necessary to say. The sympathies of the public were effectually roused by the narratives which revealed to us the deplorable depths of human depravity into which vast numbers of English people had fallen. The sufferings of the children in the gloomy, pestiferous cabins used for ‘living’ purposes especially excited the country’s pity. At this present moment the lot of these poor waifs is far from being inviting, but it is vastly different from what it was a short time back. It was only a few days ago that the Duke of Richmond, in reply to no less a personage than the Archbishop of Canterbury, announced that express arrangements had been made by the Government to meet the educational requirements of the once helpless and neglected victims.
“Mr. Smith has now embarked upon a fresh crusade against misery and ignorance. He has turned his attention from the ‘water Gipsies’ to their brethren ashore. He has already began to busy himself with the condition of ‘our roadside arabs,’ as he calls them. We fear Mr. Smith in prosecuting this good work of his is doomed to perform a serious act of disenchantment. The ideal Gipsy is destined to be scattered to the winds by the unvarnished picture which Mr. Smith will cause to be presented to our vision. He does not pretend to show us the romantic, fantastically-dressed creature whose prototypes have long been in the imaginations of many of us as types of the Gipsy species. Those of our readers who have formed their notions of Gipsy life upon the strength of the assurances which have been given them by the late Mr. G. P. R. James and kindred writers will find it hard to substitute for the joyous scenes of sunshine and freedom he has associated with the nomadic existence, the dull, wearisome round of squalor and wretchedness which is found, upon examination, to constitute the principal condition of the Gipsy tent. Whether it is that in this awfully prosaic period of the world’s history the picturesque and jovial rascality which novelist and poet have insisted in connecting with the Ishmaelites is stamped ruthlessly out of
being by force of circumstances, it is barely possible to say. Perhaps Gipsies, in common with other tribes of the romantic past, have gradually become denuded of their old attractiveness. It is, we confess, rather difficult to believe that Bamfylde Moore Carew (wild, restless fellow though he was) would persistently have linked his lot with that of the poor, degraded, poverty-stricken wretches whom Mr. Smith has taken in hand. Perchance it happens that our old heroes of song and story have, so far as England is concerned, deteriorated as a consequence of the money-making, business-like atmosphere that they are compelled to breathe, and that with more favoured climes they are to be seen in much of their primitive glory. In Hungary, for instance, it is declared that Gipsy life is pretty much what it is represented to be in our own glowing pages of fiction. The late Major Whyte-Melville, in a modern story declared to be founded on fact, introduces us to a company of these continental wanderers who, with their beautiful Queen, seem to invest the scenes from our old friend, ‘The Bohemian Girl,’ with something akin to probability. But there is, of course, a limit to even Mr. Smith’s labours. Hungary is beyond his jurisdiction. He does not pretend to carry his experience of the Gipsies further than the Midlands. Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and our neighbouring counties have offered him the examples he requires with his new campaign. The lot of the roamers who eke out a living in the adjacent lanes and roadways is, he explains to us, as pitiful as anything of the sort well could be. The tent of the Gipsy he finds to be as filthy and as repulsive as the cabin of the canal-boat. Human beings of both sexes and of all ages are huddled together without regard to comfort. As a necessary sequence the women and children are the chief sufferers in a social evil of this sort. The men are able to rough it, but the weaker sex and their little charges are reduced to the lowest paths of misery. Children are born, suffer from disease, and die in the canvas hovels; and are committed to the dust by the
roadside. One old woman told Mr. Smith ‘that she had had sixteen children, fifteen of whom are alive, several of them being born in a roadside tent. She says that she was married out of one of these tents; and her brother died and was buried out of a tent at Packington, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch.’ The experience of this old crone is akin to that of most of her class. She also tells Mr. Smith that she could not read herself, and she did not believe one in twenty could. Morally, as well as from a sanitary point of view, Gipsy life, as it really exists, is a social plague-spot, and consequently a social danger. Especially does this contention apply to the children, of whom Mr. Smith estimates that there are ten thousand roaming over the face of the country as vagrants and vagabonds. It is to be hoped many months will not be allowed to elapse before this difficulty is seriously and successfully grappled with. Mr. Smith’s counsel as to the children is that ‘living in vans and tents and under old carts, if they are to be allowed to live in these places they should be registered in a manner analogous to the Canal Boats Act of 1877, so that the children may be brought under the compulsory clauses of the Education Acts, and become Christianised and civilised as other children.’ The Duke of Richmond and his department may do much to facilitate Mr. Smith’s crusade without temporising with the prejudices of red-tapeism.”
Figaro writes August 27th:—“Our old friend having successfully tackled the brick-yard children, and the floating waifs and strays of our barge population, has now taken the little Gipsies in hand, with a view of bringing them under the supervision of the School Board system now general in this country. He is a bold and energetic man, but we are bound to say we doubt a little whether he will be able to tame the offspring of the merry Zingara, and pass them all through the regulation educational standard. Should he succeed, we shall be thenceforth surprised at nothing, but be quite prepared to hear that Mr. Smith has
become chairman of a society for changing the spots of the leopard, or honorary director of an association for changing the Ethiopian’s skin!”
The following letter from the Rev. J. Finch, a rural dean, appeared in the Standard, August 30th:—“The following facts may not be without some interest to those who have read the letters which have recently appeared in the pages of the Standard respecting Gipsies. During the thirty years I have been rector of this parish, members of the Boswell family have been almost constantly resident here. I buried the head of the family in 1874, who died at the age of 87. He was a regular attendant at the parish church, and failed not to bow his head reverently when he entered within the House of God. His burial was attended by several sons resident, as Gipsies, in the Midland counties, and a headstone marks the grave where his body rests. I never saw, or heard, any harm of the man. He was a quiet and inoffensive man, and worked industriously as a tinman within a short time of his death. If he had rather a sharp eye for a little gift, that is a trait of character by no means confined to Gipsies. One of his daughters was married here to a member of the Boswell tribe, and another, who rejoiced in the name of Britannia, I buried in her father’s grave two years ago. After his death she and her mother removed to an adjoining parish, where she was confirmed by Bishop Selwyn in 1876. Regular as was the old man at church, I never could persuade his wife to come. In 1859 I baptized, privately, an infant of the same tribe, whose parents were travelling through the parish, and whose mother was named Elvira. Great was the admiration of my domestics at the sight of the beautiful lace which ornamented the robe in which the child was brought to my house. Clearly there are Gipsies, and those of a well-known tribe, glad to receive the ministrations of the Church.”
I next turned my steps towards London, having heard
that Gipsies were to be found in the outskirts of this Babylon. I set off early one morning in quest of them from my lodgings, not knowing whither; but my earliest association came to my relief. Knowing that Gipsies are generally to be found in the neighbourhood of brick-yards, I took the ’bus to Notting Hill, and after asking the policeman, for neither clergyman or other ministers could tell me where they were to be found, I wended my way to Wormwood Scrubs, and the following letter, which appeared in the Daily News, September 6th of last year, is the outcome of that “run out,” and is as follows:—“It has been the custom for years—I might almost say centuries—when speaking of the Gipsies, to introduce in one form or other during the conversation either ‘the King of the Gipsies,’ ‘the Queen,’ or some other member of ‘the Royal Family.’ It may surprise many of your readers who cling to the romantic side of a Gipsy’s life, and shut their eyes to the fearful amount of ignorance, wretchedness, and misery there is amongst them, to say that this extraordinary being is nothing but a mythological jack-o’-th’-lantern, phantom of the brain, illusion, the creation of lying tongues practising the art of deception among some of the ‘green horns’ in the country lanes, or on the village greens. It is true there are some ‘horse-leeches’ among the Gipsies who have got fat out of their less fortunate hedge-bottom brethren and the British public, who delight in calling them either ‘the King,’ ‘Queen,’ ‘Prince,’ or ‘Princess.’ It is true also that there are vast numbers of the Gipsies who, with a chuckle, tongue in cheek, wink of the eye, side grin and a sneer, say they have these important personages amongst them; and if any little extra stir is being made at a fair-time in the country lanes, in the neighbourhood of straw-yards, they will be sure to tell them that either the ‘king,’ ‘queen,’ or some member of the ‘royal family’ is being married or visiting them; and nothing pleases the poor, ignorant Gipsies better than to get the bystanders, with mouths open,
to believe their tales and lies. I should think that there is scarcely a county in England but what a Gipsy king’s or queen’s wedding has not taken place there within the last twenty years. There was one in Bedfordshire not long since; another at Epping Forest; and the last I heard of this wonderful airy being was that he had taken up his head-quarters at the Royal Hotel, Liverpool, and a carriage with eight wheels and six piebald horses had been presented to him as a wedding present from the Gipsies. Gipsy ‘kings,’ ‘queens,’ and ‘princes,’ their marriages and deaths, are innumerable among the ‘royal family.’ It is equally believing in moonshine and air-bubbles to believe that the Gipsies never speak of their dead. There is a beautiful headstone put in a little churchyard about two and a half miles from Barnet in memory of the Brinkly family, and it is carefully looked after by members of the family; one of the Lees has a tombstone erected to his memory in Hanwell Cemetery; and such silly nonsense is put out by the cunning, crafty Gipsies as ‘dazzlers,’ to enable them more readily to practise the art of lying and deception upon their gullible listeners. Then again, with reference to the Gipsies having a religion of their own. There is not a word of truth in this imaginative notion prevalent in the minds or some who have been trying to study their habits. Excepting the language of some of the old-fashioned real Gipsies, and a few other little peculiarities, any one studying the real hard facts of a Gipsy’s life with reference to the amount of ignorance, and everything that is bad among them, will come to the conclusion that there is much among them to compare very unfavourably with the most neglected in our back streets and slums. Of course, there are some good among them, as with other ‘ragamuffin’ ramblers. The following particulars, related to me by a well-known Gipsy woman in the neighbourhood of ‘Wormwood Scrubs’ and the ‘North Pole,’ remarkable for her truthfulness, honesty, and uprightness, will tend