BILL SHEARMAN founded Crisis, the charity for the homeless, in 1967. A Tory, a humanist and a staunch believer in individual liberty, Shearman fought to highlight the plight of the homeless in London and to enlist the help of political parties, charities and church groups.
Shearman worked for three years to put Crisis on a sound footing. Last year he wrote a chapter for the book The Unsung Sixties, admitting: “If anyone had told me that thirty-odd years later I’d be speaking to you about Crisis — a massive organisation with computers, budgets, Christ knows what else — I wouldn’t have believed it. I would have thought the problem would be solved by now.”
Shearman was born in East Ham in 1937. His father was a businessman and a member of the Liberal Club, who won awards for swimming and boxing. “It was absolutely marvellous as a kid when people would come up and say: ‘Your father was in the Three Rabbits pub and he laid two people out’,” he recalled.
Shearman was expelled from his first school for swearing, then was sent as a boarder to Ryde School on the Isle of Wight. There, at first reviled as an East End guttersnipe, he earned respect by fighting and getting a record number of canings. His first job, as a quantity surveyor, ended when he was caught kissing the boss’s daughter.
In 1956 he was called up for National Service. Posted to Singapore and Malaya, he spent his spare time helping Baptist groups around the kampongs or reading. He came to admire Karl Popper and his ideal of the Open Society, while his experience of army discipline turned him against authority, institutions, state control and anything else he saw as destructive of individual liberty.
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Shearman joined the Conservative Party in 1958, in the belief that it was the best protection against statism. He had just been elected chairman of his local Young Conservative group when he was hit by a car and had to spend a year in hospital. There he met his wife, whom he married in 1962.
He went on to form the East London Conservative Association, determined to highlight the social blight he had seen in the Cable Street skid row, a haunt of meths drinkers — a problem that he felt the area’s dominant Labour politicians had ignored.
Shearman unsuccessfully contested West Ham at the 1966 general election, on a platform of helping the most marginalised in society. He next persuaded Iain Macleod, then Conservative Shadow Chancellor, to highlight the plight of London’s homeless in Parliament. On December 16 that year the BBC broadcast of Ken Loach’s harrowing docudrama Cathy Come Home made a profound impact. For the first time Britain’s street-sleepers were presented in a realistic context.
In 1967 Crisis at Christmas was established, with help from Macleod and Michael (now Sir Michael) Spicer. Shearman wanted it to be an ecumenical effort. Brian Tully, of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, sat on the committee, with representatives from all the churches. Lord Soper acted as treasurer. Both he and Macleod stayed with Crisis until they died.
Shearman steered Crisis away from its Tory beginnings with the help of a young curate, Nick Beacock. Based in a vicarage in East Ham, the pair organised events for Crisis at Christmas, for which Shearman aimed to earn £50,000 with a sponsored walk and a rally in Hyde Park. He spoke at universities and conferences, and rang up every government agency. Thousands volunteered, yet only £7,000 was raised for Christmas 1967. The press paid scant attention, and Shearman was despondent.
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The next year was similarly a struggle, but in 1969 a reverse pilgrimage from Canterbury to London led by Macleod and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, to highlight the plight of young people who ran away to the capital, attracted a great deal of attention.
Crisis had established an identity that could be built on. In the following years it held “open Christmas” events where food was distributed.
By that time Shearman had come to feel incompatible with a group that had acquired headed notepaper and paid its volunteers. He left Crisis in 1969 to set up a group of banking and financial concerns with a friend, until they went into receivership. Thereafter, he worked mainly as a business consultant, but he rejoined his surviving colleagues for the events to mark Crisis’s 30th anniversary in 1997.
Shearman was a founder member of the Tory Reform Group, but he left the party when Margaret Thatcher became leader in February 1975. Nothing in Conservatism over the ensuing 30 years tempted him to return.
Shearman is survived by his wife, Julia, and by their three children.
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William Shearman, founder of Crisis, was born on November 16, 1937. He died on June 17, 2005, aged 67.