By the time I had arrived at the gipsy quarters, owing to my loads, the deep snow, and the slippery nature of the roads in some places, I was ready for a rest.
At the entrance to the village I met a number of little half-starved, dirty, ragged gipsy children, who, to say the least, would require a deal of “straightening up” before they were ready for angelic robes. One little fellow with fine lips, but a mouth almost extending from ear to ear, accosted me in such a manner as to satisfy me that I was, without doubt, in the land of gipsydom. With the exception of the fine old church and one or two houses, the whole presented a miserable appearance. The gipsy dwellings were one story high, and of a dirty dingy white.
Leydon’s opinion of the Yetholm gipsies in his day was not very high, for he says—
“On Yeta’s banks the vagrant gipsies place
Their turf-built cots. A sunburnt swarthy race,
From Nubian realms their tawny line they bring,
And their brown chieftain vaunts the name of king.
With loitering steps from town to town they pass,
Their lazy dames rock’d on the panier’d ass,
From pilfer’d roots or nauseous carrion fed,
By hedgerows green they strew their leafy bed;
While scarce the cloak of tawdry red conceals
The fine-turned limbs which every breeze reveals.
Their bright black eyes through silken lashes shine,
Around their necks their raven tresses twine;
But chilling damps and dews of night impair
Its soft sleek gloss and tan the bosom bare.
Adroit the lines of palmistry to trace,
Her horded silver store they charm away,
A pleasing debt for promised wealth to pay.”
Slater says in his Directory for 1882 that “Town Yetholm and Kirk Yetholm are both very humble in appearance, especially the latter, which is chiefly inhabited by gipsies, a race formerly remarkable for their disorderly lives and dangerous characters, and at this day distinguished by peculiarity of habits from the general body of the community.”
Dr. Baird says in his “Memoir of the Rev. John Baird,” written some twenty years ago, “A colony of gipsies which had long been settled at Kirk Yetholm had given rather an unenviable notoriety to the village, and rendered its name familiar to thousands in Scotland. The great majority of this wandering race were little better than heathens though born in a Christian land, and were notorious for poaching, thieving, and blackguardism.”
Most of the gipsy dwellings belong to a friend, the Marquis of Tweeddale, and he has of late years taken steps to improve their appearance. At the present time I am told the gipsy dwellings, so far as the outsides are concerned, show a great improvement. Sad to relate, the gipsy tenants have not improved one jot. Landlords may make gipsies’ and labourers’ houses—and it is right they should—healthy and habitable, but estate agents cannot purify the moral iniquity that dwells within. The schoolmaster, law, and the gospel are the agents for this reforming work.
I was told by Mr. Laidlaw that a gipsy named Mathew Blythe was the most respectable gipsy in Yetholm, and would give me any information; so to Mathew I made my way. I knocked at his door and was met with a shout—“Come in.” I did not stand knocking twice after this invitation, and went through the dingy, greasy passage—or “entrance hall”—to another door, which I opened, and there found a round-faced, grey-haired, good-looking, cobbling gipsy at work upon his “last.” The room seemed to serve for kitchen, scullery, parlour, dining-room, sitting-room, bedroom, closet, and workshop. For a minute or two he eyed me over from head to foot before asking me to sit down on a rickety old chair that stood by my side. I told him that I was come to look up the gipsies at Yetholm. I was met with a gruff reply, “There are no gipsies at Yetholm; they are all gone away, and I don’t know where they are gone to.” I said, “I am sorry for that, as I had brought some books, oranges, tobacco, pictures, and coppers for them.” And after a few words in Romany the old man turned up his face with a smile and said, “Well, to speak the truth, I am a gipsy, but my old woman is not. Sit you down.” I sat down and began my tale, and told him who I was and all about the object of my visit. At this the old man opened his eyes wider and wider and said, “Lord, bless you, me and my brother, who lives at Town Yetholm, were only talking about you yesterday, and saying how glad we should be to see you. Let’s shake hands.” He took hold of my hand and gave it a good grip and a squeeze, one that I shall not soon forget. I said, “I suppose you wanted to see me in order to give me a ‘good tanning,’ or else to make the place warm for me; for I have been told by a backwood gipsy writer at — that the gipsies in Scotland would make it hot for me if they once got hold of me; and this is one, among the many other reasons, why I am here to-day.” “Those,” said Mr. Blythe, “who told you that tale told you a lie. I don’t know any gipsy who would hurt your little finger. You have said some hard things about us, but they are true, or nearly so. Why should not our children be educated like other people’s children? Why should gipsy children not be allowed to sit on the same bench with the rest? They are the same flesh and blood, and God looks upon them the same as He does upon other children. In church and in school no one will come near to us, and what is the result? Why, there is not a gipsy in all the place—and there are between one and two hundred—except myself who goes to church on Sundays. The gipsies in Yetholm are worse off to-day than they ever were. Some are in receipt of parish relief.” This upsets the romantic tales of the gipsy writers who maintain that gipsies never receive parish relief. “A few of the children can read and write, but that is all. I learned to read and write a many years, thank God, and I also learnt to make and mend shoes.” I said, “What do the gipsies do and where do they wander, as they grow up?” “They,” said Mr. Blythe, “generally goes to town, or travels the country, and nobody knows where they end their days.” Mr. Blythe was some distant—“ninety-second cousin”—relation to the notorious dare-devil gipsy, Will Faa, who claimed to be a sort of a gipsy king, and on this account I wanted to have a few words about the gipsy kings of Scotland. “Well,” said Mr. Blythe, “you know better than I can tell you that there are no such beings as gipsy kings and queens. It is all bosh and nonsense, conjured up to get money on the cheap. The woman they call the gipsy queen does not live at Yetholm now, she has gone to live at Kelso. I could not tell you whereabouts she lives, but in some of the back streets.”
Mr. Blythe began to relate some of the gipsy tales; and how many kings’ lives the gipsies had saved, and a number of other things relating to gipsy life, into which I had not time to enter, as I wanted to be on the road again with my gigman before it was dark. The old man’s crippled foot prevented him making some visits with me to the other gipsies in the village, or, as he said, “I should have been only too glad to have done so. The poor things want somebody looking after them, I can assure you.” I emptied nearly the whole of the contents of my bags of books, pictures, tobacco, oranges, and a few coppers upon the gipsy cobbler’s bench, among the awls, nails, waxed-ends, &c., for him to distribute, as a man, among the gipsy children and old women in the village; and as a man, and with gipsy greetings and good wishes, trusting to Mr. Blythe’s honour, I left them, and they have, with God’s blessing, no doubt been distributed. After a few words of cheer and consolation and several shakes of the hands, which somehow brought out my weakness in tears, I bade Mr. Blythe, the grey-haired, open-faced gipsy, “good-bye,” maybe never to meet again on this side of Jordan. I felt as I stepped out of the door that I could have said with a blind writer in the Church of England Magazine—
“Though dark and dreary be my way,
Thy light can turn my night to day.”“Pensive I tread my sad and lonely road,
Pain, gloom, and sorrow marked me for their prey.”