Josef Stawinoga

Nov 20 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

SOME people kick a ball, others forecast the weather, a few split atoms. There are many ways of becoming famous.

But the man, with a secret and a smoke-stained beard of many twists, knots and strands, spent nearly 40 years in a succession of tents in a central reservation between a computer shop and a showroom for fashionable baths, basins and showers.

Neither emporium was of much interest to the tramp, whom, it was supposed, had his mind on higher matters. So he was revered as a holy man by local Hindus and Sikhs, though it should be noted that neglect of the body does not always lead to nourishment of the spirit.

But there seemed to be something of the mystic about Josef Stawinog, as he swept the central reservation on the A4150 inner ring road at Wolverhampton.

Such was his celebrity among the more mystic Midlanders that he had his own 6,500-members’ fan club on the Facebook internet site.

Central to Stawinoga’s celebrity was his capacity to live freely in a society of CCTV cameras and computerised data files, in which the particulars of almost every individual can be rung up at the press of a few buttons.

Wolverhampton Council not only tolerated his presence on the reservation, but also supplied him with replacement tents. After members of the Slade rock group, he was one of the town’s most celebrated residents

There is also the tendency to romanticise the tramp, feeling that his brain is aswirl with poems and profound thoughts.

In fact, there was much mystery in Stawinoga’s past.

He was apparently Polish- born, and arrived in Britain shortly after the World War II. Some said that he had been a member of the Polish Army Medical Corps, whose hatred of confined spaces was the result of a period as a Russian prisoner-of-war.

It was alternatively claimed that he had served the German Wehrmacht as a member of the SS and had spent the latter part of his life repenting for that.

Stawinoga was employed at a steel works in Bilston and married an Austrian woman, whom he locked in their bedsit before going to work. She objected and, after a break-out, never returned.

A failure to pay the rent in lodging-houses began his years in a tent.

Josef Stawinoga, tramp; born December 15, 1920, died October 28, 2007.