Part 25
“According to promise, I forward you the particulars of our visits to the shows and vans visiting our fair on Thursday; and I also took a little more trouble to be along early on Friday morning. I was certainly astonished to see the people turn out of some of these places, some of the smaller vans turning out the greatest number. I give you a few instances of the number who turned out of the smaller vans. In Nos. 1, 2, 6, 13, and 19 there were 5 men, 5 women, and 22 children, making a total of 32 in the 5 vans. Education totally neglected. They were dirty, neglected, and uncared for. One van was as clean as could be expected.
“In 1879, 40 vans visited our fair.
“In 1880, 50 vans visited our fair, in which there were 38 men, 32 women, and 43 children.
“In 1881 there were 130 persons in 36 vans. While some of the vans were remarkably clean and well fitted up, there were some totally unfit for habitation, and certainly ought not to be allowed. The gipsy tribe was fairly represented, and evidently some of them are fairly blest with an amount of property which surprises me. There were a few surly people who did not like our visit, and gave us unmistakable signs of displeasure, but the majority were civil.
“If you can devise a plan whereby these people can receive _any_ education, you will render valuable service, morally and religiously, to society at large.”
After referring to the value of the Canal Boats Act, and the amendments I propose, Mr. Dixon said that he should be pleased to further my efforts at any time.
A minister of the town writes me to say that a number of vans left the town on Thursday night or early on Friday morning. In the 15 vans he visited he found 48 children and 22 men and women, only six of whom could read and write a little. The rest were growing up as ignorant as heathen, and with the exception of two of the vans, dirt and wretchedness abounded in their _homes_. He said also that the conduct of the gipsies and other travellers at this fair has been better than in former years.
Notwithstanding the reports that have been in circulation, enough to shake the nerves of timid folks, I am received kindly and civilly by all the gipsies. One gipsy woman named Smith in a jocular term said, “Mr. Smith, we have been told that you are going to take all our children away from us and send them to school; you will require a mighty big school, bigger than any in the world, to hold them, I can assure you.”
A few yards from where we were standing there was a van, into which I was invited to tea by the poor woman, the “mistress of the _house_.” In this wooden tumble-down house upon wheels, about 9 ft. long by 5 ft. wide, and 6 ft. high, there were man, wife, and seven children in a most dirty and heartrending condition. The youngest was a baby only three weeks old, and was born in the van at Weedon.
I had a long chat with the good-natured woman. As I sat upon an old sack at the bottom of the van, with the children in rags and dirt creeping round me, and in the midst of an odour not at all pleasant to the olfactory organs, I felt as if my heart was almost ready to break at the sight of human woe and misery before me. To say that I could have wept hot briny tears would not convey in language telling enough the strong feeling of sympathy that crept over me, to the extent of almost freezing the blood in my veins. For a moment I seemed to lose sight of everything else in the fair, and it was with some difficulty I could refrain from crying out, as I stepped from amongst the poor little forgotten and neglected children, and out of this gipsy house, with a cocoa-nut which “Jack” would thrust into my bag, “Good Lord! when shall these sad things and these wretched and pitiable sights come to an end? Would to God that the trumpet which is to bring to life the dead would begin to ring! ring! ring! and thrill into our ears a nervous, disquieting solo, keeping on and on till it has awoke us all up—aye! ministers, philanthropists, Christians of every grade, moralists, members of Parliament, cabinet ministers, and peers—to a sense of our duty towards the little and big heathens at our own door, before our fate becomes as that of Belshazzar and Babylon.”
“Oh say, in all the bleak expanse Is there a spot to win your glance So bright, so dark as this? A hopeless faith, a homeless race.”
“_Lyrics of Palestine_,” _Religious Tract Society_.
I answer, No.
No children in lovely, beautiful England, the bright star of the West, stand so much in need of help as do our poor canal and gipsy children, who are living outside our factory, educational, and sanitary laws, and, with some bright exceptions, religious influences.
Short Excursions and Rambles in the Bypaths of Gipsydom.
SOME time ago a gipsy named Shaw was found in a Northamptonshire churchyard at midnight, asleep between the gravestones, with his fiddle by his side. When awakened by a wandering policeman crying out, “Now then, move on,” gipsy Shaw grunted and growled out, “Who’s there? What do you want, Mr. Devil? Wake these others up; they’ve been here longer than me, and when they goes I’ll go, and not till then, Mr. Devil; and so make yourself scarce.” The policeman saw, and in fact knew, that Shaw was a queer kind of customer, and he therefore let him snore and sleep among dead men’s bones till morning. On the following morning Mr. Policeman met gipsy Shaw with his fiddle (_Boshomengro_) under his arm, when he called out, “Halloo, Shaw, you’ve left your companions behind you after all.” “Yes,” said gipsy Shaw; “when I opened my eyes it was daylight, and the sun was shining in my face, and I thought over fresh considerations.”
At the present time the gipsies and other travellers in this country are among the dead men’s bones of backwood gipsy writers and their present-day sins and wrong-doings, with Mr. John Bull standing by, saying in effect to the lost gipsies and their children, “Snore on, sleep on; stick to your fiddles and the devil; care not a straw for either parsons or priests.”
If John Bull cares not, will not and won’t do for the children of travellers the same as he is doing for other children within his dominions, and what his Continental neighbours are doing for theirs, it is time the gipsies themselves “thought over fresh considerations,” and walked out into open day, and demanded the blessings of English civilized life in a way that will readily secure an attentive ear to the cries and wails of their children.
Thank God, a few writers of tales and stories of a healthy, interesting, elevating, and heavenly kind are coming to the rescue of the poor gipsy, canal, and other travelling children. May their name be Legion and their motto be Fairelie Thornton’s lines in the _Sunday School Chronicle_—
“Direct the words I say, Oh, let them reach the heart; Let there be wingèd words alway, And light and life impart.”
On my way to Edinburgh in October, 1880, to read a paper before the Social Science Congress, upon the condition of our gipsies and their children, I took occasion to call at Leicester races on my way, and paddled ankle deep in mud and quagmire to try to ascertain how many gipsy and other travelling children there were upon the course living in tents and vans. At a rough calculation there would be fully four hundred children and two hundred men and women huddling together in eighty of these wretched temporary abodes. Not a score of the children, except a few snatches in the winter, were receiving any education other than such as is obtained upon a racecourse and its associations, giving and taking lessons in the initiatory stage of a gambler’s life. The following cases will give some idea of the state of morality amongst the wandering classes. Phillips, a gipsy from Maidstone, had in his van one woman and eleven children; Green, a gipsy from Bristol, had in his van two men, two women, and eleven children; Brinklow, a gipsy, had in his van two women and seven children; Lee, a gipsy from London, had in his tent two young men, one woman, and seven children; making a total of forty-seven men, women, and children of all ages and sizes, huddling together in these four tents and vans, not two of whom could read or write a sentence. Mrs. Brinklow said her eldest girl attended a Bible-class at Bristol in the winter, which led me to think that the gipsy girl could read, but on inquiry I found she could not tell a letter. Those who are spellbound by gipsy fascination and admire the “witching eyes” of picturesque human degradation and depravity, will consider this in the nineteenth century a state of civilization preparing us for the millennium, when the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and all tears be wiped away.
Last autumn I visited the gipsies at Cherry Island, near London, and found about thirty tents, in which there were between one and two hundred gipsy children growing up worse than Zulus. For one minute let us get inside one of the gipsy tents in which these children are born, and in which they live and die. It is about seven feet wide, sixteen feet long, and where the round top is highest, is about four feet and a half in height. It is covered with pieces of old canvas or sacking to keep out the cold and rain, and the entrance is closed with a kind of curtain; the fire by which they cook their meals is placed in a tin bucket pierced with holes. Some of the smoke from the burning sticks goes out of an opening in the top of the tent that serves as a chimney, while the rest of it fills the place and helps to keep their faces and hands a proper gipsy colour. The bed is a little straw laid on the damp ground, covered with a sack or sheet, as the case may be; an old soap-box or tea-chest serves both as cupboard and table. Here they live, father and mother, brothers and sisters, huddled up together. They live like pigs, and die like dogs. Washing is but little known amongst them; and of such luxuries as knives and forks, chairs and tables, plates and cups, they are very independent. They take their meals, and do what work they do, squatting on the ground; and the knives and forks they use are of the kind that Adam used, and sensitive when dipped in hot water. Lying, begging, and pretended fortune-telling have as much to do with their living as chair-mending, tinkering, and hawking. The heaviest work falls to the lot of the women, who may often be seen with a child upon their backs, another in their arms, and a heavily-laden basket by their side. The men lounge about the lanes and hedges with their dogs, whilst the children grow up in such ignorance and sin as to deserve the name of _ditch-dwelling heathens_.
[Picture: Gipsy quarters, Plaistow marshes]
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!”
[Picture: An English gipsy king—“krális”—lying in wait in his palace, králisko-kair]
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.”
The Rev. John L. Gardiner, vicar of Sevenoaks, wrote me in 1880 stating the guardians in his place were thinking of moving the authorities to take some steps for ameliorating their condition. In 1880 I received the following letter from a right worthy, good, and true working man living in Derby:
“DEAR SIR,—