Post by Lord Emsworth on Dec 24, 2020 10:22:22 GMT
This is in The Times today - it's a really wonderful story that I was unaware of.
I've pasted it as The Times have a paywall and I doubt many here have a subscription...
A telephone rings at a warehouse in Hanley near Stoke-on-Trent. Lou Macari takes the call to be asked by a prison officer if he will vouch for Steve, who can have early release if he comes to live in Macari’s homeless shelter. “I’ll do that,” he says. Steve, Macari explains, has had some troubles but is an OK lad at heart.
As we resume chatting, there are incessant knocks on the door. A chaotic figure barges in. Smithy needs urgent help from Macari because his medication has been denied by a local chemist and, without it, he could be on the downward spiral into drugs. Heroin and “monkey dust” have caused havoc and harm in the area.
Meanwhile, the chairman of the Stoke City Supporters Council, and centre trustee, has dropped in for a catch-up. Smithy interrupts again, agitated. Then a man stops by with an envelope that he wants to hand-deliver to Macari.
“I’ve told my adult children they aren’t getting Christmas presents this year,” this stranger tells the former footballer. “Here’s the cash I would have spent on them.”
“You’re going to think I set that one up,” Macari says, smiling. In the homeless shelter that bears his name, Macari is surrounded by non-stop human commotion yet cuts a figure of extraordinary good cheer and calm.
It is remarkable enough that the former Manchester United and Scotland player set up this shelter: truly humbling to witness him working tirelessly, aged 71, as organiser, adviser and friend to these 43 homeless people that he has taken in.
It was four years ago that Macari saw the news about worsening homelessness in a region where, twice in the Nineties, he was the manager of Stoke City. Local politicians were bickering over the scale of the problem so Macari decided to go and find out for himself.
“I jumped in my car and drove up to Hanley, pissing down with rain, blowing a gale and right away there were three lads in the doorway of the local bank huddled up with their cardboard boxes,” he says. “Across the road in another doorway, there were another three. I quickly met 11 homeless people in one street and I thought, ‘This is crap. Surely I can put a roof over their heads.’”
Macari thought he might be involved for a short while, using his renown as a man with more than 400 appearances for United, as well as 24 caps for Scotland, to lobby the council for an empty building.
It has been almost a full-time job since, not only setting up a shelter but providing food, showers, security and life advice. And then Covid-19 came along.
Macari was already looking at alternatives to the original dormitory-style base — “a bit shambolic,” he says — when coronavirus made it even more essential. From seeing a glamping campsite, he had the idea of separate pods.
There is little glam in the huts spaced out through a deserted warehouse but there is warmth and, crucially, each resident has their own space, a key and a number over the door, meaning that they have an address.
Food is provided by local firms and supermarkets. Each pod even has a television donated through the League Manager Association. “It’s giving them a chance at a better life than the one they had, and that’s all I ever wanted to do,” Macari says.
He is a man singularly non-judgmental over those who come in, however much they test his patience, which is endlessly. Drugs are the biggest challenge.
“I can feed them, clothe them, just be here for them,” he says. “I keep telling our council, ‘I can’t beat those drugs.’”
Some have been here weeks, others for up to three years. “There’s lots of reasons why they’ve got here, people who have fallen on hard times, marriages that have hit the rocks,” he says.
One resident tells me he was kicked out of his home by the landlord and could have gone to stay with mates “but most are involved in crime”. He says that without Macari, he would be in prison or sleeping in the cold on the streets.
Some still do. “We say to them 10pm is the closing time, if you want to go out after that and do drugs or whatever, you’re out and can’t come back in till 6am,” Macari says. “Sometimes they’ll do that, and they can handle rain, hail or snow, compared to staying in here without the drugs. They are willing to do it because they can handle it on the streets, watching the clock tick till daylight, battle-hardened.”
Matters will only get worse as Covid-19 decimates the jobs market. Most are here for the foreseeable future and Macari says demand will grow.
“If you did let everyone in, there will be someone who probably shouldn’t be let in for whatever reason,” he says. “It’s happened. We’ve had some proper horrible lads. That’s when I was a bit green to the whole thing, ‘In you come!’
“If you ask them, ‘Where you’ve been recently?’ and they say, ‘Nowhere,’ that tells you it’s because no one will take them. Or if they tell you, ‘I’ve just been to the Salvation Army,’ you pick up the phone and ask them what so-and-so was like, and probably nine times out of ten they tell you, ‘We had to throw them out.’”
For those who are here, he tries to do what he can for them. “My name is associated with it,” he says. “I’ve got to look after them.”
It has become a job in itself, though Macari does have a more regular one of those. He works as an ambassador and host at United but that work has been on hold for most of 2020. In the absence of corporate hospitality, the chef and staff from Old Trafford volunteered to bring a Christmas dinner down to the centre. Alcohol is meant to be banned from the premises but Macari, a teetotaller, will not be policing it that day.
What brings Macari to devote all this time and care, assisted by one of his sons and a grandson? “I’ve been quite fortunate unlike a lot of people and families,” he says.
Macari calls himself one of the lucky ones even though, in 1999, Jonathan, one of his three sons, took his own life. He had been released by Nottingham Forest.
Inevitably, Macari asked himself what more he could have done, but downplays the suggestion that this shelter is in some way connected to Jonathan or a need to help.
Watching him move between the residents, chatting and joking, there seems something very natural and humane about him, a man who likes to mix with people whatever their backgrounds or circumstances.
There are echoes of Marvellous, that beautifully joyous film about how Macari recruited Neil Baldwin at Stoke to lift the dressing room. As a clown, who also had learning difficulties, “Nello” was an unlikely addition to the staff but he became Stoke’s kitman. “My idea was to have a clown in the dressing room, lifting the spirits, not serious, and see how we go with it,” Macari says. “We took Neil on the team bus and he’d dress up, chicken outfits, Ninja Turtle. We’d get off the bus at other grounds and they’re thinking, ‘What the f***?!’ He’s carrying his kitbag in a chicken outfit.
“He was brilliant, an entertainer. One of the journalists from Radio Stoke was called George Andrews. One game against Port Vale, a derby match, I said to Neil, ‘If that bastard comes down, don’t let him in because he slagged the team off.’ I was joking.
“I’m sitting in the dugout at 3pm and security comes down and says, ‘George Andrews has been locked up in the laundry for two hours, should we let him out?’ The game has kicked off and he’s meant to be doing commentary for Radio Stoke.
“We go to the laundry and Nello has got him bound and gagged, tied to the chair, because he’d do anything for me. Because I said that, he did it.”
Macari chuckles away, someone who seemingly cannot get enough of human company. We have been chatting for ages and yet barely touched upon a career that included three league titles under Jock Stein at Celtic, and the 1977 FA Cup final win with United over Liverpool. “Good times,” Macari says wistfully, talking admiringly of Stein’s man-management. “No tactics, he just got you to play.”
Sitting in this warehouse, it is hard not to think of all the acclaim that Marcus Rashford is receiving, quite rightly, for his campaigning for free meals for disadvantaged children. As we leave, Macari is still trying to soothe Smithy while several other residents clamour for his attention.
“You get through your life, you soldier on but then maybe one day or night like I did at home when I was looking through the paper, you realise there are other things happening,” he says. “I just thought, ‘What have I ever done like this in my life?’”
