‌14

‌Revival

Sitting over his campfire at the top gate of Appleby Fair in the second week of June 2012, just days after the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, Billy Welch was a contented man. His family was all around him, and the fair, which he organises, as his father did before him, was going off quietly, trading was good. Now, in a calm moment, he was taking stock, chatting with friends. One of the topics of conversation, of course, was the battle of Dale Farm, and the ongoing saga at Meriden.

Some people felt keenly the agony of the Dale Farm site clearance, and shook their heads in sympathy, asking in particular how the mothers were bearing up on the roadside. Others hazarded that the Travellers had brought it on themselves, by packing the site so full and bringing in outside activists, rather than doing for themselves. A few of the Dale Farm activists had been seen around the fair, handing out leaflets, something that Billy himself was not tremendously enthusiastic to see.

He was licking wounds, it was true, but Billy was a man looking to the future, or rather looking to find a better future by looking back into the past. Dale Farm had been demoralising; Meriden was shaping up to be a bad time too. Yet even in these barren times, he was sowing a kernel of hope. In the battle he had realised that Gypsies and Travellers were ready to speak for themselves. And he was trying to raise funding to make the first documentary of Gypsy folk to trace their travelling over the centuries back east across Europe, then onwards to Turkey, then on again into Iran, and finally all the way to India where, it’s thought, they came from. ‘We might go even further back,’ he said. ‘Some say we are the lost tribes of Abraham.’ It might sound romantic, but at least today, unlike in Victorian times, the Gypsies were romanticising themselves. Billy continued: ‘We aren’t as shallow as people think. We managed to hang on to our culture for hundreds of years; the language we speak is ancient Sanskrit. We want to try and trace our history back, give our people a sense of pride.’

This was Billy’s thirteenth year as spokesman for the fair, and he had grown into the task. Still, it was a big undertaking. Gypsies and Travellers from all over the world, numbering some ten thousand, come to Appleby each year. In the weeks beforehand, they retouch the paintwork on their bow-top wagons and spruce up their modern caravans. Then they set off. If they are travelling by horse (rather than putting the old wagons on trailers, an increasingly common practice), they stop every ten or fifteen miles, at traditional stopping places, where their families have rested and grazed their horses for generations. ‘It’s our Mecca,’ said Billy, ‘our pilgrimage. It’s not just the fair that’s important, it’s the journey to the fair … Even when the fair is over, you’ll still find hundreds of old Gypsies encamped in their wagons … The journey is as important as arriving,’ he continued. ‘It lets us reconnect with our roots.’

These old stopping places are opened up each year as ‘temporary areas of acceptance’ by the Multi-Agency Task Force, which manages matters such as licensing, policing, transport, animal welfare and human safety during Appleby. On the first day of the fair, officers from the police, fire, ambulance, even the RSPCA, squeezed into a room for a task force confab. Things were going well. Still, two villages en route to the fair reported having problems with the stopping-off points. Grasses not set aside for grazing had been eaten, and then trampled. The Gypsies involved said that grass in the area was already eaten down when they arrived.

One of the aims of the task force is to dispatch such problems and potential disputes quickly. The deputy mayor of Appleby, Andy Connell, said that local feeling had improved – the mood in the community was ‘much happier than it used to be’. Many townsfolk, he added, made money out of it, although others resent the disruption. According to Connell, who is also a local historian, the fair in its current form developed in the eighteenth century, when it was primarily used as a market for selling livestock. After the railways came, and the cattle went to auction by freight train, horses – and their Gypsy owners – came to the fore.

The fairs offered a chance for people to let off steam and meet up with old friends, to ‘network’ with other families and organisations now that most of the community no longer work together in the fields. The last thing they wanted was to feel a threat over their heads. But Gypsies and Travellers have had to fight to retain the summer horse fairs. The major fairs – Appleby in Cumbria and Stow in the Cotswolds – had survived, but many local fairs had been opposed before disappearing. The Appleby Fair had faced two serious threats to its existence in the past century, once in 1947 and again in 1964. In both cases, the local council decided in the end not to push for closure, but other Gypsy fairs have not been so lucky. The fair at Horsmonden, in Kent, which evolved from a ‘hopping fair’ into a Gypsy horse fair, was closed down briefly in the 1990s; when it re-opened in 2006, it was saddled with restrictions from the council. And at Stow, where the traditional horse fair is held twice yearly, a local residents’ group has been formed to oppose it, and many shops in the town close down, often suspiciously claiming a well-timed family holiday or the need for redecorating, during fair time. While it is illegal to bar entrance to shops and other venues on ethnic grounds, this is pretty much flouted in Stow. Even the church closes its doors during the duration of the fair.

In Appleby, however, most shops were open for business – and doing a brisk trade at that. More than 1,500 visitors were expected to arrive by chartered coaches on Saturday alone. Two hundred police had been mustered for duty during the fair, compared to the six who patrol the market town, population 2,500, on more usual days. The visitors and their watchers initially clustered along the swollen river bank, after a day and night of heavy rainfall, hoping to catch a glimpse of the horses being washed off before sale, but most were disappointed, because the river level was too high and the river had to be closed for most of the day

So instead, they made the walk up the hill to the fair ground itself, where gypsy cobs and lighter horses were being raced in the so-called flashing lane, to show off their qualities to interested buyers. Some were harnessed to traditional lightweight traps known as sulkies, others ridden bareback by the lads or the odd girl with hair streaming down her back. The cry ‘Watch your backs!’ would go up as the sulkies raced along. Horses that showed a straight line in the traces, and a high trotting step, raised appreciative cheers in the pouring rain.

The horses and ponies were not the only items up for sale. There were goats and donkeys as well as thick rugs and Crown Derby china for decorating a home, whether stopping for a few days or settling in to a pitch. There were also embroidered dresses and brightly-coloured leisurewear for the girls and women and beautifully cut shooting jackets and flat caps for the boys and men. ‘Genuine Gypsy palmists’ and fortune-tellers were out in force, awaiting the young women (and some men) looking to see what – or who – their future might hold.

Despite the conditions, many girls, hoping to be wooed at the fair, were dressed in tiny shorts, skirts and shirts that showed off their immaculate spray tans. Many tottered along the uneven grass verges to and from the town and on Fair Hill itself, trying to avoid the paths, which were inches deep in mud, in their high-heeled wedges. The ambulance service was standing ready to treat sprains and fractures due to ‘inappropriate footwear’.

Most families had parked up in the same spot as last year, and the year before, and the one before that too. Among them were William and Janey Michaelson, who had visited Appleby since their childhood. In their caravan, chatting over a beef sandwich and a good mug of tea, William recalled his first visit to the fair seventy-three years previously, when he was just a babe in arms. Surveying the fair, he declared, ‘You can travel all over the world and not see anything like this.’

Just a month earlier, in May, the Stow spring fair had been held. It was just as rainy at the time, and Vera Norwood, the former Tiller girl and former mayor of Stow-on-Wold, had been forced to buy wellingtons in order to venture down to the pub, where she was set to meet a few local councillors for a pre-fair walk-round. When they didn’t turn up, she downed a rum with a companion and trudged down to the site, located on the outskirts of Stow, on the road leading out towards the village of Maugesbury. It’s from Maugesbury that some of the staunchest opposition to the fair comes.

The gathering is held on land owned by the Smith families, headed by Isaac and Walter Smith. Though this was proving to be the rainiest fair for years, the families said they had not been allowed to put down any kind of path, even a removable one, with the council citing the fact that the field is located in the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which is known for its limestone grassland. This was a frustrating development, all the more so since, as Vera pointed out, the local Tesco supermarket had built paths and car parks in virtually the same area. With the rain and the mud, it was inevitable that the field would be destroyed, churned up by both many feet and bad weather, and some local residents would later seize the opportunity to ask how much the Gypsies were paying towards the clean-up.

For now, though, all of the worries about how the fair would go were only worries – though admittedly some of the worriers were ready to see trouble. Earlier in the day Vera had visited the local library, which was hosting an exhibition about the fair. The building was festooned with painted milk stools, churns and photographs from years past, a beautiful collection of history and tradition. At the centre of the exhibition was a display of the text of Edward IV’s Royal Charter protecting the fair. While she was taking a spin around the library, she was accosted by Robin Jones, the current mayor of the market town. He was decidedly irked, asking her whether ‘she had put them [the library] up to it’ and suggesting that she was stirring up trouble by referring to Stow as a ‘charter fair’. Vera, being someone who liked to build consensus, tried to calm him down, but this was not a good sign. After leaving the library, she walked down the high street. Many shops were shuttered, although it seemed a few less than the year before. In the local supermarket, the shop manager stood on guard when young Traveller children came in to buy milk, eyeing them suspiciously the whole time.

At Stow, as at Appleby, the Gypsies and Travellers were on show to the public, the stereotypes held by the settled community shadowing them. Mary Lovell, Isaac Smith’s wife, was incensed, for example, by the way in which My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding had come to be seen as a fair representation of her community. ‘Life is for the Gypsy people, not make-believe Gypsies. I’m not talking for all kinds; I’m talking for the real Gypsy people, who have lived in wagons, lived on the side of the road, have shared these things with other people for generations and [who] keep their old-fashioned ways with their children. And getting “grabbed” by boys, that’s new,’ she said, referring to the alleged practice, repeatedly depicted on the TV programme, of forcing girls to kiss boys. ‘Grabbing a new girl and taking her name from them, that’s wrong. Young Gypsy men would go to the parents. They would ask for the courting girls and then get married and we would sew the young girls’ frocks, make them stand out a mile, but they didn’t cost a billion to do that.’‌¹

To people like Billy Welch and Mary Lovell, the fairs, if anything, were more important now than at any time in the history of England’s Gypsies and Travellers. They were one of the few places that Gypsies and Travellers could come together to meet on uncontested ground and be themselves – not a subject of reality TV.

Many of the Gypsies and Travellers at Stow were talking about the draw of evangelical Christianity – and how it seemed a path forward, as families and as a larger community, though a challenging one. One well-respected woman had converted to the Light and Life ministry earlier in the year, and said that she was trying to bring together the old customs and the beliefs of the new church. ‘I’ve read fortunes all my life and I goes out hawking still; I like to keep it going, the pegs, the favours, the tablecloths, it’s lovely,’ she recounted. ‘I like to talk to people, tell them who I am, what I am, it’s a way of life. I don’t want to change it. We just want to be left in peace.’ Unlike the McCarthy family members who had converted, she had found a middle ground, in her own mind, that allowed her to maintain some aspects of her travelling heritage – in particular her fortune-telling – and worship with Light and Life. ‘We have a gift. If you can talk to a person and say things are going to be better, you are not doing anything bad. It’s a gift from the Lord, [though] some of the Christians say it’s from the enemy. If you gave them false hope then it’s not from the enemy, it’s what you believe … There is only one God, and I love God. God will change their way of life … either go to heaven or hell.’

Over the past several years, Light and Life had grown to be a crucial part of Romani Gypsy identity. Almost every Gypsy family (and a growing number of Irish Travellers) in the UK had at least one family member in the church, or had been affected by the church’s work in some way. Around thirty churches had been opened. The church had become so dominant that on the evening before the Stow Horse Fair’s traditional opening day, there was now a Light and Life prayer meeting, led by Siddy Biddle and his family, to bless the gathering. The rain was so heavy in May 2012 that the Stow vigil had to be cancelled.

But Pastor Davey Jones, Billy Welch’s cousin and one of the leading figures in the church, made his way to Appleby the following month. A former altar boy turned quietly spoken pastor, Jones had found most organised religion in England to be ‘cold and dead’ and had yearned for something deeper. He soon realised that this wish was shared by many of his people – he was an English Gypsy himself, and today lived in a lovingly restored chrome caravan which he had bought from Billy’s father. ‘My people were in spiritual darkness,’ said Jones, sitting in his immaculate caravan at Appleby. ‘We had a form of religion but really, in our hearts, we weren’t believers, because we held to the traditions of our people, like worshipping the dead. We lived a double life. Now many of them are experiencing a personal relationship with God for the first time.’‌²

The movement had started in Brittany, France, in the 1950s, Jones explained. There, an evangelical church, called Vie et Lumière, had been founded by a non-Romani father and son, Jean and Clément le Cossec.‌³ The Cossecs converted Jones and many other English Gypsy elders over twenty years ago in a site in Darlington – known, only half-jokingly, as the ‘Gypsy capital of England’ – where Billy now lives with his extended family, as did his father before him. ‘The church members from France visited my Dad, then he went back to France with Davey. My Dad brung them back here – he had a big marquee tent, just there, out the back, the very first one ever in this country,’ Billy said. ‘It all began here on Honeypot Lane caravan site.’ Though Billy himself is not a member of Light and Life, his cousin Jackie Boyd is also a leading pastor in the church.

This wasn’t the first time that England’s Gypsies and Travellers had been evangelised. A century earlier, Anglican priests had tried to save them from their ‘depraved’ nomadic lifestyle. One famous preacher, ‘Gipsy Smith’, had emerged during the Victorian era – a member of the Salvation Army who travelled to and from America and attracted thousands of people to his services – but on the whole Christianity was something imposed on the travelling peoples by the settled majority.‌⁴ Light and Life, in contrast, is a self-organised church.

It’s thought that almost half of all Gypsies in France belong to the church. The number in the UK is lower – around a fifth – but with conversions coming at a high rate among both English Gypsies and traditionally Catholic Irish Travellers, that is changing year by year. Many newly arrived Roma from Central and Eastern Europe are also enthusiastically evangelical, with some choosing to join established English Gypsy churches, such as the London Gypsy Church, rather than starting their own satellite churches in areas with a growing Roma population, as in Luton. In the words of Angus Fraser, author of The Gypsies. ‘There is … something in the ecstatic aspect of evangelical faith – the witnessing for Christ – that is highly attractive to people whose traditional manner of life is in some way under threat’ – and he adds, prophetically, that it is the first real example in Western Europe of a ‘mass pan-Gypsy organisation, transcending tribal subdivisions’.‌⁵

All of the leading Light and Life identified themselves as Romani Gypsies. Jones stresses that none of the pastors in the church are paid, because, he said, if they were, some Gypsies and Travellers would suspect they were being converted to grab tithes or other donations. ‘Some of our people were fortune-tellers and con-men. This makes it very difficult to con them. Either they are having a personal experience that is changing their lives – or they are not going to be deceived.’ The Pentecostal religion was having a profound effect on some of these traditional aspects of Gypsy and Traveller culture. Fortune-telling is frowned upon. The church is sceptical of the appropriateness of teenage marriage, still common among Gypsies and Travellers. It also holds a very strict view on the use of illegal drugs and the overuse of alcohol. As a show of faith, believers practise speaking in tongues and divine healing.

One unforeseen result of the evangelical revival has been the growing number of new converts attending Bible school and the understanding of just how important education is. Most of these converts, including children, were being taught to read so that they could pore over Scripture. Gypsies and Travellers might not need to read and write for their chosen work, but they were going to literacy night school for their chosen faith. In turn, different professions were opening up to them and to the rising generation.

Not long after Appleby, Davey Jones had a revival meeting set to be held on the grounds of Carlton Towers estate, near Selby in Yorkshire. When he was talking up the meeting at Appleby, he said he was expecting around five thousand people to turn up. Instead, around twice that number descended on the estate, provoking an onslaught of anger among some of the local people, who felt that they had not been given proper notice of the gathering. The Yorkshire Post headline blared: ‘Fury over village of Gypsies for festival’. The newspaper went on to say that ‘residents have complained of gangs of youths marching through the village and disturbing houses’.‌⁶ (The owners of Carlton Towers subsequently donated the fee they had received for hosting the meeting to the local village.)

Despite the splash and the claims, there was little evidence of such trouble. Youngsters were huddled in the middle of the village, but the village shopkeepers said that they had not had any problems – in fact, they had done well by the revival, selling extra soft drinks, milk, food and sweets. The police presence was relatively loose, though large in number.

The revival meeting itself displayed a remarkable integration of Gypsy culture into evangelical worship, a live-in, authentic religion, not a religion just for show. Around half of the women present donned headscarves as they entered the big circus tent, as a very literal reading of Scripture would suggest they should. The pastor who led the prayer meeting spoke to the congregation as only a fellow Romani could – chiding and praising his community in equal measure. He pulled the youngsters up on littering. He talked about how wives and mothers needed to raise ‘good ingredients’ to ensure a good life was led – a lesson that touched many of the women, who took great pride in their cooking and other home-making.

The atmosphere at the convention felt a little like Appleby – relaxed, cheery. Most of the men said they worked as tree surgeons, scrap dealers or small businessmen, mostly selling beds and the like, judging from their vans, and the women were caring for their children or cleaning and cooking, as well as praying. Several stalls had been set up to sell religious DVDs and books. But there was another element too, something that extended the sense of community beyond one family, one clan, or one caravan site. People called each other ‘sister’ or ‘brother’. They were rebuilding their community, making it stronger, one convert at a time. Their ‘silent revival’ drew upon what was best about the travelling way of life – the strength of the family, the respect for elders, the strong impulse towards charity and the tolerance of people of all races.

Like many of the church elders, Walter Smith, who organises Stow Horse Fair, had seen a shift in the last few years, as the church was reaching more and more of his ‘sisters and brothers’, as he warmly called them. After an afternoon prayer meeting, he had retired to his caravan with his family. It was a peaceful scene – his grandchildren had been playing chess all morning and had just switched to a game of backgammon. Then Walter said grace before his wife served their homely meal of gammon, potatoes and cabbage.

Walter had been converted over twenty years before, around the same time as Davey Jones. He thought that there would be still more converts. ‘We believe as Gypsy people that the end is coming very soon, and it’s important to be saved. Our belief is in the Bible. In Luke 14:23, it says that to find new Christians you need to go out to the hedges and back roads, and we believe that Jesus was talking about us, the people of the hedges and the back roads,’ he said. ‘Gypsies are hard to get to; some of them will give you baloney and many have a lot of problems, and they have got to be set free from old ways like fortune-telling. There is only one way to get to heaven, and that’s through Jesus.’

As Walter talked about the end being nigh, it was hard not to imagine that he was really talking about the end of a way of life being nigh – the life of travelling and trading on the road. The Light and Life church was a rock in hard times to him, and to many others. Many new members, in fact, were choosing to put down roots near a bricks and mortar church, a place where they may worship in the safety of their community. Travelling was something that they only did during holidays or horse fairs or, more and more, church conventions.

The church’s tough line on the use of alcohol and drugs had also been a comfort to some in the community. There’s a widespread fear of the growing menace of drugs, especially as a threat to younger Gypsies and Travellers. People could point to some young person who had fallen prey to unscrupulous drug dealers, and the church had helped a few of them to regain a foothold in the traditional, stricter way of life. The church offered a place for them to be proud of and rejoice in who they are, to throw off the sense of shame created by the constant stigma and stereotypes they felt were thrust on them by the settled community and the media.

Billy’s cousin Jackie Boyd praised the church’s ability to nurture the good in Gypsy and Traveller culture. ‘In every culture there are things that are wrong. In our culture there are some good things, such as the family ties and the respect we have for them. But we used to have cultural jobs, like fortune-telling, that go against the word of God. It’s only things that come against the word of God that need to change,’ he said. ‘It was never our intention to have Gypsy churches. We wanted to evangelise people, but we found so many difficulties with the church’s understanding of Gypsies. They thought we had to become non-Gypsies if we were to become Christians. The people from the churches thought that if we were saved, we had to live in a house. But God is interested in the spiritual man. Chinese churches don’t become white churches; they come to God as they are in their culture, and things that are wrong, He will change.’

He remembered one incident in particular that had shown him the light: ‘When I first became a Christian, the pastor said he had to drive out the demons from the fortune-tellers. I told him they were not possessed by demons just because they told fortunes. The churches themselves had a lot to learn.’‌⁷

Now Life and Light was spreading the word throughout the world, building churches not just in the UK and France but in Eastern Europe too, and becoming a force for Gypsy and Traveller identity. ‘If people want to deal with the Gypsies and get the truth, they need to deal with the evangelical Christians,’ said Davey Jones. ‘Our churches are cultural centres as well. Christianity isn’t taking away from our culture. It’s adding to it.’

Candy Sheridan said she was enthusiastic about the Gypsy church and its work in the UK, though she herself is a Catholic. ‘I know of many broken Gypsy men whose lives have been revived and I have seen this success first hand,’ she said. The academic Thomas Acton was also largely positive: ‘Davey Jones and other Romani Pentecostal pastors are very creative theological thinkers. They are aware that they are not only leading a church movement, but an intellectual revival of their people.’‌⁸

Others have been more cautious. Professor of Romani Studies Ian Hancock, whose ancestors include British travelling Showmen and Hungarian Roma, was one of the doubters, despite seeing several strengths in the evangelical model of worship. ‘They preach love in a powerful way, which is something Romanies don’t hear. Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches are very impersonal, and some have refused to allow Romanies inside to worship. Secondly, the Born Again churches allow Romani individuals to have a say, and titles, and even become pastors with churches of their own.’ But Hancock sees the prohibition of fortune-telling and of arranged and teenage marriages as ‘gross cultural imposition’.‌⁹

He has not been alone in his doubts about the new church. One founder member of the Gypsy Council (who is also a celebrated writer about life on the road) named Dominic Reeve recalled some of the first converts turning up at Epsom Races when the races were still a favoured haunt of Gypsies and Travellers. ‘A huge collection of wealthy-seeming French Romanies appeared one Race Week with new trailers, new Mercedes vans and a vast marquee,’ he wrote of an encounter in the late 1970s. ‘They were my first experience of Born Again Christians, later to prove a rather fanatical band of well-intentioned Bible fundamentalists, whose simple fire-and-brimstone message has presently been embraced by a large number of British Romanies and throughout Europe too, I believe. As a lifelong agnostic I was naturally a little depressed by this and can only hope it will pass, like other fashions.’‌¹⁰ The ‘fashion’ had not passed – far from it.

At Appleby, Pastor Jones mused about what he meant when he said that ‘if people want to deal with the Gypsies and get the truth, they will deal with the evangelical Christians’. ‘We come to the fairs so people can see we are Christians, but not fanatics. We must draw our people to us.’ He was looking ahead to an influential role in public life for his church members, though, he said, ‘We are not interested in political power.’

Although it is the biggest, Light and Life is not the only church making inroads into the Gypsy and Traveller community. There is a movement to bring together all of the peoples of the Roma nation, whether they live in the UK, France or Spain or in Eastern Europe or Russia. Religion is one aspect of that, and as a result Roma and English Gypsies have begun to worship together. In addition, the growing numbers of Roma immigrants from Eastern Europe are establishing influential churches of their own.

In mainland Europe, where the overwhelming majority of the Roma population of around ten million live, living conditions had become nearly unbearable. Indeed, a May 2012 report published by the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights confirmed that the situation was grim beyond belief. In a survey of 84,000 households in eleven countries, only fifteen per cent of young Roma adults had finished upper-secondary general or vocational education, compared with more than seventy per cent of the majority population. Less than thirty per cent of Roma were in paid employment. About forty-five per cent lived in households lacking a kitchen, inside toilet, electricity or washing facilities. They were cordoned off in apartheid-like conditions, in separate communities pushed to the edges of towns and villages. They were frequently the target of hate crimes.‌¹¹

No official figures exist, but the best estimate, from the advocacy group Equality, suggests that at least half a million Roma have come to the UK, with families settling in clusters around Glasgow, London, Manchester, Leeds, Kent and the East Midlands.‌¹² The influx has been huge – and may more than match the existing population of Gypsies and Travellers. ‘Most people are intrigued by Gypsies and Travellers but the new Roma population is bigger than those two communities put together and still growing,’ said scholar Robbie McVeigh.‌¹³ One place where Roma have been settling fast is Luton, where the Church of England has appointed its first and only chaplain to the Roma people, Martin Burrell.

Martin, who previously worked with Kentish Romanies in his former parish, came to Luton in 2009, and started the Roma church there in the spring of 2011. ‘Until recently you had to go abroad to do missions. The churches have not woken up to the fact that now there is a whole mission field on our doorsteps, a new world that is forming around us’, he observed. I see it as a movement; God is moving us towards His future, where there are no divisions between different ethnic futures. We have to learn to live alongside each other. This patch is not ours, and what the Roma are saying to us is a challenge to all nations. The Roma are an ethnic group of some twelve million people who say that they don’t want a patch [to] each, just somewhere to live.’

When Pastor Burrell started his work, a minister from the London Gypsy Church, Pastor Stevo, would come every fortnight to offer a service to those in the community who had adopted Pentecostal worship. That lapsed, however, due to differences between the two Roma communities: none of those at the London Gypsy Church were poor, while many in Luton were, explained Burrell. ‘They were wonderful people, but a different social class. We are still trying to find the right model for our church. All the energies of my people are on surviving, but they are coming to church as well. The state has made it possible for them to come, but it has tied their hands behind their backs. They have to stretch the system just to survive. Somehow they will find a way to make this work – they are adventurous entrepreneurs after all.’

By the end of 2012 Burrell’s Roma flock numbered around forty or fifty, many of whom are collected each week for a mid-week evening service by a church minibus. One of his congregation was Esmeralda, a fond grandmother with nimble fingers. This Wednesday evening in November 2012, she was sewing a duvet from fabric she had bought cheap on a market stall, with gold rings in her ears, a headscarf and a long, colourful skirt, awaiting Burrell’s minibus to go to church in a small terrace in Luton, the one incongruous element. Her small sitting room was dominated by an enormous TV, tuned to Romanian television, and other women in the family would wander in and out, all wearing traditional headscarves. Esmeralda explained that her family had not always lived here. They had been forced to move several times due to problems with landlords.

Then it was time to make their way to the church. When she arrived, many members of the congregation were already assembled. The younger children darted about, translating from English for the older people – that is when they weren’t delightedly cutting, sticking and colouring Christmas scenes that had been prepared by members of Christchurch, a church in Bushmead, for them.

The congregation that day included some Roma who had set up in Leicester, then arrived in Luton while they were travelling to find work and found the church by chance by coming across other ethnic Roma. Burrell, with characteristic generosity, invited them to minister to the Roma, taking a back seat himself. The newcomers explained that they had been trained as pastors back in Romania, by a pastor who had himself been trained by Jean le Cossec. During the service, which was conducted in Romanian, the women sat separately from the men. As part of their ministering, the Roma pastors took up a variety of instruments, including a keyboard, dulcimer and accordion, to share some traditional songs. The music was plaintive, almost Middle Eastern in feeling.

The Roma pastors were nearly destitute, but despite their lack of money, they were smartly turned out for worship, in gleaming shoes and pressed suits. They said that the only contact they usually had with English Gypsies and Irish Travellers was either working for them as labourers or competing with them for business at the local scrap yard – and sometimes coming to blows. One claimed he had escaped from near slavery conditions working for one Traveller family. Still, they remained remarkably cheerful in the face of their poverty, refusing an offer of petrol money from the congregation, even when they were told it was in thanks for their ministering. The men insisted that they did not deserve the money – whether or not it was considered a tithe – because they felt the congregation had not yet been saved.

Burrell’s job, by his reckoning, was these days less preaching the Gospel and more advising on benefits. He would help his Roma congregation members to find work, fill out invoices, sign on at the job centre, apply to get National Insurance numbers. He said that recent changes in the employment law and budget had hit the community hard. ‘Recently the job centre narrowed the goal posts so [the Roma] couldn’t be self-employed any more, and they are really desperate. If they don’t have anybody who speaks the language, it’s pretty impossible for them.’ If it doesn’t work for them here, they will shift on, he said. ‘They say if it doesn’t work, they will go to Spain. One family came from Brazil. They will pitch up anywhere they can eke out an existence.’

Burrell, too, was stretched. He had expanded from one church to two – the church for the Roma people, plus Christchurch, which primarily serves the settled community. Some of the parishioners from Christchurch assist with his Wednesday evening service for the Roma. ‘I am asked, “Is it appropriate for a minister to run a mission outreach programme in another part of the town? I move from a white English congregation to an Eastern European Roma group of people on the edge of everything, in what I call a holistic mission. We try and bring help to every part of their lives. We are stepping out onto the water here, and it is very risky. But God is there, on their lives, these people who live on the edge. God is found in the poor and marginalised, where we see another dimension of reality that doesn’t get recognised.’

Religion is hugely important to many in the communities, but the struggles that Gypsies and Travellers are facing require not just spiritual answers, but political ones. For all its flaws, it seems as though the Pentecostal church will be the most likely source of political leadership in the coming years. ‘There will still be a community in one hundred years’ time, but they won’t speak much Romani, and many of them will be living in houses, with a Romani Bible they can’t read. The music and songs will go on,’ Donald Kenrick, the scholar said. ‘Many of them will be Pentecostals.’‌¹⁴ Could a Martin Luther King arise out of this new church, and harness together the cords of political and religious strength? For other passions are stirring at the grass roots of the community, and though they have links to Light and Life, these passions are directed at a very different agenda.

Just a handful of English Gypsies and Irish Travellers have made it into political life in the UK over the past forty years. These include the late Charlie Smith, who was elected a Labour councillor in the 1990s and went on to become mayor of Castle Point in 2003; a year later, he was the only English Gypsy named to sit on the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Candy Sheridan too had twice been elected a councillor for the Liberal Democrats in North Norfolk, but stepped down just before the 2010 election. A number of organisations were becoming increasingly vocal, as well, with well-respected spokespeople, such as Candy and Joe Jones at the Gypsy Council, Siobhan Spencer at the Derbyshire Gypsy Liaison Group, Helen Jones at Leeds GATE and Yvonne McNamara at the Irish Traveller Movement. Some young people, including Blue Jones and Nadi Foy, were standing up to articulate the voice of the community.

They had allies, of course, including many of the activists from Camp Constant, who had since formed the Travellers Solidarity Network and launched the ‘Fight for Sites’ initiative. Some in the communities had welcomed this support, but just as many felt that this outside intervention would only worsen their situation. In October 2012, for the one-year anniversary of the Dale Farm clearance, the activists had staged a demonstration outside the Department of Communities and Local Government. Most of the Dale Farm residents were by now sick of the media coverage, and some said they were tired of the connection with the activists and felt it was not useful to their cause. In the end, although the Travellers Solidarity Network sent a minibus to Dale Farm to collect residents living roadside, only three women had come out – and all three turned pale and shocked when some of the activists allowed the demonstration to become physical, and police began arresting people. The network remains active, and many in it are genuinely committed to greater equality for the community. However, whether the network will ever be trusted by a critical mass in this very disparate grouping of peoples, bound by strong family and historical ties that are difficult to penetrate and understand, remains to be seen.

Billy Welch, for his part, wants to build on the enthusiasm from within the Gypsy and Traveller community – particularly in his hometown of Darlington. At least eleven per cent, and up to fifteen per cent, of Darlington’s population self-declare as Gypsies or Travellers. The real figure may be higher, nearer to a third, as many have moved to houses in town and may not identify themselves for fear of harassment. Nearby Doncaster and York also have significant populations of Romani Gypsies and Travellers. This is where Billy said he intends to start his initiative, in the next round of local elections.

‘We have gathered together influential people in the Gypsy and Traveller community, the shera rom, and the big men from the Irish Traveller community,’ he explained. They had recruited, for instance, ‘Big Dan’ Rooney, a one-time bare-knuckle boxer who was now a prominent preacher with Light and Life, as well as the Irish Traveller Alexander J. Thompson. Billy’s cousins, Davey Jones and Jackie Boyd from the Light and Life church were part of the conversation too. ‘We are all talking to each other about what needs to change,’ Billy said. ‘We have all these Gypsy and Traveller organisations, around 120 all around the country, and yet they aren’t run by people like us, the elders. The government loves a “yes man”, so they have built up a white man’s structure. We are going to change all that.’ His big dream is that his people do it for themselves by being less secretive and engaging more with settled society. He wants to launch an Obama-style ‘Yes, We Can’ political campaign among his people, starting with getting people to the polls. ‘We need a voice,’ he says. ‘So we need to vote.’

Billy estimated that close to a million people in the UK could claim some Gypsy or Traveller origin – a potential electorate that he said was all but ignored. Even if the figure were nearer to the official estimate of some 300,000, if the community voted together, this number could tip seats to preferred candidates in some areas. ‘Eighty per cent of our people live in houses now, and they don’t put that they are Gypsy on the census. We think the gorgers [settled people] can do what they want with their world; we live in our own world. My people aren’t interested, but they will have to be, the world isn’t the same place it was fifteen years ago. They are smothering us with laws and restrictions. We’ve got no voice in Parliament. When the authorities come down on us, I want my people to vote; I want the government to know how many of us there are. When there is a tight election, we could be the difference to someone getting kicked out. That is the only way we will get treated as equals, have some value in society. We need to register to vote. We are going to have to get involved in their world as well.’

He decided to launch his voter drive at the Appleby Fair in June 2013. Twenty people, some from the Light and Life church and others from clans from around the country, would distribute leaflets and talk to people as they wandered the fair grounds. ‘I’m the shera rom of my tribe, and I’m talking to the heads of all the other families. Some of them cover big areas, some small, but they are all influential. The communities will listen to us. We will decide which party is the best for us and this will be a collective decision. In some areas, with around one million of us, we can swing a vote; round here we can definitely swing it.’ He had heard from families in Scotland and Wales who supported his political campaigning as well.

Billy was motivated to become politically engaged by an experience some twenty years before. He was on his way home from a business trip to Germany, and was set upon by a National Front gang. He was beaten so badly that his family didn’t recognise him when they visited him in hospital. Yet no action had been taken against the perpetrators of the attack. Then, in 2011, his outrage was renewed when he was barred from his local pub on the grounds that he was a Gypsy. Billy fought that case with the aid of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but he was aware that, up and down the country, Gypsies and Travellers were being targeted for their ethnicity and routinely refused access to hotels, restaurants, pubs and clubs. He wanted to change that – make a stand, not just for himself, but for the community.

The attitude of Gypsies and Travellers needed to change, he explained. ‘Our people have had a very coloured view of authority. The wider world has been out there and we have lived in our little world and thought, What they do doesn’t concern us, that nothing that we would ever do would influence anything in the community, so we have just got on with our life. But things have changed. A lot has happened in the wider world. It’s about time we started taking charge of our own destiny, started to influence. If we don’t vote, we will never improve the situation,’ he said.

‘We live in a democracy and we don’t use it. Because we don’t vote, we don’t have a value. Until we become worth something in electoral terms, to both local government and national government, they will continue to privilege the settled community over us. We are our own worst enemy, and that needs to change.’ Other groups were also planning to help – Simon Woolley, Director of Operation Black Vote, fresh from working on the Obama re-election campaign, had offered advice. The Gypsy Council was helping to register the residents roadside at Dale Farm too – in an audacious plan to vote Len Gridley onto Basildon Council in 2014, to question the eviction and the money spent.

The voices of Gypsies and Travellers are being heard in other arenas as well. In October 2012, the East Anglian Museum of Rural Life in Stowmarket hosted an event celebrating Romani achievements in the arts.‌¹⁵ Thomas Acton kicked off the event by charting the evolution of Romani art since the Second World War. ‘Romani writers were trapped in a gorger world,’ in the early years, he argued, with many works marked by a knowledge or direct experience of the Holocaust, the legacy of slavery in Eastern Europe, and sometimes both. For instance, Elena Lacková’s 1956 play The Burning Gypsy Camp confronted the theme of the Holocaust. The great Romani novelist Matéo Maximoff wrote eleven books, some touching on his experience in a Gypsy camp during the war; twenty-seven of his relatives, he said, were killed in concentration camps in Poland. He became an evangelical pastor in 1961, translating the New Testament into Kalderaš Romani before his death.‌¹⁶ ‘What marks the early writers is their isolation’, Acton said. ‘They were paranoid; they lived in a world that didn’t welcome them.’

Today, however, Romani art is another catalyst for change in the community – particularly the movement to build a Roma nation that transcends state boundaries. As the Roma art historian, curator and activist Timea Junghaus put it in the foreword to the book Meet Your Neighbors: ‘We must recognise that constructing effective representations involves the artist as much as the scientist or the politician.’‌¹⁷ Some of the most important members of that artistic movement – Damian and Delaine Le Bas, Daniel Baker and Ferdinand Koci among them – live in the UK, many of them British citizens.

Other talented artists with Romani/Traveller roots include Dan Allum, a Traveller who grew up in East Anglia and attended the exhibition opening. He recalled a childhood with little schooling, but much back-breaking agricultural labour. It seemed an unlikely way to begin a successful artistic career. But after landing work as a video producer, in 2002 he founded the Romani Theatre Company, for which he was the artistic director.

Allum was keen to extend the reach of his theatre projects to the settled community. He had created a series, Atching Tan (‘Stopping Place’ in Romani), for local BBC radio, as well as two spin-off plays, the first also called Atching Tan, which was shortlisted for two national radio awards, and A Gypsy Wife. Both plays were performed for Radio 4 by a cast of Roma, Gypsies and Travellers, including Damian Le Bas; Candis Nergaard; Sian Willett; Patricia Keegan; Maryanne, Dean and Sharon Loveridge; along with two non-Travellers, Brodie Ross and Danny Dalton. Reflecting on Atching Tan, Allum said: ‘As a Traveller it was fascinating for me to write this script, because in many ways I faced the same dilemma when I was young. And although I did take a risk and step out of my community to work in the arts, I’ve always managed to keep close links with my community both personally and professionally … I’ve often heard or seen Travellers portrayed on radio, TV or film in such a clichéd way: it’s either over-romanticised or just showing the bad side. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising, as so few people know anything about the Gypsy community, it’s so secretive and tight-knit.’ He was impressed by the consideration of these new voices. ‘BBC drama have been very sensitive and respectful to the Traveller community throughout and have always kept authenticity at the centre of the work. Even so I never thought in a million years I’d hear Traveller voices speaking the Romani language on Radio 4!’ He was looking forward to seeing Atching Tan adapted for television, in a move that might be as ground-breaking for mapping Gypsy heritage in the UK as the book and TV series Roots was for a generation of black people in the United States.

The poet and ecologist David Morley was also there, to read from his work. Now a professor of creative writing at Warwick University, he had grown up in Blackpool with his mother, who, he said, was a ‘half-blood Rom’. He had started writing at the age of twelve, when his father died and he had to earn money to support the family. ‘I twigged that this writing work is indoors, and when you write you can disguise your gender and age with a typewriter – you can make it up. And it was easier than doing four paper rounds,’ he remembered. ‘For me there is always this connection between survival and writing – although in the cosy world of Ivy League universities, this is hard to get over to the great middle classes, that they can be co-equals, a very vital realisation that if you take one away, you take the other.’ He then led the audience outside for a reading of some of his sonnets, conceived as a conversation between the nineteenth-century poet John Clare and his friend Wisdom Smith, a local Gypsy. It was a crisp autumn day, which gave the event a feeling of electricity.

He had been drawn to these figures from a time when the travelling lifestyle was more prominent – and the land was already under siege. ‘In the New Year, I returned to my writing shed and found Wisdom Smith waiting there like an impatient Daemon,’ Morley explained before starting. ‘I sat down to work, as did he; and he wrote two sonnets. The next day he wrote three. Since then he has kept me busy on every writing day. The truth is, he is good at sonnets, and strong at dialogue; and his work is crisp, fresh and funny. After letting him take me over for two weeks, I looked at his work, then I looked at my own book – the book I had thought was working. The truth: Wisdom Smith was a better poet than me. His work was more alive than the poems I had spent the previous year writing. It was not “literature” as such – it was life. This was no “sideways and up” movement in voice, but a forward advance. And he was leading me by the nose. And so I gave in and let him. After all, he is writing my book, not me.’ He then read some of the sonnets, old vardos and chrome caravans surrounding the audience:

‌The Act
A chorredo has burreder peeas than a Romany Chal.‌¹⁸

Wisdom swings to his feet as if pulled by an invisible hand.

‘I shall show how this world wags without making one sound.’

And the Gypsy transforms himself first into a lawyer. He bends

a burning eye on invisible jurors. He simpers. He stands on his head

as the Judge and thunders silent sentence. Then Wisdom levitates

to tip-toe in pity and pride as a Reverend bent over his Bible

while an invisible scaffold gasps and bounces from a rope’s recoil.

The Gypsy hangs kicking until hacked down by invisible blades.

The world grinds to a stop on invisible springs, bearings and axis.

‘Do you ever tell lies, Wisdom?’ ‘All the long day through, brother,’

laughs the Gypsy. He lights his long pipe beneath his hat’s brim.

‘But the brassiest of lies’ – the Gypsy plucks – ‘are like this heather:

a charm against visible harm and’ – he crushes it – ‘invisible harm.’

And the friends look at each other across the invisible stage of grass.

Next, Damian Le Bas, editor of Travellers’ Times but also an accomplished poet, actor and budding playwright, took the stage, sharing a powerful poem about bigotry. It was drawn from a mosaic of real and fictionalised incidents, and described an imagined ‘cousin’ who had decided that he could not stand by while racist language was hurled at the family. A Gypsy relative of Damian’s had driven by a local pub in his wagon, and one of the people at the pub had said: ‘The dirty, inbred Pikey cunts – if you ask me the cunts are better off dead.’ Damian’s cousin had hit the racist with a snooker cue and then left. The poem recounted his cousin’s supposed sense of closure:

‌And the peace of the dead who took no stick

Was bought … so you went and said no word,

And the breeze was light and cool.

Later in the day, after the readings and lectures were completed, the artists talked together about why such creative enterprises were so important to Gypsy identity in the twenty-first century. For David Morley, the issue was one of straddling two worlds, the one inhabited by the settled community and the other by Gypsies and Travellers, and the perception that everyone is trapped by the restrictions attached to each. Artists are able to move between those worlds, he believed, adding, ‘I don’t feel trapped in two worlds, I feel free in two worlds. I want to free people. We have got to spring that trap, the language trap, the identity trap.’

Then Dan Allum considered how he related to Morley’s two worlds. ‘Within the travelling community, you are sort of something different if you are an artist … so I didn’t take negative comments from my community to heart when I started doing stuff. And if people from outside didn’t like what I was doing, I don’t take notice either. I answer to myself; I work in both worlds, but ultimately it’s my world,’ he said.

Damian Le Bas had been brought up in a different way. His parents, Delaine and Damian Le Bas Snr, were (and are) both respected visual artists, whose work was selected for the Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007, among many other international art shows. To them, art is crucial in deepening the sense of self-representation within the community – challenging how mainstream culture views and depicts Gypsies and Travellers. Delaine’s artwork was often made using brightly coloured textiles, which she sews, embroiders and paints herself, to create vibrant and appealing mixed-media installations that somehow subvert the horror of their subject – usually anti-Gypsyism, gender and nationhood. A recent work, Witch Hunt, for example, explores how Gypsies are treated in the UK. She described her goal thus: ‘I’m drawing people in by the prettiness of the work, only for them to see that nothing is quite as it seems.’ She freely identified herself as part of the Outsider Art community – those who produce from outside the establishment, such as people from minority groups, or those with mental health issues, who are often self-taught.

Her husband, an Irish Traveller with French Manouche Roma and Huguenot roots, started as an artist by sketching football crowds when he was a young child, then went on to study textiles at the Royal College of Art. His work has branched out to involve painting as well as drawing in oil pastel and pencil, and in recent years he has been re-envisioning maps and merging them with portraiture, visually questioning the boundaries of the new Europe, as the Roma nation spills exuberantly across borders. ‘The maps I am doing are subversive – the way I am not respecting these borders or, indeed, the inter-bickering within the community,’ he said.

The Le Bas family’s artwork is in many ways a protest against the lives they have had to live – but they are also committed to gaining ever more exposure and recognition, both for the pieces and for the Gypsy and Traveller experience. Delaine had been campaigning, along with other artists, for several months to support the building of a memorial to the Roma Holocaust in Berlin – a commission that was unveiled in December 2012.‌¹⁹ As Delaine said, ‘You can bring attention to things in a different way through art; it is a powerful medium.’ Curiously, though, the pair felt more accepted in the art world beyond Britain – perhaps because their outsider status was less of a threat in Europe and elsewhere. Regardless, their work served as a reminder to their community, that it is possible to do something new, outside of traditional trades – and yet remain true to your identity.

Identity was also in the mind of the Scottish singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl, whose ballad ‘The Travelling People’ has become almost an anthem. Without Gypsies and Travellers, MacColl argued, the traditional folk music of Britain and Ireland could have died out. These communities passed the old lyrics and music down, generation after generation, for centuries. In his day, MacColl had patiently collected field recordings of both songs and speech in Gypsy and Traveller encampments. Other singers, including June Tabor, soon followed his lead, as well as people from the communities themselves, such as Sheila Stewart, Thomas McCarthy and the Orchard family. Now, some twenty-five years after MacColl’s death, such cultural preservation work is being honoured and valued. The young musician Sam Lee was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2012 for his debut album, A Ground of its Own, featuring songs collected from Gypsies and Travellers. Though not a Gypsy or Traveller himself, Lee had trained for four years under the legendary ballad singer Stanley Robertson, a Scottish Traveller.

The resurgence of interest in so-called folk music is not a peculiarly English phenomenon. New bands with Roma roots have formed across Europe, including the Romanian Gypsy bands Taraf de Haidouks and Fanfare Ciocarlia and the Macedonian brass band Kocani Orkestar. The annual Guca Brass Band Festival in Serbia hosts many up-and-coming Roma bands who perform in the traditional style, but there are also new fusion groups combining Gypsy and Traveller sounds with rap, punk and jazz, including Jewish klezmer. Night clubs play records by the Shukar Collective, Besh o droM and Balkan Beat Box – including a special Nuit Tsigane (‘Gypsy Night’) in hot spots such as Le Divan du Monde in Paris. Often, at Appleby and Stow, the young Gypsy men driving cars rather than ponies are listening to this rap or punk-inflected music out of Eastern Europe.

Sam Lee, however, has been more focused on the traditional string music beloved by the older members of the travelling community – songs like ‘On Yonder Hill’ and ‘Goodbye, My Darling’ – that he had collected from all over England, Scotland and Ireland. Many of the songs touch on matters of love and separation – but also tell of a steely will to survive. As a young Jewish man from North London, he had been inspired to collect these songs in large part because of learning about the treatment of Gypsies and Travellers in Britain. ‘Many are the indigenous people of this country – although Gypsies are not originally from here, the Irish and Scotch Travellers are pre-Celtic, as old a community as you will ever get in Britain. But the treatment they have had was very [similar to] what happened to Native peoples in other places. For instance, in 1968, when sites were opened up here, that was the same year that the Canadian government forcibly settled the Canadian peoples, such as the Inuit … So there is that amazing time contiguity. There is also the nature of the lifestyle of the older Gypsies. Many were born in tents, and so many have lived outdoors, and because of that, they have this amazing affinity with the outside. To have that regularly enforced on such a deeply ancestral level, is quite a … nature–man relationship that many tribal peoples have.’‌²⁰

Lee had begun by patiently knocking on doors on sites where he didn’t know anybody. Mostly he had been welcomed, albeit with some caution, and as families got to know him, he experienced great warmth and hospitality. The fact that he was Jewish – ‘another wandering tribe’, as he termed it – seemed to help. During his apprenticeship under Robertson, his role was ‘keeper of songs’. Most folk singers raid the archives of field recordings gathered by other musicians, most notably those housed in Camden’s Cecil Sharp House, considered the home of English folk music. But Sam wanted to hear it from the Romani people themselves – they were not dead, just because their songs had been collected. He said that simple fact came as a surprise to some in the folk scene. ‘None of them believed there were any singers out there; they thought it was dead. They didn’t know about Gypsy culture; they thought that the precious oral tradition was dead, but actually it’s still there. I have recorded songs from fell-pack huntsman, farmers, not just Gypsies – music is alive everywhere. The folk music world just wants its safe world on Radio 2 … It likes soft, fluffy, comfortable stuff. I have brought loads of Gypsy families down to Cecil Sharp House and it’s terrifying for them. They sit down in the library and sing these ballads that they have no idea are hundreds of years old. And some people say, “Wow, it’s lovely,” but they have no idea what to do. It’s like bringing the dinosaur into the Natural History Museum and saying, “Hey, watch it dance,” and they say they only know about bones.’

He went on: ‘Mahler said, “Tradition is tending the flame, not worshipping the ashes,” and I think there is a huge amount of ash-worshipping in the folk world … Nobody is putting much effort into keeping the flame alight, and we mustn’t let it die.’

Damian Le Bas Jnr said that his culture will survive, despite the oppression that so many continue to suffer in the UK. ‘The living culture takes place far away from this analysis, when people are together at a horse fair, having a laugh and a joke. At some point you will get tired of the sad stuff. At home we have a laugh, we talk the Romani language, we reminisce, tell stories, jump on our horses and do nice things that are part of our culture – get some rabbits, cook mutton round a fire. Those nice things don’t come across.’ This sense of always being able to make it through, no matter the hardships, also rang true to Jake Bowers, the Romani journalist. ‘We are shape-shifters. We have an innate defiance in us. I am optimistic about our survival here – after all, things are far worse abroad,’ he said. Jake’s own life story exemplifies this adaptability. He has just trained as a blacksmith as well as working as a journalist.

The default position is still one of pride in their separate culture and identity. As Robbie McVeigh had noted in 1997: ‘Despite their marginalisation and subordination and the internalisation of anti-Traveller racist stereotypes, many Gypsies and Travellers still believe in their superiority. The use of the words “country people” and gaujos (which means bumpkin or clod-hopper) to describe all settled people, rural or urban, illustrates the nomad’s sense of his or her privilege.’‌²¹ Damian (senior) is aware of this too: ‘We are a culture that likes to be separate, that’s the elephant in the room – that Travellers don’t like to be like anybody else. They might complain about racism, but they would never want to be anybody else, we are proud of our life.’

Jim, Noah Burton’s brother, pulled on to the field in Meriden around the same time as Noah, and also lived and worked there until the families were forced to leave in March 2013. As his young family played around him in his spacious caravan, he considered his strong sense of ethnic identity, comparing it with that found among South Asian families: ‘We stick together as a community, just as they do, we have similar morals. I feel safe with my family around me. Girls and boys aren’t forced to leave home at eighteen. This is the way we have lived, we want to continue the way we live. It’s a modern world and we have to make some changes, but to take me and put me in a house? No. I am a wild bird in a hedge, I am a wild bird, don’t put me in a cage.’

Noah remained proud of his culture, though he thought some aspects of it were coming to a close. ‘It’s not that we think being a gorger is bad, but we just want to hang on to our culture. I know it’s a changing culture but it’s still pretty good, it’s not dying. Look, you’re talking to me in one of my friend’s trailers, we live in a close-knit social setting, we like to keep near to nature. Here in the UK it’s hard for us to up roots and go somewhere else for a few weeks. We have been put off the road really, but we have to adapt and do it differently.’

He paused for a moment, then added: ‘We’ll blend in, as we are forced off the road, but I was born to this, from my granny and granddad, and from generations back, from my living memory, we have travelled up and down, pulled on fairs, that’s who we are. I can’t say I’m somebody else, I can’t pretend. I can stay in one spot for the rest of my life but it won’t change who I am.’ He can see the advantages of that – at least in economic terms. Like his brother, he could see the resemblance in the South Asian immigrant experience in the UK. ‘You will see us forced off the road and we will be forced into jobs too. And then you’ll see us take off – we will earn and do really well, once we adjust to the nine and five, just like Asians. Whites are lazy buggers; they won’t work. Indians are very close to us, you know. Language is very similar, and the work ethic, and the family. Once we are more educated, our time will come.’

For Damian and Delaine le Bas, witnessing a rising generation of artists – such as the writer Louise Doughty and the artist Tracey Emin – discover their Gypsy and Traveller roots had proved poignant. ‘For these other people who were already professionals, our life hasn’t been their life, like going to weddings, funerals and so on,’ Damian said. ‘We live that life still and they are learning it. There will be a lot more of that to come. When we were in the wilderness, you would never have dreamed of this. But now there are “made” guys coming out as Gypsies, and it’s quite interesting: Are we still vagabond beings or are we acceptable now?’ But they look further afield as well.

Still, Damian insisted he was ‘transnational’ – not primarily British in his mindset. Delaine added: ‘The diversity is the thing to concentrate on, rather than the isolationism, that’s what is important, being European in a different way and that actually that has lots of possibilities for everyone … We now have an international perspective. This is an important time; things are changing quite quickly; the old way of life is disappearing in front of us. But it’s a case of thinking, “What are the possibilities with this, what has enabled us to survive?” And for me it’s our adaptability … We are not seeing this as an end, but as a beginning.’

She mentioned one of her projects, entitled Safe European Home, which explored the community’s feelings of rootlessness. The whole point of the artwork, she said, was to have people think, ‘This could be you. That person in that shanty town is not somebody else, it could be you. Greece being a prime example. Suddenly other people are in our position, and how does that feel, how do you deal with that?’ The current recession will drive new people into nomadism – and some will find it a positive choice, despite all the hazards and discrimination they will face, just as Damian and Delaine have.

That freedom of movement, the obvious adaptability and resilience of the Roma who had joined Martin Burrell’s growing congregation in Luton, coming from homelands as dispersed as Romania and Brazil, was the same spirit that motivated Noah Burton as he travelled from Scotland and Wales to his field in Meriden, then off to ‘either Sweden or Switzerland, not sure where really’, following the work. What lessons could Noah share about the outmoded notion of an Englishman’s home being his castle (defended, of course, tenaciously from having Gypsies as neighbours) in a time when owning property is no longer affordable for so many in the settled community? And what of the traditions that have been lost? As Sam Lee put it, ‘So much of what was good has been outmoded by capitalism. We have been sucked into comfort but we have lost a wealth of knowledge and ideas along the way.’

What is a home, and what should it be? In a bold essay published posthumously in the book The Anatomy of Restlessness, Bruce Chatwin wrote: ‘Evolution intended us to be travellers. Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been a sporadic condition in the history of man. Prolonged settlement has a vertical axis of some ten thousand years, a drop in the ocean of evolutionary times. We are travellers from birth.’‌²² We settled people, Chatwin concluded, take a ‘hard line towards nomads’, and had no right to the ‘rationalised hatred and self-assumed moral superiority’ that was used to restrict the Gypsy and Traveller way of life.‌²³

After all, the number of migrants – economic nomads of all nationalities – is growing all the time. According to Guy Standing, Professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, ‘the mobility of people around the world has soared with globalisation. One billion people cross national borders every year, and the number is rising’.‌²⁴ Some three per cent of the world’s population are estimated to be migrants from somewhere other than where they’re now living. The world is on the move – we are going to have to get used to this, to find some way of coping with it. We should welcome the richness it can bring to our shores, if managed well, rather than being afraid and mean-spirited. We can learn from Gypsies and Travellers how to be more fleet of foot and adaptable to the changes that the world brings to the very shape of our doorstep.

This is a small island, it is true, but it also remains a wealthy island in the face of the ongoing financial storm. Surely it is big enough to make room for all its citizens. Surely after fifty or a hundred or a thousand years on these shores, as the case may be, Irish and Scotch Travellers and English Gypsies have the same right to be here as any other citizen. But surely we can also afford to be generous to the newly arrived Roma, as well, who are fleeing poverty, persecution and institutionalised discrimination, and who have come here seeking a better life, one for which they are all too keen to work. They have as much right to be here as any other citizens of the EU. It is time to stop living apart in this informal and invisible apartheid and try to start living together, more comfortably, side by side. These nomads, when all is said and done, are our neighbours – and we have much to learn from them. As Delaine Le Bas says, we need to create structures that allow all of us to be part of the world, in an equal but interesting way. ‘There is a space is for everyone … Not just for the chosen few.’

On 1 December 2012, a grey winter’s day, I drove back to Essex, to the parish of Wickford, near Dale Farm. The Sheridan family had invited me to join them at their local church, Our Lady of Good Counsel, in Wickford, to celebrate the confirmation of Nora’s youngest son, Jimmy Tom, and Michelle’s middle son, Patrick. Twenty-seven other children from Dale Farm would be celebrating their first communion or their confirmation with them that day.

I’d lost count of the times I’d driven up to Dale Farm with a cold feeling clutching at my stomach. I knew I was going to see families I had come to know so well and to like, experiencing yet more troubles. But this time was different. This time I was driving to see the Dale Farm families and to be part of a happier moment in their lives.

I got there just before eleven, and was greeted by Candy, who had stayed overnight to sort out drivers’ licences for several of the men. Soon the stretch limos started to arrive – cream, pink, gleaming black. A procession of beautifully coiffured girls, their hair curled and studded with stars and glitter, fell out of them. Their white dresses, some even made by Thelma Madine, the so-called ‘Gypsy dressmaker’ up in Liverpool, were pure meringue. The boys were also turned out smartly, in blue shirts and beige suits. The proud mothers were resplendent, with glitter on their hair, tiny fascinators, and diamanté shoes. Nora and Michelle both had their hair up, and in blue and purple lace respectively, looked absolutely stunning. The men had all got back from working away in order to attend the celebration, and were got up in natty suits.

I recalled how many of them had no access to running water or electricity, and were struggling to make ends meet on the roadside. They had saved up for months so that their children would have a beautiful confirmation that they would remember for the rest of their lives. There was a lot of love in that church – and a lot of photographers, too, so many that the new priest, Father John, forced the snappers out into the hallway because he was finding it so disruptive. ‘This is the House of God. Respect it,’ he said as he ushered them out.

During the service, Jimmy Tom and one of Michelle’s boys, John, read out prayers in their clear, bright trebles. The liturgy was read and then the priest said a few words about the lesson of the five loaves and two fishes that miraculously divided so that a congregation of five thousand could eat. The feeding of the multitude: a fitting act of faith, given the wing and prayer with which the residents at Dale Farm were somehow still surviving in spite of everything. Then the children were asked to come up to take their first communion, the girls struggling to contain their enormous skirts. The younger children were next handed their confirmation certificates. At this point, Father John allowed the photographers to come to the altar. There was a bit of a scrum, but something very real and vibrant could be felt in the church, as this community came all together, perhaps for the last time. Sean Risdale from the Irish Traveller Movement was sitting next to Candy and me. Quietly, he said, ‘They are undefeated, somehow, despite everything.’ This was true. Looking on and holding back tears, Candy reflected: ‘There they all were, helping each other with each other’s children, as they had done for so long, all dressed up for that special moment for children brought up in the Catholic faith. I knew they’d come from the roadside and they’d go back there that night. But they had this glimmer, this moment’s glory and they were enjoying it.’ And they were.

Later, as I stood with Nora and Michelle watching the family get themselves ready for yet more photographs for the album, Nora said proudly, ‘We’re still here. Together.’ And then she put her arms around her boys, as the cameras clicked away.

‌

‌Acknowledgements

I couldn’t have written this book without the help of so many Romani Gypsies, Scotch and Irish Travellers, as well as Roma newly arrived in the UK. I thank them all for their help. I’m also very grateful to the many academics, politicians, police officers, artists and campaigners (on both sides of the fence) who have given up their time so generously, for a number of years, to talk with me.

In particular, I‘d like to thank those who took the time to discuss, read or comment on sections of the book: Thomas Acton, Alice Bloch, Jake Bowers, Stuart Carruthers, Dan Allum, Damian Le Bas (Junior and Senior), Delaine Le Bas, Margaret Greenfields, Tom Green, Ian Hancock, Sebastian Hesse, Johnny Howorth, Zoe James, Donald Kenrick, Ann Kobayashi, Robbie McVeigh, John Pring, Grattan Puxon, Sean Risdale, Candy Sheridan, Jess Smith and Tony Thomson.

I’d like to thank the following families for their help and patience: the Burton family, the McCarthy family, the Sheridan family and the Townsley family, as well as the Gammells, the Egans, the Flynns, the Welch family, the Le Bas family and the Smith family. I’d also like to thank the many members of the Light and Life church who have been kind enough to talk to me, particularly Walter Smith, Davey Jones, Jackie Boyd and others, as well as Martin Burrell and the Roma families in his Luton congregation, and the other church people from different Christian traditions, in particular Father Dan Mason and the Reverend Robert Norwood. Thanks also to Vera Norwood for introducing me to the people of Stow Fair and for her generosity, time and trouble.

Particular thanks go to the family of Johnny Delaney, who were generous to give up their time to talk about Johnny’s life and his death, at just fifteen.

Thank you to so many organisations who have helped me with background research, contacts and advice: the Gypsy Council; the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain; Leeds GATE; Families, Friends and Travellers; Liverpool Services for Gypsy and Traveller Families; Romani Arts; the University of Huddersfield and the Traveller Solidarity Network. I’d like to pay tribute to the Irish Traveller organisations in the Republic, whose work I have drawn on in this book, most notably Pavee Point, Donegal Irish Traveller Project and Nexus.

I would like to express thanks to my wonderful agent, Andrew Lownie, who has supported my career as a writer for many years. I’d also like to thank all at my publisher, Oneworld, in particular my editor, Robin, and the marketing and publicity team of Henry Jeffreys, Lamorna Elmer and Alan Bridger. Thank you to the Society of Authors, for providing me with a much-needed grant. Thanks also to my editors at The Economist, Merril Stevenson and Joel Budd, who have allowed me to write so much on the communities over the past six years, my friend and editor Tim Minogue (and others) at Private Eye, Mark Townsend at the Guardian/Observer, as well as Nick Pyke at the Mail on Sunday and Laura Davis at the Independent.

A special thanks to Sebastian Hesse and Tom Green, whose photographs appear in this book and enrich it on every level. Thanks also to the family of Dennis Sheridan, who allowed us to put his picture on the cover of No Place to Call Home — and thanks to Mary Turner, who photographed him.

The deepest thanks, as always, go to my family – Mary, Michael, Tom, Josie, Raffy, Paul, Margaret, John, Tiffany, Chris, Jane and children – and friends. I am always in your debt.

‌

‌Further Reading

Thomas Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974)

Thomas Acton (ed.), Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997)

Thomas Acton (ed.), Scholarship and the Gypsy Struggle (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2000)

Zygmunt Baumann, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989)

Howard Becker, The Outsiders (New York: The Free Press, 1963)

George Borrow, Lavengro (London: Nelson, 1851)

Martin Burrell, The Pure in Heart, An Epistle from the Romanies (Milton Keynes: Author House, 2009)

Bruce Chatwin, Anatomy of Restlessness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996)

John Clare, By Himself (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002)

Colin Clark and Margaret Greenfields, Here to Stay: The Gypsies and Travellers of Britain (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006)

William Cobbett, Rural Rides (London: Penguin, 2001)

Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Oxford: Routledge Classics, 2011)

Robert Dawson, Empty Lands (Alfreton: Robert Dawson, 2007)

Robert Dawson, Times Gone (Alfreton: Robert Dawson, 2007)

Eammon Dillon, The Outsiders (Dublin: Merlin Publishing, 2006)

Fiona Earle, Alan Dearling, et al., A Time to Travel: An Introduction to Britain’s Newer Travellers (Lyme Regis: Enabler Publications, 1994)

Isobel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing, The Gypsies and Their Journey (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995)

Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford: Blackwells, 1992)

Roxy Freeman, Little Gypsy (London: Simon and Schuster, 2011)

George Gmelch, The Irish Tinkers: The Urbanization of an Itinerant People (Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1985)

Erving Goffman, Stigma (London: Pelican, 1968)

Ian Hancock, The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Karoma Publishers, 1987)

Ian Hancock, We are the Romani People (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshie Press, 2002)

D. Hawes and B. Perez, The Gypsy and the State: The Ethnic Cleansing of British Society (Bristol: Policy Press, 1996)

Jane Helleiner, Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)

Kevin Hetherington, New Age Travellers: Vanloads of Uproarious Humanity (London: Cassell, 2000)

Nan Joyce (and Anna Farmar), My Life on the Road (Dublin: A. and A. Farmar, 2000)

Donald Kenrick and Colin Clark, Moving On: The Gypsies and Travellers of Britain (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1999)

Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies (London: Heinemann, 1972)

Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2009)

Charles Leland, The English Gypsies and their Language (London, 1873)

J.P. Liegeois and N. Gheorghe, Roma/Gypsies: A European Minority (London: Minority Rights Group, 1995)

Richard Lowe and William Shaw Travellers, Voices of the New Age Nomads, (London: Fourth Estate, 1993)

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012)

George McKay, Senseless Acts of Beauty (London: Verso, 1996)

Jim MacLaughlin, Travellers and Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995)

Alen MacWeeney, Irish Travellers: Tinkers No More, (Henniker, NH: New England College Press, 2007)

David Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth Century Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)

Henry Mayhew, Mayhew’s London (London: Hamyln, 1969)

David Morley, The Invisible Kings, (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007)

Rachel Morris and Luke Clements (eds), Gaining Ground: Law Reform for Gypsies and Travellers (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1999)

Rachel Morris and Luke Clements, At What Cost? The Economics of Gypsy and Traveller Encampments (Bristol: Policy Press, 2002)

Judith Oakley, The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)

Colm Power, Room to Roam: England’s Irish Travellers (London: Action Group for Irish Youth, 2004)

Grattan Puxon, Freeborn Traveller (Dublin: Small World Media, 2007)

Farnham Rehfisch (ed.), Gypsies, Tinkers and other Travellers (London: Academic Press, 1975)

Dominic Reeve, Smoke in the Lanes (London: Constable and Co, 1958)

Sandy Reid, Never to Return (Edinburgh: Black and White Publishing, 2008)

Ramona Constantin and Ciara Leeming, Elvira and Me (The Big Issue in the North Trust, 2012)

Jeremy Sandford, Gypsies (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973)

David Sibley, Outsiders in an Urban Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981)

Charles Smith, Not all Wagons and Lanes (Essex: Essex County Council, 1995)

Jess Smith, Jessie’s Journey (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2002)

Jess Smith, Sookin’ Berries (Edinburgh: Birlinn Limited, 2009)

Maggie Smith-Bendell, Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two (London: Abacus, 2010)

Southwark Women’s Traveller Group, Moving Stories, Traveller Women Write (London: Traveller Education Team, Southwark, 1992)

Guy Standing, The Precariat (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011)

C.J. Stone, Fierce Dancing (London: Faber & Faber, 1996)

C.J. Stone, The Last of the Hippies (London: Faber & Faber, 1999)

Mikey Walsh, Gypsy Boy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2009)

Andy Worthington, The Battle of the Beanfield, (Lyme Regis: Enabler, 2005)

‌

‌Notes

Introduction

1‌ The research has been conducted by Turi King and Matt Sears in the Jobling Lab at the University of Leicester. The results are expected to be released in 2013. www2.le.ac.uk/projects/impact-of-diasporas/the-Romani-in-britain-projecth

1. ‘Chance of a Lifetime’

1‌ Author interviews with Mary Ann McCarthy, 30 March 2006, 6 August 2010, 28 August 2011, 30 August 2011, April 2013, and phone interviews in 2006, 2007, summer 2009, 29 July 2010, 2012

2‌ Author interviews with Grattan Puxon, 30 March 2006, 19 September 2011, 18 October 2011, 6 and 11 January 2012, 6 February 2012, 19 June 2012, 19 October 2012, and subsequent email correspondence

3‌ Author interviews with Len Gridley, 19 September 2011, 24 May 2012, and subsequent phone interviews and local meetings, including church rooms, Wickford, 10 January 2013

4‌ Austin, Jon, ‘How did Dale Farm get so big?’, 9 December 2006, www.echo-news.co.uk/echofeatures/1065414.How_did_Dale_Farm_get_so_big_/

5‌ Austin, Jon, ‘Trustee quits from Gypsy Council following Echo exposé’, 21 April 2009, www.echo-news.co.uk/news/local_news/basildon/4305149.Trustee_quits_from_Gypsy_Council_following_Echo_expose/

6‌ Advocacy Net, 2005, ‘Report: Evictions report of Roma and Irish Travellers’, www.advocacynet.org/resource/466

7‌ Author interview with John Prescott, 17 December 2012. Subsequent quotes in this book are also from this interview.

8‌ BBC News, ‘Timeline: Dale Farm Evictions’, 19 October 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-15367736

9‌ Author interviews with Sean Risdale, 19 September 2011, 19 October 2011, 26 September 2012, 13 October 2012, 30 November 2012, and subsequent email correspondence

10‌ Quarmby, Katharine, ‘The siege of Dale Farm’, The Economist, 6 April 2006, www.economist.com/node/6775075

11‌ Hansard, House of Commons Adjournment Debate, 14 July 2005, www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/vo050714/debtext/50714-31.htm

12‌ Author interview with Bryan LeCoche, Constant and Company, 4 April 2006; this interview was conducted for the article ‘The siege of Dale Farm’, The Economist, 6 April 2006

2. Neighbours and Nomads

1‌ Author interviews in 2006 and later, as well as other recollections recorded by the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain for a DVD, Irish Travellers Talk about Their History (2009)

2‌ Hancock, Ian, The Pariah Syndrome (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Karoma Publishers, 1986), www.reocities.com/~patrin/pariah-ch11.htm

3‌ Ibid.

4‌ Ibid., p. 113

5‌ Fraser, Angus, The Gypsies (Oxford: Blackwells, 2007), p. 112

6‌ Vesey-FitzGerald, Brian Seymour, Gypsies of Britain (Newton Abbot: David & Charles Ltd, 1973)

7‌ Weber, Leanne, and Benjamin Bowling, ‘Valiant beggars and global vagabonds’, Theoretical Criminology 12, 2008, p. 355; Beier, A.L., Masterless Men (London: Routledge, 1985)

8‌ Hancock, Ian, We are the Romani People (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002), p. 21

9‌ Ibid., p. 26

10‌ McVeigh, Robbie, ‘Therorising sedentarism: the roots of anti-nomadism’ in Thomas Acton (ed.), Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1985), p. 19

11‌ Fraser, The Gypsies, pp. 113–14

12‌ Beier, Masterless Men, p. 64

13‌ Ibid.

14‌ Cohen, Stanley, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Oxford: Routledge Classics, 2011)

15‌ Fraser, The Gypsies, pp. 123–6

16‌ Ibid., p. 130

17‌ Roberts, Samuel, The Gypsies: Their Origin, Continuance, and Destination (London: Longman, 1836), cited in Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 134.

18‌ Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 140.

19‌ Mayall, David, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth Century Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 42

20‌ Kenrick, Donald and Grattan Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2009), p. 9

21‌ Cobbett, William, Rural Rides (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 44–5

22‌ Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, p. 151

23‌ Ibid., p. 153

24‌ Ibid., p. 20

25‌ Ibid., pp. 153–4

26‌ Ibid., p. 156

27‌ Weber and Bowling, ‘Valiant beggars and global vagabonds’, p. 355

28‌ McMullan, John L., ‘The arresting eye: Discourse, surveillance and disciplinary administration in early English police thinking’, Social and Legal Studies 7, 1998, p. 97

29‌ Ibid.

30‌ Colquhoun, Patrick, quoted in McMullan, ‘The arresting eye’, p. 97

31‌ Chadwick, Edwin, 1839, quoted in McMullan, ibid.

32‌ Turner, Royce, ‘Gypsies and parliamentary language: An analysis’, Romani Studies, Series 5, 12:1, 2002, p. 5

33‌ Grellman, Heinrich M., Dissertation on the Gipseys: Representing their Manner of Life, Family Economy. With an Historical Enquiry Concerning their Origin and First Appearance in Europe, trans. Matthew Raper (London: Ballantine, 1807)

34‌ Hancock, Ian, ‘George Borrow’s Romani’, in Pater Bakker (ed.), The Typology and Dialectology of Romani (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998), pp. 65–89

35‌ Ibid.

36‌ Ibid.

37‌ Behlmer, George K., ‘The Gypsy problem in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies 28:2, 1985, p. 243

38‌ Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and London Poor (London: Griffin, Bohn, and Company, 1861, vol. 1)

39‌ Himmelfarb, Gertrude, ‘The culture of poverty’, in H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian City: Images and Reality (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973, vol. 2), p. 715

40‌ Samuel, Raphael, ‘Comers and goers’, in Dyos and Wolff, The Victorian City, p. 153

41‌ Wilkinson, T.W., quoted in ibid., p. 130

42‌ Hancock, Ian, ‘Marko’, in Special Issue: Gypsies, Index on Censorship, 27:4, 1998, www.radoc.net/radoc.php?doc=art_a_intro_marko&lang=en

43‌ Raphael Samuel, ‘Comers and goers’, in Dyos and Wolff, The Victorian City, p. 153

44‌ Mayhew, Henry, quoted in ibid., p. 138

45‌ Ibid.

46‌ MacLaughlin, Jim, 1999, ‘Nation-building, social closure and anti-Traveller racism in Ireland’, Sociology 33, 1999, p. 129

47‌ Mayall, David, English Gypsies and State Policies (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1985), p. 34

48‌ Smith, George, Gipsy Life (London: Haughton and Co, 1880, vol. 4), www.gutenberg.org/files/28548/28548-h/28548-h.htm

49‌ Acton, Thomas, Gypsy Politics and Social Change (London and Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 120

50‌ Kenrick, Donald, and Colin Clark, Moving On: The Gypsies and Travellers of Britain (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1995), p. 52

51‌ Dawson, Robert, Empty Lands (Alfreton: Robert Dawson, 2007), p. 17

52‌ Kenrick and Clark, Moving On, pp. 53–4

53‌ ‘Report from the Departmental Committee On Habitual Offenders, Vagrants, Beggars, Inebriates, And Juvenile Delinquents’ (Edinburgh: Neill and Co, 1895), summary at gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/haynin/haynin0205.htm

54‌ Dawson, Empty Lands, p. 93

55‌ Ibid., p. 95

56‌ Ibid., pp. 103–4

57‌ Ibid., pp. 126–7

58‌ Reid, Sandy, Never to Return (Edinburgh: Black and White Publishing, 2008)

59‌ Burton, Basil, et al., 2008, ‘Remembering our families’, www.newforestRomanigypsytraveller.co.uk/stories11.html

60‌ Ivey, Joe, ‘Our New Forest: A living register of languages and traditions’, www.newforestcentre.org.uk/uploads/publications/65.pdf

61‌ Smith, Charles, Not all Wagons and Lanes (Essex: Essex County Council, 1995), p. 21

62‌ Although I use the term ‘Roma’ throughout the discussion of European nomadic peoples, the Roma are merely the largest nomadic group on the continent. The second largest group, the Sinti, were also persecuted during the Holocaust, and the estimated numbers of those who were deported or killed, or who died, include both Roma and Sinti.

63‌ Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies Under the Swastika, p. 153

64‌ The deportation involved all Roma and some Sinti peoples.

65‌ ‘Transcript of the official shorthand notes of the trial of Joseph Kramer and 44 others’, www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial_Day_013.html; ‘Strangers in a strange land’, www.humanityinaction.org/knowledgebase/278-strangers-in-a-strange-land-roma-and-sinti-in-the-netherlands-the-world-war-two-experience-and-after; Lifton, Robert Jay, ‘What made this man?’, New York Times, 21 July 1985, www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/100/mengle.htm,

66‌ Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, pp. 146–8

67‌ Ibid., p. 156

68‌ Hancock, We are the Romani People, p. 48

69‌ Kenrick, Donald, and Gillian Taylor, Historical Dictionary of the Gypsies (Romanies) (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998), p. 4

70‌ grthm.natt.org.uk/timeline.php

71‌ Smith, Charles, Not all Wagons and Lanes, p. 22

3. Never Again

1‌ Among their many collaborations, Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon wrote the first, much-acclaimed history of the extermination of European Roma. Thomas Acton, now Emeritus Professor of Romani Studies at the University of Greenwich, has charted the social, artistic and political changes in the Romani communities of Britain and the rise of Roma activism in Europe. He has spent the past few decades publishing most of the seminal books on the subject published in the UK.

2‌ Acton, Thomas, Gypsy Politics and Social Change, (London and Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 206

3‌ MacLaughlin, Jim, ‘Nation-building, social closure and anti-Traveller racism in Ireland’, Sociology 33, 1999, p. 129

4‌ Ni Shuinear, Sinead, ‘Why do Gaujos hate Gypsies so much, anyway? A case study’ in Acton, Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, p. 39

5‌ Helleiner, Jane, Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 65

6‌ Author interviews with Nora Sheridan, 30 March 2006; 6 August 2010; 2 August 2011; 19 September 2011; 19 October 2011; 11 November 2011; 6 and 11 January 2012; 23 February 2012; 2, 12 and 24 May 2012; 20 June 2012; 19 August 2012; 6 and 28 September 2012; 15 October 2012; 1 and 10 December 2012; 10 January 2013; 28 February 2013

7‌ Author interviews with Candy Sheridan, 12 May 2011, 2 August 2011, 30 August 2011, 19 September 2011, 12 October 2011, 19 October 2011, 28 December 2011, 9 May 2012, 15 and 30 October 2012, 1 December 2012, and subsequent phone interviews and email correspondence

8‌ First Government Commission on Itinerancy (CI), 1963, p. 111

9‌ Helleiner, Irish Travellers, p. 61

10‌ Ibid., p. 71

11‌ First Government Commission on Itinerancy, p. 37

12‌ Ni Shuinear, Sinead, ‘Why do Gaujos hate Gypsies so much, anyway?’, pp. 40–1

13‌ MacLaughlin, ‘Nation-building’, p. 129

14‌ Ibid.

15‌ Ibid.

16‌ Gmelch, George, The Irish Tinkers (Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1985), p. 45

17‌ Ibid., p. 48

18‌ Puxon, Grattan, Freeborn Traveller (Dublin: Small World Media, 2007), p. 19

19‌ Acton, Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, p. 156

20‌ Burke, Mary, Travellers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 206

21‌ www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR3mNrQ4lr0&feature=plcp

22‌ MacWeeney, Alen, Irish Travellers: Tinkers No More (Henniker, NH: New England College Press, 2007), p. 3

23‌ Joyce, Nan, and Anna Farmar, My Life on the Road: A Traveller’s Autobiography (Dublin: A. and A. Farmar, 2000), p. 68

24‌ Grattan Puxon discussed these events with me in an interview in January 2012 while he was supervising a digger at Dale Farm.

25‌ Bhreathnach, Aoife, 2006, quoted in McVeigh, Robbie, Travellers and the Troubles (Donegal: Donegal Travellers Project, 2006), p. 30

26‌ Acton, Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, p. 156

27‌ Joyce, My Life on the Road, pp. 72–4

28‌ McVeigh, Travellers and the Troubles, p. 4

29‌ Ibid., p. 10

30‌ Ibid., p. 15

31‌ Morris, quoted in McVeigh, ibid.

32‌ McVeigh, ibid.

33‌ McVeigh, Robbie, ‘Irish Travellers and the logic of genocide’, in Michel Peillon and Tony Fahy (eds), Encounters with Modern Ireland (Dublin: IPA, 1997)

34‌ BBC News, ‘Home targeted in petrol bombing’, 21 February 2005, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4283005.stm

35‌ McVeigh, Travellers and the Troubles, p. 33

36‌ Ibid., p. 34

37‌ Ibid.

38‌ Burke, Travellers, pp. 206–7

39‌ Quoted in Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change, p. 163

40‌ Ibid., p. 173

41‌ ‘Gauje’ is the term commonly used by Gypsies to refer to non-Gypsies. There is no widely accepted spelling of the word and it sometimes appears as ‘gorger’ (which closest reflects its pronunciation), ‘gorgio’, ‘gorgia’, ‘gorgie’, ‘gaje’ or ‘gaujo’.

42‌ Quoted in Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change, p. 207

43‌ ‘Migration and settlement in late 20th-century Birmingham’, www.connectinghistories.org.uk/Learning%20Packages/Migration/migration_settlement_20c_lp_04a.asp

44‌ Ibid.

45‌ Guardian, 3 July 1963

46‌ Birmingham Mail, 9 July 1963

47‌ Quoted in Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change, p. 175

48‌ Author interviews with Joseph Jones, 10 May 2012, 25 October 2012, 10 January 2013

49‌ ‘Tinkers’, ATV Today, 16 September 1968, www.macearchive.org/Archive/Title/atv-today-16091968-tinkers/MediaEntry/12.html

50‌ MacColl, Ewan, and Peggy Seeger, ‘Terror Time’, 1966, lyrics at mysongbook.de/msb/songs/t/terrorti.html. All rights reserved.

51‌ Joyce and Farmar, My Life on the Road, p. 74

52‌ Okely, Judith, The Traveller Gypsies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 19

53‌ Ibid.

54‌ Author interview with Eric Lubbock, 30 March 2012, and subsequently on a visit to Dale Farm. He became 4th Baron Avebury in 1971, so he is referred to as Lord Avebury.

55‌ Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change, p. 212

56‌ West Midlands Gypsy Liaison Group Report, 1973, www.connectinghistories.org.uk/Learning%20Packages/Migration/migration_settlement_20c_lp_04a.asp [MS 4000/1/8/19 reports file]

57‌ ‘Vox pop on Irish Travellers in Walsall’, ATV Today, 23 September 1970, www.macearchive.org/Archive/Title/atv-today-23091970-vox-pop-on-tinkers-in-walsall/MediaEntry/15071.html

58‌ Kenrick, Donald, and Sian Bakewell, On the Verge (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1990), p. 26

59‌ Crowley, Una, ‘Outside in Dublin: Travellers, society and the state 1963–1985’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 35, 2009, pp. 17–24, eprints.nuim.ie/3025/1/UC_Backup_of_JCH_final.pdf

60‌ Joyce, My Life on the Road, p. 101

61‌ Ibid., p. 26

62‌ Ibid., p. 115

63‌ Helleiner, Jane, ‘Traveller settlement in Galway city: Politics, class, and culture’, in Chris Curtin, Hastings Donnan and Tom Wilson (eds), Irish Urban Cultures (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1993), p. 191

64‌ Garner, Steve, Racism in the Irish Experience (London: Pluto, 2004), p. 60

65‌ Cripps, John, Accommodation for Gypsies: A Report on the Working of the Caravan Sites Act 1968 (Cardiff: Department of Environment Welsh Office, 1977)

66‌ Smith-Bendell, Maggie, Rabbit Stew or a Penny or Two (London: Abacus, 2010), pp. 256–7

67‌ Hansard, Parliamentary debate about Gypsies, 29 June 1977, hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1977/jun/29/gipsies

68‌ The papers were only released to the public in 2004. Casciani, Dominic, ‘“Prejudice” defeated Gypsy reform’, BBC News, 14 May 2004, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3704167.stm

69‌ Marilyn Fletcher responded to emailed questions on 30 June 2012

4. New Travellers and the Eye of Sauron

1‌ Dearling, Alan, ‘Not only but also … some ramblings about the English festivals scene’, 2001, www.enablerpublications.co.uk/pdfs/notonly1.pdf

2‌ Clark, Colin, ‘New Age Travellers: Identity, sedentarism and social security’, in Acton, Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, pp. 125–41

3‌ Mackay, George, Senseless Acts of Beauty (London: Verso, 1996), p. 11

4‌ Ibid., pp. 46–7

5‌ Ibid., pp. 36–9

6‌ Davis, J., R. Grant and A. Locke, Out of Site, Out of Mind: New Age Travellers and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill (London: The Children’s Society, 1994), p. 6

7‌ Martin, Greg, ‘New Age Travellers: Uproarious or uprooted?’, Sociology 36:3, 2002, pp. 723–35

8‌ Author interview with Tony Thomson, 12 March 2012

9‌ Freeman, Roxy, Little Gypsy (London: Simon and Schuster, 2011), p. 36

10‌ Mackay, Senseless Acts of Beauty, p. 33

11‌ Reilly, Gill, ‘“The enemy within”: Thatcher’s secret war on CND revealed’, Daily Mail, 7 January 2012, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2083489/Margaret-Thatchers-secret-war-CND-revealed.html

12‌ Clark, ‘New Age Travellers: Identity, sedentarism and social security’, in Acton, Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, p. 129

13‌ Lowe, Richard, and William Shaw, Travellers: Voices of the New Age Nomads (London: Fourth Estate, 1993), p. 68

14‌ Ibid., pp. 91–2

15‌ Freeman, Little Gypsy, p. 74

16‌ Clark, ‘New Age Travellers’, in Acton, Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, p. 129

17‌ Hansard, ‘Hippy convoy (New Forest) debate’, 3 June 1986, hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1986/jun/03/hippy-convoy-new-forest

18‌ Clark, Colin, and Donald Kenrick, Moving On: The Gypsies and Travellers of Britain (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1995), p. 105

19‌ Turner, ‘Gypsies and Parliamentary language’, pp. 1–34

20‌ Hansard, ‘Itinerants Debate’, 15 June 1989, hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/jun/15/itinerants

21‌ Ibid.

22‌ Conservative Party press release, 1992, quoted in Luke Clements and Sue Campbell, ‘The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act and its implications for Travellers’ in Acton, Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, p. 61

23‌ McVeigh, ‘Therorising sedentarism’ in Acton, Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, p. 6

24‌ Ibid., p. 7. Later, of course, Central and Eastern Roma were in newspaper sightlines too. Shortly before the accession of Eastern Europe countries into the EU in 2004, the Daily Express warned off the Roma in a series of front-page stories featuring headlines such as ‘Gypsies: You can’t come in’.

25‌ Hansard, Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill, Second Reading, 11 January 1994, hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1994/jan/11/criminal-justice-and-public-order-bill

26‌ Clements and Campbell, ‘The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act’ in Acton, Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, p. 61

27‌ Mackay, Senseless Acts of Beauty, p. 49

28‌ Howard, Michael, 1994, quoted in Mackay, ibid., p. 161

29‌ Hansard, ‘Gipsies, Essex debate’, 19 June 1995, hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1995/jun/19/gipsies-essex

5. Things Can Only Get Better

1‌ Andrew Mackay from a debate on ‘Law of Trespass’, Hansard, 15 January 2002.

2‌ Power, Colm, Room to Roam: England’s Irish Travellers (London: Action Group for Irish Youth, 2004)

3‌ BBC News, ‘Boys guilty of killing “Gypsy”’, 28 November 2003, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/3246518.stm

4‌ Townsend, Mark, ‘A burning issue in the village’, Observer, 16 November 2003, www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/nov/16/raceintheuk.uknews

5‌ Ellinor, Rebecca, ‘Gypsy caravan burnt in village bonfire’, Guardian, 31 October 2003, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/oct/31/race.world1

6‌ Payne, Stewart, ‘Outrage as “gipsies” are set alight at village party’, Telegraph, 20 November 2003, www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3321895/Outrage-as-gipsies-are-set-alight-at-village-party.html

7‌ Hansard, ‘Travellers’ sites’, 19 November 2003, www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo031119/halltext/31119h04.htm

8‌ Bowers, Jake, and A. Benjamin, ‘Pitch battles’, Guardian, 28 July 2004, www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/jul/28/politics.localgovernment

9‌ www.planningportal.gov.uk/general/news/stories/2005/mar/2005-03-Week-4/gypsyplan

10‌ Author interview with Eric Pickles, 2010, conducted for The Economist. Since then, I have requested further interviews with Mr Pickles on several occasions, in both 2012 and 2013, but he has not been available.

11‌ ‘This is dangerous, vile nonsense’, Guardian, 23 March 2005, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/mar/23/race.budget2005

12‌ Hinsliff, Gaby, ‘Howard: I’ll clear illegal Gypsy sites’, Guardian, 20 March 2005, www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/mar/20/conservatives.localgovernment; Happold, Tom, ‘Tories back Sun’s Gypsy campaign’, Guardian, 18 March 2005, www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/mar/18/media.media?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

13‌ Barkham, Patrick, ‘Gypsy groups report the Sun to the police’, Guardian, 10 March 2005, www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/mar/10/pressandpublishing.localgovernment,

14‌ European Court of Human Rights, Connors v The United Kingdom, Application no. 66746/01, 27 May 2004

15‌ Smith-Bendell, Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two, p. 262

16‌ Author interview with Steve McAllister, 15 March 2012

17‌ ‘Pursued by prejudice’, Scotsman, 19 August 2007, www.scotsman.com/news/pursued-by-prejudice-1-1421903

18‌ Author interview with Alan McDonald, 15 March 2012

19‌ Author interview with Marcela Adamova, 3 February 2013

20‌ www.equalityhumanrights.com/key-projects/good-relations/gypsies-and-travellers-simple-solutions-for-living-together/

21‌ Author interview with Tony Ball, 11 April 2012, and numerous phone interviews including 22 March 2013, and at court 9 August 2010, 13 October 2011, 9 January 2012

22‌ Austin, Jon, ‘New bid for Pitsea Traveller site’, Echo, 4 October 2007, www.echo-news.co.uk/news/1734033.print/

23‌ Hansard, ‘Gypsies and Travellers Debate’, 22 May 2008, www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080522/halltext/80522h0005.htm

24‌ Author interview by phone with Julie Morgan MP, 9 November 2012

25‌ Austin, Jon, ‘BNP won’t be able to remove Travellers’, Echo, 1 September 2008, www.echo-news.co.uk/news/local_news/3632271.BNP_wont_be_able_to_remove_travellers/

26‌ I requested an interview with John Baron and was invited to the Commons to interview him on 19 November 2012. By the time I arrived at Westminster the interview had been cancelled due to urgent business. However, he did provide me with a detailed statement to several questions instead of a face-to-face interview.

27‌ Brown, Martyn, ‘7,500 sites for Gypsies on the way’, Daily Express, 21 November 2008, www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/72245

6. Payback

1‌ ‘Guidance on Managing Anti-social Behaviour related to Gypsies and Travellers’, Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), March 2010, www.communities.gov.uk/publications/housing/anti-socialbehaviourguide

2‌ Quarmby, Katharine, ‘Travellers’ Travails’, The Economist, 12 August 2010, www.economist.com/node/16793224

3‌ ‘Full text: Conservative-Lib Dem deal’, BBC News, 12 May 2010, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8677933.stm

4‌ Grayson, John, ‘Playing the Gypsy race card’, Institute of Race Relations, 4 June 2010, www.irr.org.uk/news/playing-the-gypsy-race-card/

5‌ ‘Eric Pickles calls on councils to crackdown on unauthorised bank holiday building’, press release, Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), 28 May 2010, www.communities.gov.uk/newsstories/planningandbuilding/1602649

6‌ Buchanan, Kirsty, and Eugene Anderson, ‘Eric Pickles helps end rural blight of gypsy sites’, Daily Express, 29 August 2010, www.express.co.uk/posts/view/196236/Eric-Pickles-helps-end-rural-blight-of-gypsy-sites

7‌ Confidential author interview, unnamed EHRC official, 2 September 2011

8‌ Power, Colm, Room to Roam: England’s Irish Travellers (London: Lottery Community Fund, 2004), p. 19

9‌ Quarmby, ‘Travellers’ travails’

10‌ ‘Tough guy Sarko’, The Economist, 26 August 2010, www.economist.com/node/16889547

11‌ ‘Don’t mention the war’, The Economist, 16 September 2010, www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2010/09/row_over_roma

12‌ Author interview with Father Dan Mason, 4 December 2012.

13‌ ‘Bailiffs move in for Basildon traveller site evictions’, BBC News, 7 September 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-11211938

14‌ Author interviews with Jonathan Oppenheim, 20 May 2012, 18 October 2011, and email correspondence

15‌ Author interviews with Jacob Wills, 28 August 2011, 21 February 2012, 19 October 2012, and subsequent email correspondence

16‌ I obtained information on how Essex Police gauged the threat of the growing resistance to the clearance through a number of Freedom of Information requests made in June 2012 which were eventually responded to in some detail in October 2012. I was also allowed to conduct an extensive interview with Superintendent Iain Logan, a senior police officer for the force, who was the Silver Commander for the eviction, planning the tactics for the day. I was given audio of some stages of the eviction, from radio logs and the Air Support Unit.

17‌ Freedom of Information request to Essex Police, obtained 10 October 2012.

18‌ Freedom of Information request to the Home Office, obtained 12 October 2012, and reported upon in Quarmby, Katharine, et al., ‘Rotten boroughs’ column, Private Eye,18 October 2011.

19‌ Ibid.

20‌ Ibid.

21‌ Quarmby, Katharine, ’All the fun of the fair‘, The Economist, 19 May 2011, www.economist.com/node/18712487

22‌ Freedom of Information request to Essex Police, obtained 10 October 2012

23‌ Ibid.

24‌ Author interview with Candy Sheridan, 28 August 2011, and notes from meeting.

25‌ Author interviews with Sebastian Hesse, 10 May 2012, 25 October 2012, plus subsequent phone interviews and email correspondence

26‌ Author interview with Jacob Wills, 29 August 2011

27‌ Author interview with Jacob Wills, 21 February 2012

28‌ Author interviews with Ann Kobayashi, 19 September 2011, 12 October 2011, 30 May 2012, 10 January 2013

29‌ Freedom of Information request to Essex Police, obtained 10 October 2012

30‌ Ibid.

7. ‘We Will Not Leave’

1‌ Quarmby, Katharine, ‘Trouble ahead’, The Economist, 20 September 2011, www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2011/09/gypsies-and-travellers

2‌ Barkham, Patrick, ‘Vanessa Redgrave gives support to Dale Farm Travellers’, Guardian, 30 August 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/30/vanessa-redgrave-dale-farm-travellers

3‌ Harris, Paul, ‘UN team accuses council of “violating international law” by evicting travellers on extraordinary visit to Dale Farm (and even compared it to China and Zimbabwe)’, Daily Mail, 14 September 2010, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2037358/Dale-Farm-eviction-UN-team-accuses-Basildon-Council-violating-international-law.html

4‌ Author interview with Cormac Smith and Tony Ball, 11 April 2012. Specific points discussed in the interview were later confirmed in several subsequent phone interviews and email correspondence.

5‌ The media coverage of Dale Farm was split just like the campaign within the site itself. On one side were (loosely) the Basildon Echo, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and the London Evening Standard, which took aim at the activists and were sometimes openly hostile to the residents at Dale Farm. On the other side were the Guardian and Left-leaning magazines such as the New Statesman, which were more sympathetic. As a writer for The Economist, I tried to steer a middle ground, putting forward both sides of the argument – an approach that was also seen in the pages of The Times – but it was a tricky story to get right, in terms of giving all the parties their say. At the time, I was also writing the occasional story on Dale Farm for Private Eye, mostly focusing there on the money being spent on both sides to fund the campaign.

6‌ Freedom of Information request to Essex Police, obtained 10 October 2012.

7‌ Snell, Andrew and Emily Fairburn, ‘The Sun goes undercover for Dale Farm diary’, Sun, 7 September 2011, www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3887347/The-Sun-goes-undercover-for-Dale-Farm-diary.html

8‌ ‘Assurance given over Christian Gypsy Festival’, BBC News, 26 July 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-14295891

9‌ Author interview with Father Dan Mason, 4 December 2012. Since the eviction, Father Dan has moved from Crays Hill to a parish in East London. He remains in close contact with the Dale Farm community, however, as the chaplain for Gypsies and Travellers in the diocese.

10‌ ‘Dale Farm: Labour leader Ed Miliband supports evictions’, BBC News, 1 September 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-14752048

11‌ ‘Travelling to a better future’, Welsh Government, 28 September 2011, wales.gov.uk/topics/housingandcommunity/communitycohesion/publications/travellingtoabetterfuture/?lang=en

12‌ Frost, Vicky, ‘Channel 4’s big fat Gypsy ratings winner’, Guardian,7 February 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/07/big-fat-gypsy-weddings

13‌ Quarmby, ‘Trouble ahead’

14‌ Ibid.

15‌ Author interview with Marina Pepper and others, 19 September 2011. The interviews were made in preparation for (but not used in) the article ‘Trouble ahead’, The Economist, 20 September 2011

16‌ ‘Dale Farm Evictions live’, Guardian News Blog, Guardian, 19 September 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/sep/19/dale-farm-evicitons-live

17‌ I reported on the day’s events for The Economist. Quarmby, Katharine, ‘Judgement day’, 13 October 2011, The Economist, www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2011/10/dale-farm

18‌ Author interview with Marc Willers, 19 December 2012

19‌ ‘Dale Farm eviction: Travellers refused appeal bid’, BBC News, 17 October 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-15342282

8. Eviction

20‌ Author interview with Superintendent Iain Logan, Specialist Operations, Essex Police, 23 October 2012, and subsequent email correspondence

21‌ Freedom of Information request to Essex Police, obtained 10 October 2012

22‌ Author interviews with Billy Welch, 9 June 2012, 10 November 2012, and phone interviews

23‌ I was among the reporters helped onto the site that day by the legal monitors, and quotes from Dale Farm residents and activists come from interviews conducted during 19 October, unless otherwise noted. Also see Quarmby, Katharine, 20 October 2011, The Economist, ‘The fight moves on’, www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2011/10/evictions-dale-farm

24‌ Author interview with Joanna McCarthy, 22 December 2012

25‌ Author interviews with Michelle (‘Mary’) Sheridan, 30 March 2006, 28 August 2011, 19 October 2011, 29 November 2011, 11 January 2012, 24 May 2012, 1 and 10 December 2012, 10 January 2013, 28 February 2013

26‌ Craig-Green, Susan, 2011, advocacynet.org/wordpress-mu/scraiggreene/

27‌ Ensor, Josie, ‘Dale Farm eviction: As it happened’, Telegraph, 20 October 2011, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8837820/Dale-Farm-eviction-as-it-happened-October-19.html

28‌ Ibid.

29‌ Author interviews with Kathleen (‘Pearl’) McCarthy, 12 October 2011, 19 October 2011, 15 October 2012, and by phone in December 2012 and January 2013

9. Clinging to the Wreckage

1‌ As observed by the author on a visit on 10 January 2011

2‌ Quarmby, Katharine, ‘Bleak midwinter’, The Economist, 14 January 2011, www.economist.com/node/21542792

3‌ www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2012/apr/20/dale-farm-eviction-video

4‌ Ibid.

5‌ Ibid.

6‌ travellersolidarity.org

7‌ ‘Boys guilty of killing Gypsy’, BBC News

8‌ Coxhead, John, ‘Moving Forward’: How the Gypsy and Traveller Communities Can Be More Engaged to Improve Policing Performance (London: Home Office, 2005); Coxhead, John, The Last Bastion of Racism (Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2007)

9‌ www.cps.gov.uk/westmidlands/us_and_the_community/

10‌ Personal communication with Rosemary Thompson, October 2011.

11‌ Quarmby, ‘Bleak midwinter’

12‌ British Red Cross, ‘Dale Farm, December 2011–February 2012’, unpublished report.

10. Caught

1‌ www.bedfordshire.police.uk/about_us/news/news_2011/110912_-_operation_netwing.aspx

2‌ www.bedfordshire.police.uk/about_us/news/news_2011/110912_-_slavery_offences.aspx

3‌ ‘Workers held at Green Acres site “got veiled death threats”’, BBC News, 19 April 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-17773902

4‌ ‘Family exploited homeless on Greenacres site’, BBC News, 18 April 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-17755278. Other Connors family members were facing retrial in April 2013, during the writing of this book.

5‌ ‘Servitude trial: Four of Connors Traveller family guilty’, BBC News, 11 July 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-18644539

6‌ ‘Traveller family guilty of forced labour’, BBC News,14 December 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire. In this case, the convicted individuals were William Connors (age fifty-two), Brida (Mary) Connors (forty-eight), their sons, John (twenty-nine) and James (twenty), and son-in-law Miles Connors (twenty-three).

7‌ ‘No link to slavery allegation arrests’, Nottingham Post,14 September 2011, www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/link-slavery-allegation-arrests/story-13326740-detail/story.html#axzz2MZIYbYss

8‌ Author interviews with Jake Bowers, 3 September 2012, 3 October 2012 and subsequent email correspondence

9‌ Okely, Judith, ‘Gypsies travelling in southern England’, in Farnham Rehfisch (ed.), Gypsies, Tinkers and Other Travellers (London: Academic Press, 1975), p. 60

10‌ Author interview with Janette McCormick, 5 September 2012

11‌ Stanton, A.K., ‘An impressionistic account of the discrimination suffered by White ethnic minorities in Newark’, unpublished paper,1994, cited in Fletcher, H., et al., The Irish Community: Discrimination and the Criminal Justice System, (London: National Association of Probation Officers, Federation of Irish Societies, Action Group for Irish Youth, Irish Commission for Prisoners Overseas, and The Bourne Trust, 1997), p. 16

12‌ Fletcher et al., The Irish Community, p. 18

13‌ Devereaux, D., ‘Enforced invisibility: The Irish experience of the Criminal Justice System’, unpublished MA thesis submitted to the School of Law, Manchester Metropolitan University, 1999, quoted in Power, Colm, ‘Irish Travellers: Ethnicity, racism and pre-sentence reports’, Probation Journal 50:3, 2003, pp. 252–66

14‌ Power, ibid., p. 261

15‌ Mac Gabhann, Conn, Voices Unheard: A Study of Irish Travellers in Prison (London: Irish Chaplaincy in Britain, 2011), www.iprt.ie/files/Voices_Unheard_June_20112.pdf

16‌ Cusack, Jim, Irish Times, 11 January 1996, quoted in ‘The media and race reporting’, Calypso Productions, homepage.tinet.ie/~calypso/racism/media.html

17‌ Myers, Kevin, Irish Times, 19 January 1996, quoted in ‘The media and race reporting’, ibid.

18‌ Moore, Kevin, Sunday Independent, 4 February 1996, quoted in ‘The media and race reporting’, ibid.

19‌ Synon, Mary Ellen, ‘Time to get tough on Tinker terror culture’, Sunday Independent, 28 January 1996, www.indymedia.ie/article/63540?author_name=CC&comment_order=asc&condense_comments=true&userlanguage=ga&save_prefs=true

20‌ Synon’s misstep came when she wrote a similarly offensive article about athletes competing in the Special Olympics in 2000: ‘It is time to suggest that these so-called Paralympics … are – well, one hesitates to say “grotesque”. One will only say “perverse” … surely physical competition is about finding the best – the fastest, strongest, highest, all that. It is not about finding someone who can wobble his way around a track in a wheelchair, or who can swim from one end of a pool to the other by Braille.’ Her editor was forced to apologise.

21‌ Lentin, Ronit, and Robbie McVeigh, Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2002), p. 6

22‌ ‘Deasy suggests birth control to limit traveller numbers’, Irish Times, 14 June 1996, www.nccri.ie/travellr.html

23‌ County councillor interviewed by the Cork Examiner, 18 July 1989, and quoted in ‘Travellers in Ireland: An examination of discrimination and racism’, National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism, www.nccri.ie/travellr.html

24‌ MacGréil, Michéal, Prejudice in Ireland Revisited: Based on a National Survey of Intergroup Attitudes in the Republic of Ireland (Maynooth: National University of Ireland, 1996), quoted in Lentin, and McVeigh, Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland, pp. 62–3

25‌ Ibid.

26‌ Lentin and McVeigh, ibid., introduction

27‌ Connolly and Keenan, 2000, Brown, 2004, quoted in Drummond, Anthony, ‘The construction of Irish Travellers (and Gypsies) as a “Problem”’, in Mícheál Ó hAodha (ed.), Migrants and Memory: The Forgotten Postcolonials (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007)

28‌ Haughey, Nuala, ‘Two in five Travellers would like to live in a house or flat’, Irish Times, 20 October 2001

29‌ Okely, ‘Gypsies travelling in Southern England’, in Rehfisch, Gypsies, Tinkers and Other Travellers, p. 60

30‌ Berger, A. A., Essentials of Mass Communications Theory (London: Sage Publications, 1995). The role of the media in reporting on particular communities has been well analysed. I have also carried out content analyses of reporting of disability hate crime and also of welfare benefits for my book Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People (London: Portobello Books, 2011) and for a chapter in the book Disability Hate Crime and Violence, edited by Alan Roulstoune and Hanna Mason-Bish (Oxford: Routledge, 2012).

31‌ Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944)

32‌ www.mediawise.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Portrayal-and-participation-of-minorities-in-the-media.pdf

33‌ www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Submission-by-Media-Wise-Trust.pdf

34‌ http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Submission-from-The-Irish-Traveller-Movement-April-20121.pdf

35‌ ‘ECRI report on the United Kingdom’, European Commission on Racism and Intolerance, March 2010 (fourth monitoring cycle), www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/ecri/country-by-country/united_kingdom/GBR-CbC-IV-2010-004-ENG.pdf (p. 39)

36‌ Morris, Rachel, Gypsies and Travellers: Press Regulation and Racism (Cardiff: Cardiff Law School, 2000), p. 213

37‌ I wrote about the TV programme in a comment piece for the Independent in July 2012. Of the 108 comments on the piece (the third most viewed that week in the newspaper), over half were hostile to the communities; a smaller number were explicitly racist. Quarmby, Katharine, ‘Gypsy culture is much more than dresses and make-up’, Independent, 23 July 2012), blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/07/23/gypsy-culture-is-much-more-than-dresses-and-make-up/

38‌ www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2012/10/Channel-Four-Television-Corporation/SHP_ADJ_197451.aspx

39‌ ‘Seminar report on Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in the media’, Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, 20 June 2012, irishtraveller.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Seminar-report-on-Gypsies-Roma-and-Travellers-in-the-Media.pdf

40‌ Swinford, Stephen, ‘Leveson’s regulator could be hijacked by “sinister” pressure groups, Telegraph, 2 December 2012, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/leveson-inquiry/9717664/Levesons-regulator-could-be-hijacked-by-sinister-pressure-groups.html

41‌ Maher, Sean, The Road to God Knows Where (Dublin: Veritas, 1998), p. 151

42‌ Baumann, Zygmunt, Legislators and Interpreters (London: Polity Press, 1995), p. 94

43‌ MacLaughlin, Jim, ‘Nation-building, social closure and racism in Ireland’, Sociology 33, 1999, p. 147

44‌ Thomson, Tony, Traveller (Brighton: Friends, Families and Travellers Support Group, 1997), p. 5

45‌ Drummond, ‘The construction of Irish Travellers (and Gypsies) as a “problem”’

11. Gypsy War in Meriden

1‌ gypsytrailercaravans.webeden.co.uk/#/big-just/4533622715

2‌ Acton, Thomas, 1998, ‘Authenticity, expertise, scholarship and politics: Conflicting goals in Romani studies’, Inaugural Lecture Series, University of Greenwich, www.gypsy-traveller.org/pdfs/acton_article.pdf

3‌ Author interviews with Noah Burton, 1 December 2011; 1 February, 22 February and 25 April 2012; and 13 February 2013; plus short telephone interviews to clarify particular points.

4‌ www.meridenraid.org.uk

5‌ www.meridenraid.org.uk/?p=247

6‌ Author transcript, Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council planning meeting, 1 February 2012.

7‌ Author interview with Deborah Martin-Williams, Head of Communications, Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council, 1 February 2012

8‌ Author interviews with confidential source, carried out in person, by telephone and by email in November and December 2011 and January 2012

9‌ Garland, Jon, and Neil Chakraborti, ‘Recognising and responding to victims of rural racism’, International Review of Victimology, 13:1, 2006, pp. 49–69; see also Chakraborti and Garland, ‘Protean times? Exploring the relationships between policing, community and “race” in rural England’, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 7: 347, 2007

10‌ Garland and Chakraborti, ‘Recognising and responding to victims of rural racism’, pp. 49–69

11‌ Author interviews with Barbara Cookes, December 2011, 4 February 2013, plus phone interviews in 2012 and 2013

12‌ Freedom of Information request to Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council, responded to 27 January 2012

13‌ Personal communication from David McGrath, received 6 March 2012

14‌ Author interview with Susan and Senga Townsley, 25 April 2012

15‌ Wilkes, David, ‘Why we won’t give ground to the Bin Laden of Meriden: Villagers step up fight to halt new gipsy camp’, Daily Mail, 4 May 2010, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1271529/Why-wont-ground-Bin-Laden-Meriden-Villagers-step-fight-halt-new-gipsy-camp.html

16‌ Author interview with Senga Townsley and Noah Burton, 1 December 2011

17‌ www.meridenraid.org.uk/?p=376

18‌ EU Reporter, ‘Protest in Strasbourg’, 23 September 2010, www.eureporter.co/story/protest-strasbourg/

19‌ Dale, Paul, ‘Government steps in over Meriden Gypsy site row’, Birmingham Post, 29 September 2010, www.birminghampost.net/news/west-midlands-news/2010/09/29/government-steps-in-over-meriden-gypsy-site-row-65233-27360053/

20‌ JoePublic Blog, Guardian, 26 October 2010, www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2010/oct/26/travellers-residents-battle-green-belt-site

21‌ Baldwyn, Kat, ‘Residents celebrate as Gypsies lose appeal to stay at Meriden camp’, 26 October 2011, Birmingham Post, www.birminghampost.net/news/west-midlands-news/2011/10/26/residents-celebrate-as-gypsies-lose-appeal-to-stay-at-meriden-camp

22‌ Author interviews for a short film for the Guardian website about the Meriden situation, and for research on this book, were postponed on at least three occasions: once over half term, 20/21 February 2012, and then again on 24 February 2012, after train tickets had already been booked. The interviews were then rescheduled at Meriden RAID’s convenience for Monday, 27 February 2012, and were abruptly cancelled that day. An interview for the same day with a local councillor, Jim Ryan, was also cancelled, with the same reason given as that given by Meriden RAID. In the end, after so many cancellations and lost filming days, the film was not transmitted.

On 6 March 2012, David McGrath provided a written statement in response to questions provided to him, with the request that his statement be reprinted in full, without editing of his responses. The statement is reprinted in the appendix on pages 321–9. Notes referencing this statement are noted in the book as the ‘Personal communication’ received from David McGrath on 6 March 2012.

David McGrath and Doug Bacon were also contacted on 20 June 2012, when I was writing a short article about parish council payments made to residents’ groups opposing Gypsy and Traveller sites for Private Eye, to ask them about whether they had carried out paid consultancy work for a parish council. McGrath promised to respond one day later but did not do so.

David McGrath was contacted again on 30 January 2013, as this book was nearing completion, to make further comment. He did not reply to the interview request.

23‌ Author interview with David McGrath, 1 February 2012

24‌ Personal communication from David McGrath, received 6 March 2012

25‌ Author interview with Barbara Cohen, 8 March 2012, and subsequent email correspondence

26‌ Personal communications from Hockley Heath Parish Council, commencing with email received on 2 February, 14 February, 20 February, 21 February, with legal decision received 6 March 2012; Quarmby, Katharine, et al., ‘Rotten boroughs’ column, Private Eye, 15–28 June 2012; Quarmby, Katharine, et al., ‘Rotten boroughs’ column, Private Eye, 29 June–12 July 2012

27‌ I contacted Neil Whitelam and the group on 5 and 6 March 2012, through Facebook and their site, asking for a statement on his involvement with the RAID group and the British National Party. None was forthcoming before this book went to press.

28‌ Personal communication from David McGrath, received 6 March 2012

29‌ Erfani-Ghettani, Ryan, ‘Localism, populism and the fight against sites’, Institute of Race Relations, 8 November 2012, www.irr.org.uk/news/localism-populism-and-the-fight-against-sites/

30‌ I emailed David McGrath and asked for a last interview on 30 January 2013, but he did not reply to the interview request.

31‌ Author interview with John Prescott, 17 December 2012

12. Targeted

1‌ Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics

2‌ Powell, Ryan, ‘Civilising offensives and ambivalence: The case of British Gypsies’, People, Place & Policy Online 1:3, 2007, pp. 112–23, extra.shu.ac.uk/ppp-online/issue_3_281107/documents/civilising_offensives_british_gypsies.pdf

3‌ Richardson, Joanna, Can Discourse Control? (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006)

4‌ Richardson, Joanna, ‘Policing Gypsies and Travellers’, Plenary Paper to the Housing Studies Association Conference (HSA), (Lincoln: September 2005)

5‌ Cemlyn, Sarah, Margaret Greenfields, Sally Burnett, Zoe Matthews and Chris Whitwell, ‘Inequalities experienced by Gypsy and Traveller communities: A review’ (London: Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2009), p. 150, www.equalityhumanrights.com/uploaded_files/research/12inequalities_experienced_by_gypsy_and_traveller_communities_a_review.pdf

6‌ Ibid., p. 151

7‌ James, Zoe, ‘Eliminating communities? Exploring the implications of policing methods used to manage New Travellers”’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law 33, 2005, p. 163

8‌ Cemlyn, Greenfields, et al., ‘Inequalities experienced by Gypsy and Traveller communities’, p. 151

9‌ Lombroso, Cesare, Criminal Man (Durham: Duke University, 2006), p. 119

10‌ Cemlyn, Greenfields, et al., ‘Inequalities experienced by Gypsy and Traveller communities’, p. 151

11‌ Dawson, Robert, Crime and Prejudice: Traditional Travellers (Derbyshire: Dawson and Rackley, 2000)

12‌ Author interview by phone with Janette McCormick, 19 September 2012

13‌ I visited the supermarket with the town’s former mayor, Vera Norwood, on 9 and 10 May 2012 and visited the fair again on 24 and 25 October 2012

14‌ James, Zoe, ‘Policing marginal spaces: Controlling Gypsies and Travellers’, Criminology and Criminal Justice 7, 2007, pp. 367–89

15‌ Ibid.

16‌ Greenfields, M., et al, Gypsy Traveller Accommodation (and Other Needs) Assessment 2006–2016 (High Wycombe: Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, 2006), www.southglos.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/92A18DC8-DE24-4A66-991F-0ECF1E3CF0C3/0/PTE070602.pdf; Greenfields, M., and R. Home, ‘Assessing Gypsies’ and Travellers’ needs: partnership working and “The Cambridge Project”’, Romani Studies 16:2, 2006, pp. 105–31; Greenfields, M., and R. Home, ‘Women Travellers and the paradox of the settled nomad’, in Lim, H., and A. Bottomley (eds), Feminist Perspectives on Land Law, (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007), pp. 135–54; author interview with Margaret Greenfields, 26 October 2012

17‌ ‘Councillor suggested minefield should be built around Travellers site’, Cambridge News, 26 September 2012, www.cambridge-news.co.uk/News/Councillor-suggested-minefield-should-be-built-round-travellers-site-26092012.htm

18‌ Quarmby, Katharine, et al., ‘Howell of rage’, Private Eye, 13 December 2012

19‌ Mayall, David, Gypsy Identities, 1500–2000: From Egyptians and Moonmen to Ethnic Romani (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 174

20‌ ‘Travellers refused entry to north London pub’, BBC News, 25 November 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15899248

21‌ Acton, Thomas, ‘International Romani politics: More successful than commonly realised?’, paper given at the National Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Symposium, City Hall, Cardiff, 22 June 2012

22‌ Sometimes, the term kris is used to refer to Romani law in general, as in Big Just Burton’s fines, mentioned in Chapter 11.

23‌ Acton, ‘International Romani politics’

24‌ Author interview with Damian Le Bas Jnr, 20 August 2012, 13 October 2012, plus subsequent email correspondence

25‌ refuge.org.uk/files/1001-Forced-Marriage-Middle-East-North-East-Africa.pdf. The FMU has been attempting to carry out research on forced marriage in the travelling community, and I have been asked by a number of experts in the field whether I would be interested in contributing to a bid on this, which I refused, as there doesn’t seem to be evidence of a widespread problem.

26‌ Brown, Jonathan, ‘We tackled grooming gangs. Now we have to confront forced marriage among Travellers’, Independent, 21 May 2012, www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/nazir-afzal-we-tackled-grooming-gangs-now-we-have-to-confront-forced-marriage-among-travellers-7769697.html

27‌ I contacted Nazir Afzal by email on 21 May 2012 but he was unavailable for further comment.

28‌ www.gypsy-traveller.org/your-family/health/domestic-violence/

29‌ gypsymessageboard.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/the-question-of-forced-marriage-in-the-traveller-community/

30‌ The site for Gypsy and Traveller women is provided by Solace Women’s Aid, www.solacewomensaid.org/about-us/refuges

31‌ Cemlyn, Greenfields, et al., ‘Inequalities experienced by Gypsy and Traveller communities’

32‌ Author interviews with Janie Codona, 10 October 2012, 15 November 2012

33‌ Author interviews with Bernie O’Roarke, 8 October 2012, 15 November 2012

34‌ ‘Murder victim’s 12-hour torture’, Manchester Evening News, 8 June 2006, menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/215227_murder_victims_12hour_torture

13. Life on the Margins

1‌ ‘New scrap-metal regime becomes law’, Material Recycling World, 28 February 2013, www.mrw.co.uk/news/new-scrap-metal-regime-becomes-law/8643580.article

2‌ ‘Witness statement of Raymond Bocking’, submitted to the High Court of Justice, Queens Bench Division, Patrick Egan vs. Basildon Borough Council, Claim no. CO/11/666, 25 September 2011. The statement included documents regarding Ray Bocking’s appeals regarding enforcement notices that were sent by the Planning Inspectorate of the Department of the Environment and dated 26 May 1994.

3‌ Private Eye interview with Ray Bocking, 4 July 2012; ‘Private Eye interview with Ray Bocking’, Private Eye, 27 July–9 August 2012

4‌ Cripps, Accommodation for Gypsies

5‌ Cemlyn, Greenfields, et al., ‘Inequalities experienced by Gypsy and Traveller communities’

6‌ Johnson, Chris, and Mark Willers, Gypsy and Traveller Law (London: Legal Action Group, 2007), p. 79

7‌ ‘Designing Gypsy and Traveller sites: A good practice guide’, Department for Communities and Local Government (2008), www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/11439/designinggypsysites.pdf

8‌ ‘Gypsy, Roma and Traveller achievement’, Department for Education, 14 November 2012, www.education.gov.uk/schools/pupilsupport/inclusionandlearnersupport/mea/improvingachievement/a0012528/gypsy-roma-and-traveller-achievement

9‌ Author interviews with Delaine and Damian le Bas Snr, 13 October 2012, 9 November 2012, 16 March 2013 and subsequent email correspondence

10‌ Smith, David, and Margaret Greenfields, ‘Housed Gypsies and Travellers in the UK: Work, exclusion and adaptation’, Race and Class, 55:3 2012, pp. 48–64

11‌ Ibid.

12‌ www.travellersaidtrust.org.uk

13‌ Author interview with Margaret Greenfields, 26 October 2012, and subsequent email correspondence

14‌ www.clearwatergypsies.com/parallel-lives.html

15‌ Author interview with Ian Hancock, 22 June 2012, and email correspondence

16‌ Pati, Anita, ‘After Dale Farm: Managing Gypsy and Traveller sites’, Guardian, 14 October 2012

17‌ Ibid.

18‌ Smith and Greenfields, ‘Housed Gypsies and Travellers in the UK’, pp. 48–64

19‌ Ibid.

20‌ Quarmby, Katharine, and Mark Townsend, ‘Mental illness now blights many Dale Farm families’, Observer, 20 October 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/oct/20/dale-farm-families-in-squalor

21‌ Van Cleemput, P., et al., ‘Health-related beliefs and experiences of Gypsies and Travellers: A qualitative study’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 61, 2008, pp. 205–10

22‌ Parry, G., et al., The Health Status of Gypsies and Travellers in England (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, 2004)

23‌ Van Cleemput, P., ‘Social exclusion of Gypsies and Travellers: Health impact’, Journal of Research in Nursing, 1 March 2010

24‌ Barry, J., B. Herity, J. Solan, The Travellers’ Health Status Study: Vital Statistics of Travelling People (Dublin: Health Research Board, 1987); Maureen Baker, Gypsies and Travellers: Leeds Baseline Census 2004–2005 (Leeds: Leeds Racial Equality Council, 2005)

25‌ ‘Progress report by the ministerial working group on tackling inequalities experienced by Gypsies and Travellers’, Department for Communities and Local Government, 2012, pp. 8–18, media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/m/ministerial%20working%20group%20report%2012%20april%202012.pdf

26‌ Richardson, J., J. Bloxsom and M. Greenfields, East Kent Sub-Regional Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Assessment Report (2007–2012) (Leicester: De Montfort University, 2007), www.doverdc.co.uk/pdf/EastKentGTAAreport17July07.pdf

27‌ ‘Progress report by the ministerial working group on tackling inequalities experienced by Gypsies and Travellers’, pp. 13–14

28‌ Van Cleemput, ‘Social exclusion of Gypsies and Travellers: health impact’

29‌ Cemlyn, Greenfields, et al., ‘Inequalities experienced by Gypsy and Traveller communities’, p. 22

30‌ Ibid.

31‌ Ibid., p. 77

32‌ Ibid., p. 78

33‌ Stack, Sarah, ‘Traveller suicide rates soar at six times the settled community’, Irish Independent, 4 October 2011, www.independent.ie/national-news/traveller-suicide-rates-soar-at-sixtimes-the-settled-community-numbers-2895924.html

34‌ Nexus, Moving Beyond Coping: An Insight into the Experiences and Needs of Travellers in Tallaght in Coping with Suicide (Tallaght: Tallaght Travellers Youth Services, 2006), iol.ie/nexus/suicide%20and%20the%20young%20traveller.pdf

35‌ Author interview with Tony Ball, 22 March 2013

36‌ Author interview with David McPherson-Davis, 23 March 2013

37‌ Author interview with Nigel Smith, 29 March 2013

38‌ Author interview with Candy Sheridan, 23 March 2013; the interviews in this section were originally conducted for Quarmby, Katharine, and Mark Townsend, ‘Dale Farm asbestos find fuels concerns for health of evicted Travellers’, Observer, 31 March 2013, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/mar/31/asbestos-dale-farm-travellers

39‌ Smith, Charles, Not All Wagons and Lanes (Essex: Essex County Council, 1995), p. 26

14. Revival

1‌ Quarmby, Katharine, ‘Big dreams at Appleby Fair’, Huffington Post, 13 June 2012, www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/katharine-quarmby/big-dreams-at-appleby-fair_b_1587339.html

2‌ Quarmby, Katharine, ‘A silent revival’, The Economist, 30 June 2012

3‌ The movement in Britain is known interchangeably as ‘Light and Life’ and ‘Life and Light’, but I’ve used the former throughout the book to match the church’s website, www.lightandlifegypsychurch.com.

4‌ www.biblebelievers.com/gypsy_smith/index.html

5‌ Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 315

6‌ As quoted at travellerspace-gypsyroads.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/fury-over-village-invasion-of-gypsies.html

7‌ Author notes from Life and Light convention, 1 August 2012

8‌ Author interviews with Thomas Acton, 22 June 2012, 13 October 2012, plus a subsequent phone interview for The Economist and email correspondence

9‌ Author interview with Ian Hancock, 22 June 2012, and email correspondence

10‌ Reeve, Dominic, Beneath the Blue Sky (London: Abacus, 2007), pp. 8–9

11‌ ‘The plight of Europe’s Roma’, The Economist, 25 May 2012, www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2012/05/europe%E2%80%99s-biggest-societal-problem; ‘Widespread Roma exclusion persists, find new surveys’, United Nations Development Programme (2012), europeandcis.undp.org/news/show/C15701B7-F203-1EE9-B1F8B88C17029CA1 (24 May)

12‌ equality.uk.com/Roma.html

13‌ Author interview with Robbie McVeigh, 9 September 2012; this section also includes quotes from author visit to the Luton Roma church, 28 November 2012, and an author interview with Martin Burrell, 15 June 2012

14‌ Author interview with Donald Kenrick, 19 July 2012

15‌ Author interview with Sam Lee, 24 November 2012; the interview followed a private concert at the Dog and Gun that had been organised by promoter, artist and mutual friend Pete Lawrence

16‌ Rombase, Matéo Maximoff, romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/artframe.pl?src=data/pers/maximoff.en.xml

17‌ Junghaus, Timea, Meet Your Neighbours (New York City: Open Society Institute, 2006), p.7

18‌ This Romani text is a quote from ‘Lil of Romano Jinnypen’ (‘Book of the Wisdom of the Egyptians’) collected by George Borrow and published in Romano Lavo-Lil: Word-Book of the Romany (John Murray, 1905). Borrow translated the phrase as ‘A tramp has more fun than a Gypsy.’

19‌ ‘Merkel opens Roma Holocaust Memorial in Berlin’, BBC News, 24 October 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20050780

20‌ Words of the Wheel Arts event at the East Anglian Museum of Rural Life, 13 October 2012. I attended the event at the invitation of Damian Le Bas Jr, who organised it along with Thomas Acton; I also recorded some of the proceedings.

21‌ McVeigh ‘Theorising sedentarism: the roots of anti-nomadism’, in Acton, Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, p. 12

22‌ Chatwin, Bruce, The Anatomy of Restlessness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), p. 102

23‌ Ibid., p. 80

24‌ Standing, Guy, The Precariat (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), p. 90

‌

‌‌Appendix

Full text of statement submitted by David McGrath, chairman of Meriden RAID, on 6 March 2012. Reprinted in full, as requested.

Dear Katharine

Thank you for your questions. I would be grateful if you could reprint the statement below – which includes my answers – in full without editing my response to your questions.

Kind regards

David McGrath

Dear Ms Quarmby

I note that you are wish [sic] to broadcast a programme regarding the dispute in Eaves Green Lane without giving Meriden RAID the clear opportunity to participate in the making of this programme at an appropriate time. You will be aware that we are keen to participate in the making of your film – and your new book – and we have indicated that a time in early April would be the best time to do this. This timing is based on advice that we have received suggesting that we should not give detailed interviews on the specifics of the legal dispute in Eaves Green Lane as there are two Court cases pending.

We are anxious that the court appearances of the Travellers should not be prejudiced in any way and will be happy to discuss all points with you – on camera – after the dispute has been resolved – hopefully the end of the this month (March 2012).

Nevertheless you have exercised your right to broadcast (which I respect) and I am happy to answer the written questions that you have tabled (below) as I feel that this is only way in which any level of balance can be incorporated into your work. I think that your questions are fair and I hope you agree that my answers are fair too. I do not see this as an opportunity to enter into correspondence – merely a holding position until you are able to schedule appropriate interviews – giving all sides a fair opportunity to participate.

I am pleased to answer your questions as follows:

1. Solihull Council has informed the Guardian that you trained two of the members of the planning committee who subsequently went on to reject the planning application for the Gypsy site at Eaves Green Lane. Do you consider that your involvement in training councillors, who were then closely involved with taking a decision on a planning application to which you were opposed, is a conflict of interest?

I provide training for Councillors from many Local Authorities. This training is not on Planning matters as I am not qualified to do so. Contact with Local Authorities is through Training Managers not the Councillors. I provided two x 2-hour training sessions for Solihull Council for two groups of Councillors on Chairing Public Meetings and Overview and Scrutiny. This training was completed well before the dispute in Meriden arose.

I would have had no contact with Councillors before or after the seminar and had no control over which Councillors would be attending nor any interest as to which committee they might sit on. I did not attend or speak at the Planning Meeting of 7 July 2010 which made a decision consistent with the recommendations of its officers. Any informed or fair minded person would not be able to construe anything or [sic] than absolute probity in my actions.

2. If not, why not?

This is explained above.

3. A partner of a member of RAID was arrested for urinating in front of a Gypsy woman in 2010. Do you consider that this was inappropriate and did you take any action to prevent such incidents from happening again in the future?

I understand that – some two years ago – an individual relieved himself in some bushes behind one of the camps on private land and an allegation was made, that this was seen by one of the occupants of the site resulting in the arrest of that individual. I also understand that no criminal charges were brought, indicating that there was insufficient evidence of any crime having been committed. RAID have and will continue to remind members to have regard to their actions so that we conduct our protest in a peaceful lawful and dignified manner.

4. An email from a senior police officer, Keith Portman, written in 2010, suggested that he felt that bricks near the entrance to Eaves Green Lane had been fly-tipped in an attempt to implicate the Gypsies in fly-tipping or were there so that RAID members could blockade the site. (I can send you the email if you would like to see it.) Was this incident connected to RAID members and if so, did you take any action against it?

In the e-mail to which you refer, Inspector Portman states he is ‘unsure as to who dumped the bricks’ and then gives a view as to who may have done so. Meriden, like many rural areas is subject to fly-tipping and had the Insp had evidence to support his personal view, I have no doubt he would have acted upon it. I am unaware of any party being responsible for the dumping of bricks but I did ask the Council to remove debris as it was inappropriately located. I also from time to time voluntarily pick litter from the Lane and value greatly our countryside.

RAID welcomes and encourages robust and thorough investigation of all allegations of any anti-social behaviour regardless of the origin of the allegation (settled or Travelling community) and have communicated such to the police.

RAID have requested and continue to request a CCTV camera be installed following threats and intimidation by the occupants of (and visitors to) the site in order that all allegations can be properly investigated. Surprisingly we understand the occupants of the Travellers site have objected to such installation.

5. Doug Bacon, the vice-chair of RAID, served as a police officer alongside some of the officers now policing the situation at Meriden that has arisen out of the conflict between Meriden RAID and the Gypsies (according to information obtained from West Midlands Police). Do you consider this a conflict of roles and do you intend to do anything about it? If you do not wish to answer this question, please send to Mr Bacon so he can answer for himself.

Mr Bacon ceased being a serving member of West Midlands Police nearly 8 years ago, and is a private resident of Meriden. He has not served alongside those officers involved in policing Meriden for at least 11 years in some cases longer and in the case of the senior officer Sector Inspector Portman never.

The role of the Police in this matter is one of keeping the peace and the prevention and detection of crime and one in RAID’s view in which the Police have maintained strict professional neutrality as one would expect of such a public body.

Mr Bacon’s role is simply providing information to the police on RAID activities, a central point for the reporting of incidents (not solely confined to those connected with Eaves Green Lane) and managing the expectations of the local residents with regard to police powers and procedures.

The Police have no part to play in the planning process, therefore to construe a conflict of roles is not only inaccurate it is nonsensical. On a personal point I would add that Mr Bacon has played an invaluable role as a level headed leader who – along with our wider RAID membership – has always insisted that RAID opposes the unlawful development in Eaves Green Lane in a way which focuses on the material legal and planning issues – nothing else.

6. Holderness RAID, which states on its website that it is in almost daily contact with Meriden RAID, has as its chair a former British National Party candidate for the area. It also cites, in its press area, the news that ‘Andrew Brons, British National Party MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber has shown his support for our case’. Does it concern you that a far-Right party is supporting the activities of a RAID group? Do you feel that it taints the brand of what you call ‘ethical localism’ and lays RAID groups generally open to the accusation of closet racism?

We do not seek nor do we welcome the interest or involvement of any person or group within Meriden RAID who holds extreme views. Our campaign is non political and focused on green belt and planning issues (including opposing a local housing scheme).

Anyone who uses the unlawful and unethical tactics that we have seen in Meriden (attempting to ‘steal a march on the planning process’ by Bank Holiday land grabs, denying residents the chance to comment on proposals before they are executed, destroying the green belt etc) would be opposed – whether they were Travellers, multi national corporations or individual developers.

It is also worth mentioning that we have had support and financial donations from members of the wider Travelling community who are repulsed by the way in which the reputation of their community overall is being sullied by a small number of irresponsible developers. In Meriden, we have lived peacefully with Gypsies and Travellers in Meriden for hundreds of years and are determined that this incident should not poison that relationship. But unlawful and inappropriate development is what it is – and should be opposed irrespective of the cultural, ethnic etc background of the developers.

In making reference to quotes on RAID web sites (your next question) you have omitted to make reference to our web site whereby a statement has been in place since October 2011. It states:

The Secretary of State has DISMISSED the appeal by the Travellers for both permanent AND temporary occupation of the site. Meriden RAID Chairman David McGrath said ‘We are relieved that Solihull Council, The Government Planning Inspector and the Secretary of State all agree with us that this unlawful site is totally inappropriate and causing daily harm to our Green Belt. Our protest camp will stay until we see clear action from the Council and Courts to enforce the decision. The focus should now be on how we urgently ease people from an unlawful and unsustainable site to one where their needs can be met AND to re-instate the land. We are determined that this episode will not taint the good relations between the settled community and the wider travelling population which has played a valued part in our community life for generations.

7. Holderness Raid has on its website the following section:

RAID would like to thank to the tireless work of dedicated villagers, the nationalists who set up RAID in the best interests of the villagers and members of the wider community who helped by writing to the planning office and attending the RAID meeting to make their feelings known. The council said it was the largest response they have ever had to a planning application. Without the effort put in by upstanding members of our community we may well have had a fully fledged gypsy site down mill lane.

Does it concern you that RAID groups such as this, which you say you are gathering together in a large alliance and for which you held a national conference last year, talk about ‘nationalists setting up RAID’ – which sounds like coded language for the BNP? Will you disassociate the National RAID alliance from such language and make it clear that the national RAID Alliance does not support racism against Gypsies, Roma or Travellers?

Meriden RAID utterly rejects racism and we have consistently made our view on this matter clear. Meriden RAID was formed spontaneously from ordinary concerned residents, determined to oppose an unauthorised development causing massive harm to a Greenfield site in the Green Belt in the heart of the Meriden Gap.

The conference in January 2011 was organised to elicit the views of residents from across the country in similar situations and facilitate discussion on a response to the Governments proposal to change the ministerial guidance for Gypsy and Traveller sites. We believe that the only long term solution to unauthorised development is the provision of authorised sites through a plan led approach based on genuine verifiable need with full engagement by the Travelling Community with Local Authorities and the settled community, in appropriate locations, coupled with robust action against those who seek to develop by stealth.

8. As I told you in a previous email, we are also looking at proposed sites in the Solihull area, one of which was, until recently, Hockley Heath. On the Hockley Heath Residents website (www.hockleyheath.org.uk/hhra–gypsy–site.html), it states that you and Doug Bacon have been ‘formally appointed to work on our behalf’ and further states that they have raised £4,560 so far towards your bill, which is, the website says, ‘just over half the amount required’. Is this money going to Meriden RAID, to your company, or to you personally?

This money will be paid to my company and from this will be deducted the services of a Planning consultant, researcher and ecologist. Residents in Hockley were concerned that they should have a professionally prepared response evaluate [sic] a proposal to locate a Traveller site in Hockley Heath. The reports identified clear planning reasons why the site would be inappropriate. Solihull Council also carried out its own independent survey and also concluded that the site was inappropriate.

9. Do you consider it is legitimate business to look for paid work opposing proposals by local councils to find Gypsy/Traveller sites when Meriden Raid is a voluntary group?

Yes. Although my services would be to facilitate the evaluation of a site not necessarily oppose it. If there are clear reasons why a site IS suitable (e.g. in brownfield areas, sustainable locations) then I can see no reason why I should oppose this. You will be aware that I & RAID have not opposed all plans to expand Gypsy and Traveller provision in Solihull. We feel that it is essential that appropriate provision is made at suitable sites on a plan led basis to avoid the ugly spectre of unlawful developments such as we have seen in Meriden.

It should noted that the site referred to in Hockley Heath was put forward by a private individual and was never therefore a ‘proposal by the Council’.

Meriden RAID raised and spent over £67,000+ engaging the services of planning consultant, highways consultant, ecologist etc. Meriden RAID cannot pay for other groups. Local groups must raise funds in the same way and pay for the expert analysis.

10. Do you see any conflict of interest between seeking paid work opposing proposals for proposed legal sites when at the same time you are seeking paid work as a trainer of councillors who may well have to decide whether such sites go ahead?

No – I have already explained that I neither provide training in planning matters neither do I form relationships with Councillors given that I am simply booked to provide training to groups on unrelated matters. I do not have contact with Councillors before or after my seminars. This answer is also expanded on in question 1.

11. Your own land, which we understand you purchased in 2007 and on which you live after having retrospectively applied for planning permission, is in the green belt. Why do you consider it is legitimate for you to live in the green belt after retrospectively applying for planning permission, and not the Gypsies at Eaves Green Lane?

I did not – and have never – applied for retrospective approval to build in the green belt in a personal or business capacity. I applied for change of use to keep filing cabinets in a bungalow and to use it for administrative purposes (without prompting from the Council). Permission was granted as there is no adverse impact on my neighbours, the building or the green belt. This is only the same level of use as a home/office scenario.

I trust that this answers your questions and look forward to further chats on camera after the Courts have made their decision in March.

Good luck with your film and your book.

Kind regards

David McGrath
Chairman Meriden RAID‌

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‌Plates

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Michelle Sheridan prepares tea in her Dale Farm caravan while her son looks on. Photo by Sebastian Hesse.

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Mary Ann McCarthy in her chalet at Dale Farm, near Crays Hill, Basildon, Essex, in summer 2011. Photo by Sebastian Hesse.

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Father Dan Mason prepares for an open-air mass to be held at Dale Farm in the run-up to the eviction. Photo by Sebastian Hesse.

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The McCarthy sisters – left to right, Margaret, Maria, Nora and Pearl (also known as Kathleen) – take tea at a protest outside the High Court, London, after the last appeal against the eviction failed on 12 October 2011. Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.

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The leader of Basildon Council, Tony Ball, gives an interview to the international media. Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images.

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Eviction day, 19 October 2011: an activist settles in at Dale Farm while police scan the perimeter. Photo by Sebastian Hesse.

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Former social worker and Wickford resident Ann Kobayashi became a vocal supporter of the Dale Farm community. Photo by Katharine Quarmby.

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A Traveller boy stands atop a van painted with protest slogans. The gantry, erected at the front gate of Dale Farm as a defence against the eviction, can be seen behind him. Photo by Katharine Quarmby.

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Metropolitan Police, dressed in riot gear, walk around the site as a caravan burns. The fire was set purposefully by an activist. Photo by Sebastian Hesse.

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Co-chair of the Gypsy Council Candy Sheridan (left, pointing) at Dale Farm on eviction day. Photo by Sebastian Hesse.

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Michelle and Nora Sheridan stand on the site after the clearance amid mounds of dirt and trenches, the product of ‘bunding’. Photo by Katharine Quarmby.

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Noah Burton in his caravan on the field he owns at Meriden, near Birmingham. Photo by Katharine Quarmby.

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Senga Townsley moved to Noah’s site in 2010. The families there were facing eviction in spring 2013. Photo by Katharine Quarmby.

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Cuzzy Delaney holding a photo of her son Johnny, who was killed because ‘he was only a ... Gypsy’ in 2003. Photo by Katharine Quarmby.

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Billy Welch, the English Romani Gypsy elder who organises Appleby Horse Fair, with his granddaughter outside the family caravan. Photo by Tom Green.

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The ‘flashing lane’ at Appleby Fair. Photo by Sebastian Hesse.

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Haggling for a fair deal on horses at Stow Horse Fair. Photo by Katharine Quarmby.

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Siddy Biddle, a member of the evangelical Gypsy Christian church Light and Life, recites a prayer before the beginning of Stow Fair. Photo by Sebastian Hesse.

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Activist Grattan Puxon at a Holocaust memorial. He and others are working to gain greater recognition of the experiences of the Romani people during the war and across Europe today. Photo by Sebastian Hesse.

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‌About the Author

Katharine Quarmby’s journalism has appeared in The Economist, Private Eye, The Times, the Mail on Sunday and the Guardian, among other publications. She has been a finalist for the prestigious Paul Foot Prize and has produced films for BBC Newsnight and Panorama. Her first book, Scapegoat, on hate crimes against disabled people, won the AMIA International Literature award. She lives in London.