About a month after receiving the news of the death of my old pal, I came upon his grandson, who told me that the vâdo (cart) had been hotsherdo (burnt). The fragments which remained after the fire were duly buried, and the faithful nag had been sent away to the hunt-kennels. Thus, with the ancient ceremonies of his race, my old friend had been laid to rest.

To the English Gipsies. [246]

“You soon will pass away;
Laid one by one below the village steeple
You face the East from which your fathers sprang,
Or sleep in moorland turf, beyond the clang
Of towns and fairs; your tribes have joined the people
Whom no true Romany will call by name,
The folk departed like the camp-fire flame
Of withered yesterday.”

CHAPTER XIX
BITSHADO PAWDEL (TRANSPORTED)

Thickly sprinkled with Gypsy names are the “Transportation Lists” (1787–1867) reposing on the shelves of the Public Record Office in London; yet as your eye scans those lists of names, how dull and ordinary they look. It is not until you embark upon the arduous task of tracking individuals in old newspaper files that you realize the charm of unearthing buried romances in which the Gypsies played a part.

If, on the one hand, the wildness and roughness of the times are fully impressed upon your mind, there arises also the unedifying spectacle of British justices vieing with one another in their ardour for dispatching Gypsies across the sea on the most trivial pretexts. In the Transportation Lists both sexes are well represented, and occasionally one obtains the aliases borne by Gypsies at the time of their arrest. From a study of these aliases, it becomes possible to trace the origin of some of our modern Gypsy families, for it is quite in keeping with Romany usage for the children of an expatriated father to adopt his alias.

I have never yet known an elderly Gypsy whose memory lacked a store of what may be called transportation tales, and, listening to their recital, I have sometimes been saddened, if not angered. What can we of the twentieth century think of the “justice” (!) which sent a Romany mother across the sea for stealing a lady’s comb valued at sixpence, or banished for seven years a middle-aged Gypsy man for the crime of appropriating three penny picture-books from a cottage doorway?

Over a few crimson embers on the ground I listened one summer evening to tales from the lips of one of the old Herons, as we sat together under a thorn hedge. For a theft of harness Solli Heron (my informant’s uncle) was sentenced to a lengthy residence in an over-sea colony. The time came when he and a few Gypsy comrades were led out of prison and placed in chains on board the coach which was to convey them to the convict ship. By some means Solli had become possessed of a small file, wherewith, during the journey by coach, he managed to cut through his irons and make his escape into a wood. After an exciting chase through brake and brier, the Gypsy was recaptured and duly shipped across the sea.

The following story shows that sometimes, when two Gypsies were implicated in a crime, one of them would endeavour to screen his companion. From the stables at Claremont House, Esher, during the period of the Princess (afterwards Queen) Victoria’s residence, a horse and a mare were stolen by two Gypsies, an elderly man and a younger one. Early one foggy morning these fellows broke open the stable door and took the animals away. A hue-and-cry was set up, and, within a few days of the theft, the red-breasted “Runners” had made an arrest. In court, the Princess’s coachman declared that he had seen two men near the stable, but the elder Gypsy persistently affirmed that he had done the business entirely alone, and his endeavour to screen his mate proved effectual. The young Gypsy was acquitted, but his companion was transported for life to Van Diemen’s Land.

The same spirit of self-sacrifice is seen in another incident—

A Gypsy tinker and a sweep were arrested for stealing a pony at a time when the penalty for horse-stealing was death. Said the sweep to the tinker—