Gypsy Coppersmiths in Liverpool and Birkenhead

Transcribed from the 1913 Henry Young and Sons edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
BY ANDREAS (MUI SHUKO)
LIVERPOOL HENRY YOUNG AND SONS 1913
Printed by Robert McGee & Co., Ltd., 34 South Castle Street, Liverpool.
as amends for his annoyance when the railway-officials refused to allow the donkey to travel with a dog-ticket, and
in gratitude for comforting portions of St. Luke and scrambled eggs administered in hours of depression, these sketches are dedicated.
December , 1913 .
Descendants of Gunia:
Descendants of Grantsha:
Descendants of Worsho (Nikola or Kola Tshoron) the chief:
When you want to find a Gypsy the police are more likely to be able to give you his address than directories, bankers, or ministers of religion; and it was a Liverpool policeman who sent me to the back of the municipal slaughter-house to seek a horde of “Hungarian” Roms whose arrival had been announced by the evening papers. In a squalid street, at a corner where insanitary dwellings had been demolished, I found a vacant plot of brick-strewn ground surrounded by high walls. There, evidently, were my Gypsies, for a crowd of boys had gathered round the one door, struggling for a glance through its keyhole. Mistaking me for a detective, they made way, and I knocked loudly and long.
The boys were not mistaken. There was a scene within which was worth looking at. The strangers had journeyed so rapidly from Marseilles to Liverpool that they had outstripped their heavy baggage, and, arriving before their tents, were obliged to bivouac under tiny extemporized shelters propped against the windowless house-walls which formed two sides of the square. They were making the best of circumstances with considerable success, for they had with them countless beds of eiderdown in brilliantly coloured covers, and they had their all-important samovars. The men were out, but the women, protected by a police-serjeant from the inhospitable attentions of their neighbours, were in the camp, and into that shabby yard they had brought an unaccustomed glory which was altogether foreign and oriental.