‘What happened on Saturday has set us back 40 years’ – Billy Welch speaks out on Manchester

Romany Gypsy leader Billy Welch – who helps to organise the annual Appleby Fair and sits alongside Westmoreland Council, Cumbria Police, and the myriad of health and welfare organisations that make up the steering group for the biggest Gypsy and Traveller event in Europe – speaks to the Travellers’ Times about the “terrifying” events of last Saturday in Manchester, how his own family were caught up in it, and the meeting with the Deputy Mayor on Tuesday.

“It was unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it in my life, it was scenes reminiscent of Nazi Germany,” says Shera Rom Billy Welch (Shera Rom is Romanus for ‘Head Gypsy’).
Billy explains that his grandchildren, and his nieces and nephews went to Manchester last Saturday and that they travelled by train from Darlington.

“They go there every year. All the Gypsy and Traveller children, with their mothers. You never see the Gypsy men there because they're not interested, but the women love it, and the kids love it,” says Billy.

“But what happened this year was terrifying. It was horrifying. There wasn't one crime committed by any of them children. The children were being forced onto trains and they didn't know what destination the trains were going to. They had no idea. They were crying and begging.”

Romany Gypsies, like Billy Welch, do not bring up Nazi Germany lightly. To Romani people, like the Jews, the Nazi Holocaust in World War Two was directed at them, as ethnic groups, and designed by the Nazis to wipe them from the face of the earth. An estimated one to one and a half million Sinti (German Gypsies) and Eastern European Roma were killed and murdered. This is not something the Romani people only read about in the history books - it happened to their kith and kin, and the stories and the fears of the concentration camps, the roundups, the death camps and the transports have been passed down through the generations. Billy himself has part-Sinti heritage.

“There was one young girl there who came with her mum and dad who stayed in a hotel in Manchester,” says Billy.

“The young girl walked down to the train station to meet the rest of the kids and was forced onto a train. She told the police, ‘I didn't come on the train. I was staying with me mum and dad in the hotel’, but the police forced her onto a train anyway, and she didn't know where she was going,” explains Billy.

“Children were separated, little girls, little boys were separated from their mothers and forced onto different trains and ended up in different parts of the country. The verbal and physical abuse was just unbelievable, like something out of a Nazi Europe.  I've seen nothing like that before. Not in the UK.”

Billy is related to the young man that was brutally assaulted, thrown to the ground and arrested by the police outside the Arndale Centre - which was caught on video by You Tuber @ManchesterWalks and then shared widely among Romany Gypsy and Traveller communities.

The young lad’s mother is Billy's niece.

“Did you see what the police were doing to his neck and his head,” asks Billy. 
“He is 16 or 17. He's the quietest, nicest young man in the world. But he wanted to know why he wasn't allowed into that Arndale Centre, so they dragged him to the floor, and then he was dragged away to the police station, and they charged him with assaulting a police officer,” says Billy.

“But when the police seen it on social media and that it was going out everywhere, they changed their minds, dropped the charges and apologized to him and let him out - so that speaks volumes,” adds Billy.

“The Gypsies and Travellers are terrified, they're even too frightened to come forward and give statements for the ones that were assaulted, they're too frightened to come forward and complain for fear of retribution by the police.”

Billy was at the meeting called for by Manchester Deputy Mayor Kate Green - who he said “seemed like a lovely lady” - alongside other Gypsy/Traveller representatives, which took place over Zoom Tuesday afternoon.  Billy says that the Chief Constable of Manchester Police was meant to be there – but didn’t show up.

.“Kate Green listened, and she said she was going to go back to the police, with what she'd heard from us,” says Billy.

Before becoming Deputy Mayor of Manchester, Kate Green was a Labour MP and shadow Minister - and, for a while, co-Chair of the Parliamentary group for Gypsies, Roma and Travellers.

I ask Billy what he thinks about the claims from Manchester Police that their unprecedented use of a dispersal order against a whole ethnic community that covered almost the entirety of Manchester City centre was justified by “intelligence” and “reports” of crime and anti-social behaviour.

“What I would like to say to the Manchester Police, is would you please show us the evidence,” asks Billy.

“That was the question I was going to ask the Chief Constable if he'd have been there yesterday - I was going to say, could you show me the intelligence and information that you've received?” he adds. 

“I would like to see this intelligence, and we'd like to see evidence of antisocial behaviour on the train.”

Billy then describes a train journey down to Manchester last Saturday, which had a non-Traveller busker singing and playing a saxophone on the train - who soon gathered a crowd of “15-20 Gypsy and Traveller kids.”

“So, then the kids were taking turns at singing, and then the others were doing like a backup group to the songs and this lady was playing the saxophone - she wasn't a Gypsy, she was from the settled community - but this lady was having the time of her life with the kids, and the rest of the people on the train, they were watching it and they were all applauding too.” says Billy.

“And we were at that meeting thinking - was that it? Was that the intelligence of anti-social behaviour the police said they had? Was that it? Did that justify two, three hundred police officers, a load of riot vehicles and a Gestapo approach to this?”

“We want to see the evidence,” says Billy. 

Billy explains that they were told that the police had said that there were two crime gangs coming together – but that they didn’t show up.  

“I think the police would have had sufficient training to know the difference between a potential dangerous crime gang and some women and children going shopping,” says Billy.

“The only crime that we can see that was committed by the children and the women in the eyes of the police, was that they were Gypsies and Travellers,” says Billy. 

“Unfortunately, in some people's eyes these days, just being a Gypsy or being a Traveller is a crime in itself,” he adds. 

“I think Manchester Police need some serious education and serious training on the history and the culture of our people because they made a massive mistake on Saturday.”

“We've worked so hard with different police forces, different education authorities, different councils, with the government, to improve relationships between the Gypsies and Travellers and the authorities and to bring things on and break down those barriers of mistrust and misunderstanding, and the confidence has been building up for years and gradually, slowly, people have been getting more confident - the Gypsies getting more confident - and it's been slow, a long process but it has been working - but what happened on Saturday has set us back 40 years.”

Travellers’ Times News

Interview by Mike Doherty 27/11/2024

(Lead photo: Billy Welch at Appleby Fair 2023 – by Bela Varadi for the Travellers’ Times)