Gipsy Life: Being an account of our Gipsies and their children, with suggestions for their improvementSmith, George
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Gipsy Life: Being an account of our Gipsies and their children, with suggestions for their improvement
Smith, George
Romanies -- Great Britain
At a pretty good rough estimate I reckon there are at least from 15,000
to 20,000 Gipsies in the United Kingdom. Apart from London, if I may
take ten of the Midland counties as a fair average, there are close upon
3,000 Gipsy families living in tents and vans in the by-lanes, and
attending fairs, shows, &c.; and providing there are only man, wife, and
four children connected with each charmless, cheerless, wretched abodes
called domiciles, this would show us 18,000; and judging from my own
inquiries and observation, and also from the reliable statements of
others who have mixed among them, there are not less than 2,000 on the
outskirts of London in various nooks, corners, and patches of open
spaces. Thus it will be seen, according to this statement, we shall have
1,000 Gipsies for every 1,750,000 of the inhabitants in our great London;
and this proportion will be fully borne out throughout the rest of the
country; so taking either the Midland counties or London as an average,
we arrive at pretty much the same number—_i.e._, 15,000 to 20,000 in our
midst, and moving about from place to place. Upon Leicester Race Course,
at the last races, I counted upwards of ninety tents, vans, and shows;
connected with each there would be an average of man, woman, and three
children. A considerable number of Gipsies would also be at Nottingham,
for the Goose Fair was on about the same time. One gentleman tells me
that he has seen as many as 5,000 Gipsies collected together at one time
in the North of England.
Of this 20,000, 19,500 cannot read a sentence and write a letter. The
highest state of their education is to make crosses, signs, and symbols,
and to ask people to tell them the names of the streets, and read the
mile-posts for them. The full value of money they know perfectly well.
Out of this 20,000 there will be 8,000 children of school age loitering
about the tents and camps, and not learning a single letter in the
alphabet. The others mostly will tell you that they have “finished their
education,” and when questioned on the point and asked to put three
letters together, you put them into a corner, and they are as dumb as
mutes. Of the whole number of Gipsy children probably a few hundreds
might be attending Sunday-schools, and picking up a few crumbs of
education in this way. Then, again, we have some 1,500 to 2,000 families
of our own countrymen travelling about the country with their families
selling hardware and other goods, from Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham,
Leeds, Leicester, the Staffordshire potteries, and other manufacturing
towns, from London, Liverpool, Nottingham, and other places, the children
running wild and forgetting in the summer, as a show-woman told me, the
little education they receive in the winter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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