by Becky Taylor
While Gypsies found few supporters in Whitehall, the developing self-image of civil servants that centred around professional impartiality, liberal values and ‘fairness’ meant they were unwilling to extend regulations which were seen to disproportionately affect family life. While, as we shall see, civil servants’ ideas of impartiality might be deluded or self-serving, they did have the effect of putting a break on the kind of measures which were to become more and more common in Continental Europe over the following decades. The terms of the Children’s Act – that if travelling children made 200 attendances between October and March, they were free to travel for the rest of the year – satisfied civil servants who had wanted to promote compulsory education but had objected strongly to interfering with the liberty of people who chose to travel for a living.3
If the potential for heavy state interference was rejected by the British central state, this was reinforced by the local authorities whose job it was to implement the legislation. Indeed more common than enforcing school attendance were the actions of the Education Committee who ‘authorised managers to exclude from school children of nomads who apply for admission’ as a response to complaints from parents who did not wish their children to be schooled alongside Gypsies. In other cases committees were ‘reluctant’ to enforce the law because of the ‘heavy expense’ of sending the children to industrial school, while a candid letter from the Home Office in 1918 admitted that ‘village schools often refuse to admit gipsy children because they are dirty or otherwise unfit to mix with the other children’.4
Matters were generally rather different north of the border in Scotland. Here, because of the longer tradition of working-class education, the provisions of the act were taken seriously. The census of Scottish Travellers of 1917 found that, of the 1,120 Traveller children in Scotland, 200 of them were in industrial schools, having been removed from their parents for non-compliance. In Merkinch, Inverness, commitment to ‘Tinker’ education was demonstrated through the creation of a special school. This was set up ‘in the interest of the vagrant children themselves as well as of the other children’, with staff stressing that for public health reasons, ‘segregation’ should be ‘insisted upon’.5
This segregation of the Tinker children enabled the teacher (a) to give more careful supervision, (b) to teach such practical subjects to both boys and girls as might induce them to acquire a desire for settled occupations, (c) to keep in touch with them during their journeyings in the country, and (d) to induce cleanliness among all.6
Such an emphasis on practical and supervisory elements of schooling shows how the scheme was designed primarily to socialize and not to educate: ‘careful supervision’ could have enabled closer attention for each individual to improve their literacy and wider academic education, but instead the focus was on ‘practical’ skills and personal hygiene to promote settlement and integration. In its own terms the Merkinch scheme was a success. Rigid enforcement of the 200 attendances rule was supported by vigilant checking of certificates by the local police force. Commentators believed the project caused parents to stay longer in town, and generated ‘a noticeable wish that their children should get out of the special class and be drafted into the ordinary school’.7
In its willingness to enforce new regulations, Scotland in fact had more in common with Germany than it did with England. In Prussia, in particular, new educational requirements were actively combined with everyday controls on movement and often older regulations over pedlar licences or identity documents to push Gypsies towards settlement. In 1899 Gypsy children were required to attend school or would be removed from their parents, and two years later this was followed by a measure enabling authorities to institutionalize children in order to ensure they were schooled.8 In fact, Prussia had been expending significant resources for some time regulating its nomadic Gypsy population with the aim of forcing them to settle through making it almost impossible to obtain the necessary itinerant trade licence. Applicants were forced to comply with ‘a host of meticulously applied bureaucratic requirements’ which included ‘proof of domicile, absence of serious convictions, satisfactory educational provision for the children, and proper accounts for tax purposes’.9 Local authorities might also prosecute Gypsies for failing to register with them on arrival in a district, or for military service.10
If education is one area in which Gypsies across Europe were drawn, albeit often partially and unsuccessfully, into mainstream regulations, the turn of the century saw more active measures designed to target them and their lifestyles very specifically. Both France and Germany – this time led by Bavaria rather than Prussia – began using new developments in policing and surveillance technologies in order to register, monitor and control their Gypsy populations. As ever, these innovations did not take place in isolation, but rather can be seen as part of a continuum in the professionalization of the police and the expansion of state bureaucracy into the everyday life of its citizenry. In France, the mood of conservative republicanism we noted at the end of the nineteenth century was compounded by intense public debates over the nature of Frenchness and the relationship between the state and citizens. Most apparent in the convulsions accompanying the Dreyfus affair, which itself compounded the questions raised by the French loss of Alsace-Lorraine following the Franco-Prussian war, debates over national identity were also a response to rapid foreign immigration in to newly industrializing centres. Overall, it no surprise then that the years 1870–1914 saw a particular concentration of xenophobic attacks and local fights against foreign workers, with a peak in violence occurring in the years 1893–7. At the same time an intellectual racism based on social Darwinist ideas positioned France’s Jews as ‘foreigners’, and formed one of the contexts of the Dreyfus affair.11
All this formed the wider backdrop to harsher anti-Gypsy measures, with a circular in 1898 ordering the continuous expulsion of Gypsies through successive départements in order to facilitate deportation.12 And, in a foretaste of what was to come, the French minister for the interior Clemenceau’s ‘Tiger brigades’ intercepted nomads, and were ordered to identify and record as many details (including taking photographs) as the law would allow. Their first operation against a group of 100 Gypsies saw many Gypsies detained in Tamblade in 1907, with the operation’s success slavishly feted in the conservative press.13 Yet confrontations at provincial borders between gendarmes expelling groups of Gypsies and neighbouring forces attempting to prevent their entry into their jurisdiction show that the state had yet to develop a coherent response.
Growing momentum generated both parliamentary activity and a ‘Report on the Repression of Vagabondage and Begging’ (1910). This, alongside fixing Gypsies as being distinguishable for having ‘black eyes, greasy hair, sallow face’, expressed anxieties around the presence of ‘foreign nomads’: ‘Like his father and his grandfather, he’ll live as a perpetually foreign vagabond on the soil of France, which he knows only for the purposes of exploitation.’14 Different remedies were explored, with lessons being drawn from other countries: Deputy Flandin, for instance, noted with approval the creation of a repressive ‘depot’ for Gypsies at Merxplas in Belgium, which had ‘isolation at night, [and] forced work during the day under extremely severe discipline’.15
The solution chosen by the French state was ‘The law of 16 July 1912 relating to the exercise of ambulant professions and the regulation of the circulation of nomads’. As in Britain, however, despite the fevered climate of the time, the principle of equality before the law prevented the passing of directly racially targeted legislation. The decision to base the law on occupational categories rather than race explicitly signalled the French state’s twin intentions to both draw Gypsies into the machinery of state and to deny them an ethnic identity. Its terms separated mobile traders into three categories: travelling salespeople (marchands ambulants), traders at markets and fairs (forains) and nomads (nomades). The first category included either French or foreign people who had a fixed address but
followed an itinerant trade; the second was for French nationals with no fixed address who lived by selling at markets and fairs, whom it was decreed should carry an identity card, with a photograph, personal details and last address; while nomades included those ‘no matter what their nationality, all individuals circulating in France with no fixed abode, and not fitting into any of the above specified categories, even if they have resources or pretend to have an occupation’.16 While, as with Britain’s educational legislation, the law of 1912 targeted a way of life rather than an ethnicity, contemporaries were well aware that this law was explicitly aimed at Gypsies.17
Building on the new scientific developments in policing, the law’s most important provision for nomades was the introduction of a full anthropometric booklet designed by the Parisian policeman Bertillon, one of the pioneers of anthropometry. These contained personal information, included detailed physical characteristics and had to be stamped by the police chief, commander of the gendarmerie or the town hall each time an individual or group of Gypsies entered a département.18 This simultaneously enabled the police to keep track of their movements, and created an offence with progressively harsher punishments if holders failed to fulfil this requirement. Some municipalities used this as a way of preventing Gypsies from stopping: if they refused to grant a stamp, the Gypsies had no choice but to move out of the area.19 Furthermore, nomads were required to have a special registration plate on their vehicles, and their booklet was to contain details of their vehicle’s body, wheels, suspension, axle, brakes, paint and hitch. A sanitary element was added in 1913, with the booklets required to include information on vaccinations, sickness, hospital visits and quarantine, and gave local officials the right to check the health and cleanliness of vehicles.20
In its use of both expanded policing and developing surveillance technologies, particularly in recording anthropometric data, France was entirely in step with innovations being used in other countries. Most notable here was the work of the Security Police at the Imperial Police Headquarters in Munich, which established an Information Service on Gypsies under Arthur Dillmann in 1899. From the 1880s, despite the relatively small number of Gypsies, Bavaria had been exhibiting an increasing preoccupation with them. This state was located between the German, Swiss, French and Austrian borders, and so often had groups of Gypsies moving through its territories. On top of this geographical situation there was a prevailing suspicion that it was relatively simple for them to evade the law.21 Using the latest technology – telegraph, photographs, identification cards and finger printing – Dillmann collected and shared information on the Gypsy families of Bavaria with an aim to register the entire Gypsy population. In 1905 he published his Zigeunerbuch (Gypsy Book): this was littered with the word ‘plague’, with the bulk of the text taken up with the numerous regulations which could be used against Gypsies and the detailed records of individuals and their families.22
Despite Dillmann’s obsession with collecting and detailing the particulars of Gypsies – the Zigeunerbuch held records of 3,350 people, 613 of these being detailed descriptions – it is notable that he explicitly used a ‘lifestyle’ rather than a ‘racial’ definition. For him, anyone who travelled around with their family deserved his attention, although he further distinguished between ‘Gypsies’ and ‘people who live like Gypsies’. Even then it is not clear that those who were designated as ‘Gypsy’ were done so on ‘racial’ grounds: ethnographic features such as language or skin colour played a subordinate role to manifestations of a ‘disorderly life’, such as giving false names or other details.23 Dillmann’s work is significant because it was to form the basis for the genealogical charts of the Nazi period, and yet what we see here is the messy conflation of race and behaviour in the construction of Gypsyness.
Evidence from neighbouring Hesse shows that Bavaria was not alone in its preoccupations. A letter on the ‘Gypsy pest’ from the Hessian authorities in 1912 urged the state police to apply any measures possible to harass Gypsies in their area, a process ‘made easier through the use of the Zigeunerbuch’. Hesse’s regional prosecutor approved of the fact that Munich’s approach allowed the police to verify personal details, including criminal records, enabling them to decide if someone was a persistent vagrant. Here too, however, it was behaviour – vagrancy – that was the focus. This letter reminded officials that it was ‘forbidden for Gypsies to travel in hordes through the state’, and recommended automatic detention and a delayed trial for those picked up for vagrancy as a ‘useful method’ to keep them out of the Grand Duchy.24 In Prussia we see a similar extension of the role of the police into social surveillance and welfare tasks relating to behaviours and people who were seen as undesirable or deviant, including alcohol consumption, unhygienic housing and unregulated mobility. As part of their expanded remit the police ‘used every rule and regulation to make matters as difficult as possible for travelling groups’.25
And although it was issued by Prussia’s Minister for the Interior, rather than the national government, the 1906 directive on ‘combatting the Gypsy nuisance’ included nine bilateral international agreements – with Austria–Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Russia and Switzerland – indicating that the preoccupations of individual German states had a Continent-wide resonance.26 Indeed, this was the period when emigration and movement between national states was beginning to be tightened across the western world: boundaries and rights of belonging which might until recently have existed at the municipal or regional level dissolved as they were superseded by national-level borders and rights. Attempts to control the movement of Gypsies across borders came at the same time as, for example, Britain’s Aliens Act of 1905. This, as well as trying to stem Jewish immigration, was used to hound visiting Kalderashi Gypsies out of the country.27
Nevertheless, we need to be wary of constructing a story of unremitting persecution and the unrelenting extension of bureaucratic control over Gypsies’ lives in this period. We can find evidence of resistance from within bureaucracies, even in Germany, to more regulation, although not necessarily for pro-Gypsy reasons. There, in 1912 the police proposed to create a dedicated anti-Gypsy police force in order to enable a system of constant surveillance. This coincided with attempts by the Munich Gypsy station to expand its work across Germany, and yet other states – notably Prussia – resisted these innovations. In part this was due to the costs they would entail, but there were also disagreements over the definition of ‘Gypsy’. A number of states expressed concern over Dillmann’s sociological definition which, they feared, would mean that ‘decent’ itinerant traders could be included within their remit.28 As was the case with so many things in this period, the chaos brought by the war and its aftermath meant that any plans for further regulation were shelved.
It is no easy task to chart the impact of the First World War on Europe’s Gypsy populations, but we would expect that given how closely entwined their lives were with majority society, we would see them both on the war and home fronts. Indeed, it is clear that they fought alongside the wider populations on both sides, particularly although by no means exclusively, as part of the Austro-Hungarian armies which had a long tradition of recruiting Gypsies, and where they served in relatively large numbers.29 Things were rather different for Gordon Boswell, an English Gypsy, who joined the Veterinary Corps in February 1915 and felt isolated by his experiences:
I never met any Gypsy boys, nobody belonging to me, I felt a lonely man . . . There was no other Gypsy boy in that [punishment] camp. Nobody to talk to . . . We wasn’t men – we was numbers. And it used to dawn on me how one British subject can treat another . . . That is what killed my faith in the army . . . I had come from a free life. And then come under this military discipline. And they treated you not as a child and not as a man. You were a number.
Evidence is patchy, yet inter-war and later descriptions of Gypsies’ lives contain enough passing references to men injured, shell-shocked or otherwise d
amaged by their experiences of combat to suggest that if not universal, war service had been a normal enough experience to pass into commonly accepted memory.30
We get something of an understanding of the impact of fighting and war losses on the home front for Gypsy communities through the fact that in 1916 the Hungarian government felt the need to develop a policy dealing with homeless Gypsy children.31 Similarly, in Scotland by 1916 concerns had begun to be raised by local officials and mission workers over the living conditions of Traveller women and children, who were struggling to continue a nomadic lifestyle in the face of the absence of most men. In one case a group of Traveller women and children from Caithness was reduced to living in a section of dug-out peat bog, leading to the death of a newborn baby.32 Right across Britain, lives were made more difficult through assiduous implementation of the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914:33
[The] prohibition, in many areas, to camp out and light fires; the ration system; separation allowances to be drawn; absence of men folk to take their share of the tent-life with its duties (for even tents have their tasks, e.g., they have to be put up and to be carried); stricter enforcement (at long last) of education of the children; the constant need to be near a Post Office for the eagerly-expected news from India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, France; the advantage of a fixed place to welcome the boys to when they come home on leave.34