Don McCullin’s first professional photograph, the one that kicked off his astonishing career, is of a ruined building whose scarred timbers are exposed to the sunlight. It wasn’t taken in Vietnam, Cambodia, Cyprus, Congo, Lebanon, Northern Ireland or any of the other theatres of conflict that made this photographer justly famous. Look at the picture (on page 77, top right) and you will see seven young men in suits, positioned stylishly in different sections of the building.

This is Finsbury Park, north London, where McCullin grew up, and the men were members of a gang, “the Guvnors”, that he knew well. It was 1958 and the Guvnors were about to go to the Astoria cinema over the road. They might have been going to see The Big Country, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or one of the other top movies released that year. Somewhere a Bakelite wireless might have been playing Jailhouse Rock by Elvis Presley, or Cliff Richard’s debut disc, Move It. Later, as fashions changed and people stopped wearing suits on Sundays, that same cinema would become the Rainbow rock venue, playing host to concerts by David Bowie, Eric Clapton and Bob Marley.

The gang had some time to kill, and young McCullin possessed a nice Rolleicord camera, which he had bought towards the end of his national service with the RAF. Why not have some pictures taken for a bit of fun? So he nipped home, which was in the same street, and fetched his camera. “I didn’t have an exposure meter or anything,” recalls 72-year-old McCullin today. “I just said to them, ‘Get in there, and you get in there, and you get in there…’ I processed the film the next day and the negative was perfect.”

Then destiny intervened. The Guvnors were involved in a fight with another gang, and in the melee a policeman was stabbed to death. Because some of the gang were suspects, McCullin’s picture was suddenly a hot property, and he sold it to the national press. “And then I went off and started taking more pictures.” But in his early twenties, he evidently lacked the visual gravitas he now has as Britain’s most celebrated war photographer, and the bobbies on the beat refused to take him seriously. “I was arrested and taken away in a police car, because they said I’d stolen the camera. They didn’t think I was the type of person to have the money for it. One of them said, ‘We’ve heard of a stolen camera in the area.’ I said, ‘It’s mine.’ They said, ‘Where’s the receipt?’ So they took me home, and it really pissed them off when I produced the receipt. They started calling me Mr McCullin then.”

As the 1960s dawned, he could often be found roaming the streets of London, capturing real life in stark black and white. London street markets were a favourite subject, yielding lively flashes of social history that become ever more fascinating with the passing of time. “Markets are a very good training ground for photographers,” he explains. “There’s so much going on, and you can shoot pictures of people in an unobtrusive way: they don’t see it, because they’re too busy looking for a bargain and being pushed and shoved around.” He quickly found himself drawn to society’s outcasts – vagrants, single mothers in penury, and the people we used to call “gypsies” – driven by a conviction that it was morally unacceptable for people to live like this, and a determination that his images prick the conscience of the powers that be. “We live in one of the richest nations in the world,” he says, “so I wanted to know why this was happening.” McCullin became the Charles Dickens of photography. He was certainly no stranger to hardship himself, having grown up in a “basement hovel” where he wore second-hand clothes and slept in the same room as his parents and brother, and having attended a school dominated by “teachers who had no love of their job and were basically sadists”, hardly an ideal environment for a dyslexic child.

In 1966 he began a long association with The Sunday Times Magazine, initially photographing everyday life near the Mississippi river, but two years later becoming embedded with US marines and recording the horrors of the Vietnam war. PC Plod would never question his right to wield photographic equipment again. As other foreign wars and tragedies developed, McCullin rushed to cover them, showing a fearlessness and compassion that, combined with his eye for composition, made him unassailable as a war photojournalist.

But he didn’t neglect his home country. Emulating his photographic hero Bill Brandt, he explored the north of England, where he recorded industrial devastation and slum clearances. He also continued to focus on the destitute in London’s East End. “In the ’70s I got to know this woman called Jean who lived under the railway arches in Aldgate. She came from the West Country and was mentally handicapped. She used to address me as Captain Mark Phillips. She’d say, ‘Hello, Captain Mark.’ And I’d say, ‘I’m not a bit like Captain Mark,’ and she’d say, ‘Oh, to me you are,’ and give me a little curtsey. I went to see her one morning and she said, ‘Like a cup of tea, Captain Mark?’ I couldn’t see how she could make tea. But she said, ‘I’ve got milk. I take it from people’s doorsteps. It’s always there…’ She wound up in a hostel and I never knew what happened to her after that.”

There is a fine line between insanity and old-fashioned English eccentricity, and McCullin crossed it in his exploration of his home country. He discovered the character known as Snowy (who appears on the first spread of this feature) when he drove into Cambridge one day in the early 1970s. “I saw this man standing with an ice-cream barrow; he had a beard, a top hat and gaiters, and a whole menagerie of animals. There were mice running round the brim of his hat. I sidled up to him and asked if I could take a portrait of him wherever he lived and he said, ‘I don’t see why not.’ So I turned up one night at this old garage about five miles outside Cambridge and started taking pictures of him. I said, ‘I’d like to get the mice involved,’ and he went off and came back, and pulled a mouse out of his pocket and shoved it in his mouth. A company made some postcards of that picture, and they sold like hot cakes – but only in Australia. So I can only assume,” he laughs, “that Aussies eat mice.”

It’s arguable, he says, that war photographers have a greater need for humour than ordinary mortals. “I’ve often been labelled a miserable old sod, because I emotionally attach myself to the honesty of photographing wars and revolutions. But of course there is a lighter side to me. If there wasn’t, who knows, I might’ve gone barmy by now, looking at constant death and misery.” He loves the English summer for its unique calendar of “nutty events that are tailor-made for photography, where people love to get dressed up”, and has recently captured the rich at play at Royal Ascot, Henley Regatta and Glyndebourne.

The range of his work is greater than he is often given credit for, and even includes celebrity. In 1968 he was asked to accompany the Beatles on a “mad day out” around London. The band wanted fresh, up-to-date pictures of themselves to give to the media, who had been increasingly resorting to outdated portraits. McCullin remembers that the adventure, which took place on Sunday, July 28, wasn’t without its problems. “Unfortunately, we had to take Yoko Ono in tow, and she drove me completely mad. While I was lining up pictures I’d hear her say, ‘Why is the photographer standing there when he should be standing there? The picture’s much better here.’ You can imagine the four-letter words that were coming out under my breath.” But the shoot did yield a chillingly prophetic shot of Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Paul McCartney surrounding John Lennon as he played dead. The next day, Lennon was back among the living, rehearsing and recording McCartney’s new song Hey Jude with his bandmates at Abbey Road studios.

Of course, McCullin being McCullin, among his photographs of England are scenes of conflict and strife. He witnessed the posturing of Sir Oswald Mosley and his supporters in the 1960s, and saw right-wing extremism rear its head again at the Battle of Lewisham on Saturday, August 13, 1977, when the National Front took a battering from its opponents in south London. “I went right into the lion’s jaw that day,” he remembers, “which suited me fine. I always used to like photographing confrontation. If I didn’t do it in somebody else’s country, I’d look forward to doing it here.”

Lately, McCullin has been photographing atmospheric, sweeping, unpopulated English landscapes. But he can occasionally still be found on the streets, capturing urban life in the way he has done for 50 years. The veteran shooter is puzzled that he doesn’t bump into other practitioners. “Photographic schools are knocking out students with degrees like sausages, and yet you never see photographers on the street shooting any more. What are they all doing?”

All of the pictures on these pages, and many more, appear in a new book, which celebrates McCullin’s photography of England and its people over the past half-century. “I suppose a lot of people won’t thank me for

this book,” he frets, “because it doesn’t show England as a very attractive place, really. But the fact is, I just photographed what was there. It’s the truth.”

In England, by Don McCullin, is published by Jonathan Cape on November 8, price £35. It is available from BooksFirst for £28, including postage and packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585

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