Note on language: ‘The word ‘Tinker’ which was used historically to refer to Scottish Gypsy/Travellers as well as other hereditary nomadic groups, is used here only when directly quoting from primary sources, and in relation to the set of interlinked state practices described by activists as working to enact cultural genocide on Scottish nomadic peoples. Readers should note the continued use of the word within wider contemporary society should be recognised as pejorative and a form of racist language. Scottish Gypsies/Travellers are an ethnic group protected under the Equalities Act 2010, although they themselves may not identify with either of these labels, but rather may self-define as ‘Nacken’ or ‘Nawken’.
Scots Traveller Betsy Whyte was a child in the inter-war years. In the first instalment of her autobiography, The Yellow in the Broom (1979) she wrote about Hendry, a ‘rogue tinker’ who was unpopular with other Travellers for his thieving and boasting of his sexual prowess and exploits during the First World War. For this behaviour Hendry was ‘chased from camp to camp for his cockiness and his thieving’. And yet, she remembered, the ‘other travellers would not hit him or report him… they pitied him, having been in a Home, and at any camp that he came to someone would put him up and feed him’. And the reason, as Betsy’s father explained to her:
Any bairn that is taken away to they Homes is never right. When he [Hendry] was about nine he was gotten standing at the door of an inn. His mother and father were in the inn. The woman wasn’t drunk, but the authorities took the bairn anyway. She prigged [pleaded] with them, but it was no use. The woman broke her heart over her bairn and she died not long after that.
The ‘Home’ that Betsy’s father referred to would have been one of the network of industrial and approved schools set up from the 1860s to ‘reform’ the children of parents who were seen as in some way failing. ‘Vagrancy’, by definition was a failure: the Vagrancy Act 1824 that had made it a criminal offence to sleep rough or beg had, in 1912, been extended to Scotland. There was no exception, either in the terms of this Act, or indeed in the British state’s thinking more widely, for families who actively chose a mobile way of life. That is, of the kind of hereditary nomadism maintained by Romanies/Gypsies and Travellers within and across the British Isles. Mobility, for majority society, unless underpinned by conspicuous wealth, always carried with it the whiff of suspicion that there was something inherently wrong, threatening or unfortunate with having neither a stable home nor firm connections to a parish or neighbourhood. In the twentieth century, as the state extended its business into the lives of its citizens, these attitudes became expressed in multiple ways and the removal of Gypsy/Traveller children from their families to industrial/approved schools was only one example of the impact of legislation that affected their communities in the twentieth century.
Alongside active, and sometimes coercive, efforts to bring them into the formal education system, and the longstanding implementation of anti-vagrancy and begging laws, across Scotland – just as south of the border – from the 1920s onwards hereditary nomads experienced the disappearance and forced closure of traditional stopping places and a number of measures to settle and move them into housing. When they were allocated standard council housing it was common to disperse them across a district, while some local authorities constructed ‘simplified housing’ schemes to accommodate them. As they gathered pace in the mid-twentieth century decades of the high welfare state these policies together in the Scottish context became known as ‘the Tinker Experiment’.
Let us return to Whyte’s account, which I believe tells us a number of things about this was expressed, enacted and experienced on the ground. First, despite the persistence of stereotypes that maintained that Britain’s Gypsy/Traveller populations were a people untouched by modernity, Whyte’s account makes clear that Scots Travellers’ lives were profoundly shaped, not only by the major events of the twentieth century such as the world wars, but also by longer term processes including the expansion of the welfare state and the shift towards a more regulated and regularised society. Such developments, as with British society more generally, were based on unthinking assumptions of sedentism that took a fixed address – and the desirability of having one – as a given.
Second, Hendry’s experiences give us a window onto the impact of key legislation on individuals and families. Hendry’s removal from his parents was perhaps under the Industrial Schools (Scotland) Act, 1866. This gave magistrates the power to sentence vagrant children aged seven to fourteen years, to a spell in an industrial school; or perhaps it had been under the Education (Scotland) Act, 1908 that required parents to send their children to school for two hundred attendances a year, with non-compliance resulting in children being sent to a residential industrial school. Hendry’s removal might, still further, have stemmed from one of the child cruelty pieces of legislation that set out a number of behaviours – parental drunkenness, begging, having no fixed abode – that could cause a child to be removed from their parents. Underpinning all these laws was the unspoken belief that ‘vagrancy’, whether accidental or intentional, was in and of itself demanding of vigorous state action.
Third, and building on from this, Betsy Whyte’s memory demands that we think past any idea of this being the work of a faceless entity – ‘the state’ – to unpick exactly who might have been actively complicit in Hendry’s removal. His apprehension might have been prompted by the action of a member of the public, who having made their own judgement of Hendry’s parents’ ethnicity and behaviour might have alerted the authorities; or perhaps a passing policeman or Scottish National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children inspector had taken in the scene and decided that, owing to the unfit nature of Hendry’s parents, he needed to be removed to an industrial school. Then a magistrate would have needed to agree to the committal and the local education authority would have to approve the costs involved. And finally the school principal to receive him. This is to say that institutionalisation did not just ‘happen’ to Hendry, but rather at every stage particular individuals played a role. And, at each of those stages, the individuals would have taken in the fact of his Traveller heritage, and would have allowed the fact of his Travellerness to play a part in their judgement. And so the tiny second-hand trace we have of Hendry provided by Whyte, hints at something much larger: a systemic denigration of Scottish Gypsies’ and Travellers’ mobile way of life that worked to ensure that the enforcement of apparently neutral pieces of welfare legislation broke up their families, and by extension their social structure and communities.
Finally, what perhaps comes through most strongly in Betsy Whyte’s account is, despite Hendry’s behaviour, the compassion and understanding that other Scots Travellers had for him. Even her few lines tell of the consideration given to someone apparently irretrievably broken by their experience of institutionalisation. It is hard to escape the normalcy of Betsy’s tone. Hendry, we feel from her words, and the behaviour of the Travellers she describes, was not a one-off. In fact, the most easily accessible figures we have of Traveller children in institutions come from the ‘tinker census’ of October 1917, and these back up this impression. That census gave the total number of Scots Travellers as 2,728, of whom 171 were children who, at that moment, were housed in industrial schools (although it is likely that this census significantly undercounted the number of Scottish Gypsies/Travellers). We have neither the total number of children, nor any figures for the total number of Travellers who had ever been institutionalised, but, at just over 6 per cent of the entire Traveller population on one particular day in 1917, that was a significant number of potential Hendrys.
Scots Traveller campaigners including the MacPhees of Bobbin Mill have long fought for recognition from the Scottish government of the deep harms done to them personally, and their community more generally, by the ‘Experiment’. There is yet to be published any substantive and detailed research into the conception, implementation and effect of these policies: we are awaiting a Scottish Government commissioned report. But even without this there is enough research to show how cumulatively imposed sedentism has been nothing short of catastrophic for Scotland’s hereditary nomadic populations. They have significantly poorer health and life outcomes across all measures, and the government’s own independent equality adviser, Kaliani Lyle has pointed to the ‘widespread exclusion, deprivation and social antipathy that Gypsy/Travellers face’ as a matter of course in their daily lives and across their life course.
The problem with sedentarism is that it is so embedded in every level of thought and action of majority society that it doesn’t necessarily need to be spelled out. It was, and is, embedded as much in the momentary judgement made passing by a wayside stopping place or of a Traveller family sitting inside a public house as it was and is in legislation and procedure. Not only long-standing government policies but also more nebulous attitudes held by public health officials, police officers, teachers, social workers and individual members of the public, all worked to play their part in subjecting Scots Travellers to the twentieth century sedentist state.