that any one attempting to “pull it up by the roots” would have a difficult task, unless he set to it with his teeth. They looked to me as if several of them had worn bright steel ornaments round their wrists and had danced at a county ball, and done more stepping upon the wheel of fortune than many people imagine; at any rate, they were quite happy in their way, and seemed prepared for another turn round when needful. Their first salutation was, “Well, governor, how are you? Sit you down and make yourself comfortable, and let’s have a chat. Never mind if it is Sunday, send for some ‘fourpenny’ for us.” I partly did as they bid me, but, owing to the darkness of the tent and the fog, I sat upon a seat that was partly covered with filth, consequently I had an addition to my trousers more than I bargained for. I told them my object was not to come to send for “fourpenny,” but to get a law passed to compel the Gipsy parents to send their children to school, and to have their tents registered and provided with a kind of school pass book; and, before I had well finished my remarks, one of the Gipsies, a good-looking fellow, said, “I say, Bill, that will be a capital thing, won’t it?” “God bless you, man, for it,” was the remark of another, and so the thing went the round among them. By this time there were some score or more Gipsy women and children at the tent door, or, I should rather say, rag coverlet, who heard what had passed, and they thoroughly fell in with the idea. The question next turned upon religion. They said they had heard that there were half-a-dozen different religions, and asked me if it was true. One said he was a Roman Catholic; but did not believe there was a hell. Another said he was a Methodist, but could not agree with their singing and praying, and so it went round till they asked me what religion was. I told them in a way that seemed to satisfy them, and I also told them some of its results. I could not learn that any of these Gipsies had ever been in a place of worship.
I mentioned to them that I wanted to show, during my inquiries, both sides of the question, and should be glad if they would point out to me the name of a Gipsy whom they could look up to and consider as a good pattern for them to follow. Here they began to scratch their heads, and said I had put them “a nightcap on.” “Upon my soul,” said one, “I should not know where to begin to look for one,” and then related to me the following story:—“The Devil sent word to some of his agents for them to send him the worst man they could find upon the face of the earth. So news went about among various societies everywhere, consultations and meetings were held, and it was decided that a Gipsy should be sent, as none of the societies or agents could find one bad enough. Accordingly a passport was procured, and they started the Gipsy on his way. When he came to the door of hell he knocked for admittance. The Devil shouted out, ‘Who is there?’ The Gipsy cried out, ‘A Gipsy.’ ‘All right,’ said the Devil; ‘you are just the man I am wanting. I have been on the look-out for you some time. Come in. I have been told the Gipsies are the worst folks in all the world.’ The Gipsy had not been long in hell before the Devil perceived that he was too bad for his place, and the place began to swarm with young imps to such a degree that the Devil called the Gipsy to him one day, and said, ‘Of all the people that have ever come to this place you are the worst. You are too bad for us. Here is your passport. Be off back again!’ The Devil opened the door, and said, as the Gipsy was going, ‘Make yourself scarce.’ So you see,” said Lee to me, “we are too bad for the Devil. We’ll go anywhere, fight anybody, or do anything. Now, lads, drink that ‘fourpenny’ up, and let’s send for some more.” This is Gipsy life in England on a Sunday afternoon within the sound of church bells.
The proprietor of the Weekly Times very readily granted permission for one of the principals of his staff to accompany me to one of the Gipsy encampments a Sunday or two ago
on the outskirts of London. Those who know the writer would say the article is truthful, and not in the least overdrawn:—“The lane was full of decent-looking houses, tenanted by labourers in foundries and gas and waterworks; but there were spaces between the rows of houses, forming yards for the deposit of garbage, and in these unsavoury spots the Gipsies had drawn up their caravans, and pitched their smoke-blackened tents. These yards were separated from each other by rows of cottages, and each yard contained families related near or distantly, or interested in each other’s welfare by long associations in the country during summer time, and in such places as we found them during the winter season. After spending several hours with these people in their tents and caravans, and passing from yard to yard, asking the talkative ones questions, we came to the conclusion that, in the whole bounds of this great metropolis, it would have been impossible to have found any miscalling themselves Gipsies whose mode of living more urgently called for the remedial action of the law than the tenants of Lamb-lane. In the first place, there was not a true Gipsy amongst them; nor one man, woman, or child who could in any degree claim relationship with a Gipsy. They were, all of them, idle loafers, who had adopted the wandering life of the Gipsy because of the opportunities it afforded of combining a maximum of idle hours with a minimum of work. The men exhibited this in their countenances, in the attitudes they took up, by the whining drawl with which they spoke; the women, by their dirtiness and inattention to dress; and the children, by their filthy condition. The men and women had fled from the restraints of house life to escape the daily routine which a home involved; the men had no higher ambition than to obtain a small sum of money on the Saturday to pay for a few days’ food. There was not one man amongst them who could solder a broken kettle; a few, however, could mend a chair bottom, but there all industrial ability ended; and the
others got their living by shaving skewers from Monday morning to Friday night, which were sold to butchers at 10d. or 1s. the stone. These men stayed at home, working over the brazier of burning coke during the week, while their wives hawked small wool mats or vases, but nothing of their own manufacture; and the grown-up lads, on market-days, added to the general industry by buying flowers in Covent-garden, and hawking them in the suburbs of the metropolis. We were assured by Mr. Smith that this class of pseudo-Gipsy was largely on the increase, and to check their spread Mr. Smith suggests that the provisions of an Act of Parliament should be mainly directed. Only one of all we saw and spoke to on Sunday was ‘a scholar’—that is, could read at all—and this was a lad of about fourteen, who had spent a few hours occasionally at a Board school. With all the others the knowledge that comes of reading was an absolute blank. They knew nothing, except that the proceeds of the previous week had been below the average; social events of surpassing interest had not reached them, and the future was limited by ‘to-morrow.’ We questioned them upon their experiences of the past winter, and the preference they had for their tents over houses was emphatically marked. ‘Brick houses,’ said one woman, who was suckling a baby, ‘are so full of draughts.’ Night and day the brazier of burning coke was never allowed to go low, and under the tent the ground was always dry, however wet it might be outside, because of the heat from the brazier; besides, they lay upon well-trodden-down straw, six or eight inches deep, and covered themselves with their clothes, their wraps, their filthy rugs, and tattered rags, and were as warm as possible. The tents had many advantages over a brick house. Besides having no draughts, there was no accumulation of snow upon the tops of the tents; and so these witless people were content to endure poverty, hunger, cold, and dirt for the sake of minimising their contribution to the general good of the whole commonwealth. The poorest working man in
London who does an honest week’s work is a hero compared with such men as these. It would be impossible to nurture sentiment in any tent in Lamb-lane. There was no face with a glimmer of honest self-reliance about it, no face bearing any trace of the strange beauty we had noticed in other encampments, and no form possessed of any distinguishing grace. The whole of the yards were redolent of dirt; and the people, each and all, inexcusably foul in person. In several yards little boys or girls sat on the ground in the open air, tending coke fires over which stood iron pots, and, as the water boiled and raised the lids, it was plain that the women were taking advantage of the quiet hours of the afternoon for a wash. Before we came away from the last yard, lines had been strung across all the yards, and the hastily-washed linen rags were fluttering in the air. One tent was closed to visitors. It was then four o’clock, and a woman told us confidentially her friend was washing a blanket, which she would have to dry that same afternoon, as it would be ‘wanted’ at night; but ‘the friend’ professed her readiness to take charge of anything we had to spare for the washerwoman—a mouthful of baccy, a ‘sucker’ for the baby, or ‘three ha’pence for a cup of tea.’ Boys were there of fourteen and sixteen, with great rents in the knees of their corduroys, who only went out to hawk one day in the week—Saturday. They started with a light truck for Covent-garden at four in the morning, and would have from 4s. to 6s. to lay out in flowers. When questioned as to what flowers they had bought on the previous day, one lad said they were ‘tulips, hyacinths, and cyclaments,’ but nobody could give us an intelligible description of the last-named flowers. Two lads generally took charge of the flower truck, and the result of the day’s hawking was usually a profit of half-a-crown to three shillings. These lads also assisted during the week in shaving skewers, and accompanied their fathers to market when they had a load to sell. In one tent we found a dandy-hen sitting; she had been so
occupied one week, and the presence of the children and adults, who shared her straw bed, in no way discomposed her. We found that baccy and ‘suckers’ were the most negotiable exchanges with these people. The women, young and old, small boys and the men, all smoked, and the day became historic with them because, of the extra smokes they were able to have. The ‘suckers’ were the largest specimen of ‘bulls’ eyes’ we could find—not those dainty specimens sold at the West-end or in the Strand, but real whoppers, almost the size of pigeons’ eggs; and yet there was no baby whose mouth was not found equal to the reception and the hiding of the largest; and we noticed as a strange psychological fact that no baby would consent, though earnestly entreated by its mother, to suffer the ‘sucker’ to leave its mouth for the mother to look at. The babies knew better, shaking their wary little heads at their mothers. Instinct was stronger than obedience. We were not sorry to get away from Lamb-lane, with its filthy habitations, blanket washings, ragged boys and girls, lazy men and women. For the genuine Gipsy tribe, and their mysterious promptings to live apart from their fellows in the lanes and fields of the country, we have a sentimental pity; but with such as these Lamb-lane people, off-scourings of the lowest form of society, we have no manner of sympathy; and we hope that a gracious Act of Parliament may soon rid English social life of such a plague, and teach such people their duty to their children and to society at large—things they are too ignorant and too idle to learn for themselves.”
My son sends me the following account of a visit he made to a Gipsy encampment near London:—I visited the camp at Barking Road this afternoon. Possibly you thought I might not go if you gave me a correct description of the route, for I certainly went through more muddy streets and over lock-bridges than your instructions mentioned. Presuming I was near the camp, I inquired of a policeman, and was surprised with the reply that there used to be one, but
he had not heard anything of it for a long while. His mind was evidently wandering, or else he meant it as a joke, for we were then standing within three hundred yards of the largest encampment I have yet seen. It is situated at the back of Barking Road, in what may be termed a field, but it certainly is not a green one, for the only horse and donkey that I saw were standing against boxes eating—perhaps corn.