Perched on the stool he’s brought from home “London’s oldest beggar”, Tom, can often be seen gripping the side of his granny trolley. The 83-year-old has to be on the lookout for central London’s many thieves who’ll snatch his money the moment he lets his guard down.
“I’ve been robbed twice,” he told Express.co.uk “they watch me, pounce when they see their opportunity and grab my bag of money. I’ve had nearly £100 taken.
“They run away. [No one’s] going to stop them because they might have a knife. They’d end up in a pool of blood. A lot of crime is perpetrated by people who carry knives.”
Tom, who spoke to us on the condition we didn’t reveal his second name, braves the cold to beg on Oxford Street because he can’t afford to live in London on his government pension.
“It’s nothing,” he added, “you’d be living off bread and cheese.”
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Even then, it’s a battle for Tom to sit on the street. The Express.co.uk finds him dressed in a large coat and hat, but still shaking from the cold.
“I nearly didn’t come out today. I’ve had chronic heart failure, blood clots in both legs, arthritis in both knees, sugar diabetes and I’m blind in one eye. For six months I wasn’t coming out, today I wasn’t feeling well but I talked myself into it,” he said.
Originally from Romford, East London, Tom has been coming to the West End to work for 60 years. “I was a street trader,” he continued, “I sold balloons on Oxford Street for 10 years, then I sold clothes, handbags, hotdogs and chestnuts.”
In his youth, Tom felt the brunt of a hardline approach taken by the police. “They used to arrest us ‘for obstructing the Queen’s highway’. Once when I was selling balloons I got arrested seven times in one day, that was my record. But, one day, they came along and said ‘we’re not going to arrest you anymore, we’re going to take your property and put it in the crusher,” the pensioner said.
Tom’s precarious health condition means his wife of 58 years will occasionally come down to the West End and check on her husband. The 83-year-old said: “She was keeping an eye on me because I might fall ill. I’ve been having a lot of nosebleeds recently.”
The couple have two children together; a boy and a girl. Tragically Tom’s son died of stomach cancer last year and, although he’s barely scraping by himself, the pensioner still seeks to support his daughter, a single mother with three children.
“She knows what I do,” he continued, “I’m a street person. I’m not an architect or a doctor or anything. [But] I feel duty-bound to support her and the kids.”
He takes immense pride in the fact his eldest grandchild recently graduated from university and is set to study for a master’s degree. Tom describes the boy’s younger brother, who has aspirations to study Latin and Greek at Oxford, as the “real genius of the family”.
Tom still bears strong resentment towards his own father who abandoned the family when he was a child. “My father was a drunken Irish pig who ruined our family. [Years later] I was selling hotdogs in Soho when I saw him walking down the other side of the street. He saw me and just walked straight on. How can you be such a pig that you can blank your own child? He was just a scumbag,” he told Express.co.uk.
Occasionally, Tom is handed a donation so generous he can squirrel it away and pay for the things he needs for several days.
“One man gave me £120 pounds, a Northern Irish Protestant who was 10 years in the British Army. He gave me [that money] which was a miracle. I never know when I might not be able to go out on the streets so it’s good to have some [savings for] security. I look after it and use it when needs be.”
After 60 years, Tom has a warning to anyone who might follow in his footsteps. “I wouldn’t recommend a street life to anybody. Not these days especially,” he added.
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