The Travellers who visited the sea

Tanya stood outside her caravan telling me about her adventurous life on the road, with a twinkle in her eye, her irrepressible character sparkled like a rough diamond; “Growing up my family travelled around the country working the land, in Kent we’d pick apples and sweet peas, sweet peas were my favourite, they were good to eat and easy to pick, too many apples would eventually make you sick, or make you crap a lot. We would do sprout topping and all sorts. In the evenings we’d all gather round a fire and cook up a big pot of stew to share, it was a good life back then.” Looking at their motor homes pitched up on our seafront car park made her idyllic sounding childhood seem like a completely different era.

One of the caravan windows was broken. The night before someone had fired ball bearings at their homes using a BB gun. Tanya explained: “We heard something hitting our van, the kids asked me what was it, I said it was the seagulls dropping stones on the roof, I didn’t want to tell them the truth.” Tanya and her partner were travelling with four children, one of them has Downs Syndrome and is terminally ill with a heart defect: “Doctors say he will only live until 13, all the time we have with him is borrowed. They operated on his heart when he was born.” Sonny Jim stood wrapped in a blanket ecstatically grinning and hopping with glee. “His health has improved since we started travelling, when we were settled in our council flat in Tottenham, he was always sick.”

Looking into the caravan I was amazed that 6 people were able to live in such a compact space. It was fastidiously tidy, everything obviously had a place, possessions minimal. It made me think that their carbon footprint must be miniscule compared to that of static house dwellers.

Her accent had an Irish lilt and sang with humorous stories of high adventure on the open road, a lust for travel and an unquenchable thirst to live freely. Tanya is a Romany Traveller, while her husband is an Irish Traveller, she explained how their families had not wanted them together, plus, at the time, she was ‘settled’ in a house, another mark against her eligibility.

She nestled a cup of tea against her chest, she had barely taken a sip in the hour we chatted, too distracted by childhood stories of travelling around with her father who won strongman competitions and made a small income out of the prize money: “My brothers and sisters would sit either side of an iron bar, he would pick us all up. He worked as a labourer; he could do lots of things. He could mend things, take something which wasn’t useful and make it into something good.”

Her youngest son Paddy, who looked around 8, was dressed in a blue Monsters Inc dressing gown. His spiked hood was pulled up for extra monster effect. He peered up at me, “Is this rain or snow?”. The weather couldn’t decide what it was doing as specks of sleet settled on his freckle filled face.  The blue mini-Monsters Inc figure then haired off toward the beach, his small stature disappearing behind a mound of shingle set against a backdrop of overcast grey and languid turquoise sea.

Young in spirit, it was hard to pinpoint Tanya’s age, but from her life chronology, I would guess she was around 50. She explained how she loved Hastings and had always visited as a child, and now she tried to visit every year, as they love the town so much. She told me about an aunt who, 40 years ago, had lived in a cottage in Old Town. Originally the small fisher cottages had been slum-quarters for the working people. Now the cozy cottages are exclusive and much sought after; fashionable, quaint and cute holiday homes or expensive Air BnB. Tanya pointed at the East Hill: “My Aunty lived near the big blue house, we’d come and stay with her for a few weeks every summer, we’d eat chips on the beach, it was a brilliant time.”

The controversial police bill going through Parliament will not only curtail protest rights, it will also further criminalise Travellers. In 1994 the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act limited Travellers to convoys of 6 caravans. The Police Crime and Courts Sentencing Bill currently going through Parliament will limit them to just a single caravan, in effect completely outlawing an already criminalized and endangered way of life. The aim is obviously to eradicate this community. 

If a Traveller community are found to be breaking the law, the maximum penalty is a £2,500 fine or a 3-months prison sentence.*

If the Police Bill passes, Gypsy, Roma and Travellers will be the litmus test for further repressive legislation, using the most vulnerable within society to see how far draconian law can be pushed.

Maintaining a nomadic lifestyle has only been achieved by a small number of ethnic groups. During visits to Afghanistan, I have been lucky enough to meet the nomadic ‘Kuchi’ who largely survive by grazing livestock. Similarly, the Kuchi are persecuted. In the hierarchy of discrimination, their subsistence nomadic tent dwelling lifestyle is considered least desirable within society.

The Roma are thought to have originated from India, but due to their dark features people assumed they were from Egypt, which is where the word Gypsy comes from.

Travellers are generally of Irish or Scottish ancestry and have probably always roamed this country, choosing not to settle when most humans built permanent dwellings around the time crops started to be farmed. In the last 500 years these three nomadic groups have overlapped and lived side by side, different histories, similarly persecuted. It’s remarkable to think we have all originated from nomadic tribes, that humans evolved as a species to constantly be on the move. Roma, Gypsy and Travellers have a long and proud history in Britain. They were known as story tellers, musicians and entertainers. They have been mobile, cheap and versatile labour – helping to build our extensive canal systems, roads, the factories which fueled the industrial revolution, casual seasonal farm labour, serving soldiers during war, everything from blacksmithing to basket weaving – they have been an integral part of building this country, though, throughout their service, they have been persecuted. At times they were shipped abroad and even hung.

“I hated living in my council flat in Tottenham, having 4 walls felt like a prison. We were also targeted by our neighbours, attacks on our home, my kids were picked on at school. The final straw was when a Traveller said to me ‘you’ve settled, you’re no longer a Traveller, that was it, I packed up a few special things, took my children and went on the road. I couldn’t live knowing I was depriving my children of their heritage.”

In less than two days of arriving in our town a Facebook campaign against the Traveller community had been launched. First of all, accusations about stealing sweets and forcing a nearby gift shop to close, when in reality, the shop was actually short staffed and employees “felt intimidated”.

Tanya struck me as a woman who has really lived life, with 16 children she is certainly a hard-working person. Her hair was casually pinned up with a plastic diamond studded clip, dangly gold ear rings finished off with a jazzy floral cotton top and a dressing gown thrown over. High cheekbones and soft blue eyes made her mature beauty striking. But what really shines is her energy, her lust for life and a natural knack for humorous story-telling and a fast-thinking intelligence. Proud yet at the same time humble, she proclaimed: “My children won’t be anything special like a doctor or a policeman, but they’re good kids.” A couple of times she referred to her eldest daughter who had tragically passed away. Never going into detail, it was obviously a sadness constantly at the forefront of her mind. Her analysis and understanding of racism was perceptive: “the government are coming after all of us, Blacks, Muslims, Refugees, we’re all the same, they want to criminalise us all. The discrimination we experience is racism, same as Black people, in some ways it’s worse. Everywhere we go, people make up stories about us.”

Three days later I caught up with the community at their third location in as many days. The night before they had been evicted from a recreation ground near the town’s dump. Police issued a section 61 eviction notice after an argument in a playground involving one of the Traveller kids.

Tanya was still in good spirits: “It’s true, our kids get excited when they play in proper playgrounds, but you’ve got to understand, we’re normally on the road, it’s not often they go in a proper playground. Our 4-year-old had an argument with another kid, I think it was over a swing.” Another Facebook campaign ensued. The official police justification described an altercation in a playground and the discovery of “human faeces” in the same play area. Upon reading this officially filed explanation my mind started to boggle -- had the police really carried out a rapid forensic test on excrement, or, like the rest of our town, was it in fact the result of an irresponsible dog owner. Obviously, I am aware of the racist trope around Travellers being unclean, but seeing this unconscious bias written down as an official justification for a legal eviction notice was completely jaw dropping.

Currently Hastings doesn’t have a site for Travellers to legally pitch up, which means, wherever they stop in our town, they are automatically criminals. The shared attitude within local authority is to try and get Travellers out as quickly as possible, and being seen as soft will lead to a ‘mass incursion’. The only legal stop site in the county is in Lewes, some 30 miles away, but there’s no guarantee of getting a place. Over the last 10 years there has been an 8.4% decrease in local authority transit stops.

As a town, one of our main industries is tourism, a Victorian borough specifically built for leisure, we pride ourselves on hospitality. We are also a ‘Community of Sanctuary’, which means we offer shelter for those fleeing persecution and with nowhere else to go. It was deeply saddening that our travelling visitors were not provided with the sanctuary we proudly advertise.

Within less than 24 hours of being parked up in a pub car park, which was closed due to Covid restrictions, the Travellers were evicted by bailiffs, and before evening, they were in another town 40 miles away. The last I saw of them, their half dozen caravans were resting under giant Douglas Fir Trees, the spring sky piercing blue, illuminated by the bright midday sun. Tanya called out to her kids who were running around the car park, it was almost like a promotional video for a caravan holiday camp, if not for the bailiffs dressed in black prowling around, tow truck in the wings.

Only the previous week there was an uproar within the Labour Party, the Shadow Equalities Minister tweeted out a photograph of her delivering a leaflet which described “traveller incursions” alongside tackling anti-social behaviour, fly tipping and waste transfer sites. The word ‘incursion’ is normally used to describe a hostile foreign military invasion. Listing Travellers alongside these other particular complaints is just outright racist. It’s generally acknowledged that racism is rife within Britain, but it’s unlikely you would get the Labour Party in this day and age describing a community of British black people as an ‘African incursion’ to be dealt with alongside rubbish. Within a week I have had my eyes opened to the discrimination experienced by one of the most persecuted minorities in the country, and indeed, the world. I have regularly heard that the GRT community are one of the most persecuted minorities, but in all honesty, I had never really processed what that actually meant. For the community visiting Hastings, they were shot at, had a window damaged, were (unknowingly) subject to two Facebook campaigns, legally accused (without evidence) of defecating in a playground, and evicted 3 times, all of this within less than a week. And this is their life every week of the year, no wonder Travellers are known for their toughness.

Being hostile towards Gypsy, Roma and Travellers is still completely acceptable and unchallenged within mainstream society.

The discrimination experienced by the GRT community has a high price: acute deprivation, which results in life expectancy 10-12 years less than that of the national average, suicide 4 times higher, 42% are affected by  long-term conditions, 1/5 women will experience loss of a child compared to 1 in a 100 non- Traveller community, disproportionate number of children in the care system, mental health, depression, alcoholism. State run criminalisation and racism mean it has become harder and harder for this community to survive. Gypsies and Travellers also have the lowest rate of economic activity of any ethnic group.

It’s curious to consider where these outwardly racist attitudes have come from, especially as most Travellers are white and have roamed these lands for hundreds if not thousands of years. It strikes me that Travellers are one of the last sectors of society not to be controlled by the State and capitalism.

In the last week, one of the main complaints was: “they don’t pay taxes”, which of course is ridiculous, everything in this country is highly taxed, you buy a bar of chocolate and you’re paying tax. Billionaires with offshore tax havens in the Bahamas dodge millions in tax, but they don’t receive the level of vitriol, discrimination and criminalization which is directed towards the GRT community. 

By Maya Evans

Photo credit of Travellers visiting Hastings: Jake Bowers

Photo credit of Maya with placard: Lily Kim

* this article was amended to remove inaccurate information about special schools