Catching a glimpse of the Romany Road.

(click on thumbnails for full-size images)

I read that a thousand years ago they traveled on horseback and in wagons. They were frequently richly dressed and dark in complexion with gold coins woven into their black hair. Romany Gypsies are England's oldest ethnic minority. They come and go at the edges of society and, before meeting some of them to make a collection of portrait photographs, I knew next to nothing about them.

“I wish more people would just come in and see us," I was told. "See how we live, who we are. You’d think we had three heads the way people look at us. I wish people would just turn up and talk to us instead of thinking they know all about us from the rubbish that gets written and said.”

I was simply an interested stranger from the settled community but, wherever I went, that interest was rewarded by the unwinding of memories, the articulation of pride and the heartbreaking familiarity with day to day prejudice.

I met Maggie, a Romany woman, who sat across the table from me dressed all in black as part of a twelve month mourning period after the death of her mother. She is settled in the West of England where once her neighbours collected cash which they hoped would persuade her to move on; to move away. Ahead of her, walking into the future on the long road her people have traveled, are her children, whose integration into the settled community is successful. Behind her are her parents who I can see in a photograph cutting branches to make clothes pegs to sell in villages. They sit and cook by the side of that thousand year old road out of India, through Persia and Eastern Europe, and on into the Gypsy sites and Local Authority settlements in England.

There are photographs on the table, some of mine reminding her of old friends, some of hers reminding her of the past and teaching me about her people. As she flicked through them and talked it was impossible to keep old fears and old assumptions in focus. The clamour of newspaper headlines warning of the squalor of Gypsy camps, and the political jingoism coupling traveling people and immigrants as a problem to get tough about, began to sound hollow.
More than fifty years ago I was amongst children who chanted the skipping rhyme, "My mother said, I never should, play with the Gypsies in the wood. If I did, she would say, dirty little Gypsies run away." Now, through the process of making photographs, I was getting to know these mythical child stealers as proud people awake to the often painful but always rich bloodline which makes them Romany Gypsies.

"A policeman once said to me," I was informed, "that it must be hard for Gypsies because we had no country we belong to. I told him I could trace my line back in England further than he could and we had fought and died in wars and were as English as him.
"In the war, you know, when there was conscription, the men had no address and couldn't get a letter to call them up. Somebody just arrived and took them; left the women to look after themselves. It wasn't unusual then that they'd come back in a few days and take the horses. We had no men and no way to move."

As Maggie turned the photographs on the table, her memory drifted with them into the austere years after the Second World War when change was everywhere and the way of life that Gypsies had known for hundreds of years was beginning to be threatened.

There is a photograph of a funeral. In the distance the barrelled tops of trailers can be seen and in the foreground a line of mourners following a hearse trails into the distance.
"It was my brother's funeral," she tells me. "He was killed in an accident with a wagon. My father held us all up, one at a time, so we could lean into the coffin to kiss him goodbye."
She shakes herself from this memory but the glimpse of her own childhood stays with her.
"You know, it would be about 1950 when I was ten or eleven. The men were out delivering rag bills in the villages and a big, black car pulled up and a feller in a suit got out. Everybody thought he was a gavver and kept away but he drew the women together and told them he was from the Government. He had papers in his hand and he said we were to stop traveling on the road and move to a site. The women said they'd never heard of a site and would do no such thing. But this man said that if we didn't move onto this council site then the children would be taken into care to learn to read and write. Well, the worst thing you can do to a Gypsy woman is to threaten her children so there was uproar. When the men came back there was talking and shouting into the night. They were mad and they left the common straight off to get out of the way and hide themselves.

"I remember my father tying sacking round the horses' hooves so that they would go quiet through the villages in the early hours and nobody would know we were passing and tell where we had gone.

"That was the first we knew of sites."

Early on in my contacts with Gypsy families someone said to me that, because it was becoming impossible to stop, it was becoming necessary to settle. I am quite sure that I didn’t understand this properly at the time but now I think I can catch the weight of that statement.
That difficulty in stopping relates, of course, to the closure of the traditional camping places along the road and to the laws which move people on. Settlement brings with it access to education and doctors and many other needful things. It also brings relief from the constant pressure to move on and move away.

It seems to me, however, that to stop is to pause. It gives time to work, to meet others or to relax and then to move on. To settle, on the other hand, seems to imply ending the journey. All of the Gypsy people who talked to me have insisted that their sense of identity, the blood line which makes them Gypsies, will remain and retain its central importance for them. The way of life, however, the traditional work and the following of that work through the seasons which shaped the travel, is changing and may be drawing to a close.
And the future?

Michael Howard, as Margaret Thacher's Home Secretary in 1994 steered a Criminal Justice Act through Parliament. This act repealed the Caravan Sites Act which obliged local authorities to provide living space for Travelers. During the last U.K. general election, Howard, as Conservative Party leader proposed the repeal of the Human Rights Act if it stood in the way of evicting Travelers from unauthorized sites, claiming that there was no racism involved in his proposal.

There was an intention in the 1994 legislation to promote opportunities for Traveling People to lead a settled life on their own land but by 2003 a survey conducted by Lord Avebury found that 96% of Travelers who apply for planning permission to settle on their own land are refused.
I have tried hard to make and present images of these proud and welcoming people which are positive and direct because that is the way I found them. For nearly two years I have been turning up, unannounced, at Gypsy sites, most of which were, at the time, unauthorized. I have pulled up beside caravans at roadsides and I have been welcomed and treated well. I have been influenced by the people I have met. Who could not be?

I keep in mind the photographs and stories given to me by a Gypsy woman in the West of England and offer my own pictures in the hope of a little more understanding in a world where these final few words are not unusual...

“We’ve owned the field over there by the main road for years. There’s nothing round it, nobody near it, just the main road. We applied for planning permission to live on it, just us, just the family, and they said no. We did what they said and appealed but we had to get off the field, where we were bothering nobody, until after the appeal.

Now it’s all going through and we are going to be able to live on the field. But in the meantime it’s been eleven months. We’ve had to live at the side of the main road in our caravans with traffic shaking past us. Me and my wife and my children and my children’s children, in three caravans. We’ve got a generator for the electricity but no water, and the man at the garage down the road lets us wash and use his toilet. Everybody who knows us likes us but people drive past and think ... look at those Gypsies on the tarmac in a lay–by … It doesn’t seem right, does it?”