Patrolling the mean streets with the ‘Mother Teresa of Burnley’
It is close to closing time, with squalls of wind and rain whipping in off the Pennines, turning the worst of the winter’s snow to slush. Mary Pickles, 87, takes a last sip of tea, secures her baseball cap, zips up her jacket and heads out into the sea of heaving blue flesh, clouds of aftershave and booming music that is Burnley on a Saturday night in January.
The great-grandmother’s stout, black boots are an incongruous presence among clattering white stilettos with heels the size of small mill chimneys in this Lancashire outpost. Suddenly, a rather worsefor-wear man in a smart shirt puts his arm around her shoulder — she’s just five feet tall — and poses for a photograph before attempting, and failing, to take her baseball cap. “They often try that,” Mary says. While this is far from her preferred Saturday evening — knitting, sewing and marking passages of the Bible for church next day — this is the life of Burnley’s “Mother Teresa”.
Twice a month, from 11 p.m. until 3 a.m., Mary, a retired postmistress who worked as a nurse in nearby Colne during the Second World War, is one of a group of Christian street pastors patrolling the town centre. The volunteers hand out flip-flops to women who can no longer walk in their heels, order taxis for vulnerable drunks and step in to mediate when arguments and fights threaten. Mary’s secret weapon, she tells me as we walk, is a pocket full of jelly babies, which she hands out to soothe the raucous.
The street pastors are part of a scheme started 10 years ago this month in London by the Rev Les Isaac, director of an inter-denominational charity, the Ascension Trust, to assist police and paramedics. It has now spread to 250 towns and cities, involving more than 10,000 street pastors, including special beach patrols in seaside resorts as reported in The Telegraph last summer.
The Burnley group was started in September 2009 and has 30 members, trained in first aid, who patrol in groups of four. In a town with some of the country’s worst statistics for binge drinking and alcoholfuelled violence, the pastors have proved a godsend and been credited with a drastic cut in crime.
Mary, who converted to Christianity at 56 following the death of her husband, William, has become something of a celebrity, although she has little time for the Mother Teresa comparisons.
“When I first started in 2009, people would come up and ask what we were doing,” she says. “Once I was walking past a group of young boys when one called me Mother Teresa. It is a nice comparison, but there is only one of her.”
The pastors work from their base, the Retreat ’n’ Recovery centre, which is sandwiched between three bars and a nightclub in a former foundry. It is one of many grand Victorian buildings in a town made famous by its textile and manufacturing industries.
Together we watch a young girl in a white dress stagger out of a bar and trip down the cobbles.
“Burnley has changed a lot,” Mary acknowledges. She was born in nearby Nelson and lived here for much of her life. “I used to go to the cinemas, or ballroom dancing. The pubs closed early and they wouldn’t let anybody into the ballrooms if they had drink on their breath. There were skating nights; it was much easier for young people then. All that has gone and that is sad because there is really nothing for young people apart from pub life.”
Mary, who has one son, five grandchildren and three great grandchildren, says her work as a street pastor has made her “unshockable,” but she and her fellow pastors refuse to judge as they walk the streets. Nor do they ever discuss religion unless asked. They smile patiently as a heavily tattooed man, flanked by two friends, swaggers out of an alley and shouts: “We’re two Marines and a Para, you couldn’t convert us.”