Two years ago I invited twelve gipsy children, who were living in two vans and attending our feast, to tea on our hearthstone. Although three of the parents could read and write, and ten of the children were of school age, not one of the poor little things could tell a letter. All the van-dwellers were in the lowest depths of degradation, filth, and misery. They were surrounded with sunshine, and yet it never entered their wretched dwelling; at any rate they never opened their door with glad hearts and thankful song to receive its cheering rays.
The chimes and music of church bells seemed to have no other effect upon their lives than the bringing forth of the cries of misery, wails of anguish, and groans of despair. The beautiful robes with which nature was clothed made their ragged, wretched torn garments look as if they had been pulled to pieces, torn and stuck together by demons who had thrown off all moral restraint, and were following the downward tendencies of human nature to their hearts’ content. Three of the parents once had a comfortable settled home, but alas! alas! it seems to be all over, and a blacker future for the children awaits them, if the Government do not take the poor things by the hand and lead them a step forwards and upwards.
At the close of 1882 I visited, on a Sunday afternoon, a camp of gipsies upon Turnham Green. There were five vans and tents, and fourteen men and women and seventeen children squatting round their fires upon the wet and slushy grass. As I neared them, five of the gipsy children, half naked, came running towards me. One little curly-headed fellow, named Boswell, shouted out, “If you please, guv’-nor, have you come to teach us to read, the same as a kind lady did last summer? We wish you would. Have you brought us any picture books? Please read a bit to us.” After a few minutes chat with them, I emptied my bag of cards, and with a sorrowful heart left the gipsy children in their ignorance to speed their wishes into the air, so it appears. With a writer in the Sunday Magazine, I say with a deep, deep-drawn sigh—
“Oh the wandering waifs and strays,
In hiding day and night,
And lacking verdant shelter,
On their lives a blight;
Aye, creeping far and farther
From the eyes of men;
If they find a lodging,
’Tis in some horrid den!”
A little later on I went to Daventry and found a man—a tradesman—in the market-place, exhibiting a deformed pony rather than follow his own trade. Both man and wife could read and write—in fact, the woman had once been a Sunday-school teacher—but not one of their five children could read a sentence.
Only the other day, our good vicar’s respected wife, Mrs. Darnell, in company with her niece, Miss Stansfeld, took shelter in a cottage, rather than face two most repulsive-looking men and one woman with seven children, who were tramping the country in a most wretched and forlorn condition. Their only home consisted in an old handcart full of rags, upon which were perched, on a most bitterly cold and wet day, three poor gipsy children; and the other four children were trudging by the side of the hand-cart scarcely able to get one foot before the other. Their shoeless footprints seemed to cry out loud for help. Many gipsies camp upon Cannock Chase from time to time, and such is their character that people passing that way in dark hours generally take the precaution to be armed with pistols, and to have dogs by their sides.
Think about it lightly as we may, the evils of gipsying are on the increase in this country. Fortune-telling and deceit are taking fast hold upon the “silly girls and young chaps.” Very recently the Daily News reported a case in Dorsetshire where two gipsy women induced a dairyman’s wife to part with her sovereigns for a sheep’s heart studded with pins in mystic patterns outside, and crammed inside with bright farthings. The heart was to be hung in the chimney till Easter, when it was to be taken out and all the farthings to be turned into sovereigns. The woman’s husband broke the “spell” by pulling the heart out of the chimney before Easter. The Graphic, in the spring of 1882, reports a case of a “white witch” at Plymouth, who declared that the whole crew of a smack were under a “spell”—and the crew believed it—which “spell” only the gipsy witch could remove, and of course for money only. The British Workman for October, 1882, shows a little of some of the evils of fortune-telling. At the Bradford county police-court recently, Delia Young, a gipsy, was charged with fortune-telling. For some weeks the prisoner, with a number of other gipsies, had been staying at a village named Wyke, and hundreds of persons of all ages and both sexes had visited her. Her fees ranged from ls. to 5s., the latter sum being charged when a “planet was ruled.” It was stated that her earnings must have averaged several guineas a day for many months. For the defence it was contended that the prisoner and her family had told fortunes at Blackpool during the season for twenty years. She was fined £5 and costs, with the alternative of two months’ imprisonment. The money was paid.
I have visited more than once the gipsies upon Plaistow marshes in company with Mr. —, and also with my son, and found about thirty families squatting about in their vans and tents, up to their knees in mud, and in a most heartrending condition. Farmers house their pigs in a much better condition than we found the poor lost gipsies tented and housed. Gipsy children came round us by the score. There would be not fewer than between a hundred and a hundred and fifty poor little creatures, growing up without ever visiting either the school or the church, although there were a magnificent school and church within a stone’s throw. The sanitary inspector, school board officer, and Christian ministers were unknown to those wretched, lost gipsy children. They are fully acquainted with the policeman and his doings. In one or two of the vans smallpox and fever appeared to me to be at work. Round the outskirts of London there will be nearly 3,000 gipsies tenting and squatting about. They generally find the lowest and swampy spots.
My scores of visits to various parts of the country during many years are not recorded here, but the same sorrowful tale is everywhere manifest.
It does seem that letters of blood and words of fire will be needed to arouse the hearts and consciences of my countrymen, and compel them to observe the dark side of human life which lies close to our eyes and noses; and to draw the veil of ignorance away which is preventing the sun of civilization carrying out its mission among our own outcasts.