ABSTRACT
In the optimistic days of early post-war Britain, it was expected that once the immediate housing shortages caused by war damage had been made good, a permanent home would be available to all workers. It was through the National Assistance Act of 1948 that the Welfare State impinged upon the vagrant and the homeless. The new National Assistance Board took over the casual wards as state institutions, to be known, under Part 2 of the Act, as Reception Centres. Vagrants, though outside the National Insurance scheme, now became entitled to welfare payments, the discretionary National Assistance benefit which replaced the poor law and the pre-war Unemployment Assistance Board payments. Jeremy Sandford leaves rather than see her children taken into care, and the play ends when she and her children are found sleeping in a railway station, and the latter are removed by police and welfare officers against her anguished protests.
