Preface

Taylor, Becky

doi:10.7228/manchester/9780719075674.002.0005

Extract

My interest in researching and writing about the experiences of Travellers in modern Britain was only in part stimulated by the fact that there was no general history of Travellers for the twentieth century. More than this was the apparent paradox I came across whenever I spoke to someone about my proposed work: everyone always had an opinion about ‘Gypsies’, but virtually no one had ever met one, let alone could claim a Traveller as a friend.

Very often the first question people asked was ‘do you mean the real Romanies, rather than the “didikais” or “pikies” or “tinkers”?’ They would then go on to say that they have nothing against ‘real Gypsies’, who live in bow-topped caravans and sell pegs, but these nasty Tinkers in their chrome caravans who come and tarmac drives or ‘lop and top’ are quite another matter. Similarly, the stereotypes of modern Travellers as dirty, antisocial, thieving and dangerous are trotted out in the popular press on a regular basis, underpinned by the assumption that Travellers are always a ‘problem’. Although one of Britain’s longest established minority groups, they simultaneously suffer racism on a daily basis and are denied an ethnic identity. Unlike other, more recently arrived minority groups, they have not generally been part of the state’s vision of a ‘multicultural Britain’. Instead, they are commonly denigrated as social pariahs who have failed to keep up with march of modernity and now post-modernity. Yet the ubiquitous nature of Gypsies in popular imagination is contrasted sharply with the absence of both personal experience and factual information. How could I explain this dis-juncture? This book is an attempt to begin to answer this question.

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