He is a low browed, blear-eyed, dirty fellow, who has rascal stamped on every feature of his face in nature’s plainest handwriting’. It’s a dog’s life

Kenneth Allsop died in 1973 and until now he has been nothing more than a dim memory in the head of a then 17-year-old – sandwiched somewhere in between the urbanity of Cliff Michelmore and the visually wonderful Fyfe Robertson in the world of journalism and newscasting on BBC’s long gone, ‘ Tonight’, programme. Allsop seemed to have one of those quintessentially English faces, memorable and yet handsomely unremarkable at the same time – hardly the face of someone who would be talking to and writing about hoboes and tramps on a 9000 mile trip around America. He was though a man of several talents, broadcaster, author, naturalist and prototype conservationist. Soon after Tonight came to an end, Michelmore and Kenneth Allsop, another Tonight regular, took up a late-night slot with 24 Hours (1965-68). It was more political and included more international coverage. Often on the road himself, Michelmore covered the Aberfan mining disaster in 1966, when a slag heap engulfed a junior school, killing 116 children and 28 adults. “I don’t know how to begin,” he said in his report to camera. “Never in my life have I seen anything like this. I hope I shall never see anything like it again.” Sometimes I found Allsop ’s prose a bit mannered and long-winded and, of course, much of it is now dated and what was then a ‘modern’ American psychology is now a historical curiosity’. In fact he became a regular presenter from the Hamburg end of the programme Forces Favourites (subsequently, in peacetime, Two Way Family Favourites), in which service people in Germany had records played for their families in Britain, and vice versa. Jean Metcalfe presented the London end, and, soon after their first meeting, Michelmore and Metcalfe became engaged. In 1949 he left BFN; the couple married the following year and had two children.The simplest plan, probably, where one is not a member of the Humane Society (or perhaps the human race?) is to put a little Strychnine or Arsenic in the meat or other supplies furnished the tramp.’

It does seem that few if any of these outrageous ideas were ever put into practice – but they do reveal some of the attitudes of the times. There was little thought that the industrial system had put these men in the position in which they were found, the belief being that in fact, they were too lazy to work and that they were in some way sub-human.Around 900 years ago, the Augustinian Priory of St Michael was established there but was subsequently abandoned in around 1260. Six gun emplacements and canons were then installed - these batteries and fortifications can still be seen today. One irony that Allsop points out is that these same men built the means by which their travels were achieved – the railway and the history of the hobo or travelling man are very much entwined. At various times men were welcome to ride the rails and at others, they were actively and brutally discouraged. The idea of a flexible mobile labour force, that did so much to build the American behemoth, is therefore nothing new – today it might masquerade under the title ‘transferable skills’ whilst getting ‘on your bike’ to look for work. Allsop, a WW2 veteran, wrote Adventure Lit Their Star when he was a cub reporter in the late 1940s. The story revolves around a young RAF pilot recovering from TB. He joins forces with two young lads to foil the attentions of a dastardly egg-collector, who is intent on stealing the eggs of these very rare birds.