The Geezers: We won't grow old gracefully

 

The Geezers: We won't grow old gracefully

 

TED JEORY meets a group of East End pensioners who are refusing to fade away. With a positive outlook, these redoubtable Geezers are now reaching out to today’s youth.

By: Ted Jeory

Published: Sun, January 9, 2011

 

The Geezers' inspirational work with local schools and universities has just won a string of awards []
 

In London’s East End a group  of retired butchers, truckers,  builders, undertakers and boxers  are redefining what it is to be men growing old. They have seized life  by the horns and confronted the spectre of loneliness head on.
Meet The Geezers, a club of can-do pensioners whose inspirational work with local schools and universities has just won a string of awards and sparked curiosity about their success nationwide.

Their aim is that sometime, somewhere, an energetic Geezers Club will be opening near you.

When David Cameron set out his idea of Britain’s Big Society last year his words were largely met with a Big Shrug: few knew what he really meant. If the PM is still trying to illustrate the vision he would do well to look the Geezers’ way.
The club was set up five years ago after research from Age Concern in the London borough of Tower Hamlets showed that few men were turning up to their day centres. While women were being catered for with classes in dressmaking, line dancing and how to be a grandmother none of the activities interested men.

Yes, there were worthy talks about men’s health and eating well but they didn’t capture the imagination of retirees. Instead, many widowers were hanging around in pubs and betting shops or, even sadder, some were seen simply leaning against roadside railings watching the traffic go by.

So a few old friends took matters into their own hands and decided to recapture the things that made them laugh.

They formed their own club, asked for £1 a week subscriptions and sought public funding. They play indoor bowls once a week (an activity so popular that many cancel their hospital appointments rather than miss out) and have regular outings and social gatherings.

However, those are the bread-and-butter ingredients. What makes The Geezers extra-special is their other work. They have won £20,000 in awards and grants while their industry and creative energy has attracted the attention of artists and academics.

Their latest accolade was a cheque for £5,000, handed to them last year by Attorney General Dominic Grieve for a project they undertook with the local Bow Boys comprehensive school. The prize was from the Awards for Bridging Cultures organisation for a touching short film called Bow: Now And Then, which chronicles the reflections of the two different generations growing up in the East End.

Nowhere else in Britain has there been such dramatic change in terms of demographics and urban development. Decimated by Hitler’s Luftwaffe, what was once the engine room of London’s river-borne trade and a centre of Cockney life is now a skyline of gleaming skyscrapers and a defining picture of multiculturalism.

A combination of City expansion from the west, Canary Wharf growth from the south and a wave of mass immigration from Bangladesh has contributed heavily to what social researchers have termed the “white flight” of traditional inhabitants to the suburbs of Essex. In short, older, whiter generations feel alienated in what they see as their own manor. The youngsters, meanwhile, look towards their elders as if they are aliens.

The Geezers’ film was an attempt to address that. They teamed up with Andy Porter from media charity Hi8tus and produced a montage of talking heads and sights and sounds from today and yesteryear.

At just over 15 minutes, the film is a collection of themes about growing up. Each scene juxtaposes tales from life then with teenage thoughts from today.

While Geezers talk about playing in bomb craters, kicking footballs made of paper in traffic-free side streets and courting their sweethearts in Epping Forest, today’s youth chat about computer games, hang around housing estates and chat up girls by text message.

With so much concern about violent gang culture in modern Britain and especially inner-city London, the discussion about “territory” was perhaps the most illuminating. Today’s postcode gangs are a modern version of a problem that has always existed.

Johan Campo Marin, 16, recounts in the film how he and his cousin were asked “what end?” or what postcode, they were from as they walked through the Elephant & Castle district in South East London. When they replied Tower Hamlets, they were chased by a gang.

To the older generation that was nothing new. Even venturing on to the other side of a railway bridge in their day risked trouble. However, 81-year-old Ted Lewis, a former Billingsgate fish market porter and amateur featherweight boxer, said there was an honour to their day’s toughness.

“We would have gang fights,” he says. “A neighbourhood would bring their champion and we would have our champion and the two would fight each other. If you kicked someone you were a coward. You had to stand up and fight properly.”

Ted, a former Liberal Democrat councillor, is one of the stars of the film and when The Geezers met the boys again at their school last month, he was still showing off his strength and boxing skills.

“It’s been wonderful getting involved with them,” he said, reflecting on the film. “I found that we can talk to these young children and they can also talk to us.” Johan agrees: “We thought they would be really boring but after talking to them we just thought they were really just the same as us.”

Jim Morris, the head of the pupils’ year group at school, adds: “The great thing is that it broke down the barriers and stereotypes that both groups came with. They couldn’t understand the world in which The Geezers used to live as children when there was so much more space to play and where they were free to roam.”

So what next for The Geezers? They have aready helped form a women’s group called The Bow Belles and five years after their first meeting, the local phenomenon they have created is, they hope, set to spread across Britain. Chief Geezer Ray Gipson, 70, an ex-lorry driver, football referee and another former Lib Dem councillor, says they have already worked with the University of East London on renewable energy projects and they even made a wind turbine that lit a sign over Tower Hamlets boasting “Geezer Power”.

Ray wants more men from around Britain to follow their example. “People just seem to let men grow old and senile,” he says. “We just didn’t want to have a talking club. We wanted to be talking about doing something and then actually doing something.”

Geezer Power is on its way.