It was just over a year ago when Bob Holman - the inspiring activist from Easterhouse on the edge of Glasgow, now retired but still active - issued a challenge in The Guardian newspaper. He called on eight named women to put a spotlight on the lives of people living in poverty in the UK now. (I was the add-on - woman no. 9 - who got roped in as well.) And the report we wrote together, Our Lives: Challenging attitudes to poverty in 2015, launched today in Newcastle, does just that (#ourlives2015).
Our Lives deliberately harks back in its title to the report Bob Holman wanted us to emulate. Our Towns: A close-up was published in 1943 and written by another group of eight women - members of the Hygiene Committee of the Women’s Group on Public Welfare. They were trying to respond to the many complaints made about working class evacuees sent from the East End of London and elsewhere to safer, often richer, places. Bob Holman was himself one of those evacuated children and remembers the experience well.
The host families complained that these children often had nits or fleas; they wet the bed; they didn’t have the proper clothes; and they didn’t behave properly, either. Our Towns was an attempt, by eight women all actively involved in health visiting, teaching or voluntary work, to explain the context of these children’s lives, where they came from, and in particular the structural roots of the poverty they lived. And they spelt out clearly how much the children’s parents cared about them.
