6. Belfast Simon Community 1978 Anton our Founder , a brief biography

I signed the black edged Mass card of the founding father of the Belfast Simon Community the day after my arrival at 420 Antrim Road Belfast. I felt very serious,  religious and doom-laden .Or as Neil, in the series 'The Young Ones' would say 'Heavy!'

Anton Wallich Clifford was regarded the whole world with distant admiration as a saint. Those that knew him in a work or as one of the victim/slobs that he helped painted a portrait that was strident contrast to this.

The radical community worker Sally Trench, for example, who worked with him when she was very young and who continued to work with people who draw the short straw, introduces him in her work autobiography 'Bury me in my Boots' as a 'misguided idealist'.  After being expelled from his sainthood she walked and walked, felling lost and adrift, and landed up in a mental hospital.

I met Sally years after this. Sally in her late 30's was scruffy/posh and very assertive. It was hard to imagine anyone breaking her down.

Anton started his career of saving the people as a priest in the Franciscan or or it may have been the Jesuit order. He decided that he was too remote from his flock so he unfrocked himself and qualified as a Probation Officer. 

He decided once more that he was still too remote from his flock and opted to become one of the flock homself by founding a chain of  help the homeless communities. These spanned the length and breadth of the UK and Eire. Some of them were called Simon Community after Saint Simon of Cyrene*, some were called St Mungos and some were The Cyrenians.  All of them had the abiding principle that the helpers and the helped, the 'workers' and the 'residents' as he called them shared in the life of the homeless house and lived as a united community.staff and homeless bods slept in the same dorms, ate meals together and shared in the chores.

I dislike the psuedo-dignity of the label 'resident.' Why the class distinction between the helpers and the helped. We are all 'just people.'

Workers had an escape from the communal haven. We had days off. The  only escape of the homeless people who lived there was through quarelling and illlicit drinking.  

Vic Coughtrey, a resident who went on to become a worker bee was there at the start. Drifting onto a sofa as a drunken bum who loved to write and was ok working in the kitchen he recalls the glorious arch-communnard Anton as an emaciated redhead. Bawling 'we are all inadequate!' 

Anton would bawl 'we are all inadequate!' as he barged about his work, whenever the modd took him.

Anton died of TB at the age of 55. Tuberculosis is an infection that spreads faster among  homeless folk who cough over each others' dormitory beds or communal meals. They wait in the dole queues coughing and spluttering their guts out. But it is curable with tablets if caught in the early stages. I can only guess that he was so wrapped up in everything that he attempted to do that I was unaware that he was dying until his illness was unstoppable.

So there was are. The founder of my work who has died a couple of days before I arrived was a visionary who was killed by his driven self-destructiveness. 

But love or loathe him Anton was an agent of change. Before him homeless welfare had not moved on from the days of George Orwell's  1930's memoir 'Down and Out in Paris and London'. In those days homeless people were herded like cattle overnight  in barn like dormitories. After a dawn breakfast they were kicked out, no matter how cold or wet the weather was. They then had to tramp to the next dosshouse for food and shelter. People were not allowed to park their bodies at a dosshouse for more than a single night.

So this strange entrepreneurial mix of a man was a hero! He changed Tramps to People living in Homeless Hostels. Houses, even. He gave their feet a rest and their mind and personality a chance to settle and breathe.

He deserves our respect.

Anton Wallich-Clifford 1923-1978 R.I.P.

*Saint Simon of Cyrene was the man who bore Jesus' cross for him on the road to the crucifixion