MY VISIT TO ENGLISH GIPSY CHILDREN ON THE OUTSKIRTS _Frontispiece_
OF LONDON (_by E. Weldon_)
A HOUSE-DWELLING GIPSY’S WIGWAM NEAR LOUGHTON 1
INSIDE A HOUSE-DWELLING GIPSY’S WIGWAM, PUMP HILL, 7
EPPING FOREST
AN ENGLISH GIPSY COUNTESS ON THE “LOOK-OUT” (_by E. 35
Weldon_)
TWO ENGLISH GIPSY PRINCESSES “AT HOME” (_by F. 51
Weldon_)
AN ENGLISH GIPSY DUCHESS—SMITH—“RHEUMATICKY AND 69
LAME” (by _E. Weldon_)
THE “SWEETS” AND “SOURS” OF GIPSY MARRIED LIFE (_by 116
E. Weldon_)
“ON THE ROAD” TO OXFORD FAIR 123
A SCISSOR-GRINDING GIPSY. “SCISSORS TO GRIND” 207
GIPSY QUARTERS, PLAISTOW MARSHES 281
AN ENGLISH GIPSY KING—“KRÁLIS”—LYING IN WAIT IN HIS 283
PALACE, KRÁLISKO-KAIR (_by E. Weldon_)
GIPSY WINTER QUARTERS, YETHOLM 321
ESTHER FAA BLYTHE—A SCOTCH GIPSY QUEEN 328
[Picture: A house-dwelling Gipsy’s wigwam near Loughton]
A Sunday Ramble among the Gipsies upon Pump Hill and Loughton.
SUNDAY, April 23, 1882, opened with a wet morning. The clouds were thick
and heavy. The smoke seemed to hover, struggle and rise again as if life
depended on its mounting higher than the patched and broken roofs of
London houses. The rain came down drearily, dribbly, and drizzly. It
hung upon my garments with saturating tendencies, and I really got wet
through before I was aware of it. The roads were very uncomfortable for
feet in non-watertight boots. Umbrellas were up. Single “chaps,” and
others in “couples” were wending their way across Victoria Park. The
school bells were chiming out in all directions “Come to school,” “It is
time,” “Do not delay,” “Come to school.” In response to the bell-calls
the little prattlers and toddlers were hurrying along to school. Their
big sisters, with “jerks and snatches,” frequently called out, “Now,
then, come along; we shall be too late; singing will be over, and if it
is I’ll tell your mother.”
At Victoria Park Station the platelayers were at work, and when I
inquired the cause, I was told that the Queen’s carriages were to pass
over the line to Loughton at eleven o’clock “to try the metals,” and to
see that the platform was back enough to allow sufficient space for the
footboards of the royal carriages. In some cases there was not
sufficient space, and the line had to be swung a little to enable the
carriages to pass.
At Stratford I had a few minutes to wait, and a little conversation with
the stationmaster soon satisfied me that he was an observing and
common-sense Christian, with a kind heart and good wishes for the poor
gipsy children.
I arrived at Loughton in time to join in the morning service conducted by
the Wesleyans in a neat iron chapel. The service was good, plain, and
homely, and as such I enjoyed it. Of course, being a stranger in “these
parts,” I was eyed o’er with “wondering curiosity.” In the chapel there
was a tall old man who sat and stood pensively, with his head bending
low, during the services, and whom, without much hesitation, I set down
as a gipsy. He did not seem to enjoy the service. On inquiry
afterwards, I found that my surmise was correct, and that the tall man
was a gipsy Smith, of some seventy winters, who was born under a tent
upon Epping Forest, amongst the brambles, furze, and heather, with the
clouds for a shelter from the sun’s fierce rays in summer, and the
slender tent covering, with the dying embers of a stick fire, to keep
body and soul together in the midst of the wintry blasts, drifting hail,
snow, and sleet, and keen biting frosts to “nip the toes.”
After climbing the steep and rugged hill, I made my way to find out a
cocoa-nut gambler, who once gave me an invitation to call upon him when I
happened to pass that way. With much ado and many inquiries I found the
man and his wife just preparing to go with a donkey and a heavy load of
nuts to some secluded spot a few miles away, to “pick up a little money”
for their “wittles.” My visit having ended in moonshine, I now began in
earnest to hunt up the gipsies. A few minutes’ wandering among the
bushes and by-lanes brought me upon a group of half-starved, dirty,
half-naked, lost little gipsy children, who were carrying sticks to their
wretched dwellings, which were nothing better than horribly stinking,
sickening, muddy wigwams.
On making my way through mud and sink-gutter filth, almost over
“boot-tops,” I came upon a _duelling_ which, were I to live to the age of
Methuselah, I could never forget.
Sitting upon an old three-legged chair, and with a bottom composed of old
rags, cord, and broken rushes, was a bulky, dirty, greasy, idle-looking
fellow, who might never have been washed in his life. I put a few
questions to him about the weather and other trifling matters; but the
answers I got from him were such that I could not understand. To “roker”
Romany was a thing he could not do. Mumble and grumble were his
scholastic attainments.
At the door stood a poor, old, worn-out pony, which they said was as
“dodgy and crafty as any human being. It was a capital animal in a cart,
but would not run at fairs with children on its back. Immediately you
put a child upon its back it stood like a rock, and the devil could not
move it.”
In the room were five children as ragged as wild goats, as filthy as
pigs, and quite as ignorant. On an old “squab bed”—the only bed in the
room—sat a big, fat, aged gipsy woman, on a par with the man and
children. A young gipsy of about eighteen years stood at the bottom of
the squab bed enjoying his Sunday dinner. In one hand he held the dirty
plate, and the other had to do duty in place of a knife and fork. Of
what the dinner was composed I could not imagine. It seemed to be a kind
of mixture between meat, soup, fish, broth, roast and fry, thickened with
bones and flavoured with snails and bread. Upon a very rickety stool sat
a girl with a dirty bare bosom suckling a poor emaciated baby, whose
father nobody seemed to know—and, if report be true, the less that is
said about paternity the better. In this one little hole, with a boarded
floor, covered with dirt and mud at least half an inch thick, one bed
teeming with vermin, which I saw with my own eyes, and walls covered with
greasy grime, there were a man, woman, girl, young man, and five
children, huddling together on a Christian Sabbath, in Christian England,
within a stone’s throw of a Christian Church and the Church of England
day and Sunday school. None of them had ever been in a day or Sunday
school or place of worship in their lives. They were as truly heathens
as the most heathenish in the world, and as black as the blackest beings
I have ever seen. The only godly ray manifest in this dark abode was
that of gratitude and thankfulness. A pleasing trait is this. It was a
vein embedded in their nature that only required the touch of sympathy,
brotherhood, and kindness to light up the lives of these poor lost
creatures living in darkness. Natural beauty I saw none inside; but the
marks of sin were everywhere manifest. Just outside this miserable hive,
notwithstanding the stench, the bees were buzzing about seeking in vain
for honey, the butterflies were winging fruitlessly about trying to find
flowers to settle upon; and across the beautiful forest valley the cuckoo
was among the trees piping forth its ever beautiful, lovely, enchanting,
and never-tiring “cuck-coo,” “cuck-coo,” “cuck-coo;” throstles, linnets,
blackbirds, and woodpeckers were hopping about from tree to tree within a
stone’s throw, sending forth heavenly strains, echoing and re-echoing in
the distance among the wood foliage on this bright spring Sunday
afternoon. I could almost hear with Dr. James Hamilton, in his “Pearl of
Parables” (_Sunday at Home_, 1878), a poor gipsy girl singing with tears
in her eyes—
“Some angel in the land of love
For love should pity me,
And draw me in like Noah’s dove
From wastes of misery.”