Katherine MacAlister talks to Big Issue founder and regular Oxford Union speaker John Bird

John Bird is a complex character by his own admission, with a life story to make your hair curl. But instead of allowing a childhood blighted by abuse to permanently damage him, he turned his life around by launching The Big Issue. Not that he enjoys being revered as any kind of hero, albeit a working class one. He’s much more interested in getting on with the job in hand . . . his mission in life — addressing homelessness.

Which is why the 68-year-old is coming to the Oxford Playhouse for a ‘Friday at 5’ event, to detail how and why The Big Issue got up and running, as well as to discuss his own fascinating life.

While his achievements at The Big Issue are well documented (it is now sold all around the world, from Australia to Malawi), it’s the man himself that I’m interested in. How did John Bird, who spent the majority of his youth in jails or remand centres, straighten himself out to head up one of the most successful publishing ventures of the century for a humanitarian cause?

Perhaps we should start in Oxford, where the contrast is as stark as anywhere, because while “every few years” John talks at the Oxford Union, the first time he visited the city was aged 14 in the back of a police car.

“I came to Oxford in handcuffs, not on the way to an S&M party,” he laughs. “I was going to the Oxford Detention Centre in Kidlington which is now used to detain asylum seekers. But then I spent a lot of time in institutions in one form or another, all of which is useful now.”

Born into a London Irish family in Notting Hill after the Second World War, his parents lived in the slums and his father was a violent drunk, until the children were sent to live in an orphanage, “which wasn’t a good experience”. “The way I look at it, I was part of one of the biggest tragedies in Britain — poverty,” John says. “But if I have had a tragic life I always try to see the funny side of things and extract the humour from any situation. Even at my mother’s funeral, which was a tragedy because she was so young and so was I, an Irish neighbour dressed me in my brother’s trousers which then fell down so everyone could see my underwear,” he smiles, “which humanised the memory, making it less tragic.”

Comedy aside, an inevitable cycle of drugs, alcohol, truancy, crime, jail, homelessness and unemployment followed. “Back then it was crazy and dark. My first wife left me because she said she couldn’t come home to any more stolen goods. So then I indulged in endless wild parties. It was madness. I usually woke up in a cell and spent most weekends in jail, and I was a terrible racist because that’s what I’d grown up with.”

On skipping the country to avoid the law, he met a Marxist in Paris who converted him, John pledging there and then to beat his cycle of dependency, a monumental battle with which he struggled for years.

Despite his inability to hold down a job or relationship for long, he did ensure that his short-lived stints of employment involved publishing, teaching himself a trade and eventually setting up his own printing business. “I discovered the one thing I was good at was being a worker, so I’m an autodidact and I kind of hunkered down,” he explains.

The second part of the puzzle fell into place when John switched on the TV one night and recognised someone he’d met in a dodgy pub in Edinburgh a decade before. The man was Gordon Roddick, husband of Body Shop’s Anita, and John rang him the next day and explained his plans for The Big Issue, based around John’s belief that you have to offer an alternative to begging.

“It’s always been about the giver and never about the receiver. People think they are doing the right thing when they give the homeless money. They are not. They are giving them a reason to stay on the streets. Handouts are crap and they do not get people out of poverty. And even if vendors do keep taking drugs, at least they won’t need to break into someone’s house to buy them.

“So the chall-enge was finding a way to help the homeless without making the affable and comfortable feel too guilty. The Big Issue means every one can help and feel good about themselves,” he explains patiently. John is, however, realistic, knowing some people can’t be helped, and he tries to remain impassive. “You can’t be a businessman bawling your eyes out,” he says, “and we can’t help everyone, but ultimately we are giving Big Issue vendors the means to make money.”

Meanwhile, John’s own personal issues refused to subside. “Oh God, I was awful. Very difficult. I had a bit of a temper on me and had to stop driving eventually because I always got into fights banging on people’s bonnets with my baseball bat. I was like Godzilla. I had so much unresolved stuff to deal with. If I hadn’t started The Big Issue I think I would have gone nuts because I had so much tension swilling around with all my ambition and determination, and a lot of anger. Even at work I was aggressive. I would snarl at people and I think they were terrified of me,” he says.

Eventually, John marched into The Big Issue’s therapy department and demanded help. “I’ll always remember my first session because my counsellor held the door open with his foot the entire time because he had to sit in a room with me. That’s how I came across,” John reflects.

Now happily married to his third wife with whom he has two of his five children, he teaches his offspring about nature, history, politics and poverty. “I don’t hide anything from them and they know we have a duty to try to improve things, but otherwise they have a fairly middle-class upbringing,” he says. “Which is good because I was a father aged 18/19 first time around when I was always on the run, and second time around I was militaristic.”

Not satisfied with helping the homeless, John has also set out to change the politics which enable poverty, at one point running for Mayor of London, tirelessly campaigning to change the social security system or ‘social insecurity’ as he calls it.

“I have always been an irreverent person and am happy to point things out because I was ‘one of them’ and now I’m ‘one of us’. But then being a part of the problem was always part of the solution. And it’s not as if I set out to be remembered as an affable, lovable geezer or a chirpy cockney. I want to be seen as edgy, edgy about poverty.”

But then John Bird MBE never set out to be liked. To change things, to shake things up, to help the homeless. But not to give up. Ever.

Fridays at 5pm with John Bird
Oxford Playhouse
Friday, February 28
Box office: 01865 305305 www.oxfordplayhouse.com