Alfred Yarrow was born in 1887 at 2 Walker Place in Tynemouth, Northumberland, the son of a skilled lamp maker, Marshall Yarrow, and his wife Jane, and he grew up in a crowded working class tenement with six siblings. In the early 1890s the family was hit by a succession of tragedies as his father died of tuberculosis, two brothers and his grandfather died within just a couple of years, and his widowed mother was pushed into hard, insecure work as a charwoman while Alfred went out to earn as an errand boy.

By his late teens Alfred had slipped into homelessness around North Shields, sleeping in a wash house near the street where he was born and drifting out of regular work, which brought him into conflict with both the Vagrancy Act and his own mother after he stole small items and money from home to pawn for cash. In 1905 he was twice prosecuted with his mother giving evidence against him, and a sentence of hard labour in prison, combined with years of poor housing, malnutrition and family susceptibility to tuberculosis, left him weakened. In September 1906 he died of phthisis pulmonalis at the age of just eighteen.

After his death, his mother Jane survived into 1915, his older brother Oswald lived on into the 1940s, and his sister Jane married, emigrated to Canada and reached the age of 104, carrying the Yarrow story far beyond the streets where Alfred’s short life unfolded.