Now the gipsy wants to settle down - but where? 

A mechanical digger has been shifting mounds of earth at Colney Heath in Hertfordshire, scooping out a moat eight feet wide along its famous common to keep out the gipsies - a perfect example of the medieval measures being used against the Romany peoples. 

"The old days of roaming around are over,” said Luke Davies, leader of the dispossessed campers at Colney Heath.  “Now we want to settle down.” 

Struck by that remark - which seems to blow away all the half-envious, half contemptuous romanticism confusing our image of the gipsy - I have been finding out the truth about modern gipsies. 

Protected 

There are about a million in Europe today, the great majority of them in the Communist countries. 

In Russia they have a protected status (in law, anyway) as an “ethnic minority,” with their own schools and settlement rights. 

In Hungary, many of them have proved to be naturally gifted engineers. 

And in most West European countries, surveys have been made, schools built, the drifters settled and trained - as, for instance, in Belgium 

But - what about the gipsy in Britain? 

The short, and nasty answer is that here they are not treated as human beings. 

The “free” illiterate vagrant of the past has become an anomaly in the more closely woven patterns of modern society.  The gipsy now wants education and a television aerial rather than the clinging smells of wood smoke. 

He thinks about the future of his children rather than the largely mythical freedoms of his past. 

The gipsy, than, has changed - but not people’s ideas about him. 

A Cardiganshire rural district clerk summed up a common attitude when, after the eviction of a band of local gipsies, he said: “People feel that the gipsy is not acceptable - his way of living is an offence to everyone, he is destructive, nasty, and lives on his wits.” 

From the “NO GIPSIES SERVED” of some Kent pubs, to the constant, harrying “move on and keep moving” of police and local authorities, and the dark-ages moat at Colney Heath, the gipsy is victimised. 

Gipsies are coming more and more into the news because of the changes forced on them.  The old gipsy trades do not give a family enough to live on nowadays. 

The clothes pegs, the smouldering camp fire, the old horse with protruding bones, the large baskets humped from door to door, the itinerant knife-grinders, have gone the way of the pawn shops. 

Scandalous 

So, too, have the gold earrings, the colourful splashes of cloth and the curses of those without a permanent resting. 

“In any case, gipsies don’t want the old life once they see the obvious benefits of staying put,” Labour M P Norman Dodds told me.  “But they are kept moving against their will.  It is scandalous the way they are treated”. 

Mr. Dodds has been waging a tenacious and admirable campaign on behalf of the gipsies for years now.  Time and again he has tried to peel away the callousness which so afflicts public discussion of them. 

We do not even know how many gipsies there in Britain - estimates range between twenty and forty thousand. 

We do know that the modern gipsy is more likely to be a scrap metal dealer than knife grinder, and that he attempts to stay near a big town.  He knows that his children need to read and write and find work where they will not be treated as degenerates. 

Most of all, he would like a permanent caravan site, properly equipped, or a council house. 

I visited several gipsy families who have been settled in council houses in Kent.  There could be no doubt of the success of such moves.  In one generation all the more obvious differences between the gipsy and suburban commuter can be removed. 

Mrs Bignall of St. Paul’s Cray, told me: “It’s no kind of life in the camps.  Thank God all my children are set up in places of their own.  She said she had seen on TV how some camp gipsies live.  “They don’t want to be like that - especially in the winter.” 

Mr and Mrs Gumble, of Upper Belvedere, “wouldn’t go back in a caravan now.”  Their daughter has just married a docker, and they are buying a house of their own. 

Condemned 

Mrs Gumble believes in education.  But her children were only able to go to school because they were rooted in one locality. 
These are fortunate exceptions.  Too many of the thousands of gipsies are condemned to wander to bring up children without schooling to look in vain for a place where they will not be harried. 

As Norman Dodds says: “It is time we did something practical and humane and stopped persecuting this unfortunate minority.” 

Dennis Potter

©Mirror Syndication International.