Dartmoor Bill
Toynbee Hall periodically crops up in these East End history pieces, so great a part has it played in Tower Hamlets’ story over the past 122 years. The story this week of Bill Linskey, who died last month, brings in the university settlement again, in an example not so much of coincidence but of how its benign influence has percolated down the years.
Bill Linskey was born in 1921 in the Northumberland town of Jarrow. The industrial town was a centre of shipbuilding and mining, though by the early twenties it was desperately poor (it would become better known to Londoners with the Jarrow March of 1936). His mother died when he was seven and the young Bill left at 14, for London and the hope of work. With the advent of World War II he was in the merchant navy, a tough Geordie renowned for his skill as a bareknuckle boxer and as a heavy drinker.
He had to be tough to survive. He was shipwrecked twice, first on the Ashby which was torpedoed 200 miles from shore, in the deadly waters of the South Atlantic. A small band spent seven days in a lifeboat, eventually reaching the Azores. He then worked on Arctic convoys, shipping food and weapons to the Soviet Union. The merchant fleet are the often unsung heroes of the Second World War, enduring horrible dangers and with every likelihood of losing their lives - more than 30,000 British merchant seamen died in the conflict. Bill was torpedoed again, this time on the Empire Beaumont. Again, fortune smiled, as a Russian trawler took him back to the port of Archangel. There he learned to speak Russian, drink blindingly strong vodka, and worked on the docks. Eventually he signed up with an American vessel, aiming to work his way back to London.
The ship hit an iceberg, but once again Linskey was plucked from freezing waters by a Russian ship, and in 1943 found himself back in London. With a maritime record worthy of Uncle Albert in ‘Only Fools And Horses’, Bill was understandably a deeply disturbed man; he was also drinking increasingly heavily. His young marriage collapsed, he was discharged from the Navy, and he drifted into a twilight world of drifting and boozing - until a drunken fight in 1947 saw he incarcerated in Dartmoor jail. He was to spend much of his time in solitary confinement - yet already there were the glimmerings of salvation.
He had already met Winifred Riddell, and she stuck by him until his release in 1953, whereon they married. He arrived back in London in May that year, determined that he would never drink again, and tracked down a branch of Alcoholics Anonymous to help him in his journey. In the early fifties there was just a handful of AA groups in the capital (today there are hundreds) and he fetched up at a meeting off the Edgware Road.
The movement had been founded in the mid-1930s by two recovering alcoholics, Dr Bob Smith and Bill Wilson. Despairing of psychoanalysis as a ‘cure’, the two had formulated the idea of a spiritual ‘12-step’ path to recovery, beginning with a spiritual awakening, and for this they had drawn heavily on the ideas of fellow American Dr Frank Buchanan’s ‘Oxford Group’. Buchanan was an evangelical Christian who had travelled the world in the early 1900s. He returned to the US to found his first hostel, in Pennsylvania, taking Toynbee Hall as his model. In 1947, AA had come to London and Bill, though an avowed atheist, found it gave him the strength to stay sober.
By the early sixties, ‘Dartmoor Bill’ Linskey’s life was back on track. Married with kids he was making a living as an electrician and street trader. But that wasn’t enough: a large part of the AA ethos is about helping other alcoholics. Bill saw a lot of drunkenness in the East End but no help for drinkers. In March 1965 some members began hunting for a venue, and Bill and a colleague knocked on the door of Toynbee Hall. The warden, Walter Birmingham, had taken over the crumbling settlement the year before, and was in the early days of transforming it into the hub for social work (both local and international) that it is today. He listened to Bill’s story and offered them a room in the hall. Agreeing a peppercorn rent, Bill had an East End base.
For months Bill and fellow member, actor Robert Urquhart would sit in the plush leather armchairs waiting for recruits … who never showed. But, as is the way of these things, the meeting gradually grew, celebrating 40 years of existence in 2005. Bill, meanwhile was to reach 85: drink-free for 53 years he was the longest-sober member of AA in Europe.
www.alcoholics-anonymous.org