Stretton Peter Ingram 18 January 1943 - 7 January 2025 R.I.P.
Peter Ingram, born in Worcestershire, was first and foremost an extraordinary storyteller. One could happily while away many an hour in his good company, listening to his Welsh Borders way of talking as he reminisced about the “old days” of travelling Romani folk.
Over the years he welcomed visitors from around the world into his Romany Folklore Museum opened in 1976 and his workshop in Limes End Yard in Selborne, Hampshire, where he either built from scratch or restored to their former glory many a Living Wagon or vardo. Horse drawn Bow Tops, Ledge, Reading, Burton and many others plus Flat Carts and Open Lots and a Knife Grinders Handcart all received his highly skilled attention, including a vardo commissioned by a member of Pink Floyd.
My partner at that time, John Harrison Taylor, and I first met Peter in 1970, when searching for an authentic Queenie stove for our first Bow Top. He duly put us in touch with Mervyn Jones in Holywell, Flintshire and that stove kept us warm on our travels in Kent, Essex and in Eire.
We kept in touch sporadically and on, what turned out to be my last visit in October 2023, Peter modestly showed Gwyneth Rushton and myself the Bow Top he and Mervyn had built some years before with expertly chamfered and carved details, beautiful ‘lined out’ with traditional scroll work designs. Its owner having passed away, when offered first refusal, Peter rustled up sufficient ‘wonger’ to buy it back and move it back into his yard, lovingly opening and closing its ‘stable doors’ each morning and evening respectively.
Having closed his museum in 1995, he went off on his travels to Canada, New Mexico and Australia, collecting more tales and ‘native’ artefacts along the way, completing in 2005 in Oregon, USA a last well-paid commission as a renowned ‘Builder, Restorer and Decorator of Living Wagons’.
Back in Selborne and becoming a self-proclaimed recluse, as he saw the old ways disappearing, he co-authored “Romany Relics- The Wagon Album” published by John Barker in 2010 and then was persuaded to self-publish “A Wagtail’s Tale” ISBN 978-0-9928719-0-1 in 2014.
His daughter, Nancy, gave him a ukulele to accompany himself singing old travellers’ favourites and by chance he came to own a fiddle purported to have been owned by Gypsy fiddler, John Lock. (See English Folk Dance and Song Society issue EDS Winter 2019)
Peter loved music, recording a cd “Old Fiddle Tunes & Sentimental Songs of Welsh Border Gypsies” with Cath Watkins on fiddle and having also playing his bones live on a couple of numbers, when our band Cajunologie (with my partner, Trevor George Stephenson) played a gig nearby in Hampshire. He was invited to appear on stage at Sidmouth Festival and in 2016 at the Eisteddfod in Abergavenny, celebrating 200 years since the birth of Welsh harpist Gypsy John Roberts.
A colourful character in so many ways, Peter will be sorely missed by those of us who have listened to his tales, either out of doors besides his ‘yog’, kettle on ready to pour a cup of strong tea, or inside the cabin he built, as on that last visit, a rum and coke suitably warmed by his wood stove and his voice chasing away the Autumn chills.
‘Kushti Bokh!”
By Nina Taylor 15th January 2025