strong among the heads in the United States, and the language of liberation has brought together the Black Power movement, the politicized hippies and the student rebels. Violence has become more and more characteristic of the scene. What began as a subculture has now become a counter-culture.

The young people in Soho, however, have not been much affected by the new political mood. The majority of the drifters whom we met around Piccadilly would not be described as 'drop-outs' in the usual sense: they were more 'throw outs', failures of the system, social rejects. In youth work jargon, they were the 'young drifters'. In 1966 the Salvation Army workers at Regent Hall in Oxford Street felt the challenge of the young drifters, and opened an all-night club on Fridays called the Rink Club.

It attracted very large numbers of young people who were not part of the West End scene as well as regular numbers of young drifters and vagrants. It was as an attempt to help the young vagrants that the Rink Project grew out of the Rink Club, and subsequently, with the help of a grant from the Inner London Education Authority, it became one of three experimental youth projects operating in Soho. Originally the workers used the Rink Club as their base, but in 1968 they were lent the Undercroft of St Martin-in-the-Fields, which became known to thousands of young people all over the country as 'the crypt'. The crypt was open every day except Sunday between 9.00 a.m. and 5.00 p.m. and was staffed by youth workers of the Rink Project. In the early stages, Norman Croucher, a St Martin's worker, was in charge of the work, but later the Salvationists assumed responsibility, and the project, although it was on church premises, became virtually independent of St Martin's. Primarily the youngsters used the crypt for sleep, but advice and help was available if they wanted it, and the workers found that it provided the initial contact point within the vagrant community. From the crypt they moved out to coffee bars, tea stalls and clubs used by young vagrants. Under Alistair Cox, now the leader of the City Centre Project in Manchester, and Rod Moore, who left to join a course in youth and community work, the activity of the Rink expanded considerably, and during 1968-70 I enjoyed a very close relationship with its workers. We started to hold informal meetings each Monday night in St Anne's, when we could discuss individual problems, and, with help from a Jungian analyst, we established a series of group sessions to study difficulties of relationship, motivation and so on, amongst ourselves.

Throughout 1970, however, difficulties from two directions faced the Rink Project workers. The first came from the relationship with St Martin's Church, from whom the crypt was borrowed. The Rink workers felt that there was little real contact between what they were trying to do and the church upstairs. Relations in fact continued to deteriorate, and in 1970 the crypt was closed. Whatever the real reasons for the closure may have been, it was widely interpreted by young people in the area as a rejection of the Project by the Church authorities and by the establishment. The Church, it was claimed, had sponsored and tolerated a project while it was safe, but got cold feet and opted out as soon as it became risky. I do not think that this was an entirely fair criticism, but there is no doubt that in their philosophy and approach, the church and the Project were on quite different wavelengths. As it happened, the Rink workers very quickly found their feet in the field of detached work, and, while they found the lack of a base a disadvantage, they took the loss of the crypt as a sign for a change in direction. The Project moved out much more into the vagrant culture. They were probably glad and relieved to have lost their last formal link with the institutional Church.

The more serious and insuperable difficulty was ultimately a theological one. Some of the young Salvationists who ran the Rink Project had university backgrounds, while others were widely read in current sociology, youth work methods, and social casework, criminology, and so on. Theologically, their teachers were Harvey Cox, Van Buren, Tillich, and John Robinson. But their spiritual home was Regent Hall where worship and spirituality were expressed in the forms of nineteenth-century revivalism. There was a quite fantastic gulf between theology and spirituality among these young Salvationists. At Regent Hall it was Major Fred Brown, the commanding officer, one of the few Salvationists who attempted serious theological thought, who alone held together the old and the young. But the future for Fred Brown was bleak, and in 1970, after the publication of his Secular Evangelism, he was dismissed from the Army. Soon after Fred's dismissal, the Rink Project came to an end, though it was rescued by, and absorbed into, the Soho Project.

In many respects the history of what happened to the Rink Project was tragic. It exposed the inability of the Salvation Army to understand the social revolutions of the twentieth century. There was an almost total comprehension gap, a genuine bewilderment and lack of awareness of what the young Rink workers were up to. The Salvationist hierarchy were perplexed. On the one hand they liked to exhibit the Rink Project as the living proof of their concern for drug addicts, beatniks and drifters. On the other hand, they were more and more concerned that the theology and methods of Alistair and Rod and their friends were totally alien to Salvationist thinking. Here was a radical break with the proselytizing mentality, the band meeting, and the street corner testimony. The Rink Project made no attempt to evangelize. Only in name was it connected with the Salvation Army. The extent of the gulf can be seen in an article which the Rink Project workers wrote in Vanguard, the Salvation Army youth magazine in August 1969. Here they put forward six principles for a 'mature relationship'.

(a) The two parties come together on equal terms. There is no stance of superiority/inferiority.
(b) There is no desire on the part of one to manipulate the other for his own end. We do not make our relationship conditional on a projected image of what we would like the other to become.
(c) It is slow to form and depends on consistency and persistency of presence.
(d) There is no place for haranguing, preaching or giving of advice.
(e) There is no concern for the classification we so often tend to impose on the individual. What does concern us is the degree of liberation that our relationships afford. There is consequently persistent concern for justice and a refusal to tolerate injustice.
(f) Our Christian concern is often best communicated through the trivial. We seek too often to talk about ultimates in a vacuum. These ultimates are best expressed through the sharing of a meal, the regular visit, the honest reaction, the warm pleasure of getting to know a person.

This represents an approach which is totally at variance with Salvation Army methods of evangelism. If the Army had contained in its ranks any serious theologians, or if it had been capable of taking seriously the challenge of Fred Brown's thought, then some change from withiii might have been conceivable. It was not to be so. But I believe, as a non-Salvationist who has had close contacts with the Army and learned much from it, that the death of the Rink Project was only a foretaste of further troubles within the Army, unless there are major changes soon.

From the beginning of our work with young people, the phenomenon of homelessness loomed very large. On 22 April 1968, I gave a talk to the Westminster Christian Council, an ecumenical group of Christians in the area, on accommodation needs for young people within the City. A Social Responsibility Working Party set up by the Council in 1967 had reported, not surprisingly, that the most pressing need in the City was for accommodation for the large and increasing numbers of homeless youth. On 3 April 1968, the Medical Officer of Health for the City of Westminster called a conference of all those concerned with the care of drug addicts in the City. One reason for calling the conference was a concern that 'unless a unified policy is agreed by all the parties concerned there may well be some overlapping of effort and perhaps over-provision of services and this, of course, should be avoided'. Nothing resulted from the conference although a number of people stressed the extreme urgency of the situation. In fact, we have found over the years that, in the field of accommodation for the homeless, the statutory bodies are often extremely unhelpful, and tend to leave most of the difficult problems to voluntary workers.

In November 1969 a group of us including the Rink Project workers and a number of members of the Simon Community house in Camden Town, became very conscious of a major gap in our West End work. All the agencies in Soho appeared to be spending most of their time in helping the same individuals, the 'West End regulars' who were known to us all. But at the same time, thousands of new youngsters were pouring into and through the West End, more new kids were getting involved with prostitution, new faces were appearing on the drug scene, and very little preventive work was being attempted. We felt that a new emphasis was needed in trying to avert the casualties and crises whose consequences we saw daily. As we discussed this, we realized that beneath us the basement of St Anne's stood derelict, unused for years, a virtual rubbish dump. So the idea of `Centrepoine was born.

We called our new project `Centrepoint' because it was geographically at the centre point of Soho, and also as an ironic contrast to the other Centrepoint, the luxury office block which stood empty and useless a few hundred yards away. On 16 December we opened the converted basement as an overnight crisis centre where young people who were new to the West End could be accommodated and given immediate advice and help. The people we had in mind were new arrivals, youngsters who had come to London in search of work, or who had run away from difficult home situations and who were at risk of becoming homeless and destitute. We worked out a system of staffing with the Simon Community, a body which for six years had been involved with homeless, isolated people, and it was through Simon helpers that the project got off the ground. Neil McGhee, a little Scotsman, and Bill Rice from Limerick, were our first project leaders, and did a fantastic job. In the first two months we took in 600 youngsters, and the figure had risen to 1,000 by the end of three months. Of these, 670 were newcomers, of whom eighty-nine were from Glasgow, forty-five from Manchester, and thirty-five from Dublin. Fifteen per cent of the newcomers were Scottish.

In the first year of its existence, Centrepoint was taking in an average of twenty people each night, about 5,000 over the whole year. Our clients came from three main sources: Euston Station; voluntary agencies such as BIT, Samaritans or St Martin-in-the-Fields; and the local 'grapevine'. The contact with Euston Station proved immensely useful, for here the newcomers from the north arrived. Our workers found the British Transport police enthusiastic and helpful, and we soon established a practice of having a Centrepoint car at Euston each morning about 1.00 a.m. Other organizations were a main source of referral. In particular `Benburb Base' a centre for the care of Irish youth, was tremendously cooperative. They provided us on three nights each week with several sisters, a priest, and other workers, and we referred new Irish youngsters to them for extensive counselling, accommodation or employment. During 1970, as a result of the troubles in Northern Ireland, we found an increasing number of Belfast youngsters arriving. But it was Glasgow and Scotland generally which provided the largest single minority group, and it is important that a Scottish equivalent to Benburb Base should be established in London as soon as possible.

In November 1970 Centrepoint and the Simon Community separated. The split was inevitable because the supervision and control of the project was becoming more and more chaotic. The Simon Community depends largely on volunteers who may be very immature, inexperienced or extremely disturbed and unbalanced individuals. Some of the Simon workers were excellent and responsible, and without their help Centrepoint would not have become established at all. But the situation was so bad at the end of 1970 that we found it necessary to assume complete control and set up Centre-point as an independent project. A new committee was set up with Harry Knight, an estate agent and a deeply committed Christian, as chairman. In 1971 he was succeeded by Ben Harrison, the secretary of the Church of England Council for Social Aid, who for years had been a source of support for our work. We were fortunate in obtaining a number of large donations from individuals, and later were given several sizeable grants, including one from the Supplementary Benefits Commission, and so were able to employ a full-time director, David Nairn, in February 1970. David Nairn had previously been in charge of a rehabilitation unit for alcoholics, and was closely involved with research activity. He provided exactly the right help we needed at the consolidation stage of Centrepoint: a strong, experienced worker, with a deep knowledge of human problems and a wide range of contacts. Our hope for Centrepoint is that it will expand into a twenty-four hour service, providing extensive referral and counselling where necessary, but its primary role remains that of an emergency all-night service for newcomers.

The Simon Community had been active in the field of homelessness long before the establishment of Centre-point. Its original work was with methylated spirit drinkers in Stepney, and the first Simonlight hostel was in fact at 84 Cable Street, the building in which I had lived when it was a Franciscan mission. The next Simonlight was in Sclater Street, Bethnal Green, where there was a fierce clash with the local authority. The main London work was established at Malden Road, Camden Town, where at different times young drug addicts, homeless families and new arrivals were accommodated. But a series of difficulties led to a schism between the London Simon Community and the communities in the provinces. As a result, the various Simon houses outside London banded together into the Cyrenians, while the London and Liverpool houses with the farm in Kent remained as the Simon Community Trust. The Trust, through a series of pamphlets and prolific Press activity, has continued to draw public attention to the problems of homelessness and vagrancy. It is a pity that their zeal has not always been accompanied by strict factual accuracy, and that irresponsible organization has often led their projects into chaotic muddles which can do positive harm.

Nevertheless, while these serious criticisms must stand, all who work in the homeless field owe a tremendous debt to the Simon Community. I think that they have been leaders in two directions in particular. First, in helping to eliminate the 'we-they' syndrome in social work, and to emphasize the unity of helpers and helped. Secondly, in rejecting the dividing and labelling of human beings into 'problem' categories—alcoholics, psychopaths, drug addicts, and so on—and treating them as human beings with a wide range of needs and difficulties. The early Simon houses refused to categorize people and did not attempt to be an amateur social work department. Their houses of hospitality were pointers towards what the Christian Church as a whole ought to be: a non-judgmental, caring, loving community, accepting people as they are in Christ's name. It is worth remembering that Simon, although it has accepted workers of all faiths and none, has persistently maintained that its ideals and inspiration are Christian, and Anton Wallich-Clifford, its founder, at least, seems to view it as a new-style religious order. In Ireland, where Simon houses are more closely allied with the Roman Catholic Church, this vision may be realized earlier than in England.

Another body with which we have worked in the field of homelessness is Christian Action. David Brandon, who has acted as a social work consultant to both Christian Action and Centrepoint, was a friend of mine from Hoxton days, when he ran the London County Council's Welfare Office for the Homeless at Charing Cross. His publications The Treadmill (1970) and Homeless in London (1971) have been major contributions to the fight for better housing and care of homeless people. With David's help, Centrepoint was involved in 1971 in a protest to the Registrar-General about the Population Census. We pointed out that while protests were being made, rightly in my view, about the questions on birthplaces of parents, there were a large number of homeless people who would not have a chance of answering the questions at all! A few weeks after the official Census, Christian Action conducted its own Census of the Homeless, using Centrepoint as its headquarters. In November 1971, Christian Action itself moved into Soho, and opened a shelter for homeless women in Greek Street, very near to St Anne's House.

One of the most disturbing trends which we have seen at Centrepoint is the rapid movement of some youngsters from home to situations of extreme danger. Many of those who came through Centrepoint during 1970 and 1971 were under twenty, few had used Government reception centres, and most had left home during the previous week or month. Provision for young homeless people in London is appallingly inadequate. Apart from Centrepoint and a few other places, all the beds in hostels, lodging houses and shelters are strictly segregated. Often they are all full. Over and over again, we found ourselves in positions of complete helplessness.

But although the numbers of new arrivals were increasing and more young people were coming into the world of the temporarily homeless, the West End drug culture was very much in decline during 1970 and 1971. This was true at a number of levels. After the setting up of the treatment centres, the majority of heroin addicts left Piccadilly, and only used it for surplus supplies if they ran short. The old 'junkies' corner' was reduced to a small hard core of semi-vagrant addicts, and the aura of Eros as a junkie mecca gradually faded. The changed method of dealing with prescriptions was a crucial factor in the decline of the West End, for after 1968 the clinics posted addicts' prescriptions to the chemist nearest to their home. As a result, Boots' at Piccadilly Circus ceased to play a central role for cashing prescriptions, and tended to be used more by the vagrant or semi-vagrant addicts. In addition to this, not only did a number of the established 'Piccadilly junkies' die from overdoses in 1969-70, but the graph for increases in heroin addiction nationaly had, at last, begun to fall. Dr Ian James, formerly Medical Officer at Brixton Prison, in a paper given at the International Conference on Addiction at Cardiff in 1970, showed with abundant statistical material, that the heroin epidemic was probably over.Certainly in Soho we were seeing few new addicts after 1970: we only saw the old addicts who kept coming back.

Meanwhile, Soho had begun to decline as a club quarter among young people. Of course the big music clubs for jazz, folk, rhythm and blues, and rock, remained at a fairly static level. But the subcultural life of the club-going youth was declining. Laurie Little, an experienced youth worker, described the beginnings of this decline in an article in the Soho Project Report in 1969.

Since 1963-4, the time of The Discotheque in Wardour Street and the rash of clubs run by Nash; the time of pep-pill parties in the Leicester Square conveniences—when for a moment innocent girls and boys felt they had latched on to something really new—the word has come back—the West End's had it. Certainly the action in the last two or three years has been much more on the perimeter of London: a whole club-going sector of the youth of Inner London turned their backs on the pathetic con of Soho and the West End, and it's doubtful if they will ever need to come back.

Certainly by 1967, it was the more 'deviant' kids who used the clubs, and by 1970, even these seemed less in evidence. Most of the young people whom I knew in the gay clubs and other all-night centres in 1967-68 have now left the West End. So gradually Soho has become more the refuge for the severely disturbed, fringe psychopathic youth, whose degree of alienation is very great. The gay clubs have tended to move further west towards Earl's Court, Kensington and Chelsea. Lyceums and large dance halls have sprung up in the suburbs. The entertainment role of the inner West End has declined. At the same time, the drug scene has shifted its focal points. The West End drug culture has passed its peak and is now on the wane: other parts of the country are now at, or will soon reach, the stage that Soho was at a number of years ago.

What of the pill-taking youth? Viewed solely from a pharmacological perspective, Soho has always been primarily a pill scene. It is the amphetamines which have dominated the drug market: not illicitly manufactured materials as in the United States, but tablets and capsules which have emanated from well-known pharmaceutical houses. This perhaps needs to be stressed as it is sometimes claimed by ill-informed persons that illicit manufacture plays a major role here. Thus the Guardian on 9 July 1971 reported: 'Schoolboys are helping to make amphetamines in laboratories which supply a quarter of the drugs black market, a police surgeon told a conference of the British Medical Association in London yesterday.' This is complete nonsense. The overwhelming majority of amphetamines which circulate among drug abusers are licitly manufactured, and reach the black market by a variety of routes: over-prescribing and thefts from warehouses, manufacturers, and retail chemists are the major ones. It is these substances which have provided the bulk of the drugs which are used illegally in the streets of Soho.

What value are the amphetamines? At one time they were used in a variety of conditions: fatigue, depression, overweight, and so on. Their use as a `wakeamine' made them popular during the Second World War when, in the form of Benzedrine, they were issued in enormous quantities to the armed forces. The earliest groups of abusers of 'purple hearts' (Drinamyl) in the 1950s consisted in fact, of middle-aged women who used them as slimming agents. The psychiatric use of amphetamines became virtually obsolete with the appearance of tranquillizers and anti-depressants. They were found to be virtually useless as slimmers. The Ministry of Health's Annual Report of 1955, which described them as 'relatively non-toxic', claimed that addiction to them was rare and that few risks accompanied their use. Three years later Dr Philip Connell published his Amphetamine Psychosis! But the danger of the amphetamines had been described long before this in the Japanese and American literature. In 1968 a Working Party of the British Medical Association reported that there were no real indications for their use except in the treatment of narcolepsy, a very rare condition.

Yet these obsolete drugs continue to be manufactured. In Ipswich and several other areas, doctors and chemists have co-operated in implementing a voluntary ban on amphetamines, and it has been su 14:ested that this should be attempted nationally. It would be silly to see this as panacea for all drug ills. Drug abuse will not be eliminated by more and more controls on availability. Nevertheless, the present situation, where therapeutically useless substances are poured forth onto the market, is indefensible. It is little use to have a few overworked individuals in Soho and elsewhere attempting to rescue casualties from a swamp if no attention is paid to the more important problem of draining the swamp.

In my book A Practical Guide to the Drug Scene I suggested that there were five qualities which were particularly necessary in the priest who ministers among alienated young people, and they bear repetition here. None of them are qualities which I feel I possess adequately, and indeed I tend to view much of my failure as a pastor as the result of a failure to cultivate them. First, naturalness. There is an old catholic maxim that grace perfects nature and does not destroy it: the Spirit of God works through human personalities with all their peculiarities, inhibitions, eccentricities and weaknesses. I find it very sad to see priests attempting to assume a role in order to gain effect, an assumed `with-it-ness'. Certainly there is a desperate need for more beat priests, more hippy priests, more gay priests, more revolutionary priests, and one of our major problems in the Church is that so often we draw our ordinands from a fairly monochrome section of the population. The reason why ordinands are often out of touch with the growing youth culture is that they come from sections of the community which are least representative of the community as a whole—though this pattern is changing. But the answer is not for ordinands or priests to assume a facade, a way-out cover-up for a straight, conventional individual. We must never pretend to be what we are not for the sake of our image, for the sake of 'relevance', or for any other reason.

Secondly, a non-condescending approach. There is still too much paternalism around, the soup-kitchen approach, which treats people as objects of our pity: they are there to be done good to. We need to grow in humility and to care about people for their own sakes. `If there's one thing I hate', said one young man, 'it's being worked amongst.'

Thirdly, the absence of the 'parsonic voice' and image. I really believe that the 'parsonic voice' has done a tremendous amount of damage. It is not just the dull monotony and the false impression of insincerity which it gives. It is more the cultivated style of talking at people, not to them. It is a corrupting thing which spreads like a virus: you can watch young men acquiring the voice, the intonation, the silly mannerisms, the precious, affected air. With the voice and mannerisms goes the image of the nice, refined clergyman, very fragile and easily shocked, insulated from the real world of conflict and suffering, protected by his collar and dark suit from real human contact. So many youngsters feel that the priest is not really human, and that to talk about sex, for instance, would shock and shake him. Too often I am afraid they are right. Certainly the natural, spontaneous way in which many young people talk about their sex hang-ups as well as their sexual pleasure would embarrass and shock a good number of inhibited clergymen. So the discussion takes place when he is not there, either because the people are too kind to offend him, or too scared to approach him. So it is that the priest often misses out on the central areas of human life.

One result of this, sadly, is that clergy conversations tend to become pathetically trivial. One can see this at two levels. Because many people find clergy difficult, if not impossible, to talk to in a relaxed way, they restrict their conversations to superficialities. But also the clergy themselves, through an excessive cultivation of clerical gatherings, tend to talk about ecclesiastical affairs as if the whole world depended on them. The late Canon Stanley Evans once commented of one clergyman: 'Only surrounded by clergymen can he be happy: the superficial bonhomie of the common-room or the gossip of the sacristy appears to be necessary to his salvation.' I think that an excess of clergy meetings is as bad for the soul as an excess of alcohol is for the body. They encourage so much of the clerical image which alienates us from ordinary people.

Fourthly, a sense of humour. One of the authentic signs of freedom is laughter. I think that it is very important for priests to be laughed at. In fact, my wife sees one of the main functions of the priest's wife to be 'taking the mickey' out of her husband, so that people can see through the clerical image. A ridiculously well-developed sense of the irrational and absurd is really important in contemporary youth culture. If all the clergy started to take Private Eye instead of some of the dreadful church papers, it would be a help.

Finally, confidentiality and trustworthiness. The priest needs to be seen as a reliable person whose confidence can be taken for granted. The issue of confidentiality is of the greatest importance. One's whole reputation as a priest may be damaged by a breakdown at this point. If one is not trusted, one cannot hope to be heard.
But, in the end, any recital of qualities and virtues must sound artificial and unreal. One cannot learn to be a true pastor from any book. I cannot hope to convey more than a glimmering of how one approaches pastoral work simply by writing about it: so much depends on the kind of person we become. We can only show the fruits of the Spirit if we are filled with the Spirit.