What the traveller horse dealers especially liked was buying young horses, you know, colts. They went to the islands, like Skye and the islands off the West Coast. They bought these unbroken horses in the crofts and farms, and they broke them in, fetched them back. Then any dealer who looked at them would know what he was looking at. He couldn’t make a fool of the traveller and say, ‘Och, it’s auld. It’s wind-broken, got bad feet.’ The dealer would have to say, ‘That’s a nice pony you’ve got, laddie.’
And the traveller would say, ‘It’s only a two-year-old, two-year-old garron.’ Well, there was no way in the world a dealer could try and take the traveller down.
The dealer would say, ‘Well, I’ll gie ye a swap tae two o these for yours.’ The traveller would get two old ponies, and maybe six or seven pounds. Well, he’ll naturally go home to his own place, maybe he’ll swap that two old things he got for another young one from somebody else. This is the way it went on.
Because the traveller was no fool among horses. Their forefathers might not have had much knowledge about horses, but the travellers who were reared up with horses were the real dealing travellers. They were the ones up to all the tricks of all the trade. And they could outwit any non-traveller dealer. Because clever as the non-travellers were, and there were some crafty and good dealers among them, it doesn’t matter how cute they were; the tinker would always go one better! But that was one thing about them; if a tinker got a trick played on him, he would never say he was ‘done’. No, he would try his best the next time and get his own back in his own way. He would never complain.
So, this man I was telling you about, Johnie Macdonald, the cousin of my mother and my mother-in-law’s brother, he was a great horsie man in the 1930s. He was well known for his deals, you know, and his swaps. They called you ‘game’, if you were game for a deal, game for a swap. So, one minute they were down and the next minute they were up. They never really got rich. If they hadn’t got it one day, they might have it the next day! And the traveller was never really down, because if he was that low that he couldn’t get the price of a horse, then he would build himself a handcart or go back to a pram or something, use that till he got the price of something better. So Johnie had dealed himself as low as he could possibly get, till he was left with a mummy. It got thinner and thinner till its ribs began to stick out. There was nothing more shaming than having a poor horse. Especially if you’re going to pull into a camping place among more travellers, and everybody there has a good horse.
So, in case they met with travellers, they tried to keep out of other travellers’ ways when they had bad horses, till they could pull themselves together and get something better. Johnie, he cut away up here through Fife. He came to this old road before you go into Cupar called the Sandy Old Road. That was a camping place. He pulled his cart away up the old road to camp for the night. And he comes to this tent. Nice wee tent and a governor’s car, a kind of wee trap, but it was light. Johnie lowsed his old horse out and let it go. It wouldn’t go anywhere, it was that sick and thin it couldn’t.
He says to Jeannie his wife, ‘We’ll stay here for the night. There must be somebody who’s got horses here. I see a camp there and a wee gig. Maybe I could get a swap!’ See, always swapping in mind. So after he has his camp up and has a cup of tea, or whatever he got, and got a bit fire for the wife, he wanders up to this camp. And here is an old man and woman. Johnie starts to crack to the old man. But he noticed by the old man’s tongue right away that the old man wasn’t a real traveller. He was a ‘buck’ as you may call him – half traveller – just a flattie or a country man who went on the road. But his wife, she was a traveller woman. But they were pretty old, up in years. They had a lovely wee tent and this gig. So they sat and cracked and talked about many things till it came round . . . Johnie was waiting to speak about horses. So he said, ‘Dae ye hae a beast, old man?’ That’s what he called it.
‘Aye,’ said the old man, ‘I hae a beast. I have a guid beast.’ Johnie’s ears began to cock up, you see.
‘This is a deal here,’ he said to himself. So he cracked away again and he cracked away, but he was wanting to get back to the horse. He said, ‘Whaur is yir beast, old man?’
‘Och,’ he said, ‘it’s jist roond there the back o the tent.’
Johnie’s thinking to himself, ‘It must be an awful wee horse if it’s . . . I cannae see it over the back of his tent.’ So they cracked away a wee while.
‘Wait a minute!’ he says. ‘I’m gaun to feed the beast and I’ll let you see it.’
Johnie said, ‘All right. I’ve a beast doon there tae, and maybe me and you could have a deal.’
‘O-oh no!’ says the old man. ‘I’ll no; nae such a thing wi me as that! I dinnae dae these things. I wouldnae pairt wi my beast for nae other beast.’
‘God bless me!’ says Johnie.
The old man goes round the back and he takes a wee box with a bit of netting wire into it, and he puts it sitting in the front: a black crow with a broken wing! He says, ‘The’re my beast. I’ve had that beast fir two year noo since ever it had a broken wing.’ He roared to it and it came out and sat in his hand. A big, old, black crow. He says, ‘That’s my beast.’ He was pulling the gig himself. He didn’t bother with a horse. Well, Johnie couldn’t help but laugh! He came back down and tellt his wife.
She said, ‘It serves you right! It serves you blinkin right!’ He was a great man, big Johnie Macdonald, for horse dealing. He was a great horsieman.
A good traveller horsieman knew the situation, how the deal was going to go, even before it happened. Because they knew from past experience what kind of man they were going to deal with, right? They had probably dealed with him before. They knew the money he was going to take, right? And they knew what they were going to accept. They knew how much cash they had in their pocket and how far it would go. They knew the value of what his horse was worth and they knew what their own horse was worth. The traveller man knew what his horse was costing him: he’d probably had four deals with this horse and he’d probably got two-three pounds along the way all the time. He counted off that to find out what the horse had cost him. Look at it this way: he went into the market and he bought this horse, for, say twenty pound. Now he brought it back and took care of it. Maybe he had to break it in. They were always fond of buying young horses and breaking them in, because they’d always grow into a good horse. Then, along the way he would probably meet somebody and they would say, ‘That’s a braw beast you’ve got, mister!’
‘Well,’ he would say to him, ‘I’m no married to it. What – hae you got onything?’
‘No, I would like to buy it.’
‘No, I hardly every buy, eh, sell oot. But have you onything I could swap tae it?’
And the man would say, ‘Well, come doon and see mine.’ Now he would go down and see the other horse. He would look over this other horse and he would know what the other man was thinking in his head, see what I mean! And he also knew what he was thinking himself. The other man would say to him, ‘Well, hoo could me and you have a deal?’
And he would say, ‘Well, we can deal the best we can!’ Now he would say to his ownself, ‘I’m going to gie him the swap.’ But then he would ‘kid on’ after the first offer that he wasn’t, that he had no intentions of dealing at all. And the further they went away from the deal the more keen they were, see what I mean! If they were really keen, then they kidded on they didn’t want anything to do with it! This was the idea.
Say they saw this good horse and they said to themselves, ‘I’m gaunna get this horse come hell or high water.’ But the minute he gave away a clue that he was interested, then the dealer would come down on him like a ton of bricks, sting him for the last farthing. You see, the dealers couldn’t afford to keep too many horses because they survived by dealing in horses. It was like a shopkeeper or a merchant – they had to keep a steady movement of horses. Say he had eight, maybe nine. Well, they could only afford to feed three or four.
Now a traveller would come in and look around the horses and say to the dealer, ‘What about that one?’
‘Oh laddie, that! That’s nae guid tae ye. That would kick the cart in. It would run awa wi ye.’ Now the traveller knew that man was only telling him that because he didn’t want to put it away. Well, this is the one he would go for! If a dealer had one that he wanted rid of, he would say he didn’t want it away – trying to deceive the traveller that he didn’t want to part with it. These are the kinds of things that went on. He could read the traveller’s mind just as good as the traveller could read his.
When it came to the actual deal the traveller would say, ‘I’ll take twelve pound and your horse,’ knowing he was going to have to accept three or four. He would give himself plenty of room to deal, to come and go on. Now the dealer would know fine that no man ever gets what he asks, never in a swap or a deal. Otherwise you wouldn’t be in the trade, you wouldn’t be a dealer.
So he would say, ‘Well, you asked twelve. I’ll gie ye six. That’s half.’ The traveller was only expecting four. Now he’d got six.
He would say to himself, ‘Well, if he’s willing to pay six, why no try him for another two?’ He would say to the dealer, ‘No, come on, I’ll split the difference wi ye – I’ll gie ye seven!’ [SLAP] He was still going to make another pound. This is the way it went on. They had it all set up. They weren’t deceiving anybody. Because your eye was your merchant and your pocket was your guide. That’s all you had. And they had no written words between them, nothing on paper. And there were no comebacks. If you were ‘burned’, it just went as a bad deal and you had to live through it and maybe make up the next time.
It was really fantastic when you think about it. And it still goes on today, the same thing. There are a lot of horses down in England yet and in Wales. I know a traveller lad who used to camp with me and he’s got fourteen horses, but he’s got three brand new lorries along with them. He only keeps the horses just for trading and swapping and selling.
From the First World War until after the Second World War was the heyday of the horses in Scotland. There were horses in the coal pits, the pigmen had horses, the fruit men, the fish merchants, the rag-and-bone men, the scrap men, the horse dealers. This was the horse’s time. And I’m not counting the horses on farms, just the local people and travellers trading in horses. After the 1914 war all the young men came back from the Army who had been using horses, pulling guns and that. When they came back to their way of life, they made sure they were going to have horses, and this is when the horses really got among the travellers.
But the younger generation at the present moment, and anybody that was born since forty-nine, among the travelling people, I don’t suppose could yoke you a horse, would know how to put a harness on it. They’ll take a car to pieces and build it as you see yourself within a couple of hours, and they’ll do anything with cars. But I’ll bet you if you took a set of harness and loosened them down, threw the harness down and asked them to put that set of harness together for you, they couldn’t do it. Horses started fading about 1945 or ’46, and after the war, when the boys came back from the Army. With a few shillings’ gratuity money, instead of buying a horse they bought a car. It was the war that really made some of them, because they learned to drive in the Army. When they came back as young men to their families, their children were maybe school age. They bought cars, and the children of these servicemen were born with cars.
The beginning of the sixties marked the beginning of the end of the horses, especially among the travellers. The thing that hurt the travellers worse than anything else was that cars began to come in. Small cars, small lorries, and the farmers began to buy these new-fangled threshing machines, combines and things. And they didn’t need so many hands to work at the harvest. It was only then, near the middle of winter, when the travellers could get an odd job on the farms, at the tattie time. By 1961 or ’62 the horse markets began to change from every week till every fortnight, and then to every month. The young generation of the travellers growing up, like my two oldest boys, Jimmie and Willie, by the 1960s were in their early teens, and they had little interest in horses of any description. A horse was no fun to them anymore, although they were born and reared with them.
But it helped the horses that cars came in. The horse with the travellers was well enough done to, but it was only a horse. And it was used every day in the week. Travellers worked them hard, drove them some days on and on for hours at a time. They weren’t cruel to them in any way, and they fed them and took care of them. But they really worked them hard because they had to. I think all the old horses in the country sighed with relief when the travellers finally stopped working with them! Then your fishmen and your fruitmen and your coalmen and your pigmen whom the travellers used to get all their swaps and deals with began to buy wee cars and wee lorries to sell their fruit and sell their fish. They could travel and hawk farther, and get more done in a day.
The travellers who had cars in the 1960s were little company to the ones who had horses. The ones who had horses were little company to the ones with cars. With a car you could travel and hawk further away. An old lorry or an old car was cheap to buy in these days, and the restrictions on them weren’t half as bad as they are now. There were no MOTs or anything like that. Travellers just got an old car, put a pair of Ls on it, learned to drive, got a licence and that was it. They began to travel further distances between their camping places. Where it used to take them a week to travel with a horse, they could travel in a day. It was more economical to the traveller to have a car, and they could keep their stuff dry. If it was a lorry, they could get a canopy on it and shift even in wet weather, for their stuff and their weans were always dry. And if they got a van, their stuff and their weans were always dry when they travelled. And petrol was cheap.
But gone was the comfort of five and six horses, five or six travellers being round the one campfire and having a good time! Things had completely changed in the sixties. The going of the horse left its mark in many ways. By 1962 or ’63 a lot of the good camping places along the roadways got closed up. People began to get hungry for land and greedy. The Forestry Commission started taking over a lot of the places the travellers used for camping; they closed a lot of these right o ways, planted them with trees.
The travellers’ horses disappeared very fast. When I went to Muthill for the tattie-howking in Perthshire the very first year with a horse in 1950, there were about twenty-five horses belonging to travellers in that field. When I went back in four years’ time there were only about eight horses. And three years later there was only me with a horse and my brother Jimmie. But it was another ten years before I put my last horse away. Within the space of thirteen years, from 1951, the horses on farms where I worked were wiped out completely. When I went to old Sandy Kerr’s in Kennoway first, there were twelve horses and not one machine on his farm. When I left there in 1964 there were three tractors and not one single horse.
I never was born with horses, and my father never owned a horse. But the idea that put me to horses was that I had worked on a farm with horses with my father when I was only five years old. And then before I left school, at the weekends, I went and worked on the farms with horses in Argyllshire. Then, seeing an odd traveller coming to the West Coast with a pony; and leaving Argyllshire and coming and travelling through Perthshire with my brother, meeting all the travellers and seeing how handy it was – eventually I became a good horsieman myself. But I really liked horses! I still like horses. In fact, if I could afford it, I would have two horses. For the horse goes back a long, long while among the travellers . . . back to the time when travellers really began. If they hadn’t had horses, they could never have survived to this present time. For myself and for many it was their only means of survival. It was the horse that really made the travellers from the start.
THE HAWKER’S LAMENT
O come all youse hawkers, you men of the road,
Youse
hawkers who wander around,
My story it is sad, for it saddens my heart,
For they’ve closed all our campin grounds down.
Though we fought for wir country and we fought for wir king
An some gave their life for this land,
It’s out there in Dunkirk it’s many they fell
With their blood mixed up with the sand.
But what did they fight for and why did they die?
For freedom to wander around!
But where can we wander? We have no place to go,
For they’ve closed all our campin grounds down.
They say we are not wanted, to keep movin on,
Though it be rain or be snow;
For where can we move to when we move along,
For we have got nowhere to go?
So listen, my boys, if another war should come,
Just you keep moving around:
You have nothing to fight for, you have no house nor home,
And they’ve closed all your campin grounds down.
But maybe some day, when we’ve gone from this world
An we’re buried deep down in the ground,
Will God make us welcome, will He give us a home,
Or will He tell us just to keep movin on?
Duncan Williamson
GLOSSARY
Note: Traveller Cant indicated by (C), Gaelic words by (G)
aa
all
ae
one; the same
The Horsieman Page 39