Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

The Skip People

When it comes to professional muckraking it is hard to beat the 40-year-old Londoner Benjamin Pell or Benji the Binman as he is known in the media. Benji dresses in a flat cap and overalls and during the night he raids the bins of show business stars and politicians and their advisers and sells any private papers he unearths to national newspapers. His victims have included Elton John, the late Queen Mother, the pop group All Saints, Tony Blair and Neil and Christine Hamilton.

In the Hamilton’s lawyer’s bin he found a copy of a memo outlining the strategy they were to adopt in their libel case against Al Fayed and sold it to him.

They subsequently lost their case.

Benji failed at university and also as a trainee solicitor and felt that he was the black sheep of his Jewish family. A staunch Zionist, he began by raiding the bins of pro-Palestinian organisations in London. He then became obsessed with searching through rubbish and believed that he if could gather more private and confidential documents than anyone else in the world he would make a fortune selling stories to the newspapers. This was to ingratiate himself with his long-suffering parents with whom he still lives.

When Elton John sued him for revealing his financial difficulties Benji appeared in court dressed from head to toe in bizarre Elton John memorabilia and convinced the court he was not the full Crocodile Rock. Benji sees a psychiatrist regularly. On another occasion when he leaked binned Ministry of Defence documents he said that the ‘Daily Telegraph’ subsequently accused him of being a member of the IRA (no doubt, as he sported his dark sunglasses, a beret, a black polo neck and military fatigues).

Benji, despite reportedly having earned £100,000 in the past year, lives a frugal life at his parents’ modest north London semi, and spends a fair proportion of his time in the garden shed where he stores hundreds of bin bags. He said that his immediate ambition in life is to get a second shed - which is were the Skip People of Belfast might be able to come to his rescue.

I don’t know if it still happens but many years ago I read that in Germany there was a custom when usually well-off people put out their old furniture, carpets, beds, even televisions, on the pavement where others could pick what they wanted before the arrival of the bin collectors in the morning. It was, in a way, a method of redistributing and recycling goods. In some neighbourhoods these ‘Sperrmull Nights’, as they are called, were organised every three months.

Anything the Germans can do we can do better and in Belfast we have ‘Skip Nights’, which usually take place in the early hours, when potential witnesses are asleep in their bed.

Most people manage to convince themselves that the household junk they have accumulated over the years and want rid off isn’t large enough to justify hiring a skip. So, they just wait for one to appear in their street – or, better still, the next street. Then, in the middle of the night, from out their doors or entries emerge entire families, some hooded and all sworn to secrecy, struggling with multi-stained mattresses popping their metal springs, disused coal bunkers, worn carpets, linoleum, entire sections of plumbing, old suites, and anything else that’s broken or superannuated.

There are two types of Skip People: those that operate by night and dump unwanted kittens, along with their junk, and those who collect by day. Just as no one can pass a shopping trolley without a degree of fascination and looking to see what the other person has bought, no one can pass a skip without looking into the discarded artefacts and drawing sociological conclusions about the owner: his or her taste in reading, music, furniture, wallpaper, fashion.
Collectors can’t pass a skip without wanting something they’ve seen. It could be a padded coat hanger, a toilet seat, a chair with one leg, or a mousetrap with some of the remains (the head or just the rear legs and tail) still attached. It doesn’t matter. In ten years time these things could be put to some use.

Collectors rarely have the nerve to steal from skips; they need to seek permission from the owner to lift the kettle with the burnt hole in the bottom, but are in a continual state of anxiety in case some other Collector gets there first. They will remain on skip duty till the owner comes home. Their opening line is usually, “I was just wondering…”

A friend of mine once ordered a skip after he had had his loft converted. There was a ton of slates, wood and plasterboard left over. The skip arrived late in the afternoon and he postponed the clean up until the next day. However, in the morning when he opened his front door his skip was the size of Mount Errigal. Amongst the rubbish that some neighbours had dumped were a hearth, a bucket, a chimney pot, brassieres, half a garden, including the hedges, topped with two huge and ugly wardrobes and a commode.

He was furious. The chief culprit, as far as he was concerned, was the family across the street that had no downstairs toilet, despite a bed-ridden granny living in the front parlour. She had died the previous week and recently they had had new wardrobes delivered. However, my friend could hardly go over and demand to see their old wardrobes or if the late granny’s commode was still in the parlour.
He had to take it on the chin and order another skip.

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