Clouds of Glory - Bryan Magee

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‘…the police came to view the job as one of containment. Their chief concern was to see that the wild life in these urban jungles did not become a menace to society as a whole. To this end they came down crushingly on any crimes against respectable citizens from outside, including therefore crimes against house and business property in the slum areas themselves; but apart from that it was only the most flagrant of violent crime that they treated as of pressing concern. The everyday crime that was part of normal life among the overcrowded poor was not something they could realistically regard as within their control – the pilfering and petty thieving that went on all the time, the violence within families behind closed doors that was the rule rather than the exception, the drunkenness, the prostitution. In such an enormous world as the slums of East London, in which it was common for a whole family to sleep in one bed if it was lucky enough to have a bed, such crimes as incest and the abuse of children was beyond all possibility of detection.

The life of the respectable poor was essentially a life of repression, a great deal of it self-repression, and was no life for anyone with drive and ambition unless they were dedicatedly self-disciplined.

An ever-present fact of life for most people in those circumstances was the sheer stress of it. The extreme overcrowding alone was stress-inducing, and to of that there were unsocial hours of physical labour, often mindless labour in primitive conditions, bad-quality food and clothing, bad-quality housing and heating, poor sanitation, little or no medical attention, no holidays, searing money troubles, the crushing burden of family responsibilities in circumstances always harsh and difficult. Life was just plain grim, and most of its victims were trapped in it. Serious illnesses among them were common. The average expectation of life was several years less than it was for the rest of society. Breakdowns were familiar news, and so were suicides. The great escape route that lay at everybody’s hands was alcohol. People drank to escape, to tranquillise themselves, to forget, to get out of it all. Drunkenness to the point of alcoholism was common among both sexes, especially as people got older and felt themselves less able to cope: but of course those who spent a lot of money on drink made their other problems worse, and just added a drink problem on top of them. It was a downwardly spiralling form of self-destruction, and many families were devastated by it.’

(Bryan Magee: Clouds of Glory, London, 2003, pp.82-84)
(© Bryan Magee, 2003. Published by permission of AP Watt Ltd on behalf of Brian Magee)

Clouds of Glory - Bryan Magee
Home page		Click here to return to the previous page
	‘…the police came to view the job as one of containment. Their chief concern was to see that the wild life in these urban jungles did not become a menace to society as a whole. To this end they came down crushingly on any crimes against respectable citizens from outside, including therefore crimes against house and business property in the slum areas themselves; but apart from that it was only the most flagrant of violent crime that they treated as of pressing concern. The everyday crime that was part of normal life among the overcrowded poor was not something they could realistically regard as within their control – the pilfering and petty thieving that went on all the time, the violence within families behind closed doors that was the rule rather than the exception, the drunkenness, the prostitution. In such an enormous world as the slums of East London, in which it was common for a whole family to sleep in one bed if it was lucky enough to have a bed, such crimes as incest and the abuse of children was beyond all possibility of detection. The life of the respectable poor was essentially a life of repression, a great deal of it self-repression, and was no life for anyone with drive and ambition unless they were dedicatedly self-disciplined. An ever-present fact of life for most people in those circumstances was the sheer stress of it. The extreme overcrowding alone was stress-inducing, and to of that there were unsocial hours of physical labour, often mindless labour in primitive conditions, bad-quality food and clothing, bad-quality housing and heating, poor sanitation, little or no medical attention, no holidays, searing money troubles, the crushing burden of family responsibilities in circumstances always harsh and difficult. Life was just plain grim, and most of its victims were trapped in it. Serious illnesses among them were common. The average expectation of life was several years less than it was for the rest of society. Breakdowns were familiar news, and so were suicides. The great escape route that lay at everybody’s hands was alcohol. People drank to escape, to tranquillise themselves, to forget, to get out of it all. Drunkenness to the point of alcoholism was common among both sexes, especially as people got older and felt themselves less able to cope: but of course those who spent a lot of money on drink made their other problems worse, and just added a drink problem on top of them. It was a downwardly spiralling form of self-destruction, and many families were devastated by it.’ (Bryan Magee: Clouds of Glory, London, 2003, pp.82-84) (© Bryan Magee, 2003. Published by permission of AP Watt Ltd on behalf of Brian Magee)


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