Asquith's scheme offered a pension to 75-year-olds and excluded vagrants, criminals, certified lunatics and anyone with an income of more than 10 shillings a week.
Most come by rail, though the service would be inadequate even if it were not hobbled by a shortage of trains and a surfeit of vagrants.
From its humble beginnings (for a while, the fire-fighting force consisted largely of drunks and vagrants) the service gradually became more professional, developing new techniques and introducing smokejumpers (special teams that parachute into hot spots).
In a fateful confrontation, Isaac kills one of the vagrants to save his friend.
"Here, we were poor, but we could eat".Mr Korde's parents, landless vagrants from central Maharashtra, trekked in around the same time.
Business as usual included restrictions on duelling, on the movement of vagrants and on the installation of mills when these impeded river navigation.The elector of Mainz, the equivalent of today's rotating president of the Council of Ministers, "dictated" such legislative proposals into writing and put them before the three chambers.
For Qalandar's black-clad fakirs, many of whom are full time vagrants, much like Hinduism's dread-locked saddhus, the urs is a wonderful opportunity to eat, dance and get stoned among friends.
And all but the most charitable priests tire of keeping open house for pushy parishioners and local vagrants (families can feel like public property, says a curate).
The adjutant general of Massachusetts complained in 1834 that only "town paupers, idlers, vagrants, foreigners, itinerants, drunkards and the outcasts of society" manned his militias.
Until ten years ago petitioners were often sent to "custody and repatriation" centres: in effect, jails where they, along with beggars and vagrants, could be held for weeks or even months in harsh conditions before being sent back to their hometowns.
In 2008 homeless ex-servicemen (one in ten vagrants) got an earmarked pot that now pays for housing 43,000 of them.
