Some time after his wife left him, Joseph stopped working at the steel works and dropped out of society. He became a tramp – he wandered the streets, with no proper home. For a time he seems to have lived in lodging houses, but by the 1970s he had found a home – a home where he lived for the rest of his life. It was a makeshift tent on the grass strip in the middle of Wolverhampton ring road.

　　Let me explain about ring roads. In the 1960s and 1970s, many local authorities in England decided that what their towns needed above everything else was a new road, running in a circle, around the town centre. These roads are known as ring roads. They disfigure most towns in England outside London. They say to us that cars are more important than people. Many ring roads are dual carriageways – that means that there is an empty piece of land in the middle of the road, to separate the cars racing in one direction from the cars racing in the other direction. Wolverhampton – which is an important town to the west of Birmingham – has a ring road, and it was there that Joseph decided to make his home.

　　Perhaps you think that you would like to live in the middle of a ring road too. However, you are not legally allowed to do this. But the local authority in Wolverhampton decided that it was best to let Joseph stay. His experiences during the war had damaged him psychologically. He may have suffered from claustrophobia – that is, a fear of being in a confined space, like a room or a building. So it was difficult to force him to live in a normal house.

　　Over the years, Joseph became a well-known sight in Wolverhampton. People called him “Fred” most of the time, instead of Joseph. He was often seen with a brush, sweeping rubbish off the ring road. Some people in the Indian and Sikh communities in Wolverhampton regarded him as a sort of holy man, and from time to time they would bring him gifts and food. His tent – actually it was just a piece of plastic sheeting – started to fall to bits. But Joseph, or Fred, refused to move, so the army came and erected a new tent over the top of the old one.

　　Joseph was found dead in his tent last week, on the 28th of October. He was 86 years old. He had lived in his tent for over 30 years. A lot of people in Wolverhampton are quite sad that he is no longer in the middle of the ring road. There is even talk of erecting a permanent monument to him. Why should we remember him? He did not do anything to help other people, as far as I know. He simply refused to live his life in a normal way. And that is important, don’t you think?