A brief history of the Gypsies in Britain

Gypsies¹ have lived in Britain since Elizabethan times and over the centuries have evoked much fascination, revulsion and hostility on the one hand, attraction on the other. Where did they come from? For a long time Egypt was the answer, as the term ‘Gypsies’ indicates. Isabel Fonseca, in her encompassing panorama of Europe’s Gypsies, reports that the citizens of Elizabethan England believed the newcomers deliberately painted their faces with walnut juice, ‘causing their faces to be made blacke, as if they were Egyptians’ (quoted from a pamphlet of 1610, pp. 236–7). But thorough historical and linguistic studies have since confirmed that the immigrants originally came from Rajastan in India (Cressy, pp. 2–4). They left this region for unknown reasons in the twelfth century and spread around Europe, some of them reaching the British Isles about 300 years later. Recently, in the 1990s, their group experienced a fresh growth by the arrival of distant relations from the Balkans who, to distinguish them from the descendants of the original immigrants, are often termed Roma. The Gypsies of continental Europe kept many of their cultural traditions over the centuries as well as their language Romani (or Romanes), which was, however, gradually mixed with the tongues of host countries. The British version, officially called Angloromani or cant by the people themselves, has been fast declining; this is largely due to changes in their way of life, but the authors of the texts considered in this chapter proudly use many of the old words, adding glossaries to their books for the uninitiated – with the exception of novelist Louise Doughty, who provides only a few explanations under ‘Acknowledgements’.

Traditionally, despite their special lifestyle and unfamiliar language, the itinerant Gypsies were an accepted part of the British population, as they fulfilled important tasks for the general society: above all they helped farmers with planting and harvesting corn, hops, vegetables and fruit, but they also dealt in horses, repaired tools, pots and pans, picked and sold wild flowers, made objects from copper or wood and collected, repaired and resold rags and old clothes. Yet their little-known private lives in their vehicles and their communal life on the stopping places – actchin tans in Romani language – caused much speculation, oscillating between demonisation and romanticisation. Damian Le Bas, a graduate from Oxford born in 1958 of gypsy parents, in his book The Stopping Places, does away with romantic fantasies about the living conditions in the open countryside, targeting especially certain painters he calls ‘the Gypsylorists’. He writes:

they found their favourite Gypsies in the finest of wagons on beautiful windswept heaths, by the shores of picturesque Welsh lakes, or slumbering in first-class tents among sheltered dunes. Eighteenth-century landscape painters placed Romani families in the gently cupping roots of great willows and beech groves. Later the painters Dame Laura Knight and Sir Alfred Munnings depicted ‘their’ Gypsies at country fairs, dressed in elaborate clothes, smiling and smoking cigarettes, dancing at leisure. (p. 24)

And he continues:

It was not that all this was untrue, but it was askew, lopsided. It was only part of the picture. […] the Gypsy reality also comprised frozen copses and hilltops. Old maintenance roads with potholes and bad light. Scrap yards. Council waste ground. Lay-bys near the edges of tips. Slag heaps and drained marshes. Fen ends. Chalk pits, yards and quarries. (p. 25)

Life was tough for Gypsies in pre-industrial times, not only because of bad routes and uncomfortable stopping places, as the books to be discussed here will prove. But they stuck to it passionately until their lifestyle gradually began to change since the 1930s and with increasing speed since the Second World War.

In 1976 the Gypsies of Britain were recognised as one of the ethnic groups of the country, protected by the Race Relations Act. Their number today is estimated at between 150,000 and 300,000.²

Changing lifestyle

Several causes came together to force the Romani to make changes in their traditional lifestyle. On the one hand the mechanisation of agriculture put an end to their main sources of income, and on the other hand a long series of local and national laws continually restricted their freedom of movement by prohibiting camping on ever more public sites and even on private ground they had rented or owned themselves.

According to government statistics, nowadays only a minority (twenty-four per cent) still live in caravans, old buses or other temporary homes, indicating a mobile lifestyle, while the majority of Romani live in permanent dwellings, preferably in single houses, most of them semi-detached, 9.5 per cent of which they own (as compared to thirty-five per cent of houses among the general population).³ Quite a large number of them, however, try to at least spend some weeks or months every year on the move with their vehicles. In many areas Gypsies have fared and still fare worse than the average Briton. Though not systematically persecuted and murdered as in Nazi Germany, they have been victims of expulsion, discrimination, legal restrictions and violence in Britain as in many other countries worldwide. As a result, even today their health is poorer. Of those answering the 2021 Census, 12.5 per cent rated their health as bad, in contrast to only 5.2 per cent of the total population; one in five newborn babies dies compared to one in a hundred among the rest of the population; life expectancy is ten to twelve years lower than that of non-Travellers, with one-third of men dying before the age of fifty-nine. Part of the explanation is their economic situation. Most Gypsies work in dependent, only modestly paid routine jobs or are self-employed, and 31.2 per cent are unemployed or have never worked at all as compared to only seven per cent of the total population. Yet a growing number of businessmen, academics, artists and writers has come to the fore, due to changing attitudes to education.

For centuries, Gypsies did not attend school and remained illiterate, one consequence being that they could not leave any written records of their lives. But from the 1930s onwards schooling was made compulsory, first only for a hundred days of the school year, but after the Second World War full compulsory education was introduced for all children, though still numerous young Gypsies dropped out. Even today only nineteen per cent – as compared to sixty-five per cent of all children – take part in primary education, and 10.8 per cent – as compared to 28.9 per cent in total – do their A levels. Nevertheless, in the course of the twentieth century the majority of Romani have learnt to read and write.

Quite a few have begun to produce their own literature. Poetry is particularly popular among Gypsies, but in the last three decades a substantial body of autobiographical writing has been produced in attempts to correct widespread fantasies with real life memories. Women are in the foreground of this movement. Moreover, some novelists have emerged, too, though not many yet. One of them is Louise Doughty, born in 1963 into a Romani family in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. She is an example of the lucky minority socially rising through education, as a response in a 2009 interview reveals: ‘The idea that my family has produced a writer! My father left school when he was thirteen. My mum when she was fifteen. My brothers and sisters and I were the first generation to even finish secondary education and then go to university’ (Pirker, p. 38).

The testimony of Gypsy women’s autobiographies

Aiming to explore how Gypsy women writers see Gypsy culture in past and present and especially the place of women, I will first examine some autobiographies. I have concentrated on texts by three authors of different generations as relevant examples. Two memoirs were written by Betsy Whyte, a Scottish Gypsy born in 1919: The Yellow on the Broom (1979) and Red Rowans and Wild Honey (1990). The other two authors are English Romani: Maggie Smith-Bendell, born in 1941, wrote Our Forgotten Years: A Gypsy Woman’s Life on the Road (2009); and Jess Smith, born in 1949, published Jessie’s Journey. Autobiography of a Travelling Girl in 2002, followed by two more memoirs of her later years. Finally, I will examine the novel Stone Cradle (2006), by Louise Doughty, which covers a time span of roughly one hundred years, from 1875 to 1960, reflecting the cultural changes the Romani went through in individual life stories.

Gypsy women’s memoirs can be considered a particular sub-genre of working-class women’s autobiographical writing, which – with a few earlier examples, such as Margaret Llewelyn Davies’s collection of accounts, Life as We Have Known It (1931) – flourished from the 1950s on, stimulated by left-wing academics, literary critics and publishers with a special interest in working-class culture and literature. In a seminal text of 1956, French philosopher George Gusdorf had characterised the classical male autobiography (by, for example, Rousseau, Goethe, and others) as motivated by ‘the curiosity of the individual about himself, the wonder that he feels before the mystery of his own destiny’ (p. 31). By contrast, Sheila Rowbotham, writing about women’s autobiographies in general, pointed out that ‘a woman can never see herself as a unique entity, as she is always forced (by male identification) to see herself as woman, i.e. as a member of a group’ (quoted in Stanford Friedman, p. 38). Regenia Gagnier has carried this thought further with reference to working-class women’s autobiographies, arguing that these women are communal and communicative authors in a double sense, writing on behalf of women, not in general, but of women as members of their class, ‘to record lost experiences for future generations, to raise money, to warn others, to teach others, to relieve or amuse themselves’ (p. 265). And, one may add: to inform middle-class readers about how the women of the other half live and have lived.

Gypsy women writers have even more reason than white working-class women to focus on their group’s way of life rather than the development of their personality, as the gap between their lifestyle and that of the majority is even wider, which in the past has led to much misunderstanding, suspicion, fear and hostility, but also to romanticising and eroticising, not only in painting but also in literature and certainly in popular perception. We all know examples from classical literature: sinister thieves or conspirators living in filth on the one hand, fascinating men and women, musicians, dancers, fortune-tellers on the other. In Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), for instance, we find unscrupulous Gypsy men trying to persuade an old Englishman to steal for them, frightening his little granddaughter, who overhears their conversation. As an example of the opposite stereotype is D.H. Lawrence’s novella The Virgin and the Gipsy (1926), in which the encounter with an attractive Gypsy man makes an English girl realise the bigotry and shallowness of her family. Not only does he arouse her sexual desire: in an unselfish action he rescues her from drowning. So it does not surprise that the female chroniclers’ first focus of interest is to present Gypsy culture and traditional lifestyle in a fair light, while their second motive is to describe the role of women in that context.

Though the writers differ in temperament and talent, with Betsy Whyte even having help from professional writers, the texts have many features in common. All stories are told in the first person, in chronological order and in an oral style; formative events and experiences are told, sometimes with a touch of humour, and always connected with general observations on cultural habits and traditions. Whyte, Smith and Smith-Bendell include much dialogue and mix Standard English with a certain amount of Romani words. They write at length about their youth, when the traditional lifestyle was still flourishing, but also address the great cultural changes that Gypsies had to cope with in later years.

As to the first focus, ‘group culture’, the natural and material conditions of the Gypsy way of life are remembered and described in detail, for example, landscapes, the conditions of roads and stopping places in the different seasons, the vehicles and shelters, types of work, kitchen equipment, furniture, clothes, jewellery, and so on. What strikes the reader immediately is the passion for moving freely in the open country. Whyte, for example, explains about some relatives: ‘like all travelling people, they just had to keep moving. It is only with this sense of freedom that they can get any joy out of living. And they are willing to bear discomfort, even hardships, to keep that freedom’ (Red Rowans, p. 183). Pleasure in nature is a strong part of that love. Here an example from Smith-Bendell’s book:

Spring was in full bloom as we travelled on the road. May blossom packed the hedges and their heavy perfume followed us along. Primroses and violets brought up the rear and seemed to smile as we slowly eased past. This was our world – the only one we knew. Open roads and hedges in full bloom. We could watch the badgers at play and hear birds singing as they made their nests […]. Foxes would bark to a mate. (p. 117)

Similarly Whyte: ‘Kate started the horse to trot and I soon got lost in the beauty of the scenery […]. A brilliance of wild flowers patterned the grass and couthy masses of honeysuckle caressed some of the trees’ (Red Rowan, p. 5). Life in houses, by contrast, which had been traditional during the winter months, but became permanent for many after 1945 because enforced by law, was hated by most characters. They felt ‘like wild birds in cages’ (Whyte, The Yellow, p. 184), in a ‘tea box’ or in a ‘wee square hole like a moose that’s been chased wi’ a pussy cat’ (Red Rowan, p. 126).

The various vehicles used as means of transport as well as shelters are lovingly described. Most impressive were the horse-drawn vardos, with their round shaped roofs of canvas and colourfully painted wooden sides and doors, which emerged in the 1830s. But they were too expensive for many, so that poorer families, as the texts document, often simply walked from place to place, men as well as women and children, carrying their possessions in bundles or, if they could afford it, with the children sitting on a small pony cart. At night tents were put up, the tarpaulins supported by branches and sticks to be collected nearby. After the invention of motor cars, converted old buses and finally caravans were most commonly used. Water was fetched in buckets from the nearest well or burn, milk occasionally asked for at a farmer’s door. Simple meals, mostly made from wild plants and animals like fish or rabbit, were cooked outside the shelters in big pots over an open fire, some of them true antiques. Smith writes: ‘Now, folks, if you could just see the size of the family heirloom and the colour of it – jet black with soot, from hundreds of years hanging over a blazing fire. A great muckle brute that took two hands to carry it’ (p. 90).

Socialising was of great importance. Relocating was not always done in search of work but often from the wish to meet up with other family members and friends, to live and work together and to enjoy ceilidhs (informal parties) in the evenings: sitting round the fire, making music, singing, telling stories or simply chatting and drinking. Men especially apparently drank a lot, while men and women and even older children indulged in smoking pipes. Friendly strangers were treated hospitably. Smith describes how, as a child, she once brought a Scot she had met playing the pipes in the wilderness to the family camp. After all had eaten, the party began: ‘ “Piper, would you start a ceilidh for us?” I asked him touching his pipe box. Mammy drew her Jew’s harp from her skirt pocket and joined him […]. The rest of us sang and danced while night drew in all round on sad Culloden Moor’ (Smith, p. 91). But enjoying the family circle was of prime importance: the camps built of vehicles owned by relations provided security and warmth. In some cases family bonds were so strong that they bordered on incest. Whyte writes:

Travelling people liked to marry into their own breed. A breed was usually two or perhaps three names. Our breed was made up of Johnstones, Fownleys, and Reids. They intermarried for generations, knew their faults and weaknesses, also the good points, and did not like any person marrying into another breed. (Red Rowan, p. 91)

Nevertheless, marrying outside the inner circle and even gorjers (members of the white majority) became more and more frequent over time.

In one feature, Gypsy culture differed most remarkably from the capitalist society around: their attitude to wealth and presents. Whyte reports: ‘Few travellers put much value on any material thing. They like to have them as well as anyone else, but don’t worry one bit if they are taken from them or if they lose them’ (The Yellow, p. 140). And she explains: ‘We just lived one day at a time […]. Travellers thought it a bad sin to hoard up things and money for an event, or thing or person […] and believed the very planning and hoarding would bring death or disaster to the person or project’ (p. 138). Gypsies loved to have gold jewellery or coins to stick in the women’s long plaits but easily gave them away to a friend or relation: ‘To give away something that you really liked yourself was considered the only way to give’ (p. 54). A striking result of this attitude was a unique funeral rite: when someone had died, all his or her belongings were burnt, even big and precious vardos with everything in them, even if it might bring poverty on the surviving family members.

This does not mean that Gypsies are presented as angels, but the cases of misbehaviour reported are negligible. Women are sometimes short-tempered or jealous, some men are described as lazy, very few as occasionally thieving, but – what is remarkable, considering the amount of drink men are described to consume – no heavy fighting among clan members is recorded. The reason is, of course, the overall aim: to represent Gypsies in a positive light. The ‘baddies’ are always white people, in the first place policemen, who chase them from forbidden sites, but also neighbours, suspecting them of dirty habits and complaining about noise. Schools were often uncomfortable places for Gypsy children, where the other pupils ignored or attacked them and teachers tended to treat them unfairly. Even some nuns were full of scorn, as Smith remembers: ‘For reasons known only to herself, Sister Alice had by now shown her dislike by using me as an example of “how not to be.” I was, she told everyone, disobedient, unwilling to learn, full of cheek, and, oh, yes, a heathen gypsy!’ (Smith, p. 18). Many cases of skipping school or running away are reported, but Whyte fondly remembers an instance of remarkably fair treatment by her headmaster. When a classmate out of spite once accused her of copying, a teacher was ready to strap her, but little Betty, feeling ‘the rebellious pride which I had inherited from my mother, well up’, kicked the teacher on the shin bone and fled out of the room. Finally the headmaster, who had realised her intelligence, rather than punishing her gave her books and extra lessons (Whyte, The Yellow, p. 17).

When we now focus on the role of women in traditional Gypsy culture as documented in autobiographies, they by no means come out as queens of the road. Wagons and caravans were always driven by men, and to be allowed to sit next to the coachman of a vardo was a special honour for a woman. There can be no doubt: it was a patriarchal society. Whyte writes: ‘A man’s word was law and women were supposed not only to keep them but to serve them hand and foot’ (The Yellow, p. 33). And in another place: ‘Men and boys were the VIPs among the travelling people. First their mothers and sisters, then their wives and daughters, treated them with the greatest respect and protected them most unselfishly from anything that might hurt them or damage their health’ (Red Rowans, p. 115). In some cases women obviously had to do even more: though the men in Whyte’s family always worked, she confirms ‘there were other breeds of travellers whose men folk never did a hand’s turn, depending entirely on the women to keep them. They would scoff at men who worked, saying “Women must be scarce when you can’t get one to keep you”’ (The Yellow, p. 47).

Even if none of the autobiographers experienced this extreme form of gender inequality in her family, surely all the women figuring in the texts, authors as well as their female relations and friends, coped with an enormous amount of work, beginning with managing the household, that is, cooking, cleaning and washing, all without the help of modern equipment, and caring for children. As a matter of course they also contributed to the family income by helping with the farm work or doing special jobs such as ‘doing the doors’, that is, going from door to door, often accompanied by their daughters, to sell wildflowers, berries and self-made things like baskets, clothes pegs or wax- and paper-flowers or asking for rags and old clothes to repair and resell. Fortune-telling, according to the testimony of the texts, was actually performed only by a few women who were believed to have a special gift. Smith writes: ‘Traveller women who have the “gift” never disclose their secrets, not even to their own daughters! They say if an individual is to be clairvoyant, then they will know from within from an early age’ (p. 216). This hard life, which the writers remember with a remarkable lack of self-pity, follows on a childhood they all remember with nostalgia: they enjoyed great freedom playing in the open country and were protected and spoilt by all grown-ups. Children were so much treasured that, as Whyte reports, ‘many a young wife received a beating from her husband, if a child got badly hurt or had an accident’ (Whyte, The Yellow, p. 21). But for girls, helping their mothers began early. Whyte, who had only sisters, remembers ‘one day watching a girl washing a huge heap of shirts and socks belonging to her father and brothers, and I actually envied her – wishing that I had brothers to wash for and to serve’ (pp. 150–51).

Sexuality in Gypsy culture – in striking contrast to popular and literary fantasies – was apparently treated with great reserve. Boys and girls were allowed to play together but prevented from meeting in private. Girls in particular were watched over closely and educated to prudery. As all the family slept in the same shelter, girls learnt to undress under a blanket, and were taught to take care that they always hung up their washed underwear out of sight of the boys. In some families, girls were not allowed to wear a dress without sleeves or go bare-legged (Whyte, Red Rowan, p. 27). Although girls usually married very early, that is to say, in their teens, they were left in total ignorance about sex. This ignorance produced some funny moments of discovery. Smith, for instance, remembers, how she and a group of kids observed a couple having sex in a field and believed: ‘ “God almighty, the wimmin’s gitten murdert” roared wee Tommy’. And they ran for help (Smith, p. 42). But in other cases the prudery led to a shock on the wedding night, or worse, to lasting aversion to sex. Giving birth and caring for the babies were exclusively women’s concern: they helped and supported one another in many ways. When a woman was about to give birth, she was accompanied to a separate place, for instance an empty barn or even a protected corner of a field, by female relations, who acted as midwives and also took over cooking for the family for four weeks, as young mothers were considered to be unclean.

Despite the subordinate role of women our memoir writers were brought up to, they all made a career in later years, as storytellers or singers of traditional songs at folk festivals, on radio or TV, or as activists, campaigning for the rights of Gypsies to live in accordance with their culture. Why did they not include this part of their lives in their books? The answer is probably that they are not feminists fighting for equal rights for women but were primarily concerned with the defence of their culture as a whole, including the traditional second-class place of women.

The view of a woman novelist: Louise Doughty’s Stone Cradle

In 2009 an article with the title ‘Waiting for the great British Gypsy novel’ appeared in the Guardian. Author Ben Myers must have missed Stone Cradle by Louise Doughty, first published in 2006. After Doughty had already published Fires in the Dark (2003), a harrowing novel on the persecution of Gypsies in Eastern Europe in the 1940s, in Stone Cradle she turned to the Gypsies of Britain. In an interview of 2018 Doughty explained her motivation, which is very similar to that of the memoir writers. ‘Stone Cradle is very much my family ancestry, my family were Cambridgeshire Smiths’, she said and continued:

My great granddad was a horse dealer in Cambridgeshire and we had lots of stories about him when we were growing up and has always been a big part of our family mythology. […] That was the last generation on the road, after that our family was settled in Peterborough, but it was a big part of my dad’s personal identity, and we grew up with amazing stories about him and I was always fascinated by them and that is why I went on to write Stone Cradle, it’s my family history. (Smith, 2018)

In the first chapters Gypsy culture plays an important role. Actually, in this novel we find the same two focuses of interest as in the autobiographies, yet the order of importance is reversed: Gypsy lifestyle is an important element, but the main focus is on the role and fate of women, Gypsies as well as gorjer women. Many of the features of Romani culture, familiar from the autobiographical texts, are woven into the narrative: life in tents or vardos, moving from place to place and all the traditional types of work. Even the loving decoration of a vardo is described as well as its traditional burning after the owner’s death (Doughty, 2007, pp. 66–8). Clem, one of the main characters, sets fire to the elaborate vardo left by her partner of many years: ‘I had promised him that much, and up in smoke it went with him. I could have sold it for a pretty penny […] But it had to go with him, his vardo, he had planned and painted every inch of it’ (pp. 87–8).

Yet in Doughty’s novel scenes of Gypsy culture alternate with scenes from gorjer life in country and town, for the story consists of the intertwined life stories of two women and one man; the Gypsies Clementina Lee, called Clem, and her son Eliah, called Lijah, and the white working-class orphan Rose, who escapes slavery on a farm in The Fens by running off with and marrying Lijah. Clem and Rose express their often contrasting views of the events, taking turns in telling the story as first-person narrators expressing their (strong) emotions in an oral, simple style, fitting their modest level of education. Both had grim experiences in their early youth. They lost their parents early, and Clem, as a young girl, was raped by an elderly Gypsy, which made her a mother but left her sexually frozen. For many years she remained single, until she finally agreed to live with a warm-hearted man, Adolphus, in a loving but sexless partnership. Meanwhile, in the first part of the novel, the young Rose is ruthlessly exploited by a farmer and his son. By linking their fates, Doughty subtly indicates how much two underprivileged groups in British society, the white working class and the Romani, have in common.

Rose falls for Lijah’s charm and sex appeal: ‘I looked at Eliah. He was a handsome man, with his crooked teeth and a smile that made me dizzy’ (p. 122). And he is kind and gentle when they first have sex (p. 138). But over time he proves to be an unstable character, an unreliable provider for his family, unable to show his affection to anyone and a heavy drinker. Yet he is not at the centre of interest; the main message of the novel is the praise of women’s strength in difficult circumstances (partly caused by the social circumstances, partly by Lijah’s character) and their solidarity, even if they come from differing cultural backgrounds and their connection is not voluntary. Though Clem, who loves her only son Lijah fiercely, initially feels betrayed by his secret marriage to Rose, she gradually comes round and helps the young family, who have left the Gypsy camp for a house in a small town and are permanently threatened by poverty. Beginning as opponents, the two very different women get closer and closer so that Rose on her premature deathbed wants only Clem by her side. After her death, Clem explains to her granddaughter: ‘Your Mum and I were close as close can be for 30 years. I don’t know what to do now that she’s not here’ (p. 310). Doughty celebrates their final closeness by an ironic symbolic scene: Clem and Rose end up in the same grave, as Clem, for want of space in the cemetery, several years later is buried above Rose.

Birth and death play a strong symbolic role in Doughty’s novel. The story begins in 1875 with Clem giving birth to Lijah on a gravestone, symbolising the Gypsies’ low social position at that time: young Clem, living temporarily with her parents in a cottage on a village cemetery near Peterborough left to them by a compassionate priest, finds no better place when the pains set in while her mother is absent. The last chapter offers a hopeful view into the future. The topic is Lijah’s funeral with his three grown-up children attending. It is 1960, and the traditional Gypsy way of life has practically come to an end, but something new has begun: the children, all successful in bourgeois professions, have integrated into mainstream British society.

Whether the optimism of the ending is justified by real changes in the social acceptance of Gypsies, is a matter of speculation. Louise Doughty has become a very successful writer, some of whose novels have been adapted as even more successful film versions, in the first place the thriller Apple Tree Yard of 2013, which was turned into a four-part TV drama broadcast by BBC in 2017 and watched by millions of people worldwide. But all Doughty’s later fiction figures white protagonists. Does this mean she doubts that the general readership has developed a great interest in the life and fate of Gypsies? When asked in the 2018 Ruby Smith interview, if she would write another book about Roma and why, Doughty answered that her two books on Gypsy life ‘got very good reviews but they didn’t sell particularly’. Nevertheless she expressed her intention to take up the topic ‘at one stage’, and this time would ‘write about Eastern European Roma in London perhaps […] because the whole issue of immigration and migration is incredibly important at the moment’. But she has not done so yet. Perhaps Doughty assumes that – against her hopes – the sympathetic interest in migrants has actually not increased since the 2000s, when Fires in the Dark and Stone Cradle came out, and that it might even be better for her career not to remind readers of her gypsy origin. Interestingly, though in Doughty’s online biography her ‘Romany ancestry’ is mentioned in passing in connection with Stone Cradle – though not as an important part of her life data – neither her publisher, Faber, nor Wikipedia makes any mention of it.

Note

1. 1.  In contrast to the German, Zigeuner, the English term Gypsy, with a capital G, is not a ‘non-word’ yet. Though deemed derogatory by some Traveller organisations, it is used by official government institutions as well as by many of the people themselves, often with pride. Together with some people of Irish or Scottish origin and New Age Travellers, they form part of the larger group of the population called Travellers, who all prefer to live an itinerant lifestyle. To distinguish them from the other subgroups, Gypsies are sometimes termed Gypsy Travellers or Romanichal Travellers, referring to their specific ethnic background: Gypsies are not of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic origin, but Romani (also spelt Romany).

2. 2.  Strangely, in the 2021 Census, Gypsies are grouped together with Irish Travellers. According to the census, both groups, identified through a tick-box or write-in response, together numbered only 71,440 (Office of National Statistics). Yet the authors admit that the actual figures are much higher, explaining the difference is due to obstacles to participation in census surveys. Other sources estimate the number of Romani in the UK is between 150,000 and 300,000 (Minority Rights Group International).

3. 3.  The following statistical information is mainly based on three government sources: Ethnicity Facts and Figures. Gypsy, Roma and Irish Traveller Ethnicity, Summary, updated 29 March 2022; Office of National Statistics, Gypsy or Irish Traveller Populations, England and Wales: Census 2021; and UK Parliament, Tackling Inequalities Faced by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Communities, published 9 May 2019.

Works cited