WE ARE THE UNDERDOGS

In celebration of the launch of Alec Gill’s Hessle Road book, which features over 200 black and white photographs taken during the 1970s and 80s of HU3, EofUs asks "of all the places you have travelled, why focus on HU3?"

Hessle Roaders like me are seen as Underdogs. I had an affinity with that. We were both seen as the same. Me because of being a cripple and for them there was this social snobbery that created a false image of drunken brawling fishermen and screaming fish wives. My work tries to show what's really going on.

When I was younger I loved Dr Who. I started a script for a new series I had imagined. The script slowly possessed me. I neglected friends, I cut off football, I stopped going out and I watched my Dad wasting his time studying the form. I kept thinking if I could spend all his energies and apply it then I could manifest his idea of studying into something good. So I finished my script and sent it off to the BBC. While I waited for what I thought would be success, I started photographing on Hessle Road and I spent time in the city library. Finding one day a book called The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Both things made sense.

Nine long weeks later the BBC sent their rejection. I felt stupid as I reread it and saw the spelling mistakes. I thought that must be the reason they had turned me down. It reinforced everything I’d been fighting against and had been coping with. That rejection was terrible. School had told my Mum that they would save my embarrassment by not letting me sit the 11-plus, instead they sent me home. And if I did well at things I was accused of being a cheat. I was born with these hands and I was always small. I was often bullied and told I was a cripple, but I had my minders, Tony, Barry and Roger, who helped me do things those bullys thought I couldn’t do.

But those nine weeks had opened something up and I knew I had to get better at writing. So I enrolled on a set of evening classes and met two important teachers: Professor Clarke whose advice to ‘Specialise’ and ‘Embrace the freedom of the streets’ was instrumental in why I have spent my work focused on the Hessle Road community. And English teacher Lorna Selfe changed my life by introducing me to books. I’d never had books and there in her house she had hundreds. I had a future.

Alec Gill