ABSTRACT
Among the alcoholic vagrants there is a distinct scale of descent from rough cider and cheap wine at the top, down to meths. Charitable effort for vagrant alcoholics has been varied, including amateurishly run shelters in church premises, Salvation Army hostels with attempted rehabilitation, and the Morning Star hostels in the north-west of England, 'Simonlight', and Rathcoole House in South London. The last was founded in 1966 as a response to the nuisance in Southwark caused by the high concentrations of vagrant alcoholics in the neighbourhood of Camberwell Spike. The proven futility and failure of sending drunken vagrant offenders to short terms in jail with transitory efforts at rehabilitation led to a token change in official policy from 1967. Female vagrants formed only about one in twenty of all down-and-outs, at any rate into the early 1970s, though author told that they now form a bigger proportion, an untoward side effect of women's liberation as women become more footloose.
