for recreation. But who cares for, or thinks about, the wandering Romany? True, Police-Constable Argus receives authority by which he, sans cérémonie, commands them to ‘move on,’ should he come across any by the roadside in his diurnal or nocturnal perambulations. But it often occurs that the object for which they ‘camped’ in the spot has been accomplished. The farmer’s hedge has been made to supply them with fuel for warmth and for culinary purposes; his field has been trespassed upon, and fodder stolen for their overworked and cruelly-treated quadrupeds; so, the ‘move on’ simply means a little inconvenience resulting from their having to transfer their paraphernalia to another ‘camp ground’ not far off. They also enjoy certain immunities which are withheld from other classes. Excepting that some of them pay for a hawker’s licence, they roam about as they list, untaxed and uncontrolled, though the earnings of most of them amount to a considerable sum every year; as they are free from the conventional rule which requires the house-dwelling population, often at great inconvenience, to ‘keep up appearances,’ it often happens that the wearer of the most tattered garments earns the most money. They can and do live sparingly, and spend lavishly. The labour which they choose is the most remunerative kind. Ploughing or stone-breaking is not the employment, which the Gipsy usually seeks! He takes the cream and leaves the skimmed milk for the cottier, and having done all there is to do of the kind he chooses, he is off to some other money-making industry. A Gipsy will make four harvests in one year; first he goes ‘up the country,’ as he calls going into Middlesex, for ‘peas-hacking.’ That over, he goes into Sussex (Chichester—’wheat-fagging’ or tying), and on that being done, returns toward Hampshire—North Hants—to ‘fag’ or tie, and that being done he enters Surrey for hop-picking (previously securing a ‘bin’ in one of the gardens). Some idea of his gross earnings may be obtained from the following fact:—Two able-bodied men, an old woman of
about 75 years of age, and two women, earned on a farm in one harvest, no less than £42. After that, they went hop-picking, and, in answer to my question, ‘How much will they earn there?’ the farmer, who is a hop-grower, said, ‘More than they have here.’ These operations were performed in less than a quarter of the year. In the places through which they pass to their work they sell what they can, and at night pitch their tent or draw their van on some common or waste land, buy no corn for their horses, nor spend any money for coal or wood. If they locate themselves on the margin of a wood, and make a prolonged sojourn, the uproar, the screams, the cries of ‘murder’ heard from their rendezvous
“‘Make night hideous.’
All this, and more, they do with impunity. ‘It is only the Gipsies quarrelling.’ No inspector of nuisances pays them a visit; the tax-gatherer knows not their whereabouts; the rate-collector troubles them not with any ‘demand note;’ their children are not provided with proper and necessary education, yet no school attendance officer serves them with a summons. Their existence is not known officially, saving the time a census is taken, when, at the expense of the house-dwellers, a registry is made of them. Not a farthing do they contribute to the government, imperial or local, though many of them are in a position to do it, and can, without inconvenience, find from £40 to £80; or £100 for a new-travelling van when they want one. Overcrowding and numerous indecencies exist in galore among them, yet no representative of the Board of Health troubles himself about the number of cubic feet of air per individual there may be in their tent or van. Is this neglect, indifference, obliviousness, or do the authorities believe that the impurities and unsanitary exhalements are sufficiently oxidised to prevent any disease? It is worthy of remark that they are not liable to the epidemics which afflict others. The loss of a
pony from a common simultaneously with their exodus is a suspicious fact occasionally. They live in defiance of social, moral, civil, and natural law, a disgrace to the legislature.—J. W. B.”
In the Hand and Heart, September 19th of last year, the editor says, with reference to our roadside arabs:—“Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, whose efforts to better the condition of the wretched canal population have met deserved success, draws attention to the state of another neglected class. Parliament, he says, which has lately been reforming so many things, would have done well to consider the case of the Gipsies, ‘our roadside arabs.’ Of the idleness, ignorance, heathenism, and general misery prevailing among these strange people he gives some curious instances. One old man, whose acquaintance Mr. Smith made, calculates that ‘there are about 250 families of Gipsies in ten of the Midland counties, and thinks that a similar proportion will be found in the rest of the United Kingdom. He has seen as many as ten tents of Gipsies within a distance of five miles. He thinks there will be an average of five children in each tent. He has seen as many as ten or twelve children in some tents, and not many of them able to read or write. His child of six months old—with his wife ill at the same time in the tent—sickened, died, and was “laid out” by him, and it was also buried out of one of those wretched abodes on the roadside at Barrow-upon-Soar, last January. When the poor thing died he had not sixpence in his pocket.’ An old woman bore similar testimony. ‘She said 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. This poor woman knows about three hundred families of Gipsies in eleven of the Midland and Eastern counties, and has herself, so she says, four lots
of Gipsies travelling in Lincolnshire at the present time. She said she could not read herself, and thinks that not one Gipsy in twenty can. She has travelled all her life. Her mother, named Smith, of whom there are not a few, is the mother of fifteen children, all of whom were born in a tent.’ Mr. Smith’s conclusion (which will not be disputed) is that ‘to have between three and four thousand men and women, and eight or ten thousand children classed in the Census as vagrants and vagabonds, roaming all over the country, in ignorance and evil training that carries peril with it, is not a pleasant look-out for the future.’ He contends that ‘if these poor children, living in vans and tents and under old carts, 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 Illustrated London News, October 4th, says:—“Among the papers to be read at Manchester is one on the condition of the Gipsy children and roadside ‘arabs’ in our midst, by Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, Leicester. Here, indeed, is a gentleman who is certainly neither a dealer in crotchets nor a rider of hobbies. Mr. Smith has done admirable service on behalf of the poor children on board our barges and canal-boats, and the even more pitiable boys and girls in our brick-fields; and to his philanthropic exertions are mainly due the recent amendments in the Factory Acts regulating the labour of young children. He has now taken the case of the juvenile ‘Romanies’ in hand; and I wish him well in his benevolent crusade. Mr. Smith has obligingly sent me a proof of his address, from which I gather that, owing to a superstitious dislike which the Gipsies entertain towards the Census, and the successfully cunning attempts on their part to baffle the enumerators, it is only by conjecture and guesswork that we can form any idea of the number of Bohemians in this country. The
result of Mr. Smith’s diligent inquiries has led him to the assumption that there are not less than 4,000 Gipsy men and women, and from 15,000 to 20,000 Gipsy and ‘arab’—that is to say, tramp—children roaming about the country ‘outside the educational laws and the pale of civilisation.’”
The following leading article, relating to my paper upon “The Condition of the Gipsy Children,” appears in the Daily News, October 6th:—“At the Social Science Congress Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, will to-morrow open a fresh campaign of philanthropy. The philanthropic Alexander is seldom in the unhappy condition of his Macedonian original, and generally has plenty of worlds remaining ready to be conquered. Brick-yards and canal-boats have not exhausted Mr. Smith’s energies, and the field he has now entered upon is wider and perhaps harder to work than either of these. Mr. Smith desires to bring the Gipsy children under the operation of the Education Act. Education and Gipsies seem at first sight to be words mutually contradictory. Amid the mass of imaginative fiction, idle speculation, and deliberate forgery that has been set afloat on the subject of the Gipsies, one thing has been made tolerably clear, and that is the intense aversion which the pure bred Gipsy has to any of the restraints of civilised life. Whether those restraints take the form of orderly and cleanly living in houses of brick and of stone, or of military service, or of school attendance, is pretty much a matter of indifference to him. Schools, indeed, may be regarded from the Gipsy point of view as not merely irksome, but useless institutions. Our most advanced places of technical education do not teach fortune-telling, or that interesting branch of the tinker’s art which enables the practitioner in mending one hole in a kettle to make two. Except for music the Gipsies do not seem to have much aptitude for the arts; they are more or less indifferent to literature; and business, except of certain dubious kinds, is a detestable thing to them. Their vagrant habits, on the other hand, enable them, without much difficulty, to evade