Gypsies

Reports from England revealed that attention had been turned to an educational problem as old as Robin Hood--the schooling of England's 100,000 or more gypsy children. The Surrey County Council opened a peripatetic school, with a master and mistress, to teach them, besides the three R's, crafts like basket-weaving, rug-making, woodworking, gardening. The "school house" was pitched in open country near a large gypsy encampment and though attendance was distinctly voluntary, 40 pupils enrolled the first day.

England's gypsy tribes, many of them, are unusual in this respect: unlike the nomadic folk of other countries they are not Romanies* but Englishmen. During famines and plagues and--as in the legendary case of Robin and his merrie men--during political upheavals, poor townsfolk or villagers have taken to the open road, the woods and the fields to scrape, beg or poach a living as best they can. England's winters are not severe enough to have killed them off. One generation of nomads has spawned another; continued poverty has bred shiftlessness; until today, if you stop at a romantic sylvan encampment in the New Forest and converse with its chief personage--usually a hawk-faced great-grandmother, who will offer you dirty tea and whine for a shilling--you will find that none can remember when any ancestor of the band first "took to woods." They have no legends.

Their language is lowest Cockney, guttural and larded with strange terms of the wayside. Their occupations, when pursued, are raising scrubby ponies (they milk the mares and sell the foals to tinkers, small farmers, etc.); working intermittently for the Crown, usually at ditch cleaning or road-making; collecting wild birds' eggs for city oologists. The women go into the towns in rags, carrying their grubby offspring to excite pity and alms from passing motorists. The men, for the most part, loaf about, in and under their wagons.

Far different are the true Romany gypsies still to be found in England. The large attendance at Surrey's first day of gypsy school suggested that the encampment chosen was one of several Romany bands usually to be found in Kent, Devonshire, Surrey, Berkshire or Buckinghamshire from late March on, after wintering on the Continent or in London. One pater familias or headman, Tombino, is typical of his fellows. Tombino raises a strain of horses that command top prices at any county fair in the kingdom. He moves his caravan from one fair to the next, establishing coconut-shies at each as a sideline. His children, numbering six/- are sent, immediately upon arrival at a new location, to the nearest village school, presentably dressed and bearing testimonials to their character and ability from their last teacher. Tombino, large of girth, bright of eye and smile, possesses many of the good things of life and does not intend that his children shall be denied them through want of wit and learning. There is a boy of 17 who can con Vergil with any Etonian. A younger one--"Pedge" he was called--is bound for a medical career. He began by helping Tombino with the veterinary duties of the camp, and later--through Tombino's shrewdness and hospitality--acquired books on the subject from a London publicity-man, an Irishman with a bent for the free life, whom Tombino received first as a guest, then as an assistant in the coconut shies and finally, with due ceremony, as a blood brother.

* Properly speaking, the gypsies are a race by themselves, known in western Europe since 1417. In language and origin they are Hindus, speaking a corrupt Sanskrit dialect. Strong admixtures of Persian, Slavonic, Magyar and Greek blood and language were picked up in their migrations. As inhabitants of the ancient Greek empire or Empire of New Rom, they were identified as Romanoi before the prouder term Hellenes was assumed by the Greeks.

$#134; As of 1924.