Billy’s story
The back story of East Marsh United, in Grimsby, excerpted from my book Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us
“Our mams would’ve gone,” said his neighbour Tracey to Billy Dasein one afternoon in 2017. Until she pulled that card on him, Billy wasn’t intending to go to the meeting, which had been called by a local councillor. In his fifties, with rings and studs in both ears and a further stud in his right eyebrow, Billy isn’t much for official efforts, The Authorities.
With the councillor’s meeting, Billy anticipated just another in the steady stream of opportunities for a collective wallow in the problems of the East Marsh, a neighbourhood ranked the 25th most deprived of 33,000 across England, itself part of the town of Grimsby that had recently been voted the worst place to live in the country. That summer, Rutland Street in the East Marsh hit local headlines on multiple occasions as the epicentre of Grimsby’s misery: drug dealing, antisocial behaviour and vandalism had escalated to the point where many residents were afraid even to leave their homes.
Grimsby charts a proud history back over a thousand years, and as recently as the 1950s, even the 1970s, it was buzzing. In those days it was among the world’s busiest ports, and boasted the world’s largest commercial fishing fleet. Situated on the east coast of England, on the south side of the mouth of the vast Humber River that divides the counties of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, the trawlers would head out to the north, to the rich fishing grounds off the coast of Iceland. They would bring back enough cod and haddock not just to feed the English — and establish fish and chips as the national dish — but for export to much of western Europe. And it wasn’t all work. Within a few miles, past the old industrial dockyards through the residential streets of the East Marsh (its name bestowed by marshland which was drained so that houses could be built for the dockworkers), lies the long sand beach of Cleethorpes, one of Britain’s original 19th century seaside resorts.
As Britain lost its imperial swagger, though, Iceland was one among many nations to become more assertive in defence of its national interests. Over three decades and three conflicts — known as the Cod Wars — that saw the deployment of both navies and several times came perilously close to fill-scale military engagement, Iceland and then the European Union gained control over the seas, and Grimsby’s fishermen found their catch drastically reduced.
The town still has several big employers, in fish and other food processing, and in the chemicals factories that sprung up along the Humber in the 1960s and 70s, but the jobs are of neither the kind nor the quantity to sustain the pride of the descendants of generations of fishermen. In 1970, there were 400 trawlers working out of Grimsby docks; in 2013, there were five. It should be no surprise, then, that Grimsby was an important stop on Boris Johnson’s “Get Brexit Done” tour of key constituencies in the last days before the 2019 General Election: Grimsby is the perfect example of the “Red Wall” Labour-voting seats that made the historic switch to Conservative representation, and the perfect symbol of the fault of outsiders for the country’s malaise.
Grimsby’s decline provided a background to Billy’s life. “I didn’t go to school most of the time, just skipped after register was taken. When I look back now,” he says, “I wonder what would have happened if there weren’t other education available later. Well, I don’t wonder actually. I know. I’d be in same place as most people round here are now.” He speaks with the unique Grimsby accent, clipped, almost Yorkshire but not quite, definite articles definitely optional.
Finding little to relate to at school, he took an apprenticeship as a pipe fitter at the age of 16, to the relief of his parents. “Getting a job was the single most important thing a person could do in that culture.” He did that work for a decade, the “dreary flatness of unchallenging employment,” until returning to school as a mature student. After the deeply hierarchical environment of the factory, school brought Billy to life. In the 1980s, Humber Lodge in Grimsby offered an extensive range of courses, including a two-year diploma in higher education, designed primarily (in the way of the time) for women looking to train or retrain as teachers after having had children. After earning his own degree, Billy became a teacher there until the closure of the Lodge in the late 1990s, which happened as the slow encroachment of education made its way to Grimsby.
Billy went adventuring abroad for a few years, setting up a school in Oman and teaching English in Poland, until a job at Birmingham University offered him the opportunity to start the doctorate he’d been pondering. Only in 2013, upon the death of his mother, did Billy return to Grimsby, to look after his father amid the onset of dementia. It was one of those catastrophes that evolve into a blessing, as Billy finally faced up to the challenges in the East Marsh, beginning with the 2017 meeting he intended to skip.
With his mother’s departed spirit invoked to prod him along, Billy headed to the meeting convened by a local councillor, Steve Beasant. It started out pretty much as Billy expected: “A load of people complaining, throwing stones at people who were doing their best but couldn’t fix it.”
Billy had been reading about the Broken Windows Theory, originally proposed by conservative political scientists Jame Q Wilson and George L Kelling in an article in The Atlantic in 1982, and popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point. Hugely influential, one of the most cited articles in criminology, the article opened with the sentence, “A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed.” Setting out a logical-sounding progression in which smaller crimes beget larger crimes, it would become the basis for “zero tolerance” policies that focused on people committing petty crimes like graffitti and loitering; it led to extensive “stopping and frisking” — and often arrests and convictions — that overwhelmingly targeted boys and men of colour. The Broken Windows Theory — like the “superpredator theory” that came a decade later from a neoconservative Princeton professor named John Dilulio, but embraced and popularised by the very same James Q Wilson — has since been fully debunked as yet another justification for white supremacy as expressed in unjust policing.
However, a baby might have been disposed of with the broken windows bathwater. The abandoned property and the rampant weeds described in the first part of the opening sentence were lost whne all the focus went to the criminal act of smashing the window (everyone loves to focus on the criminal). Yet according to the research, general disrepair and blight are indeed factors that correlate with the suffering (and yes, crime) of a community. Of course, they’re factors that are much more challenging to address, often reflecting decades of underinvestment from both the public and private sector, often in places like Grimsby where industry once thrived but fled due to a combination of factors: international trade agreements, and cost-saving measures on the part of corporations relocating to places with less protected, less dignified labour. The authorities can’t so easily arrest that and stick it behind bars.
East Marsh had certainly reached the point of looking — and indeed smelling — uncared for. I first came across Billy’s story in an article titled A Dead Dog in the Bathtub. In an abandoned house on Rutland Street, the said dog lay in a bathtub for months. “[It] only became obvious when bluebottle flies started coming through into next door… Police had gone in to make sure there was not a human body inside, then left again, boarding up the door behind them and leaving the dog for someone else.”
Billy stood up at that meeting and called on the better natures of those present. I’m fairly certain his speech was more inspiring than he recounts it to me, three years later. As he tells it though, “I just said we should get together and clear up, simple as that really. I got a round of applause, so I said to leave me your name if you’re up for it. I got 30 names, 16 turned up for the first clear up, and the rest is history really.”
“The rest” was the founding and subsequent growth and flourishing of East Marsh United. What began as a one-off clear up quickly became a regular affair, meeting fortnightly to sort two or three streets together (including getting rid of that dog, no thanks to either the landlord who owned the property, or the police); then things began to develop further. By the end of 2017, the growing “EMU” team had registered the organisation as a Community Benefit Society, and the first issue of The Proud East Marshian, a monthly community magazine, had gone to print. Planning soon began for a Sun And Moon Community Arts Festival. The clear up squads evolved into fortnightly open meetings (though the clear ups still happen), with rotating chairmanship, and grants started to come in, allowing for Billy to take a small salary and then another paid organiser to be recruited.
As the work of the group continued, though, a root cause of the problems became apparent: housing, and in particular the ownership of housing. With Britain’s sustained property boom, hosuing stock has become a major investment industry, with landlords proliferating over decades in tandem with house price rises. A good number of those landlords live elsewhere in the world, investing their wealth in premium London apartments and townhouses and frequently leaving them empty, furthering the housing crisis. But Grimsby and the East Marsh exemplify the relatively untold story of the damage at the other end.
“You can still buy a house in the East Marsh for ten grand or so,” Billy tells me, “and you don’t need to make much in rent to cover that. So people do it, and trust me, they don’t give a shit about the state of the property. When they can get tenants, they can’t get anything fixed. When they can’t, they leave them to rot.”
It’s clear how this sort of situation leads to the environment Billy described, and the resonance of the Broken Windows approach. But he and the EMU team are working on a solution to this, alongside everything else and in line wiht their “OUR problems, OUR solutions” philosophy. EMU is becoming a social housing provider. Pooling resources, it’s already raised the money to buy several houses in the East Marsh, and let them affordably and responsibly to new tenants while developing a revenue stream for the organisation at the same time. (You can find out more, and invest in their community share offer, here.)
When I visit and walk the streets with Billy on a rainy day in June 2021, he shows me with pride the street the EMU team thinks could be a model for the area. Wide pavements, small but enclosed front gardens where bins can be kept, a few trees. Nothing crazy, and entirely possible. The residents of several other streets are talking to EMU, and indeed joining the group, as they seek to pool funding and support one another to make it happen. Then he takes me inside EMU’s latest purchase, just around the corner from his own home. This he does to show me the scale of the challenge still outstanding. With no front gardens and narrow pavements, bins are out on the street, several of them spilling. The outside of the house has been painted, but behind a locked outer screen, it’s immediately clear what it must have looked like. The old front door is still on, a four letter word beginning with C blazoned across it in blue graffitti.
I come away chastened but deeply hopeful. Billy and the EMU team have a task on their hands. But they’re up to it, and more importantly, up for it.
***
Want more citizening in your life? Head to my website, sign up to the mailing list, and I’ll share a whole load of ways to get involved…
