The winter drives many of the gipsies to encamp in the marshes, or in the disused brickfields near London. Anything more dismal and wretched than this life it is hard to think of. All the poetry of gipsying is clean gone then, and nothing is left but filth, poverty, vice, and misery. In Hackney Marshes and elsewhere about London you may find scores of these tents, often so rotten that a stiff wind would blow them away. Creeping into one of them, almost on all fours, you find half-naked gipsy children squatting upon the ground, busy at skewer-cutting, for which they get from tenpence to one shilling for fourteen pounds’ weight. Or else the family is at work in the more elaborate processes of making clothes-pegs. One chops sticks the right length; another trims them into shape and flings them into a pan of hot water; a child picks out the floating pieces and bites off the bark; and then a bigger lad fastens the two together with a strip of tin, and the clothes-peg is ready. So the dreary day goes by until the lurcher dog springs up, the unfailing attendant of the gipsy man, and the women of the family return with the scraps they have picked up in questionable ways at back doors, and with the proceeds of their sales. At night all lie down where they have worked, and sleep as they are, with but a rag between them and the bleak night of pitiless rain and snow. Here the gipsy children are born and brought up. Here they live and here they die, almost as far away from the track of any day-school or Sunday-school as if they were African savages.
The poor wandering outcast gipsy child can say with Phineas Fletcher in the “Fuller Worthies”—
“See, Lord, see, I am dead;
Tomb’d in myself, myself my grave:
A drudge, so born, so bred,
Myself, even to myself, a slave.”* * * * *
“Ask’st Thou no beauty but to cleanse and clothe me?
If, then, Thou lik’st, put forth Thy hand and take me.”
Two years ago I attended a village feast in the neighbourhood of Bedford, and found, as usual, a large gathering of gipsies and others of a similar class plying their avocation among the “knock’em downs,” “three shies a penny,” &c. On arriving at the place I found “a gipsy row upon the carpet,” and on going up to one of the gipsies to ask him what it was all about, a gipsy some fifty yards off, more like a madman than anything else, began to bawl out all sorts of hard things, and in doing so other gipsies began to cluster round us, and to all appearance I seemed to be in a fair way for being in the midst of a “Welsh fight.” So I said to the gipsy who was standing by me, “I’ll go to see what he wants.” “If you do,” the gipsy replied, “he will knock you down.” I said, “Then I will go to be knocked down,” and away I went, and while I was going along the mad gipsy was literally foaming with rage, and uttering oaths and curses on my head not quite as thick as hailstones. On arriving before his majesty I began to smile at him, and said as I put out my hand to him, “Will you shake hands?” At this he drew back a little, and said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Lend me your hand.” He again said, with more emphasis than before, “What do you mean?” Ultimately he put out his hand into mine, and the result was nothing would please him and the other gipsies but that we must drink some ginger-beer together. And while this was going on a gipsy from Barking Road, London, whom I had seen before, whispered in his ear who I was, and that I was trying to get their children educated. So nothing would serve them but to explain in a public-house bar how the education of the gipsy children was to be brought about, which plan seemed to please them amazingly; and at the end of my tale they again closed in upon me, but this time to thank and bless me. The foremost in doing so was the mad gipsy whom I faced in the storm, saying, as he shook hands with both hands in a rough fashion, “I do love you, that I do, for taking so much trouble over our children.” After similar greetings from the others we parted. Only one out of the large number of gipsies there could read and write, and he had taken to gipsying from the boarding-school at the age of seventeen, and, sad to say, neither his wife nor one of their eight children could tell a letter; and he further said that he was sure there was not one gipsy in a hundred who could read a sentence. To the gipsies I would say with a writer in Hand and Heart, Ah!
“Mistaken mortals, did you know
Where joy, heart’s ease, and comforts grow!”
In May, 1880, I visited one of the largest towns in the midland counties, with the object of ascertaining the probable number of shows, vans, and other movable abodes there were in and round the outskirts of the town, and found close about thirty. These, together with others in various parts of the country, would in all probability bring the number to nearly forty-five. No doubt other counties would furnish similar results. In showing the number of those who live in these vans I will quote the following seven cases as a specimen. The numbers were given to me by a man and his wife, who own and live in one of the vans about the size of a carrier’s dray, following the profession of “knock-’em-down.” B—, man, wife, and eleven children of all ages and sizes; S—, man, wife, and four children; J—, man, wife, and five children; P—, man, wife, and seven children; B—, man, wife, and four children; E—, man, wife, and seven children; N—, man, wife, and five children. By these figures it will be seen that there are forty-three children and fourteen men and women, with four-fifths at least of English blood in their veins, living in these seven vans. Few of these persons can read or write. I should think scarcely half a dozen could write their own names. In the case of the man B—, two children could just put three letters together, and two could just write their own names, and this was the extent of their education. Some of the “popgun” owners I have known personally for some years. One of the sons worked for me, and would by this time have been earning his £1 per week; but instead of this the whole family of twelve have taken to this libertine kind of wandering existence, with a prospect that does not look very encouraging, and many others are doing the same thing. These cases are given to show what is going on all over the country. In some instances the parents would send their children to school, but they say they cannot afford to pay for a week’s schooling when the children can only attend a day or two. It seems hardly fair to make those who of all others should have their education encouraged to pay three times as much as town residents, which is the case when the children attend three different schools in one week. These ramblers are on the increase, and it is high time they were taken in hand. James, a man well known, and who travels with a “ginger-bread stall,” said, when I told him my object and what the results would be, as he filled my hand full of his best “Grantham ginger-bread,” “God bless you, man, for it, and I wish with all my heart it would come to pass to morrow. Will it be three months first?” I told him that I thought it would be a much longer time than that, at which he shook his head, and said it was a “bad job.”
The gipsies of England have nothing in the past to thank us for, except the policeman’s cudgel and the “wheel of fortune” in the big “stone jug.” No one has taken them by the hand to lift and lead them out from among the dead men’s bones and demoralizing scenes in the midst of which they have been content with hellish delight to revel. Thank God, a few kind-hearted friends are beginning to notice them in their degraded condition, and to write to me on the subject. One of the leading woollen manufacturers of Scotland wrote to me in 1881 as follows:
“Dear Sir,—
“I can testify to the horrible social state of the van population at described in your occasional communications to the Times. This class of people overflow in Scotland, and for some years I have had occasion to observe their habits and habitations. But hitherto no persons in authority seem to take any interest in the matter, though it is one of grave social importance. We have visits of people who live in vans, who bring to the town such entertainments as shooting galleries, hobby horses, and any kind of trumpery exhibitions. These concerns are made up of families who pig together in their vans in a state which defies decency or sanitary rules. Whole families house in these small boxes upon wheels, usually in size about eight or nine feet by five feet. One lady recently tried to converse with some children of this class, and found they were ignorant of everything that was good. A gentleman interviewed one of the male heads of one family or group. He said his wife had had seventeen children, all born in the van in different counties of England. Within a few yards of my own door a van just lately stood for a night, in which slept one woman and five men or lads. The man—if he were the father—said they dealt in horses, and belonged to Hull, and they travelled the country living in their van, which was about eight feet by five feet. What I complain of is that, while local residents are made subject to various rules, educational and social, police, and sanitary order, these people should escape all kinds of supervision, and be literally a law unto themselves. I can well understand the strong reasons you have for calling public attention to such an evil.”