Hitch-hikers Regarded As Beggars By Law

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31520, 7 November 1967, Page 14

Hitch-hikers Regarded As Beggars By Law

(By

C. H. ROLPH,

<n the

“Guardian”)

(Reprinted by arrangement) My teen-age, breakaway son wanted to go camping in Dorset with a school friend. How would they get there? Pause. He knows what I think about hitch-hiking and it happens to be what he thinks too. “Well, we might get a lift...”

If I forbade him to hitchhike he would do it without telling me. (So would 1.) So I shrugged and he hitched and came back a fortnight later. claret-coloured and happy and oddly grown up. Then I read about David Cornell of Bournemouth, who went hitch-hiking in France and was 18. Two men gave him a lift near Lyons. They took his camera and £2O and then pushed him out. He went to the nearest police station.

Forbidden In France Hitch-hiking, the gendarme told him, was forbidden. “He ordered me to go and slammed the door in my face. I was amazed at his attitude. I expected him to organise some sort of search for the crooks.” (But in France they have given up police-public relationships.) “I didn’t know what to do. T had no money. Finally I got a job in an hotel, and then I met a friend who paid my fare home. I knew hitchhiking was frowned on by the French but I didn’t know it was forbidden.” He is asking the French Embassy what the law of France really says about that, and about the slamming of police station doors upon the victims of theft. Vagrancy Act It is really the question of passenger insurance that bothers the French authorities. It worries ours, too, though not to the point where they say “serves you right” when you get what is coming to you. No doubt some of this worry rubs off on to the morality of hitch-hiking, and we may be approaching the frame of mind that made

the early Victorians imprison the poor for begging. We have carefully kept alive the part of the 1824 Vagrancy Act that provides 14 days’ imprisonment for:

Every person wandering abroad, or placing himself in any public place, street, or highway, to beg.

And we still prosecute about three beggars a year. Now what is hitch-hiking if it is not begging? The thing begged for does not have to be money—the Victorians sometimes convicted their beggars when they merely asked for bread. Even in Edwardian times, if you wanted other people's bread you had to make some pretence of singing for it, or turning the handle of some instrument Men don’t beg for money today. Of those who want money, most go on national assistance, and the rest, having drawn too much and too often, come to see me instead. (Fruitlessly.) Only those who want free travel facilities beg in the streets. They are today’s mendicants, and some of them attract special penalties. Mendicant Friars Remember the mendicant friars? Driving through my village one rainy day recently I passed a vicar I know. Paddling along and holding up his flowing cassock, he looked appealingly at me and I picked him up. Had he read the Clergy Discipline Act lately? Not lately. Did he know what an immoral act was? Oh yes. And that in addition to drinking in alehouses, playing dice or cards and swearing, it included begging? He grinned. He had not begged a ride from me, he said. He had conferred or

bestowed himself upon me. That is the way you have to be able to talk if you want to hitch-hike with dignity. Offering Lifts But there must also be some method of pulling up and offering a lift without looking shifty or lecherous or something. I have never found this method. People will not get in when I stop. They are always waiting for somebody else, thanks. I gave up trying some years ago.

So I have also stopped picking people up. I don’t ignore these young chaps with the rotating thumbs, or stare past them. I can’t do it. Instead I point to the right and try to look as if I’m nearly home. But whatever the French do, I don’t want hitch-hiking made unlawful. I know a member of Parliament who does, and he’s got a draft bill ready. It puts the onus on the motorist, making him the offender and requiring him to prove he is not. You never saw such a colander of a bill. Any motorist could get through one hole or another—these lads are my friends, my sons, my pupils, my employees, my wife’s youth club members, etc. And if you tried to penalise the hiker himself—“l thought it was my father, my boss, my uncle, my . . . ” There are too many laws that the police can enforce, without thinking up some more that they could not. Even the French police, I suspect, were bluffing. Hitching will go on until the time, not far away now, when motorists will have to sit in their cars and watch the hikers, hitchless, hurrying by. Obsolescence kills many a social custom that the law can't reach.