Gipsy Life: Being an account of our Gipsies and their children, with suggestions for their improvementSmith, George
History
Gipsy Life: Being an account of our Gipsies and their children, with suggestions for their improvement
Smith, George
Romanies -- Great Britain
Gipsies die like other folk, although before doing so they may have lived
and quarrelled like the Kilkenny cats among other Gipsies; but at death
these things are all forgotten, and a Gipsy funeral seems to be the means
to revive all the good they knew about the person dead and a burying of
all the bad connected with the dead Gipsy’s life. I am now referring to
a few of the better class of Gipsies. Gipsies, as a rule, pay special
regard to the wishes of a dying Gipsy, and will sacrifice almost anything
to carry them out. I attended the funeral of a house-dwelling Gipsy,
Mrs. Roberts, at Notting Hill, a few weeks ago. The editor and
proprietor of the _Suburban Press_, refers to this funeral in his edition
under date February 28th, as follows:—“On Monday last a noteworthy event
took place in the humble locality of the Potteries, Notting Dale. In
this district are congregated a miscellaneous population of the poorest
order, who get what living they can out of the brick-fields or adjoining
streets and lanes, or by costermongering, tinkering, &c., &c. They dwell
together in the poorest and most melancholy-looking cottages, some in
sheds and outhouses, or in dilapidated vans, for it is the resort and
_locale_ of many of the Gipsies that wander in the western suburbs. Yet
all these make up a kind of community and live together as friends and
neighbours, and every now and again they show themselves amenable to good
influences, and characters of humble mark and power arise among them. To
those who sympathise with the poet who sings of the
“‘Short and simple annals of the poor,’
we scarcely know a region that can be studied to greater advantage. In
the present instance it was the funeral of an old inhabitant of the Gipsy
tribe, one of the oldest, most respected, and loved of all the nomads,
and related in some way to many Gipsy families in London and the
neighbouring counties. Abutting from the Walmer Road is a good sized
court or alley called ‘Mary Place,’ and in a nook of one of the small
cottages here lived Mrs. Roberts for a number of years, who has been
described to us by one who long enjoyed her acquaintance as ‘a very
superior woman, intelligent and happy Christian.’ So that she must
indeed have shone in that humble and sombre spot as a ‘gem of purest ray
serene,’ though not exactly as the flower
“‘Born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.’
[Picture: Outside a Christian Gipsy’s van]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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