A minority and the state

Travellers in Britain in the twentieth century

Becky Taylor

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719091261
• eBook ISBN: 9781847796813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the only general history of Britain's travelling communities in the twentieth century and covers state and legal developments affecting Travellers as well as their experiences of missions, education, warand welfare.

Part I

The early twentieth century and wartime

1

Travellers’ lives, 1900–45

The popular image of Gypsies in Britain, propagated by gypsiologists and other writers, was of a people who turned up out of the blue, camped on commons or byways in their bow-topped caravan, grazed horses, sold pegs and perhaps ‘tinkering’, ‘here today and gone tomorrow’. This conception painted Britain’s nomads as irredeemably rural, separate from the modern world and inexplicable.

In this chapter I show how this ruralist image of Travellers has only ever been one part of the story of their lives in modern Britain. Using Okely’s conception of ‘commercial nomadism’ as central to understanding the movement and culture of Travellers, I show how the routes and employment strategies taken by travelling families had their own logic. They often aspired to be stationary in the winter, or for even longer periods, and despite appearances, Travellers were intimately tied to the concerns and trends of settled society. This is made clear in the final section of the chapter which deals with the Second World War.

More than for the latter half of the twentieth century, the years up to 1945 suffer from a lack of sources, with evidence particularly from a Traveller perspective being very limited.¹ In places, therefore, descriptions are based on perhaps only one or two individual accounts. In these cases they may be taken as illustrative of particular experiences which may have a wider resonance, rather than typical of the lives of Travellers more generally.

Patterns of nomadism

As Mayall has observed, itinerancy and migrancy were a way of life for large numbers of the population in the nineteenth century,² with Travellers making up only one part of Britain’s travelling population. Jan Lucassen’s study on migrant labour in Europe between 1600 and 1900 demonstrates how mobility, especially seasonal labour, was functional and an essential element within the labour market and therefore for economic development. By concentrating on the function of the services provided by itinerant workers, Lucassen’s work shows how migrant working cannot in general be seen as a cloak for begging or thievery, as was often believed. Hawkers and pedlars, for example, specialised in areas with a weak infrastructure and economically backward conditions,³ while certain crops demanded intensive labour over a very short period of time for harvesting, which could not be provided by the local labour force alone. Within the wider migrant workforce of Europe, Travellers were ‘made visible by their choice to live in tents or caravans which enable[d] them to move around with their families’.⁴ In doing this, Travellers were travelling not simply to find employment, but as a way of life. Families were not only on the road to accompany a working male head of household. On the contrary, a key feature of Traveller’s economic activities was the family nature of much of their work. While men dominated certain activities, notably dealing, women were central to money-making activities, commonly hawking goods and taking part in agricultural work. Children were expected to take part in field work, collect the raw materials for hawking and learn basket making and other skills alongside their parents:

My mother had to support us with only her basket of pegs for sale, and her lace to sell to the Gorgios. As for me, I used to help out too. I used to go with my brother, with my father’s pony and trap, and collect watercress, mushrooms and other things to sell … My sister, she sold violets, snowdrops, and primroses and other wild flowers.⁵

The importance of children in the Traveller economy, and the emphasis placed on learning skills integral to this way of life from an early age, often placed Travellers at odds with mainstream society and the state over the issue of education.

Contemporary accounts of Traveller’s economic activities indicate a wide range of occupations and services performed by Travellers. These included what are thought of as ‘traditional’ activities such as fruit picking, horse and donkey dealing, peg making and hawking, knife grinding, umbrella and chair mending, fortune telling and working the fairs. However, it is important to sound a note of caution. The difficulty in relying on outside observers in detailing the occupations of Travellers is the tendency to record only these visible ‘Gypsy’ occupations, where being identifiably ‘Gypsy’ was useful as a marker of legitimacy or expertise. There were times when a Traveller identity could be inhibiting and therefore might be hidden. It is largely only through personal accounts of individual Travellers that we know of times when they worked in mills or factories, joined the army, or otherwise took employment where their identity was invisible.⁶ In some cases Travellers were able to integrate factory work into their lifestyle. For instance, at Bobbin Mill in Perthshire up to the 1920s, Travellers engaged in piecework at the mill, while being permitted to camp in its environs.⁷

Central to Travellers’ economic activities were the twin tenets of flexibility and self-employment. Together these allowed Travellers to maximise the opportunities and minimise the precariousness of life out of the economic mainstream and to ensure that they remained in control of income generation. Economic activity may have required interaction with the settled population, but Travellers aimed to ensure that it was conducted as far as possible on their own terms. As a result, piece work rather than an hourly wage was preferred when engaged in agricultural labour, as Travellers could control how long a task took; for example, through using children and other relatives to complete the work. Equally, the flexibility of hawking and dealing were favoured over regular waged employment: ‘January we sold firewood. And when we weren’t selling firewood, flowers or wool, there was the hens and the hoss [horse] trade. We used to break horses too’.⁸

All around the house were stacks of old iron and special sorts of timber collected by Johnny on his tinkering rounds. There was also a shed at the back crammed always with drying sheep and rabbit and mole skins … they tried to sell mats or brushes or clothes pegs or buckets or crocks when there was no work to be done … they also offered to buy sheep and other skins, to remove unwanted scrap-iron, to barter worn or disused harness for screws, spanners or other tools⁹

A flexibility and versatility in dealing meant that notwithstanding contemporary fears over the disappearance of true Gypsies in the face of industrialisation and urbanisation, Travellers were able to make the transition relatively easily. Gypsies did not die out with the decline in wooden peg making and horse selling, they simply shifted into other areas, such as to scrap and motor dealing, both these activities becoming more common by the 1930s.

Additionally, contrary to the impressions of settled society, Travellers did not move at random around the countryside. Instead, they tended to travel in fairly small groups of family and extended family, on well-known circuits, keeping to the same parts of the country. Betsy Whyte, who grew up in Scotland in the inter-war period, followed a regular circuit of work governed by the seasons. In the spring her family went pearl fishing in Speyside, followed over the summer by potato picking, fruit picking and harvesting on a number of farms that they visited every year. They over-wintered in a small town, where her father made baskets and her mother hawked when the weather was too severe for winter farm work.¹⁰ The pattern of sticking to certain routes and activities is echoed in accounts by other Travellers: ‘We have what we call our “runs”, you know – at one time we do a bit of potato planting and cleaning, afterwards we travel to the strawberry country, then we go on to haymaking and field pea-picking’.¹¹ Travellers in the Caithness region were largely boat-based in the summers, which they spent whelking and hawking on the west coast of Scotland, while the winters were spent in Oban.¹²

For virtually all Travellers a central part of their ‘run’ were certain horse fairs, such as Barnet, Yarm or Appleby; or race meetings, most notably Epsom; or some of the larger harvesting events, such as strawberry picking in the Fens or hop picking in Kent and Hampshire. As well as presenting opportunities to earn large sums of money, they also acted as social occasions, with Travellers from all over the country converging for the duration.

After 1918 Travellers became increasingly affected by improved transport which made hawking less profitable, and during the Depression, increased competition from unemployed workers who had taken up door-to-door selling.¹³ At the same time, the growth in the mass production of kitchenware and other household items was leading to the beginnings of a throw-away society. Leitch has concluded that seasonal work consequently became more important to counteract the decline in peddling and tinkering.¹⁴ By the 1930s the horse trade was well past its peak, although the horse fairs and horse dealing continued to be both economically and socially important. Scrap, car and lorry dealing began to take over as central activities along with hawking and casual agricultural work.

The seasonality of many Travellers’ lives and the nature of many of their activities, which were subject to the vagaries of the weather, the mood of householders or fairgoers, as well as micro and macro changes in the market meant that their livelihoods were precarious. Establishing a seasonal round and diversifying their activities reduced this insecurity, through ensuring that they did not rely on one particular crop or good, and by building up relationships with farmers, dealers and householders, as well as creating a network of known stopping and grazing places. Travellers’ migration patterns, which to the settled population might have appeared as random ‘here today and gone tomorrow’ movements, had in reality their own logic.

While Acton has seen the pre-1945 period as being relatively stable, with ‘a community of craftsmen, agricultural workers, horse-dealers and entertainers existing in a fairly stable symbiosis with Gaujo society’,¹⁵ in fact many of the changes which were to make a major impact after the Second World War had their roots in this period.

Evidence of the impact of the First World War on Travellers is limited, with the most detailed account stemming from a government investigation into ‘Tinkers’ in Scotland in 1918. It found that substantial numbers of Travellers had joined up, and that a nomadic lifestyle had been made more difficult for their families, not only as a result of their absence but also through the Defence of the Realm regulations that prevented camping and lighting fires in certain areas: ‘The families were driven into towns; but on account of the prevailing scarcity, only slum or derelict ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The early twentieth century and wartime
• Part II Post-war and the 1960s
• Part III The later years
• Select bibliography
• Index