The story of my life – in 62 pubs

I had a déjà vu feeling last Tuesday when in a room with a flipchart trying to define the upcoming MOPPAC – Ministry of Poverty Prevention and Cure. Déjà vu in the sense that I had been there countless times before, most memorably in 1991 when Phil Ryan – the first person I took on to help me launch the Big Issue – and I imagined what it would look like; the flipchart being the most useful piece of kit.  

This time though we are seeking to sharpen the chancellor of the Exchequer’s mind about lifting the enormous weight of poverty off the NHS’s back. Reducing the 50% of people suffering food poverty who fill the beds and surgeries with their poverty-related ailments. By investing in poverty prevention and cure and not simply the maintenance that is leaving people in the stew of poverty.  

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Phil and I were together last weekend for a memorable concert down on Dartmoor in a pub called The Northmore Arms. I discovered it when, a few years ago, my family were at a retreat nearby and I retreated to The Northmore Arms for solace. I have been back a few times since, and a livelier pub I have not been in for years.  But it did get me thinking about pubs and their role in my life. Not just places to drink and get drunk in, but places where significant things happened that changed the course of my life. So while Phil was blasting out his songs to a packed audience I retired to my van to list the pubs that had changed my life; or were worthy of being included in a list of the significant ones.    

My mum and dad met in a pub in Notting Hill in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. It was called The Princess Alexandra and was a true slum dwellers’ pub. My mum-to-be was working around the corner in Portobello Road in a pub called The Golden Cross.  

In 1967 I met Gordon Roddick for the first time in Paddy’s Bar in Edinburgh’s Rose Street. We became friends but fell out of contact. Twenty years later I reconnected with Gordon and he was the inspiration for creating a street paper and the one who, from his earnings from his company The Body Shop, paid for the Big Issue to come into being.  

Sixty-two pubs, the latest being The Northmore Arms. 

There was The Salutation pub in King Street, Hammersmith, where I was to meet a bullying boy – now man – to confront him with his childhood crimes. Memories of black eyes and bleeding noses crowded in on me when I saw this now small and pathetic-looking man. As a boy, however hard I fought back, his superior age and strength floored me. Alas he did not show, probably aware that I might buy him pints but would enact a verbal thrashing on him.  

I could as easy measure my history by churches: St Michael and All Angels in Notting Hill, where I was baptised and had my first holy communion. Our Lady of Victories in Kensington High Street, where I was married for the first time 59 years ago. Our Lady of Perpetual Succour that I attended as a child and watched my now-dead brother Patrick pledge himself forever to his fiancée. She soon became a Jehovah’s Witness and later deserted him and took the children with her.  

St Martin-in-the-Fields which gave help to rough sleepers like me when I was a teenager, where we launched the Big Issue in their crypt. Cathedrals like Sheffield that had a drop-in centre for homeless people and where comfort and guidance were readily supplied. Churches often still do come to the rescue of the hardest hit and we should be proud of their position in our communities.   

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The 33rd anniversary of the Big Issue came round last month and I cannot remember any clamour or
celebration. It just passed. 

We are suckers for anniversaries and only the 40th awaits us with any sense of moment. For who wants a little odd number as a reason to celebrate? I can’t imagine the 35th causing any reason to be cheerful. No, we’ve passed all the possible celebrations for another six years.   

Possibly for me the 10th anniversary was the most significant Big Issue moment. Not because it coincided with 9/11, a most notorious date if there ever was one, but because when a Times journalist asked me what my next trick would be, I said that I “have spent 10 years mending broken clocks. And I will spend the next 20 or 30 years trying to prevent clocks from breaking”.  

That’s the reason I volunteered to enter The House of Lords: to try and dismantle poverty by preventing it, which is not on the agenda of any of the political players of today. Unfortunately they are caught in the doldrums of just trying to keep poor people as comfortable as possible.   

To think, if I had not gone into Paddy’s Bar in 1967 and met Gordon Roddick I would not be able to recount to you each week my obsessions about ending poverty once and for all.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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