Reform & Revolution 5 – Cathy Come Home

Published by Hannah Wooderson for 24dash.com in Housing and also in Featured

Over the coming months 24housing is unravelling – through personal testimony – the top 10 events, chosen by our panel of experts, to have shaped housing in the last 60 years.

6 Cathy Come Home – in a nutshell

Broadcast as part of the BBC’s Wednesday Play series in 1966, and watched by more than 12 million people, Cathy Come Home follows the plight of a young couple as they become homeless – eventually having their children taken off them by social services. Despite raising the profile of homelessness in Britain, it wasn’t until 1977 that local authorities were obligated to take in homeless people and the duty was transferred from local authority social services to housing departments.

Against the backdrop of the swinging sixties came a stark and grim reminder of homelessness in Britain. Still haunted by its gritty realism more than 40 years after watching it at school, social worker Ruth Stark recalls the tragic, power behind Cathy Come Home and tells Ross Macmillan why housing support means more than just bricks and mortar.

Where were you when Cathy Come Home was first broadcast in 1966?

I was at boarding school in Gloucestershire, while my parents were living in the Midlands. My father was a prison chaplain and I had a very strange upbringing. Between the ages of five and 12 I lived in an apartment above Feltham Borstal - which is now part of the young offender’s institution. When I went to bed at night I could hear the iron gates being locked and the keys being turned. I was aware that there were people aged 16, 17, and 18 living in that kind of institution and that they were being marched around – there was still a military ethic going on to install discipline.

How did the documentary make you feel?

I, and even my parents’ generation, was very shocked by Cathy Come Home. The hard-hitting message against the backdrop of the swinging sixties was a huge contrast. There were young people like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones earning vast amounts of money and enjoying their freedom, and then there was another set of young people who were very downtrodden and struggling with it all. Free thought, free thinking and free love were wonderful if you had money.

How did you take inspiration from the grim realism?

The documentary inspired my decision to work with people. I don’t think the role of the social worker in Cathy Come Home is one that inspired me. It was very harsh the way the social worker told Cathy that her children would be taken into care. It is the line I remember most – when the social worker turns to Cathy and says: “Now look, you’ve had your chance. We’re not interested in you now.”

What would the social worker say now faced with Cathy’s situation?

I think we would say it differently now. I suspect we might be saying the same thing but we would say it differently. I think we’d say something along the lines of: ‘We’ve given you the opportunity to change and you haven’t changed and it’s now too late for the child and the child’s interests are paramount.’ I would hope we would make more efforts now to keep the child with the mother.

Did the documentary have a bigger impact on you once you had become a social worker?

I would say the first screening had more of an impact on me. When I viewed it a second time I was a social worker and I was more philosophical. I remember thinking bits about the process and the profession had changed; had moved on. I thought, at least we’re talking about it more openly than we were in the 1950s and 1960s.

The changes that happened in society between the 1950s and the 1970s were staggering looking back on it, as one can do now; they were absolutely staggering. 

Were you aware of some of the social issues at the time?

Because my father was a prison chaplain I was probably more exposed to some of the social issues of the time than the people I was at school with. I was moving around all the time when I was growing up. In the prison service they moved the chaplains round every three or four years because it was still in the days of hanging prisons. The people that had to be present at hangings were the doctor, the governor and the prison chaplain so they had a policy of moving everybody around so you didn’t have to witness more than one hanging. I was very atypical in that respect. Most people lived in the same town as their grannies and their extended families.

My father was opposed to hanging. My father was working quite hard to get it abolished.

Would you say support for people in their own homes has got better?

In the last 10 years there’s been more recognition of the need for actual support for people in their own homes. I think housing support has been one of the great innovations in the last 10 to 15 years where we’ve had housing support recognised in the way it needs to be.

You can supply the bricks and mortar but that’s not all you need to provide. I do see mums who have been in the situation that Cathy finds herself in. I go round and assess what supports are available and I do see more family supports going on from support workers and that kind of thing than I did in the 1980s.

I think housing associations have been very important in recognising that it’s not just bricks and mortar – you have to have other support for people. A lot of people don’t have family around anymore, due to demographic changes etc.

Where could more support be focused?

I want people to invest more in prevention. If somebody is in difficulties, it is so much more cost effective to help them when they’re struggling than when they are in crisis. This has to come from family support and housing support services. There needs to be a better marriage of the skills of qualified social workers with housing support.

I used to work for a small housing association in Scotland. Despite marrying these two skills successfully within the organisation, the problem they then ran into was in the financing of the operation – the contract arrangements changed with the onset of community care and changes in budgeting and they got to a position where they could no longer employ qualified skilled social workers.

Are there more options for homeless people now than in the 1960s?

Yes. But although there are more options for homeless people than there were in 1966, what I think needs more development is the support while in this temporary state for people emotionally and physically - change in anyone's life is usually extremely stressful and can be traumatic especially if it is to move out of a violent or abusive situation.

Ruth Stark is a professional officer for the British Association of Social Workers in Scotland.

1966 – what else was happening?

• England win football’s World Cup for the first time since the tournament began in 1930.
• Shelter is founded in the same month as Cathy Come Home is broadcast. It is founded by The Reverend Bruce Kenrick who three years earlier formed the Notting Hill Housing Trust.
• James Callaghan announces that Britain will change over to decimal coinage in 1971 – replacing the pound, shilling and pence system.
• Ian Brady and Myra Hindley are sentenced to life imprisonment for the Moors murders.
• First US space probe lands on the moon four months after the Soviet Union makes the first controlled landing of a spacecraft on the moon. It would be three years before American Neil Armstrong would become the first man to walk on the moon.