By . Guy Adams . When Mark Thomas and Rebecca Howe registered the birth of their daughter Casey at Birmingham’s City Hospital in Winson Green in 2011, they left the section for their occupations blank. Today, the information that was — or rather was not — on Casey’s outwardly unremarkable birth certificate is entirely relevant to a rapidly overheating national debate. Mr Thomas and Ms Howe, an unmarried couple, are now known to millions as ‘Mark and Becky’, the young, jobless couple whose lives and parenting skills dominated this week’s episode of the controversial Channel 4 show Benefits Street. Mark Thomas, 23 and Becky Howe, 23, pictured outside their house on James Turner Street . To the programme’s five million viewers, the duo’s apparent inability to identify what they actually do for a living will not have come as much of a surprise. For, as the narrator of Benefits Street has frequently reminded us, neither one of these suddenly notorious 23-year-olds has ever held down a full-time job. Instead, the couple raise Casey and her four-year-old brother, Callum, in an apparently chaotic household, on the combined proceeds of jobseekers’ allowance, child benefit and child tax credit. The show tells how they moved to James Turner Street, the Victorian terrace of 99 properties where the documentary was filmed, just over two years ago. Their rent has since been paid by the State. To cover the remainder of their living costs, they rely on government hand-outs which currently total around £250 a fortnight. Though the programme has provoked much controversy, wherever you stand it’s certainly hard to watch very much of Benefits Street without reflecting on how drastically things have changed since the Victorian terraces at its centre were built. Half a century after the welfare state was established to provide a temporary safety net for those unlucky enough to have fallen on hard times, its ethos has shifted, with benefits becoming a way of life for many. And if you want to appreciate the scale of that shift, you need only take a few tentative steps up Mark and Becky’s family tree. Birth, marriage and death records reveal that despite their own employment records, the couple both come from respectable working-class stock. Take Becky’s great-grandfathers, Alfred Leach and Percy Addison. In the early 20th century, they were, respectively, an electrician’s mate and a gamekeeper from Rugby in Warwickshire, according to local archives. Those living on the street of Victorian terraces have changed substantially over the years. Previously, most families held down respectable jobs for all their adult lives . Her grandfather, Bernard, born in 1933, was a carpenter, and her grandmother Irene worked for British Rail. Her late father, David, described himself as a chauffeur on her 1990 birth certificate. Becky appears to be the first generation of the Howe family to have fallen into the welfare trap. And they have fallen hard. Indeed, all three of her siblings are understood to have claimed some form of benefits. Mark’s family tree is similarly a tale of hard graft – until, that is, it reaches the modern era. This week, I met Derek and Jean Cleaver, a retired couple who live with their English bull terrier, Zulu, in a tidy former council house in Northfield, a suburb half an hour’s drive from central Birmingham. Derek and Jean, who are 81 and 76, have two children, 11 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. They also happen to be Mark’s grandparents. The couple have lived in Birmingham their entire adult lives, and proudly tell how they both spent more than half a century in full-time employment. At times, each held down two jobs, in order to properly provide for their family. ‘We weren’t scroungers, and we always paid taxes, because that’s how I was brought up,’ Derek told me. ‘Jean was the same. She kept a full-time job until she was 72.’ The difference between Derek’s life and those of his grandchildren is, perhaps, an object lesson in some of the ways traditional working-class culture has been undermined by welfarism. Derek was the son of Jack Cleaver, a grocer’s assistant, who later became a chimney sweep, and Edith Cleaver, a housewife. He grew up with six brothers and three sisters in a small terraced house in Small Heath, just east of Birmingham city centre. As a child, before the War, he recalls going out to earn money sweeping snow with his siblings so the family could afford a turkey for Christmas dinner. In 1946, when he was 14, the family’s perilous finances forced him to leave school and take a job in the building trade. For 25 years, he worked long hours doing up Ansell’s pubs. After marrying Jean, and quickly finding himself with two daughters to feed, Derek took a second evening job, at a local cinema. ‘At the end of each day, I was exhausted,’ he says. ‘I used to leave home at half past seven in the morning and finish at half past four. Then I would go to the West End picture house and work as a doorman. I had two jobs, but we needed the money in those days.’ Circumstances didn’t improve until the Seventies, when Derek found work at the local British Leyland plant. ‘We were then able to afford to go to Rhyl for holidays,’ he recalls. ‘Sunny Rhyl every year. We would get a caravan. We didn’t have a lot, but we were happy.’ In the Eighties, they were able to purchase a council house. An officer walks the street. The Cleavers blame the government for giving residents money 'for doing nothing' Little wonder, given this relentless existence of labour, that Derek has nothing but contempt for what he sees as the ‘something for nothing’ culture propagated by aspects of the welfare state. ‘Kids today, they might say they want a job, but you never see them out and about actually looking for work. ‘Why should they, when the Government will give them money for doing nothing? At half past seven in the morning, they’re all in bed.’ Jean, the daughter of a ‘general labourer’ from Yardley, is also a grafter. She began work in a local factory aged 15, then after getting married took a job on the tills at Woolworths. She briefly quit work after giving birth to two daughters, Mandy (who is Mark’s mother) and Wendy, in the early Sixties, before returning to the grindstone after being offered night shifts in a Birmingham printing factory. ‘I used to work at night, so my mother would stay over and look after the girls for me,’ Jean recalls. ‘When she retired, I was able to change to day shifts.’ Jean took a full-time job at an amusement arcade where she remained for the rest of her working life. In later years, it gave her a unique insight into what she sees as the endemic abuse of welfare. ‘Every day, you’d see these people. They’re not disabled, but they are collecting disabled benefits, and bring the money right in and pour it into the slot machines. ‘Others would come into the arcade: they’re unemployed, but they aren’t looking for a job, they’re spending four or five hours a day at machines.’ Little wonder, then, that Derek and Jean raised their daughters to be similarly industrious. Mandy worked on the tills of a local supermarket as a teenager, before getting a job in a fish shop. She married a carpenter, Mark Thomas Snr. Mark Snr and Mandy had three children, but divorced shortly after the birth of a son in 1990. That son is the Mark Thomas who is at the centre of Benefits Street; he was raised largely by a stepfather, Craig Messer. Given their views on the virtues of hard work, not to mention the state of the welfare system, you might expect Derek and Jean to be deeply upset by the grandson who has emerged from the first three episodes of Benefits Street. But they say there is an important fact missing from Channel 4’s portrayal of Mark and Becky. It emerges that the couple both suffer from learning difficulties. Indeed, they first met as teenagers when they attended the Selly Oak Trust School, which describes itself as being a ‘specialist’ establishment ‘for unique students with special educational needs’. Mark, who admitted fiddling his benefits on the show, is led from his house by a police officer. His grandparents say the man claims as he suffers from learning difficulties . Their condition, which was not mentioned on Monday’s programme, goes some way towards explaining aspects of the couple’s parenting technique, which prompted widespread derision after the show aired. ‘The show presents him as a scrounger,’ says Jean, ‘without explaining why he has found it hard to get work. I know, because I know Mark, that he’s tried and tried to get a job. If someone offered him work, he’d start tomorrow.’ Asked why they failed to mention Mark and Becky’s learning difficulty during the programme, Channel 4 said last night that it was satisfied the couple had made an ‘informed decision’ about appearing in the show. ‘As with all the residents featured, if they wanted filming to stop at any point, it did,’ the channel said. All of which leaves Derek cold. ‘I hate people who want something for nothing. Who doesn’t? But that’s not my grandson. He has been mistreated here.’ Special pleading by a loving grandfather? Or do Derek’s words reveal a certain cynicism at the heart of the series — and perhaps a deeper problem in the welfare state, which offers handouts to people like Mark and Becky rather than helping them rise above their problems and enter the world of work and self-reliance. There’s no doubt this series has generated shockwaves. The question is whether they will help produce any meaningful social change — and see the residents of Benefits Street rediscovering the work ethic which was second nature to their grandparents.
Mark and Becky are a young, jobless couple on the controversial show .
They rely on the state to bring up their young daughter Casey .
Couple's grandparents all worked hard throughout their adult lives .
Their family say the couple both suffer from learning difficulties - a fact left out of the show .
By . Guy Adams . When Mark Thomas and Rebecca Howe registered the birth of their daughter Casey at Birmingham’s City Hospital in Winson Green in 2011, they left the section for their occupations blank. Today, the information that was — or rather was not — on Casey’s outwardly unremarkable birth certificate is entirely relevant to a rapidly overheating national debate. Mr Thomas and Ms Howe, an unmarried couple, are now known to millions as ‘Mark and Becky’, the young, jobless couple whose lives and parenting skills dominated this week’s episode of the controversial Channel 4 show Benefits Street. Mark Thomas, 23 and Becky Howe, 23, pictured outside their house on James Turner Street . To the programme’s five million viewers, the duo’s apparent inability to identify what they actually do for a living will not have come as much of a surprise. For, as the narrator of Benefits Street has frequently reminded us, neither one of these suddenly notorious 23-year-olds has ever held down a full-time job. Instead, the couple raise Casey and her four-year-old brother, Callum, in an apparently chaotic household, on the combined proceeds of jobseekers’ allowance, child benefit and child tax credit. The show tells how they moved to James Turner Street, the Victorian terrace of 99 properties where the documentary was filmed, just over two years ago. Their rent has since been paid by the State. To cover the remainder of their living costs, they rely on government hand-outs which currently total around £250 a fortnight. Though the programme has provoked much controversy, wherever you stand it’s certainly hard to watch very much of Benefits Street without reflecting on how drastically things have changed since the Victorian terraces at its centre were built. Half a century after the welfare state was established to provide a temporary safety net for those unlucky enough to have fallen on hard times, its ethos has shifted, with benefits becoming a way of life for many. And if you want to appreciate the scale of that shift, you need only take a few tentative steps up Mark and Becky’s family tree. Birth, marriage and death records reveal that despite their own employment records, the couple both come from respectable working-class stock. Take Becky’s great-grandfathers, Alfred Leach and Percy Addison. In the early 20th century, they were, respectively, an electrician’s mate and a gamekeeper from Rugby in Warwickshire, according to local archives. Those living on the street of Victorian terraces have changed substantially over the years. Previously, most families held down respectable jobs for all their adult lives . Her grandfather, Bernard, born in 1933, was a carpenter, and her grandmother Irene worked for British Rail. Her late father, David, described himself as a chauffeur on her 1990 birth certificate. Becky appears to be the first generation of the Howe family to have fallen into the welfare trap. And they have fallen hard. Indeed, all three of her siblings are understood to have claimed some form of benefits. Mark’s family tree is similarly a tale of hard graft – until, that is, it reaches the modern era. This week, I met Derek and Jean Cleaver, a retired couple who live with their English bull terrier, Zulu, in a tidy former council house in Northfield, a suburb half an hour’s drive from central Birmingham. Derek and Jean, who are 81 and 76, have two children, 11 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. They also happen to be Mark’s grandparents. The couple have lived in Birmingham their entire adult lives, and proudly tell how they both spent more than half a century in full-time employment. At times, each held down two jobs, in order to properly provide for their family. ‘We weren’t scroungers, and we always paid taxes, because that’s how I was brought up,’ Derek told me. ‘Jean was the same. She kept a full-time job until she was 72.’ The difference between Derek’s life and those of his grandchildren is, perhaps, an object lesson in some of the ways traditional working-class culture has been undermined by welfarism. Derek was the son of Jack Cleaver, a grocer’s assistant, who later became a chimney sweep, and Edith Cleaver, a housewife. He grew up with six brothers and three sisters in a small terraced house in Small Heath, just east of Birmingham city centre. As a child, before the War, he recalls going out to earn money sweeping snow with his siblings so the family could afford a turkey for Christmas dinner. In 1946, when he was 14, the family’s perilous finances forced him to leave school and take a job in the building trade. For 25 years, he worked long hours doing up Ansell’s pubs. After marrying Jean, and quickly finding himself with two daughters to feed, Derek took a second evening job, at a local cinema. ‘At the end of each day, I was exhausted,’ he says. ‘I used to leave home at half past seven in the morning and finish at half past four. Then I would go to the West End picture house and work as a doorman. I had two jobs, but we needed the money in those days.’ Circumstances didn’t improve until the Seventies, when Derek found work at the local British Leyland plant. ‘We were then able to afford to go to Rhyl for holidays,’ he recalls. ‘Sunny Rhyl every year. We would get a caravan. We didn’t have a lot, but we were happy.’ In the Eighties, they were able to purchase a council house. An officer walks the street. The Cleavers blame the government for giving residents money 'for doing nothing' Little wonder, given this relentless existence of labour, that Derek has nothing but contempt for what he sees as the ‘something for nothing’ culture propagated by aspects of the welfare state. ‘Kids today, they might say they want a job, but you never see them out and about actually looking for work. ‘Why should they, when the Government will give them money for doing nothing? At half past seven in the morning, they’re all in bed.’ Jean, the daughter of a ‘general labourer’ from Yardley, is also a grafter. She began work in a local factory aged 15, then after getting married took a job on the tills at Woolworths. She briefly quit work after giving birth to two daughters, Mandy (who is Mark’s mother) and Wendy, in the early Sixties, before returning to the grindstone after being offered night shifts in a Birmingham printing factory. ‘I used to work at night, so my mother would stay over and look after the girls for me,’ Jean recalls. ‘When she retired, I was able to change to day shifts.’ Jean took a full-time job at an amusement arcade where she remained for the rest of her working life. In later years, it gave her a unique insight into what she sees as the endemic abuse of welfare. ‘Every day, you’d see these people. They’re not disabled, but they are collecting disabled benefits, and bring the money right in and pour it into the slot machines. ‘Others would come into the arcade: they’re unemployed, but they aren’t looking for a job, they’re spending four or five hours a day at machines.’ Little wonder, then, that Derek and Jean raised their daughters to be similarly industrious. Mandy worked on the tills of a local supermarket as a teenager, before getting a job in a fish shop. She married a carpenter, Mark Thomas Snr. Mark Snr and Mandy had three children, but divorced shortly after the birth of a son in 1990. That son is the Mark Thomas who is at the centre of Benefits Street; he was raised largely by a stepfather, Craig Messer. Given their views on the virtues of hard work, not to mention the state of the welfare system, you might expect Derek and Jean to be deeply upset by the grandson who has emerged from the first three episodes of Benefits Street. But they say there is an important fact missing from Channel 4’s portrayal of Mark and Becky. It emerges that the couple both suffer from learning difficulties. Indeed, they first met as teenagers when they attended the Selly Oak Trust School, which describes itself as being a ‘specialist’ establishment ‘for unique students with special educational needs’. Mark, who admitted fiddling his benefits on the show, is led from his house by a police officer. His grandparents say the man claims as he suffers from learning difficulties . Their condition, which was not mentioned on Monday’s programme, goes some way towards explaining aspects of the couple’s parenting technique, which prompted widespread derision after the show aired. ‘The show presents him as a scrounger,’ says Jean, ‘without explaining why he has found it hard to get work. I know, because I know Mark, that he’s tried and tried to get a job. If someone offered him work, he’d start tomorrow.’ Asked why they failed to mention Mark and Becky’s learning difficulty during the programme, Channel 4 said last night that it was satisfied the couple had made an ‘informed decision’ about appearing in the show. ‘As with all the residents featured, if they wanted filming to stop at any point, it did,’ the channel said. All of which leaves Derek cold. ‘I hate people who want something for nothing. Who doesn’t? But that’s not my grandson. He has been mistreated here.’ Special pleading by a loving grandfather? Or do Derek’s words reveal a certain cynicism at the heart of the series — and perhaps a deeper problem in the welfare state, which offers handouts to people like Mark and Becky rather than helping them rise above their problems and enter the world of work and self-reliance. There’s no doubt this series has generated shockwaves. The question is whether they will help produce any meaningful social change — and see the residents of Benefits Street rediscovering the work ethic which was second nature to their grandparents.
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