by Becky Taylor
In France, by the end of the nineteenth century, the dominant political response to the upheavals in French society had manifested itself through a conservative republicanism which consciously constructed an idea of a France united around shared values of nationalism and responsibility to society. This was a France which brought together the old elite, new middle-class property owners and rural landowners, and put the sanctity of private property at its heart.71 In Britain, while it was legitimized by the subdued culture of Victoria’s court, ‘respectability’ was most strongly associated with the consolidation of the middle classes, which placed bourgeois values at the centre of cultural and public life. At its best, this trend looked at the slums of Britain’s evergrowing towns and cities and decided that it was not acceptable for the working classes to live in such conditions, and pushed for reform of housing and control of unscrupulous landlords and employers. At its worst however, it simply attempted to move problems out of the sight of those offended by the ‘nuisance’.
While clearly none of these processes were new – the situation of the poor had long been the recipient of elite attention and Gypsies had, after all, been subject to harassment ever since their arrival – with an ever-growing population, the rapid expansion of urban areas and their increasing regulation by the new municipal and local authorities, they became more fraught. And crucially it was certain behaviours rather than people that were the subject of the authorities’ attention. So, for example, in Britain from the eighteenth century, enclosures removed large areas of common land, drastically reducing the number of stopping places available to Gypsies, with this trend gathering pace through a series of Private Acts between 1834 and 1849. On top of this, road improvements often narrowed wide roadside verges, removing a common source of grazing, used not only by Gypsies but by other wayfarers.72 Matters were made more difficult following the County Police Act of 1839, which not only formalized rural policing, but in some areas, notably Dorset and Norfolk, resulted in concerted campaigns to remove Gypsy Travellers from the countryside.73 Similarly, the Commons Act of 1899 allowed local authorities to manage commons and pass by-laws prohibiting camping or lighting fires; while the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1885 allowed sanitary authorities to promote ‘cleanliness in, and the habitable condition of tents, vans, sheds and similar structures’.74 By-laws linked to these and similar acts created a new patchwork of regulation affecting Gypsies, which had the cumulative effect of outlawing sizeable chunks of Gypsy Travellers’ lifestyles in particular areas, while not in themselves targeting Gypsies as a specific group. We have seen how there had always been difficulties defining who exactly constituted a Gypsy – hence the long use of expressions such as ‘counterfeit Egyptians’, and ‘those living in the manner of Gypsies’ – yet by focusing simply on behaviour this difficulty was bypassed in one stroke.
We see similar processes at work over the Channel in France, where the evolving nature of the French state – complicated by regime changes which lurched between monarchic and republican models – produced a patchwork of highly localized responses to Gypsies’ presence. So, in the département of Yvelines and the former Seine-et-Oise the prefect Felix Cottu instituted a by-law allowing the police ‘to exercise a specific surveillance on bands of bohemians and vagabonds’.75 By contrast evidence from the Marne in 1882 shows the mayors being relatively tolerant and supporting Gypsies’ rights to use traditional stopping places.76 As ever, we need to set the treatment of Gypsies in the wider context of moves against vagrants and other mobile workers, and the nineteenth-century tendency to widen the definition of vagabondage; previously one had to have no fixed home, no regular work and no resources: a 100 sous piece or evidence of recent work could allow release. But the tightening of regulations and a shift in the burden of proof needed to demonstrate innocence meant a doubling of convictions from just over 20,000 in 1861–5, to 51,404 to 1890. By this time local governments had also started invoking and enforcing both new and existing laws against parking in order to move people on.77
This did not mean there were not attempts to target Gypsies specifically: in Britain this was done mostly consistently through the trenchant George Smith of Coalville and his Moveable Dwellings Bills. In many ways a model of a Victorian reformer – a self-educated Primitive Methodist who did not flinch from offering his opinion where he thought it would spur the progress of regulation – he had no time for romantic notions of Gypsies as bearers of a more authentic life closer to nature. Indeed, he explicitly rejected ‘the example of daisy-bank sentimental backward Gypsy writers, whose special qualification is to flatter the gipsies with showers of misleading twaddle’.78 His writings consistently suggest that ‘Gypsydom’ was spreading like a disease to the settled population, as he believed large numbers of the settled population were taking to the road as a way to avoid responsibility, hard work and moral duty. This wasn’t just about improving the lot of Gypsies, it was part of a wider vision of ensuring that the world’s leading imperial nation lived up to its reputation as a modern Christian country.
Introduced in various forms from the 1880s to the 1930s, the Moveable Dwellings Bills centred around compulsory registration of Gypsy Traveller dwellings (prompting discussions over to how ‘boughs of trees with some old cloth fastened over them’ might be registered and regulated), insisting on sex-segregated sleeping quarters, requiring the children to attend school at least on a half-time basis, with inspectors being given powers to enter any moveable dwelling to check regulations were being followed.79 The aim was, in Smith’s words, to bring ‘gleams of a brighter day . . . that will reflect a credit instead of a disgrace to us as a civilised nation’.80 In fact, despite his zeal, the bills – of which there were nine different versions between 1885 and 1894 alone – were never passed. Central to the failure of the bills was the way in which they conflicted with central government’s idea of itself as impartial. Most crucially, Home Office civil servants resisted any legislation that identified the law with the interests of a particular group, and the idea that Gypsies were being singled out for repression offended their liberal notions of equality before the law.81
In this Britain was noticeably different to the gathering mood of Continental Europe. Within Germany and France the culture of social conservatism and its stress on creating social order provided the backdrop to the consolidation of police powers, and went hand in hand with social Darwinist explanations for vagrancy and criminality: ‘Vagabondage leads to crime. All errants beg and steal.’82 Contemporary police memoirs reveal ever more virulent ‘conclusions’ drawn from their work: Officer Boué described the character of Gypsies as ‘wily, cowardly, cruel and vindictive’, and discourses of how Gypsies promoted the ‘infection’ of respectable people and of children by their mere proximity were also common. In 1907 Le Petit Parisien wrote a very influential editorial entitled ‘On the Road’, which positioned Gypsies as a public danger and a menace to order in society, while Deputy Dubief described Gypsies as ‘Extra-social parasites . . . incapable of the daily work which everyone is paid for . . . anti-social . . . anti-hygienic and propagators of epidemics . . . potential criminals.’83 In part the history of social unrest and the limited nature of poor law support in France compared to Britain affected the tone of French writing on the matter; destitution was much more closely tied in people’s minds to social disorder, causing fear among the ‘respectable classes’. It was this climate which spawned the Waldeck-Rousseau law of May 1885 which made repeated vagrancy punishable by deportation, and the general push to expel foreign Gypsies and Alsace-Lorrainers who hadn’t chosen France after the Franco-Prussian war.84 By 1897 the Minister for the Interior instituted a commission to try to ensure closer surveillance of ‘vagabonds and heathens’.85 Within elite institutions we also see anti-Gypsy attitudes being expressed in this period: the wealthy Society of French Agriculturalists, for example, repeatedly passed motions at their conferences ‘in favour of a vigorous repression of vagabondage’.86 Such entangling of
the ideas of Gypsies, vagabonds and foreigners, of course, had a long heritage, yet in the context of the marrying of bourgeois ideas of respectable behaviour with the expansion of state regulation and the police force this was to set the tone for the twentieth century.
IT IS OFTEN TEMPTING to look at the nineteenth century simply as a precursor to the convulsions of the first half of the twentieth century: taking note of how nationalisms, as ideology and political reality began to take hold; charting how states, through expanded bureaucracies and police forces, were able to expand their control over their populations, and indeed defining far more closely who belonged to those populations; observing how the increasing importance of ideas of respectability and patterns of behaviour became regulated by state action as much as social norm. These are all trends that were to come to greater prominence in the following decades, and some of these tendencies at least were to find full expression in the death camps of the 1940s. And yet, while all these things are true, and made their mark on the lives of Gypsies, we also need to take the century on its own terms. For all that harassment continued, the Gypsy hunts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been left behind; the ending of slavery and serfdom in the Balkans, while not necessarily translating into improved living conditions, represented some form of progress, if only by allowing emigration through Europe and across the Atlantic; expanding economies and cities provided new opportunities for livelihoods and modes of living. While as ever we struggle with the difficulty of generalizing experiences across a century as well as vast geographical reaches, it may be fair to observe that the nineteenth century was a time which held a diminishing number of the unsavoury characteristics of ancien régimes while not yet fully exhibiting those of modern states. And it was in this era of change that Gypsies were able to live, if not more freely than they had ever done in Europe, then at least less in fear for their lives.
FIVE
Into the Flames
THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY is rightly thought of as a crucial period in the history of the Gypsies. Since their arrival in Europe they had faced persecution, attacks on their culture, language and lifestyles and yet this period saw something different. Although not necessarily exhibiting new attitudes – for they had long been seen as outside of society and sometimes even outside the human race – what was different was the capacity of states to carry out their intentions. Incidents such as the Spanish ‘round-up’ of 1749 showed that early modern states could exhibit determined action although, as we have seen, this was the exception rather than the rule: more often governments had to rely on the power of intermittent brutality to control their subjects. What we have already seen emerging in the nineteenth century, and what was to become such a feature of the twentieth, were new technologies of rule. Seemingly low key and sometimes apparently even benign, the expansion of the functions of the state created a different world in which rules and by-laws seemingly took the place of ‘Gypsy hunts’, the scaffold and banishment. Regulations covering public health, education, environmental control and the use of particular spaces meant that Europe saw the expansion of state action in ever-widening areas of people’s everyday lives. Inevitably such regulations did not simply affect the settled population, but rather spilled over into, and indeed sometimes were directly aimed at, the treatment of Gypsies. And as the capacity of states to act expanded, so too did their ambitions: liberal democracies, as much as either Marxism or fascism, had a clear idea of what the ideal citizen might consist of and enacted measures to try and promote their vision.
Therefore, although the Holocaust hangs heavy over this period, when we think of the death camps, internment camps and genocide, it is perhaps most helpful to think of them as one particular manifestation of modernity rather than simply either as a horrific aberration or the culmination of centuries of persecution. Doing this enables us to see the Roma Holocaust as one of a number of manifestations of deeply engrained prejudices against Roma, Sinti and other Gypsies groups at a particular moment in history.1 Consequently it also helps us to understand how it was that this prejudice might find other expressions at different places and times. Rather than detracting from the deep significance of the Holocaust, it means we can understand the multitude of ways in which Gypsies faced and experienced persecution, harassment and marginalization within modern Europe.
It is useful then to begin by seeing how the extension of regulation more broadly affected Gypsies in the first decades of the century. As we might expect, the diversity we have seen in Gypsies’ living patterns across Europe, in which they took on a wide range of occupations, though often, but not exclusively, at the lower end of the social scale, can similarly be seen in their experiences of education. From the 1870s, but gathering pace from the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a mushrooming of educational initiatives directed both at the mass of the working-class population, and at Gypsies more specifically. The general historical context to this, of course, was the attempt by elites across the Continent to negotiate a rapidly urbanizing world in which various labour, socialist and Marxist movements emerged at a time when democracy was spreading to some parts of Europe, and argued for in other parts. Always seen as something of a double-edged sword, education was seen as a way of taming the revolutionary working classes and bringing them into the fold of (a highly mediated and partial) democratic politics. But at the same time education was feared, for once given the tools of literacy and critical thinking, there was no telling how a newly educated proletariat might behave. Hence universal or mass education often went hand in hand with heavy governmental, religious or nationalist agendas, and it was here that we commonly see the coming together of reform movements and debates over national identity and broader political projects. For Gypsies, the picture was often complicated by stereotyped attitudes held towards them. Sometimes education was part of a wider package of tools aimed at repressing their distinctive culture; yet at other places or times Gypsies were seen as unreachable and beyond the reforming power of literacy; and often the only point of consistency was the poor quality of formal education they received.
While it was logistically easier to bring settled Gypsies into the formal school system than it was nomadic families, this did not automatically mean they experienced education in the same way as children from sedentary society. In Hungary, for example, as part of Maria Theresa and Joseph II’s legacy, by the end of the nineteenth century nearly 90 per cent of its Roma population was settled, of whom around 40 per cent lived alongside the majority population rather than in separate Roma settlements. The census of 1893 looked at the place of Gypsies in Hungarian society and suggested that overall, although often poorer than the wider population, they lived lives indistinguishable from other peasantry. It found that the majority of the homes of settled Gypsies were ‘well managed, clean and do not differ too much from the houses of other inhabitants’; moreover, of the 6,000 villages surveyed, in two-thirds of them it was reported that ‘the conduct of the gipsies was blameless’. The figures for education were less promising: the census collectors believed that this was an ‘important means of culture and social development’, yet only 5.7 per cent of Hungary’s Roma were literate, and only 12,000 of its 52,000 settled Roma school-age children went to school. And of the 6,332 settlements in which Roma lived, two-thirds reported that enrolled Roma children never attended school, with only a third stating they attended consistently. Census analysts believed that the intellectual achievements of the Roma population could have been under-represented in their findings, for as they acknowledged, many of those who did acquire an education and a profession often tried to assimilate and therefore chose not to identify themselves as Gypsies.2
Rather than assimilation, a different strategy was initially pursued in the newly independent Bulgaria. Building on the Ottoman legacy, which accepted the right of different ethnic communities to maintain a degree of religious, cultural and judicial autonomy, the Bulgarian constitution confirmed the principle of nation
al primary-level education. The law of 1885 required all settlements, ‘whatever their size’, to have at least one school, while legislation passed in 1891 allowed ‘non-Christian children to be educated in their mother tongue’. Although designed to reduce Greek influence in Bulgarian society, it meant that Muslim Roma, but not Christian, in theory might receive an education in Romani. While by 1910 this had resulted in the opening of three Roma primary schools in Bulgaria, the majority of Roma children that went to school did so alongside the majority population. Indeed as the vast majority of Roma spoke Romani as their first language and most struggled to do well at school, with their literacy levels remaining far below those of other minorities: in 1905 it was estimated that Roma literacy stood at 3 per cent, compared to 4 per cent for Pomaks (Slavik Muslims who speak Bulgarian), 6 per cent for Turks and 47 per cent for the majority Bulgarian population.
On the other side of Europe, all but a few Gypsies in Britain also struggled to benefit from the creation of free primary education. Here, it was not language that was to prove to be such a barrier, but rather the belief that their nomadism stood in the way of active participation in schooling. Consequently they, and particularly their perceived perpetual nomadism, raised some interesting questions for the expanding state, as they occupied a space between an expanding desire for regulation and a liberal discomfort with active repression. Gypsy Traveller children had been able, and in fact were meant to, attend school along with all children following the introduction of compulsory education in 1870. In practice this was not enforced and only some families – such as that of Gordon Boswell, whom we met on Blackpool’s South Shore (chapter Four) – chose to take advantage of it. State discussions over implementing existing legislation more forcefully was partly in response to the ongoing lobbying of supporters of George Smith’s moveable dwellings legislation, and led to proposals to include measures in the Children’s Act of 1908. And yet, despite a general climate that increasingly accepted the extension of the power of the state into the lives of families and the treatment of children, draconian proposals to remove all Gypsy children from their parents in order to enforce educational requirements were rejected out of hand.