In 2006 the Commission for Racial Equality concluded that Gypsies and Irish Travellers were the most excluded groups in modern Britain. Numbering at least an estimated 300,000 – as large as the Chinese and Bangledeshi population, if not more – they, of all the nation’s citizens, were the worst off on various measures: they died earlier; their children were at higher risk of dying in infancy; they obtained fewer educational qualifications; they more frequently lived in sub-standard housing than the general population and often suffered mental health problems as a result; and they were more likely to commit suicide.
In the past decade, and especially since the start of the recession in 2009, their employment rates had collapsed, as many of their traditional trades had been regulated almost out of existence. Crime-reduction strategies, such as restrictions on ‘cold calling’ in the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations (2008), had made it difficult for those used to securing work on the doorstep, as well as for women who went hawking. Regulations on scrap-metal dealing (a favoured profession) had been increasingly tightened since the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and from March 2013 all scrap-metal dealers were required to hold a licence and were no longer allowed to deal in cash.1 Casual labouring work, a way of life for many Gypsy and Traveller men, has become harder to come by in the economic downturn. Their involvement in seasonal agricultural work had also been challenged by migrant labour from Central and Eastern Europe.
The nomadic way of life was increasingly threatened, and yet the alternatives – life on illegal and legal sites, as well as housing – were far from satisfactory. Their lives were lived on the margins of society.
After the clearance of the unauthorised pitches at Dale Farm, Nora Sheridan and her family had set up their tidy caravan on the roadside. In the summer of 2012 she walked over to the dusty old Dale Farm site, to see if she could find signs of the asbestos and oil-based contaminants that Candy Sheridan claimed to have seen when she appealed to the Environment Agency for an official inspection of the land. Nora was clad in sandals as she picked her way amongst the pitches. On almost every pitch she spotted pieces of asbestos – when she was a child her father had taught her to recognise it, so she could avoid it when they were travelling. Some of the asbestos was on land within fifty yards of the legal pitches at Dale Farm. As Nora’s tally increased, she grew increasingly alarmed about the possible effects on the many Traveller children who frequently played up there, in what could only be seen as the modern equivalent of a bombsite.
In 2010 Basildon Council’s Tony Ball had told a reporter that he hoped to create allotments for the residents of Crays Hill once the Traveller families were cleared off the site. Indeed, the council’s waste-management plan for the clearance of the site stated that any soil or hard core removed from the site would be recycled because it was deemed to be ‘clean’. That seemed laughable now. The Environment Agency was due to cordon off the site within the month so that a team could test for sources of potential toxicity – not just from the remnants of Ray Bocking’s old scrap yard, but also from the illegal tipping that was a regular occurrence at the site. The worst contaminants appeared to have been churned up as a result of the eviction itself.
Constant and Co. bailiffs, under instruction from the council, had thrown up rough mounds of earth to bund the pitches in a bid to prevent the Travellers, including the handful with permission from the court to stay on site, from moving back. Nora had fallen into one of their trenches on her way to launder her children’s school uniforms one night. In the digging, old car tyres, relics from Bocking’s car-breaking business, had been unearthed. But the tyres were unlikely to be the source of the asbestos. It could have been an ingredient in hardcore dumped on the land, however. In his October 1995 witness statement over planning breaches, Bocking testified that council workers from its direct labour organisation routinely tipped loads of unwanted cement on his site.2 Basildon Council stoutly denied it was responsible for tipping any hardcore on the site when Bocking owned it. More recently, he further maintained that the council stored old cars at his scrap yard. Bocking’s theory was that the council served enforcement notices on him in 1994 in order to cover up its own involvement in creating an unofficial landfill at Dale Farm.3
Bocking’s account was backed up by an improbable defender – the sainted Len Gridley, the local resident who had been fiercely opposed to the Travellers’ presence on the back side of Windy Ridge, but in the year after the eviction had become their champion. The council, he claimed, ‘knew [the site] was polluted since 1994, because they dumped a lot of [stuff] there. We are not clear whether it was legal or illegal’.
For decades, travelling families have stopped on the margins of cities and towns, where they hope they will not attract too much attention. But where they end up living is often contaminated, situated near landfills, electricity pylons and other blighted locations. A 1974 survey of sixty-five authorised sites by Sir John Cripps reported that twelve per cent were adjacent to rubbish dumping sites and twenty-eight per cent were located near to industrial development.4 If anything, things had got worse since then. Researcher Pat Niner found in 2003 that fifty per cent of sites were based in dangerous areas, and in 2009 the EHRC confirmed the dire state of authorised sites: ‘Although conditions vary, many publicly provided sites are of poor quality, with sites built on contaminated land, close to motorways, adjoining sewage works or on other poor quality land.’5 A number of Gypsy Traveller assessments, the report said, ‘have found bad conditions on some public sites, with significant failings in fire safety, contamination by vermin, chronically decayed sewage and water fittings, and poor-quality utility rooms’. The EHRC pointed out that the poor conditions on some of these sites were probably in breach of site licensing and health and safety legislation, but that ‘sites owned and operated by local authorities are immune from prosecution even where clear hazards exist, as no obligation to repair or even adhere to fire authority guidance on fire safety exists, despite the existence of guidance from the Department for Communities and Local Government’.6
The conditions on some private sites were alleged to be worse. In theory the owners could be prosecuted for health and safety failures, but in practice there had been little sign of enforcement of the legislation – another way in which a well-founded distrust of authorities combined with self-policing created further hazards for Gypsies and Travellers.
The government insists that sites should not be located near to electricity pylons, heavy industry or landfill. In real terms at least half are – and those that are not are often not properly maintained. The guidance from the government, which states the need for sites to be situated in clean environments, was clearly not being honoured: ‘It is essential to ensure that the location of a site will provide a safe environment for the residents. Sites should not be situated near refuse sites, industrial processes or other hazardous places, as this will obviously have a detrimental effect on the general health and well-being of the residents and pose particular safety risks for young children. All prospective site locations should be considered carefully before any decision is taken to proceed, to ensure that the health and safety of prospective residents are not at risk,’ the government’s guidance read.7
The report went on to say that the UK should emulate site location tactics pioneered in Ireland, where small sites on appropriate land had been proposed. Of course, small sites provide a limited number of pitches – not always enough to accommodate a large and often growing extended family, and typically not enough to foster a sense of a close-knit village among a group of families, as had been created at Dale Farm. Regardless, the government warned that unless more pleasant, safer sites were identified, it would ‘have a negative impact on Gypsies and Travellers’ health and access to services’. Living on polluted or dangerous sites had ‘a profound impact on how [Gypsies and Travellers] feel they are perceived and treated by the wider community’ said the report. ‘Likewise such locations reinforce the prejudiced perceptions that many in the settled community have of Gypsies and Travellers, such locations are therefore a major impediment to the social inclusion of Gypsies and Travellers.’
Dale Farm sat on contaminated land, with a huge electricity pylon towering over the families, but it was not surprising that the families had chosen to live there: authorised sites had proved to be hazardous too. One site, located underneath the Westway elevated road, the A40, in London, had been tested and found to have raised levels of lead in the soil. In the past few years a lorry had actually fallen off the elevated road and crashed onto the site, and another had shed its load. A site in Neasden, in North-West London, had been established next to a cement yard. Another, near Glastonbury, was on the site of a former tannery, and chemicals used in the tanning process – including toxic arsenic – had been discovered in the dirt. The local council had asked the families to move on for their own safety, but admitted that there was nowhere else for them to go. It cannot be a coincidence that so many Gypsies and Travellers have breathing difficulties, and die earlier than their peers in the settled community, because of these appalling living conditions. They have been forced to live on land that most people have refused, as more and more of the country has been transformed into suburbia or cordoned off as green belt.
Pushed by Candy Sheridan, the Environment Agency (EA) visited Dale Farm in August 2012. Their workers wore reflective tabards as they tested for contamination all over the old site – a disturbing sight for the Travellers, who were living so close by. Candy broke off her holiday to fly back to Essex and sign for two thousand soil samples, sixteen water samples and two possible asbestos samples from one yard alone. In late August an EA official wrote to Candy, reporting that the agency had identified asbestos at the site and advising her to tell the residents not to allow their children onto it. The EA returned in September to take several more samples, but the Travellers had not been told what else had been found.
Nora Sheridan had moved to Dale Farm so that her children could get a decent education. Her eldest son, who was then twelve, was no longer in school because of fears of bullying; he was now home-schooled, as she mainly was, as she lived on the road. But she beamed as her seven-year-old, Jimmy Tom, read out from a picture book. She explained that he had been identified as being gifted in both English and maths, and she wanted him to ‘go all the way, even to college’. For her that meant they had to stay put, in awful conditions, at the side of the road at Dale Farm – showering in the local leisure centre, begging the residents of the legal site nearby for water and spending almost all her money on heating and light.
Her pride in her children, and her wish to better their lives through education, was obvious. She was also right to push for these opportunities when they presented themselves. Although individual pupils can and do achieve very well, Gypsy and Traveller pupils are among the lowest-achieving groups at every stage of education, and the least likely minority ethnic group to attend school. They have lower attendance figures, with many older Traveller children leaving school after primary education – just as Nora’s eldest son had, because of bullying or the fear of it. They also have the highest levels of permanent and fixed-term exclusions when compared to other minority ethnic groups, and the highest levels of pupils – some 43.2% of Travellers in primary schools and 45.3% in secondary schools – entitled to free school meals. There were cultural obstacles too. Sex education is frowned on, and many expect their girls to marry young and leave school; their boys are often expected to learn a trade for which, traditionally, there are no formal qualifications.
These various factors mix to form a bleak picture. In 2011, only twelve per cent of Gypsy and Traveller pupils achieved five or more good GCSEs, including English and Maths, compared with 58.2% of all pupils in the UK.
Underachievement at school is associated with living in poverty. Starting in April 2011, the Coalition government said that poor pupils would benefit directly from a new initiative, called the Pupil Premium, which provides an additional £430 per pupil, paid to their school, to help raise the attainment of disadvantaged children. These pupils might also benefit from a recently established £125 million Education Endowment Fund, set up to fund innovative approaches to improving the educational performance of disadvantaged children in underperforming schools.8 However, such programmes seem destined to have a limited reach into the Gypsy and Traveller communities, given the number of their children who leave school under sixteen.
The Coalition has recently begun to review the existing legislation protecting mobile Gypsy and Traveller families from prosecution if their children truant from school. Under the 1996 Education Act, if parents can prove that their families are nomadic, their children are required to attend school for at least two hundred half-day sessions in a year – an exemption that the Coalition is considering for repeal. The Coalition ‘believes that this concession has come to be seen by some schools – and by Gypsy and Traveller families themselves – as giving tacit consent for mobile pupils to benefit only from a significantly shortened school year’. Cuts to local authority funding under the Coalition’s austerity plan have also hit the Traveller Education Services – dedicated teachers, trained in working with Travellers, are losing their jobs, their expertise lost for good.
These developments are particularly tragic in the view of a generation of parents like Nora Sheridan, who are dedicated to educating their children while preserving their travelling culture. More families are starting to acknowledge that poor literacy skills are holding young people back in a qualifications-based job market. A small number of teaching assistants and teachers now come from the communities too. But change is slow, and not everyone values higher levels of educational attainment for Gypsy and Traveller children. Academics Margaret Greenfields and David Smith, for instance, identified a strong element of conservatism, especially among Gypsy and Traveller boys, who tended to opt for family-based self-employment, which did not require much in the way of formal education. Many of the boys they interviewed couldn’t even conceive of alternative employment – what the researchers called ‘aspirations outside the norm’. Their teachers often found that frustrating, but felt they had little opportunity to change the boys’ attitude towards schooling.
Damian Le Bas Jnr, the editor of the Travellers’ Times and a talented writer and actor to boot, gained the highest first in his year at Oxford University as a theology student. Yet he has always felt that his academic achievement was not prized in his community. He believed this was due to the importance placed on entrepreneurial success. ‘I stayed in school, but not for business reasons. If I hadn’t gone to Oxford, I would be making more money, so I can’t make that argument, because Travellers like to make money. Money talks. People would listen to me if I had a flashier car (I have a Peugeot 206). If I had a custom long-wheelbase transit, fully chromed out, things would be different. I have a chip on my shoulder that the talents I have are not the ones that Gypsies value, like making money and fighting … My family were very proud of me but would also have been proud of me if I had made loads of money.’ But he also made the point that valuing education would further most Gypsy and Traveller parents’ goals for their children. ‘I think a lot of time in education is wasted, but it is hard to pass chainsaw certification if you aren’t in school.’
Many Gypsy and Traveller families allow their teenage children to leave school, but many also go on to college to gain vocational qualifications. Delaine Le Bas, Damian’s mother and an internationally renowned artist, runs art workshops in schools. She acknowledged the difficulties. ‘Education in a school environment fails lots of children anyway. For a community that doesn’t like sending its children to school, it’s even more problematic. Finding other ways to encourage people to do what they want to do – but how do you make that happen?’9
And pursuing an education when you have nowhere to study at home is difficult. Nora, for instance, does her best to give equal time to all three of her children in her efforts to promote their learning. But living in a cramped caravan, without access to running water or utilities, inevitably means most of their time is spent surviving. There is little time for getting ahead.
Whether or not their site was contaminated, the Irish Travellers at Dale Farm wanted to stick together. Yet, nomadism, living by the roadside, was also their choice for how to do that. Was it their right to keep travelling, to keep living in caravans, to continue living on the outskirts of society while at the same time taking advantage of the settled community when it suited them?
After the eviction, not everyone moved out onto Oak Lane. Michelle Sheridan and her family, including Tom, who was by then just over two, went on the road again in the early months of 2012, leaving her sister Nora behind in Essex. ‘I couldn’t handle it. I know it was bad to leave but when I went up to our old pitch I would just cry, I couldn’t take it any more,’ said Michelle. They set off for the Midlands, and from to time would join up and travel in convoy with a small number of other families who had left Dale Farm. And, as it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Irish Travellers came to the Midlands to escape recession and the Troubles, they found themselves being moved on countlessly, sometimes on a daily basis.
Michelle could tick off the places from which they had been evicted. ‘We used to move every few days unless there were more than six caravans. Then they would use Section 66 [of the Criminal Justice Act] and move us on within a day. We’ve been moved on from all round Birmingham, Solihull, Bilston, Wolverhampton, Bolton, Balsall Heath … On one side of Birmingham, by Balsall Heath, they wouldn’t use Section 66, but on the other side, near the Children’s Hospital, they would, so we stuck to [the Balsall Heath] side.’ By chance or by fate, Balsall Heath had been the site of a notorious eviction of Irish Travellers back in 1968.
While she was stopping in the Midlands, she decided to drive to Meriden, so that she could meet the Gypsy families there who had also come under such heavy scrutiny. None of them were in on the day she visited. She recalled: ‘We went out there and it’s just a field with just a few tourers in it. So when we got there, we couldn’t drive in, as it was muck knee-high, and we were afraid to walk in, and the gates were locked. I didn’t know the families but thought we would say hello. We beeped but nobody came out.’ Meriden RAID were there that day, however. ‘We went a little further up the lane and we saw this little bunker and we was shocked – it looks like a war-time bunker. So I stopped up and said hello, and I said, “I thought you were evicted from here.” One of the residents replied, “We’re waiting for the High Court,” and I said, “Do you really have nothing better to do with your time?”’ At this point, the member of residents’ association got curious. ‘She asked who I was, and I said, “We are the Dale Farm Travellers, and we could come on here; the whole eighty-six families from Dale Farm is pitching up …” And she was getting whiter and whiter.’ Michelle finally left, but not before offering to sell the residents some mattresses so that they could be a little more comfortable in their ‘bunker’. Her offer was not accepted.
Having tried to travel, she was back at Dale Farm for Christmas that year. She didn’t know where the family would go or what they would do next. But one thing she was sure about: she wasn’t going to move into brick and mortar housing.
Fifty-three out of the eighty-six evicted families had been offered council housing. None of them accepted it. Tony Ball believed that some of them came under pressure from other families not to take it. How could they complain about not having running water on Oak Lane if they’d had a chance to live in council housing? What was the attraction of being nomads?
Their friend Ann Kobayashi tried to offer an explanation. ‘The clans aren’t unique to Gypsies and Travellers. [They] used to be a feature of some old villages that were settled and the old East End … I think when you get a beleaguered community which encounters hostility and discrimination on a very regular basis, grouping together is one safety device. And the other is, in a sense, you don’t give up what you’ve got unless you are absolutely sure that what you are giving it up for is worth it, and is going to help you as a group,’ she said. ‘And they are not sure of that.’
It is estimated that around two-thirds of the Gypsy and Traveller communities are today housed in bricks and mortar, rather than in caravans and other travelling homes. There is scant research on their experiences, but what exists suggests that the transition has not been an easy one. In one study of several locations in southern England, Margaret Greenfields and David Smith found that while many had successfully adapted their self-employment to living in an urban context, they remained highly excluded from the settled community.10 When they moved to bricks and mortar, they were usually placed in social housing with other deprived and marginalised groups – eighty per cent of those they interviewed were in council housing. Most of the time, they moved there for reasons beyond their control. The most common reason given for new settlement was ‘a lack of spaces on local authority caravan sites; a shortage of temporary transit sites; or a failure to gain planning permission on privately owned land’.11 According to the government’s own figures, at least twenty-five per cent of the Traveller population is technically homeless,12 and housing was predominantly the choice of last resort for them.
This has, unfortunately, heightened tensions when Gypsy and Traveller families join the settled community, according to Greenfields. ‘While there are often areas of conflict between housed Gypsies and Travellers and the sedentary populations amongst which they live, this most often occurs where Gypsies and Travellers have been forcibly settled as a result of a lack of appropriate accommodation,’ she observed, based on her interviews and other research. ‘They are often placed on run-down housing estates, where there is a lack of cultural knowledge going both ways, leading to fear, hostility and cultural clashes. For example, we have plentiful evidence of Gypsies and Travellers being offered accommodation by councils where their neighbours have grown up on a diet of anti-Traveller media reports. When they hear who their new neighbours will be, there may be demonstrations, vandalism or an abusive reception awaiting the new tenants. I have personally interviewed families who report experiencing dog faeces pushed through their letter boxes, windows being broken in their houses and caravans parked outside … and, on two occasions, families who have had their homes fire-bombed.’13
When Ann Kobayashi spoke to some of the families at Dale Farm about their desire to stay, despite the dire situation, she learned that some had tried to live in housing in the past, and believed it was not a workable option for them. ‘Some have lived in bricks and mortar and have had very bad experiences,’ she said. But more than that, living in a house was for many, particularly among the older people, ‘quite an uncomfortable feeling’. Ann continued: ‘I had never realised that before, until some of the older couples … they used to say, “Sure, isn’t it grand, Ann, we can see whoever is passing, we know who is coming, we can hail them through the windows, this is what we like about living surrounded by windows. We can see everyone, even if we can’t walk out,” as both had disabilities … They can see everyone and wave and they say, “Isn’t that better than a house?” Their view of a house is that it was a prison, it was dark.’
The issue of keeping the community together came up time and time again. The housing on offer was often piecemeal, part of larger council developments, with no guarantee that other families from Dale Farm, or other Irish Travellers, would be living nearby to provide a sense of security. ‘They were isolated, separate units with no assurance that the next one to fall vacant in that block would be offered to a Traveller, so they didn’t know if they would have help; they like help on hand,’ Ann recalled. The questions were always on the tip of their tongues. What if ‘“so and so has gone into labour, or he is poorly, can anyone drive?” … that assurance that somebody would respond, do something’ was an issue.
‘There’s also the business of it always being possible to travel if you want to,’ she said. ‘You can lock up your yard and you can take off for a few weeks or months … If you are in a house, there is no accommodation for a caravan and you won’t be in the thick of it … At Dale Farm there is a constant movement of news and stories and dramas all the time, incredibly active as a community, and they feel when they look down some suburban streets that it is dead, there is nobody on the street, nobody leaning at the window talking. It’s an uneasy community … they see that closed-door, closed-in feeling.’
Ann learned too that the dread of facing discrimination loomed whenever the idea of housing was raised. ‘Taking them to view housing offers, they would say, “Some people go through this process in the hope of getting bricks and mortar. We are going through it and we know they won’t offer what we want, and we can’t accept what they will offer, so what is the point?”’ Still, they persisted, knowing that it would be important in the legal case to show that they were looking for alternative housing. ‘The business of, “Keep your name in there, so we can say in a legal case, here they are,” that was difficult.’
Some Gypsies and Travellers had managed to make a successful transition to housing on terms that were acceptable both to them and to the surrounding residents. One of the most striking examples had been established in Southampton, in what is known as ‘The Bay’ – along Botany Bay Road, a residential street where Gypsies set up home so long ago that no one could remember when they had first arrived, perhaps as early as the late eighteenth century. The road was unusual in that it hosted a mixture of accommodation, ranging from caravans, static mobile homes and chalets to residential housing and bungalows, all side by side.14
There are just a handful of such developments around the country, according to Donald Kenrick, who has been fighting for Gypsy and Traveller rights for almost fifty years. Yet, he pointed to The Bay and its fellow sites as an essential part of any solution to the housing shortage in the community. ‘There is a Gypsy colony in Gravesend, where a site used to be. You would think you were in a caravan site – lorries decorated in Gypsy symbols, horses wandering around. There are a few other places like that around England, enclaves where people still speak Romani.’ Indeed, he said, most Gypsy and Traveller families were, for all intents, settled – pulled up onto a site year-round. ‘My estimate is that there are only thirty families travelling all the time now; it’s very low numbers. And this is probably the last generation where we will see families doing that. The future for individual families is fine, but there will probably be less travelling.’
It is quite possible for the travelling and settled communities to live together, as Margaret Greenfields’s research has indicated. ‘We have a growing body of evidence which indicates the closely entwined nature of Gypsy Traveller and white, working-class communities, over decades, and in some cases centuries in certain predominantly urban locales,’ she said. ‘Thus in certain areas of London we know that Gypsies and Travellers moved into housing as early as the middle of the nineteenth century’ – for example, in areas such as Notting Hill, Sutton, Merton and North London. ‘There is abundant evidence from East London as late as the 1950s of Gypsies and Travellers living in London and in Kent, working alongside Cockneys. In our latest work we have collected numerous narratives of intermarried families and indeed a growth of “hybridised” identities. Their descendants still remain in the local area, retaining a clear knowledge of their identity, some cultural practices and yet who live alongside and are closely related to long-established gorgia families.’
The trend of hybridised identities will only continue with the growing numbers of Roma arriving from Central and Eastern Europe, many of whom have been housed for generations and are beginning to intermarry with British Gypsies and Irish Travellers. Nomadism may not remain the primary way in which everyone from these peoples identify themselves – and it is important to remember that many Roma, Gypsies and Travellers were forced to travel because of discrimination and hatred, not because they actively chose travelling as a cultural emblem. Indeed, as the Romani scholar and academic Ian Hancock, put it: ‘Most Travellers don’t travel and haven’t done so for a very long time. Certainly the slaves in Eastern Europe weren’t travelling anywhere, and those here in the UK have been kept on the move because of legislation, history, rather than anything else. If you are forced to keep moving you have to develop means of livelihood [so] that even if the cops come, you have skills that you can’t leave behind. We are not pastoral nomads. We are itinerant because of legislation.’15
Some Gypsies and Travellers will never want to settle in bricks and mortar, however. One way forward (with the right safeguards) is for Gypsies and Travellers to run their own sites, which they can do through Community Land Trusts (CLT). The first trial was taken up in March 2010 by the Tory-led Mendip District Council, in Somerset, which was staring down a shortfall of fifty-seven pitches in its area at the time.
Mendip’s pilot scheme was an attempt to rethink how sites are planned. Few councils want to propose sites these days, such is the immediate opposition to them when any consultation has been announced – so much so that, of the £60 million available in Homes and Communities Agency funding through the year 2013, £14 million remains up for grabs. Some of the areas with the greatest need for sites did not even put in a bid. The most notorious among them was of course Essex, but Cambridgeshire (where Smithy Fen was meeting determined opposition), Kent, Hertfordshire and Surrey also passed. The five counties boasting the most Travellers and twenty-five per cent of the caravans only took four per cent of the agency’s money to improve conditions.
In some cases, housing associations had stepped into the breach. According to the Guardian, in Worcestershire, Rooftop Housing was given the ownership of a site on Houndsfield Lane by Bromsgrove District Council and Bromsgrove District Housing Trust, refurbishing the site with HCA funding.16 The amenities included brand-new utility pods containing kitchen, bathroom and living space, five of which would have disability access – all too essential, given the ageing and often sick population; the architect had consulted local community members before building the pods, which is unusual. Rooftop planned to bid for additional sites in different parts of the country. Another housing association, Knightstone, had set up an advice centre for Gypsies and Travellers on two sites in South Gloucestershire. Broadlands Housing Association took over management of the Brooks Green site, which it runs with South Norfolk District Council (the council kept charge of deciding who gets a pitch on the site). The site was leased from its owner, Barry Brooks, for a nominal rent, and managed like any other council housing, according to neighbourhood officer Sarah Lovelock. ‘They shouldn’t be singled out,’ she said, of the eight Romani families who had moved in.17
Candy Sheridan, for her part, was developing a new scheme along similar lines – but with self-empowerment as a key theme. In January 2013, after years of hard work, her Traveller Pitch Funding Grant was given the green light from the Homes and Communities Agency to carry out a small number of pilot sites. ‘We have developed a Gypsy Co-op model that will be rolled out in the East by the end of this year …The pilot will, I think, become the blueprint of the future, for private and public sites alike. It involves the residents on each site becoming equal members, becoming workers’ co-operatives, be[ing] in equal control of the site … without the “employment” of either a Gypsy or non-Gypsy warden. It ensures that each site has public liability and that sites are kept up to the Better Homes Standards.’
She had been working alongside her long-time ally, planning expert Stuart Carruthers, and an English Gypsy landlord named Levi Gumble, who owns a neat, somewhat under-occupied site on the edge of Stowmarket, a pretty town in Suffolk. A former boxer who now sells carpets to many local authorities, Levi had been caught in a long-running dispute with his local council, which wanted to force him to sell the site so that the council could run it themselves. He had refused, insisting that he keep control of the property. After the Dale Farm eviction, he had offered pitches to the displaced Irish Travellers, appealing directly to Tony Ball of Basildon District Council – one of only two site owners in the country to do so. Sadly, none of the families accepted, most preferring to stay together in the community they had built. Since then the site, along with another in East Anglia, have been proposed to serve as pilots in the Gypsy Co-op bid.
The Gypsy Co-op plan envisioned a future where Gypsies and Travellers are granted the power to run their own sites, free from local authority intervention and without one strong family running roughshod over others on the site. Still, it was early days for the initiative, although by February 2013 Candy had already persuaded a small number of families from Dale Farm to form two small co-ops, ready to take advantage of any planning permission opportunities that might arise.
Some Gypsies and Travellers who found a pitch on a local authority site, or in bricks and mortar, said that it was sometimes hard to keep to their tenancy agreements, especially while carrying out traditional Gypsy and Traveller employment. For instance, many sites prohibited them from the keeping certain animals, or from storing scrap metal.
Seasonal agricultural work had become a challenge to secure, as migrant labour from Central and Eastern Europe has increasingly competed with them for jobs. The Traveller Economic Inclusion Project (TEIP) interviewed ninety-five Gypsies and Travellers, with some eighty per cent reporting that their parents had worked on farms; only one of the people interviewed did so today. ‘A strong sense of nostalgia for field work and a sense of sadness at its passing were apparent in many interviews. An unintended consequence of the decline in agricultural employment is the reduction of social contact with non-Gypsy labour now they no longer work together in the fields, resulting in greater social distance and a worsening of relations between the groups,’ the report concluded.18
The formalisation of employment, although intended to protect more vulnerable groups, had in many ways created barriers to employment – especially for those who could not read, let alone fill out forms. David Smith and Margaret Greenfields reported that their research ‘suggests that unemployment is high among Gypsies and Travellers and, on several indicators, they are among the most deprived groups in the population … Adult literacy rates are well below the national average, with research indicating that twenty-one per cent of male Gypsies and nine per cent of females sampled could not read, while one-third could only write their own name’. Other travelling jobs had been essentially abolished with the introduction in 2008 of crime-reduction strategies, such as restrictions on ‘cold calling’, reducing the availability of casual work like paving and fencing for men and hawking for women. A third of those interviewed by the TEIP project voiced concern about the onslaught of new regulations.
Looking for a job in town wasn’t always the answer. Giving a Gypsy site as an address to a prospective employer often carried a stigma. Some people hunting for employment would end up concealing their identity in order to gain it.
Moving into bricks and mortar wasn’t a panacea either. ‘In other families, living on estates where there were high levels of racism and frequent conflict with neighbours, males were reluctant to leave their homes to follow previous lines of work that involved long periods of travelling,’ again according to Smith and Greenfields. ‘Two-thirds of participants reported that their economic situation had deteriorated since moving into housing. For many, a combination of higher housing costs, fewer opportunities for casual work and restrictions on conducting work-related activities at home means that settlement has led to a decline in employment and a rise in welfare dependency and long-term unemployment. In a study of 158 Gypsy and Traveller households conducted by one of the authors, forty-four per cent of housed males of working age were unemployed and ten per cent economically inactive due to poor health.’19
But some families and individuals were succeeding against the odds, said Greenfields. A number of women were going into higher education as mature students and men were adapting traditional pursuits to modern demands. ‘Women seem more alert to the transformation of work that is occurring, but we are also seeing some men keeping their traditional modes of employment but modifying them. So men are getting the qualifications they need to work as tree surgeons, for example, especially on private sites where they can keep equipment.’ But, she warned, those on public sites or in housing have not got the networks they need to survive. ‘They don’t have the same cultural capital to find work; their networks are disrupted. They are often more marginalised. Some parents are identifying the need for their children to attain qualifications, but it is often related to fairly traditional work and it is highly gendered. There is still a preference for girls to undertake hairdressing, beauty, fit in round their childcare responsibilities; they are told that family comes first. But I’m starting to see women saying they want a fall-back, and that they want to study in case their marriage fails.’ There is a growing divergence between those Gypsies and Travellers who are engaging with the outside world, and those who are not.
Smith and Greenfields’s research had thrown up yet one more reason for the communities’ struggles: ‘They have the worst health profile of any group, dying younger and experiencing higher levels of physical and mental illness.’
At Dale Farm, health concerns were piling up. When representatives of an All-Party Parliamentary Group, the Red Cross, the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain and the Irish Embassy reported their survey of the health of residents to Lord Avebury and Andrew George MP in the aftermath of the eviction, the list was staggering. A young man living at Dale Farm had been left disabled after a car accident. A sixty-five-year-old woman suffered dementia, and her daughter, who had to care for her, had high blood pressure. An eighty-one-year old man with high blood pressure was on a breathing machine but without a formal carer to look after him or the equipment. Another woman had dementia as well as an over-active thyroid. After eviction day, the district nurse stopped visiting a seventy-six-year old woman with Parkinson’s. There was also a youngster with Down’s syndrome, hearing and breathing problems and an older woman with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and osteoporosis. Since then the tally had only increased: a woman whose son had suffered brain damage and whose husband was ill; an older man with bowel cancer whose daughter had depression and two deaf children; a woman with a fractured spine, allegedly caused by a police attack during the eviction.20 And of course Nora Sheriden’s fall into the trench.
This litany of health complaints, all from people living on one site, were not out of line with data for the Gypsy and Traveller communities as a whole. ‘There are striking inequalities in the health of Gypsies and Travellers, even when compared with people from other ethnic minorities or from socio-economically deprived white UK groups,’ a 2004 paper on the health status of Gypsies and Travellers reported.21 ‘They are significantly more likely to have a long-term illness, health problem or disability that limits their daily activities or work, and a higher overall prevalence of reported chest pain, respiratory problems, arthritis, miscarriage and premature death of offspring.’22 They also experienced ‘high infant mortality and perinatal death rates, low birth weight, low immunisations uptake and high child accident rate’. The Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths in the UK, in a report that looked across the entire population over the period from 1997 to 1999, found that Gypsies and Travellers have ‘possibly the highest maternal death rate among all ethnic group[s]’.23
The government’s latest report on the Gypsy and Traveller communities, dated April 2012, said: ‘Studies consistently show differences in life expectancy of over ten per cent less than the general population, although a recent study stated that the general population was living up to fifty per cent longer than Gypsies and Travellers – so the disparity may be even more marked.24,25 Further research indicated that the health of Gypsies and Travellers starts to deteriorate markedly when individuals reach age fifty.26 Thirty-nine per cent of Gypsies and Travellers reported a long-term illness, compared with twenty-nine per cent of age- and sex-matched comparators, even after controlling for socioeconomic status and other marginalised groups. Travellers are three times more likely to have a chronic cough or bronchitis, even after smoking is taken into account. Twenty-two per cent of Gypsies and Travellers reported having asthma and thirty-four per cent reported chest pain, compared to five per cent and twenty-two per cent of the general population. They are far more likely to suffer miscarriages, neonatal deaths, stillbirths and maternal deaths during pregnancy and after childbirth. Studies show that Gypsy and Traveller women live twelve years fewer than women in the general population and men ten years fewer, although recent research suggests the life expectancy gap could be much higher.27
Being marginalised itself is a health risk, and Gypsies and Travellers’ wariness about seeking help from authorities had many times extended to healthcare professionals. As a consequence, some treatable diseases were going undiagnosed, sometimes until they had reached a chronic or even terminal condition. ‘In addition, lack of prior knowledge about the body in general, about medical conditions, prevention of ill-health and related health matters influence the likelihood of attendance for healthcare. Illiteracy was frequently mentioned as a handicap in this respect … where there is also a fatalistic belief that nothing can be achieved by attending screening or potential early diagnosis, this can result in more serious outcomes … a self-reliant attitude to health problems, combined with mistrust can also result in late presentation and inappropriate self-treatment.’28
Among Gypsies and Travellers, owning up to ill health, especially mental health problems, was often seen as shameful. At Dale Farm, for instance, around two-thirds of the women were on anti-depressants before, during and after the eviction, but none would admit it openly. One woman claimed that the doctors were ‘giving out the pills like sweeties, in big bags’ because they did not know where the women would be in future. Such a practice would, of course, increase the risk of overdosing. Uncertainty about housing is a particularly strong risk factor for anxiety and depression, so it was unsurprising that so many reported mental health problems, especially given their insecurity over tenure in housing, whether at an unauthorised site or in bricks and mortar housing where a landlord might suddenly decide not to allow Gypsies and Travellers (or a caravan parked out front).
More disturbingly, suicide had reached almost epidemic proportions, with the EHRC reporting an ‘abnormally high mortality rate through suicide’.29 Suicides by hanging had increased sharply. ‘Despite the overall decline in suicide rates in Britain, analysis of trends over the past three decades demonstrates that suicide in the 1990s accounted for approximately one-fifth of all deaths amongst [Gypsy and Traveller] men under the age of thirty-four, the largest cause of death in men of this age group.’30 The report continued: ‘Evidence from a number of studies shows that Gypsies and Travellers have greatly raised rates of depression and anxiety, the two factors most highly associated with suicide, with relative risks 20 and 8.5 times higher than in the general population.’31 These underlying mental health problems might have been treated with access to appropriate healthcare, particularly as working-class men are known to ‘have a greatly increased rate of suicide when compared with other socio-economic classes’.
Irish-born people living in the UK have a higher rate of suicide than any other ethnic minority group living in the country. This increased tendency may, to some extent, be a reaction to anti-Irish racism and discrimination and may be relevant when considering suicide rates among Irish Travellers in Britain, but the EHRC found similarly high rates of suicide among Irish Travellers in Ireland, which made up ‘nine per cent of all Traveller deaths in a ten-year sample of burials undertaken by the Parish of the Travelling People in Dublin’.32 More recent figures suggest that Traveller suicides are six times higher than the settled population, accounting for a staggering eleven per cent of all Traveller deaths.33 That statistic could be translated in a vivid way: in her twenty or more years of working with Irish Travellers, Margaret Greenfields observed that nearly ninety per cent of the families had ‘experienced either suicide or parasuicide’.
Depression and the inability to recover from one major loss after another compounds the likelihood of suicide. The organisation Nexus in 2006 investigated the experiences of the relatives of Traveller suicide victims. On average, the people interviewed said they had known four or five members of their extended family – a parent, partner, sibling or first cousin – who had committed suicide, usually after a series of struggles, ‘For many suicide victims, death was the culmination of a number of other events, including a reaction to time spent in prison, bereavements or other family tragedies.’34 Among the many tragic cases of suicide was Bridget Joyce, who killed herself after being forced to witness the murder of her partner, Michael Foy, by her ex-husband. It is highly likely, said one support worker for Irish Traveller women, that some end up committing suicide because they believe it to be the only way out of domestic violence. ‘It’s like the Mafia. Death is the only escape.’
In spring 2013, after a Freedom of Information request, the extent of the asbestos contamination at Dale Farm was revealed, fuelling concern that the health both of Travellers evicted from the plot and of nearby residents has been harmed. Just a few weeks earlier, two tonnes of waste, including thirteen kilograms of asbestos-cement sheeting from the remains of a building, were identified and removed from the site by environmental health officers wearing protective gear and working on behalf of Basildon Council. Though council officials had previously claimed that there was no ‘firm evidence’ of asbestos on the site, it was found that at least six locations were contaminated. The Traveller families alleged that the asbestos was released when buildings were destroyed after their eviction.
Of course, around thirty of the evicted families still lived about one hundred yards away from the site in April 2013, and Travellers’ groups say that up to one hundred local families could potentially be affected by any contamination at Dale Farm. Candy says the bunding and other actions taken by the council after the eviction may have also disturbed oil-based contaminants in the soil – residue from the site’s former use as a car-breaker’s yard – as well as the asbestos. Basildon Council initially denied such accusations, saying they were ‘not substantiated’. The Environment Agency report that had been designed to settle the matter was promised in autumn 2012, but had not yet appeared more than six months after its original due-date.
The Dale Farm families are suspicious as to why the council decided to remove asbestos after denying its existence. In response to such questions, Tony Ball said, ‘We were aware that the site had been used previously as a scrap yard and there might have been stuff buried illegally. Asbestos is a concern, even if there is no danger to health, so to alleviate fears we removed it.’35
The council later said that it had cleared ‘minimal shards’ – eighty-eight fragments of asbestos cement, and in doing so has not admitted liability for the presence of any contaminants on the site that could affect people’s health. And the question of liability for the clean-up remains contentious, especially after the eighty families living on the site were billed £4.3 million for the cost of evicting them.
Ramsden Crays Parish Council member David McPherson-Davis said there was still considerable concern among local residents about the safety of the site. Among other things, he wanted to know why the EA report had been delayed for so long. ‘There must be sizeable pollution there, and the EA and the government department it reports to is trying to decide who put it there and who is responsible for cleaning it up. Asbestos dust is potentially life threatening. How far does the dust travel?’36
Others were vocal too. ‘We are very concerned and quite angry that we have not seen this report as promised,’ said Nigel Smith, the Labour group leader of Basildon Council. ‘Local settled people, Travellers and children who even play on or near the site are all entitled to know whether or not it is safe for the local community.’37
Candy, who has been carrying out a health audit of the Travellers living roadside, said that some already have lung conditions and many of the children have been reporting problems with breathing. ‘Over ninety-eight per cent of the children living roadside are using inhalers. Many are on antibiotics for chest infections or have had upset stomachs. To my knowledge this is not matched anywhere else in the country for similarly aged children.’38
The physical marginalisation of Gypsies and Travellers had deep emotional consequences. Charles Smith, the former chair of the Gypsy Council and former mayor of Castle Point, was also a writer, and dedicated one of his poems, entitled ‘Reservations’, to the scars that he was sure would come once the Caravan Sites Act became law:
All penned up on the reservations
On a bit of waste land, next to the sewage works
Behind earth mounds, fences and walls
Must not offend delicate eyes
Out on the edge of town
So we know they don’t want us amongst them
Keeping us at a distance on the reservation.
He ended with these lines:
Kindly, you give us those reservations
We in the settled community wring our hands over the reservations into which Aboriginal peoples have been herded over the past century and a half, and we try to understand the damage that has been wreaked upon their culture by those who were in power. Many people fought to end apartheid in South Africa, but we look away when it comes to our part in this piece of history.
For her part, Margaret Greenfields agrees. ‘We have emerging evidence … which suggests an over-representation of mental health issues and substance misuse among some members of the community. In my opinion this is a clear outcome of the cultural trauma experienced by members of the populations,’ she said. ‘One only needs to compare the literature on the outcomes and experiences of Australian aborigines and Gypsies and Travellers to see those broad similar experiences. For example, amongst Australian aborigines and First Nation peoples in Canada and America, we see well-documented evidence of family breakdowns, mental health issues, substance misuse and suicide. Thus it is greatly to the credit of Gypsies and Travellers that their communities remain so resilient and intact in the face of widespread marginalisation.’
One portion of our society has been abandoned, left to the injustice of self-policing, allowing the strong to lord it over the weak and men, far too often, to dominate women and children with virtual impunity. We have placed sites in contaminated places, where nobody else would want to live, almost certainly restricting the life expectancy of their residents. We have done little to nothing to bring Gypsies and Travellers in from the cold – to see them as fellow citizens, different from but equal to everyone else who makes a home within these borders. All of us need water, security, shelter, food and education, so that we can flourish, develop a strong sense of self and pass on our culture to our children. Is it too much to ask, said Candy Sheridan, quietly, one day after she had been signing forms for the Environment Agency at Dale Farm, confirming that some plots were polluted with asbestos, that Gypsies and Travellers should be granted these human rights too?