Culture: in depth reading

Books and Reviews

By no means a complete list, but on this page you'll find some books that we feel we can recommend for more in depth study or interest.

Equal Access to Quality Education for Roma

Monitoring Reports 2007 - Vols and 2

Pubished by Open Society Institute

Equal Access to Quality Education for Roma The Roma are one of Europe's largest and most vulnerable minorities. Throughout Europe, Roma remain excluded from many aspects of society, denied their rights and entrenched in poverty. The "Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005 - 2015" is an unprecedented international effort to combat discrimination and to close the gap in welfare and living conditions between Roma and non-Roma, in order to break the cycle of poverty and exclusion. The initiative is supported by the Open Society Institute (OSI) and the World Bank, and endorsed by nine Central and Eastern European countires. Education is one of the four main areas of the Decade, and the partiular problems faced by Roma in accessing quality educational opportunities have been widely recognised.

This series of EUMAP reports on "Equal Access to Quality Education for Roma" builds on previous EUMAP reports on the situation of Roma in Europe. It has been prepared in collaboration with OSI's Education Support Programme (ESP) and Roma Participation Program (RPP). The reports aim to support the Decade goals on education, and to establish a framework for regular monitoring throughout the Decade, as well as to promote consultation with Roma connumities on education issues. They provide an assessment of the state of implementation of Government education policies for Roma, data on key education indicators, and case studies on selected communities.

Volume one covers Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Serbia while volume two covers Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovakia.

All EUMAP reports are availbale at www.eumap.org

Beneath the Blue Sky

By Dominic Reeve
Reviewed by Joanna Eliot
Five Leaves 978-1-905512-02-7

Beneath the Blue Sky Evoking a world of smoking fires and muddy fields, peopled by a variety of finely drawn characters, Dominic Reeve chronicles the massive changes in British Traveller life from the mid-sixties to the early years of the new Millennium, caused by the replacement of horse-drawn vehicles with lorries, and the ever dwindling access to stopping places.

Like a cantankerous uncle relating stories from the past, the author fills his narrative with repetitions, digressions, contradictions, prejudices and political asides. He complains about noisy neighbours, unfriendly pub landlords, Irish Travellers, Gaudji academics who lecture on Romani matters, Born Again Christians, "whose simple fire-and-brimstone message has presently been embraced by a large number of British Romanies," and New Age Travellers with their "trinketty colourful and casual living conditions."

Well-known for his sharp ear for dialogue, he brings to life Old Louie and Mosey, red-faced Cockeyed Jim, the extraordinary retired surgeon who buys twenty bags of compost, and the brothers Do-shit and Don't-shit. There's the tale of Lily who almost drowned in manure, and the Gypsy who carried tarmac in the boot of his brand-new Rolls Royce.

Reeve vividly depicts the Fairs which mark the Travellers' calendar, beginning with Derby Week at Epsom in the 1960s. Rigs pull in, old friends call across the field, and gambling, bare knuckle fights, step dancing and singing take place. Romani women in long skirts carry baskets of lace and trinkets round town, while men in red or yellow boots and old-fashioned jackets and trousers admire each other's lorries. With customary wit he describes the red carpet in a trailer as of "a lively design, which would not have looked out of place in the foyer of any suburban Odeon Cinema."

He magnificently evokes Stow Fair in 1959 where hawkers of cut glass vases, decorated tea sets, carpets, cushions, caged birds, puppies, and Crown Derby China compete with Gypsies exchanging wagons and horses. Suddenly jumping forward forty years to Stow Fair 1999, the author disdainfully dismisses the academics who have now moved onto Traveller territory, and their stalls of literature boasting titles like,"The Origins of Roms in Southern Bulgaria."

Traversing the country earning a living laying gravel paths, hawking muck, dealing in scrap iron and supplying logs, Reeve is always running into people he knows, and is therefore accorded help and companionship, which lessens the Traveller's "sense of being an alien from another world." He conveys the constant wariness of being turfed off waste land, the pressures of "cold calling," and the claustrophobic lack of privacy but sense of comradeship of Traveller life.

One of the highlights of the book is a glorious dramatisation of the solidarity of the encampment, when rich and poor, Irish Traveller and English Gypsy, faced with eviction, take desperate methods to stop their trailers being towed away.

"It is very depressing to see the enforcement of these petty regulations in a so-called free society," he says, accusing council workers of allowing themselves "to be turned into inhuman monsters, wreaking havoc on men, woman, children, and their homes, purely at the whim of dark-suited bureaucrats", and is equally critical of council-run caravan sites, "mini reservations which are no place for a once-free people to live."

Trenchant comments on Planning Laws, the Caravan Sites Act and councils' obligation to construct sites for the Traveller population will make uncomfortable reading for the ministers who devise such legislation.

A brief sojourn on a council site with its washhouse, bathroom, and electricity fascinates and seduces him for a month or two. But unable to adapt to fenced plots and enforced orderliness, he soon takes to the road again. He notes that many of the "poorer classes of travellers" have allowed themselves to be manipulated into council-houses, falling into a world that is neither Traveller or Gaujo. As one unwillingly settled Romani lady tells him, "You'm like the birds in the sky, young man. You goes where you likes, but we're stuck here ... an' cain't go nowheres."

"The traveller's life-style has fulfilled my social, theatrical and material needs," writes Reeve, mourning the way things have changed "to an astonishing degree as travellers sacrificed their horses in breathtaking number; within just a few years a whole way of life virtually disappeared."

Yet he also rejoices in the resilience and adaptability of British Gypsies, a group who have survived and evolved, despite rules and regulations and attempts to drive them off the road.

In this fascinating and valuable book, Dominic Reeve once more offers an insight into the world of Travellers. Those familiar with his earlier works will sense a silent presence sitting round the fire puffing on a swigler - the ghost of his past. It's perhaps inevitable that the shadowy allure of SMOKE IN THE LANES, Reeve's most acclaimed book, resonates through this latest, long-awaited work.

You can order this book from Waterstones.

Waterstones Link.

Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930

By Deborah Epstein Nord
Published by Columbia University Press,
June 2006

Gypsies and the British imagination Gypsies were both idealized and reviled by Victorian and early-twentieth-century Britons. They were regarded as an integral part of British society but, at the same time, separate from it. Associated with primitive desires, lawlessness, cunning, and sexual excess, Gypsies were also privileged as objects of antiquarian, literary, and anthropological interest.

In this work, the first to fully explore the British obsession with Gypsies, Deborah Epstein Nord traces the varied representations of Gypsies in the works of Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, D. H. Lawrence, and others. Nord also recovers the fascinating histories of nomadic writer George Borrow, the Gypsy Lore Society, and other neglected figures and institutions.

Projecting onto Gypsies what they most feared and desired, writers and artists drew on Gypsy characters and plots to redefine and reconstruct cultural and racial difference, national and personal identity, and the individual's relationship to social and sexual orthodoxies.

You can order this book from Waterstones.

Waterstones Link

Gypsy and Traveller Law - Second Edition 2007

Edited by Chris Johnson and Marc Willers

Published by LAG Education and Service Trust Limited, 2004

Gypsy and Traveller Law From the book's reverse:

The Gypsy and Traveller communities in the UK experience widespread deprivation, social exclusion and discrimination. The lack of provision of suitable sites for Gypsies and Travellers is the root cause of most, if not all, of the difficulties that they face living in Great Britain today.

There is a new legal framework and policy designed to address the severe shortage of sites. Local authorities now have a duty to assess the need for Gypsy and Traveller sites in their area and to allocate land which will meet the need identified. However, it is likely that it will take a considerable length of time for that exercise to be completed and, meanwhile, rented site provision remains in short supply and Gypsies and Travellers c ontinue to be frustrated in their attempts to develop site for themselves.

Gypsy and Traveller Law brings together the areas of law affecting the travelling community. It is the only guide to cover accommodation needs such as planning, site provision, homelessness and eviction as well as other issues impacting on the day-to-day lives of Gypsies and Travellers such as education, healthcare and race discrimination.

It balances straight-forward, practical advice with comprehensive coverage of the relevant statutes, regulations, guidance, circulars and a rapidly developing body of case-law.

This fully updated second edition includes:

a new section on non-local authority rented Gyspsy and Traveller sites
significant human rights law developments, including analysis of the impact ofthe decisions in Connors v UK and Price v Leeds City Council
the latest developments on the question of security of tenure on official local authority sites
new Government guidance on the grant of planning permission, the provision of sites and their management
up-to-date case-law on the enforcement of planning control
the changes introduced by the Equality Act 2006 and the creation of the Commision for Equality and Human Rights

This is the key reference work for lawyers and advisers working with Gypsies and Travellers and an essential guide for local authorities on thier duties to the travelling community and the social and legal implications of failure to fulfil thiese obligations. Gyspy and Traveller Law also aims to empower Gypsies and Travellers to secure their rights and challenge injustice.

Please visit the LAG website for more details.

You can order this book from Amazon.

Amazon Link

Romany Nevi-Wesh - An informal history of the New Forest Gypsies

By Len Smith
Nova Foresta Publishing 2004 -

Romany Nevi-Wesh From their website:

"This important and eagerly awaited book traces the origins of the New Forest Gypsies, following their routes across continents before arriving on the shores of Britain in the 16th century. Harsh Tudor statutes proved no match for their ability to survive in wild places.

The Gypsies who settled in the New Forest found common cause with the commoners (of the New Forest) in holding on to a precarious way of life in the face of officialdom ever keen to move them on. The difficulties that they met and overcame, in the face of great prejudice, forms an important contribution to the general history of the New Forest.

That they were eventually forced to adopt a way of life for which they were totally unsuited is one of the great tragedies and injustices of the 20th century. This book unashamedly puts forward a Gypsy view of these last important years whilst there are still those alive who experienced it."

Winter Time - Memoirs of a German Sinto who survived Auschwitz

By Walter Winter
University of Hertfordshire Press

Winter Time From the book's reverse:

"In this book German Sinto (Gypsy) Walter Winter relates his remarkable wartime experience. One of nine children, he was conscripted into the Germany navy only to be discharged on 'racial grounds'. In 1943, together with two siblings, he was deported to the 'Gypsy Camp' of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Over a year later, shortly before the extermination of the entire Gypsy camp, he was deported to Ravenbrück, and from there to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Grotesquely, before the war was over he was reconscripted and forced to fight against the Red Army on the Russian front.

Water Winter recounts his memories of Nazi persecution with extraordinary courage and compassion. He does not flinch from recounting the dreadful crimes he witnessed in the camps and the cruel deaths of so many, including his first wife, who died in labour. Yet despair is held at bay by his own personal bravery in confronting authority, once beating up an SS guard and on another occasion confronting the notorious Dr Mengele to request extra rations for starving Sinti children in his block. Driven to the brink of starvation, he risked his life more than once to get food for himself and those around him. Despite seeing the worst of humanity, he was always willing to see the good in individuals, including some members of the SS.

The fate of Germany's Sinti and Roma at the hands of the Nazis is still to little known. Winter Time makes an important contribution to the righting of that wrong. In this edition, extensive notes throw valuable new light on the policy of the Third Reich and successive post-war governments towards the Sinti and Roma in Germany."

The Romani World - A historical dictionary of the Gypsies

By Donald Kenrick
University of Hertfordshire Press 2004

The Romani World From the books' reverse:

This encyclopaedic dictionary provides a wealth of factual information about the Gypsy people and their unique culture. The core of the book includes biographies of significant people of Gypsy origin from both past and present, in the arts, sport and other professions, as well as important figures in the struggle for gypsy rights.

There are reports on the Gypsies' situation in many different countries of the world; major organisations, events and collections are profiled and key words explained. In addition, a detailed chronology provides an overview of crucial events since the Gypsies came to Europe. Finally, a full biography, together with listings of journals and websites, provides a survey of current Gypsy culture.

You can order this book from Waterstones.

Waterstones Link

Stopping Places - A Gypsy History of South London and Kent

By Simon Evans
University of Hertfordshire Press

Stopping Places From the books' reverse:

The country of Kent, the "Garden of England", was also the market garden for London. The regular round of seasonal work attracted families of Gypsies who returned to the same encampments and worked on the same farms from one generation to the next.

Stopping Places describes the traditional life of these Gypsies, living in bender tents and horse-drawn wooden vardos, until the mechanisation of farming began to reduce the need for casual labour. At the same time, life on the road was becoming increasingly difficult because the traditional stopping places were disappearing. Eventually the whole way of life was swept away, often violently, and the Gypsies were forced to live "on the verge" or on officially designated council caravan sites. Increasingly, the ultimate fate of many Gypsies today is to make the traumatic transition from a nomadic lifestyle to enforced settlement in houses. It is impossible not to sense the isolation and loss of identity which has accompanied this. The events in South East England recounted here mirror the experience of Travellers across the United Kingdom.

Simon Evans' clear sighted and compassionate account of the changes imposed on the age-old Gypsy culture is all the more powerful for the inclusion of over 170 photographs, together with vivid first-hand accounts of the recent Gypsy experience.

You can order this book from Waterstones.

Waterstones Link

Gypsy Traveller Students in Secondary Schools: culture, identity and achievement

By Chris Derrington and Sally Kendall

Gypsy Traveller Students in Secondary Schools This is the first national longitudinal study of Gypsy Traveller pupils in secondary schools. Through a series of interviews with the young people concerned, as well with as their parents and teachers, the researchers collected and analysed significant data relating to their achievement and progress, their attitudes, values, expectations, and aspirations. The research thus provides a longitudinal account as well as a multi-perspective dimension from which the authors identified typologies and associations that can support and encourage Travellers to engage and achieve in key stage 3. This book provides information for all schools with Traveller pupils and will be a key resource for academics, students and educationalists concerned with issues of inclusion, social and cultural diversity, school disaffection and identity dissonance. A full account of the findings, published by Trentham Books in March 2004 (ISBN 1 85856 320 8), provides detailed insights into the perceptions and experiences of the pupils and their parents, which may help to further understanding of this complex issue.

Forty-four eleven-year-old Gypsy Traveller pupils across England agreed to take part in this unique, longitudinal study that was funded by the Nuffield Foundation. The aim of the research was to explore the perceptions and experiences of the pupils, their parents and teachers as they transferred to secondary school and progressed through key stage 3. In the event, thirty-eight achieved the transfer to secondary school and, of those, twenty pupils completed the first three years of secondary education. In other words, just under half of the original sample were retained in the school system to the age of fourteen. Although this finding raises obvious concerns, it may also reflect an encouraging message when compared with earlier estimates that less than one in five Traveller pupils accessed school in key stage 3 (Ofsted, 1996).

Significantly, however, the pupils that took part in this study were largely sedentary, living on established plots or in housing. Only three of the pupils lived on tolerated or unauthorised encampments. This was a deliberate feature of the research design and, had a larger and more representative sample of Travellers (including more mobile families) been considered, the findings might have revealed a less encouraging picture. The key message from this research is that whether a Traveller child lives in a house or on the roadside, their engagement in secondary education can be equally precarious. Furthermore, evidence from this study has shown that Traveller pupils are still under-achieving, are more likely to be excluded from school, and are likely to encounter racism within the school context.

You can order this book from Waterstones.

Waterstones Link

Till Doomsday in the Afternoon: The Folklore of a Family of Scots Travellers, the Stewarts of Blairgowrie

By Ewan Maccoll and Peggy Seeger

Till Doomsday in the Afternoon Manchester University Press

Over the past twenty years Ewan MacColI and Peggy Seeger, internationally known as folk singers and authorities on folk music and literature, have followed the fortunes of the Stewarts of Blairgowrie, a family of Scots Travellers, The result is an enormous treasury of tales, jokes, riddles, children's songs, 'mak'-ye-ups', and the words and music of some seventy songs.

As well as being fascinating and enjoyable in itself, this original material throws much light on how a family ofTravellers lives and works, on how tales and songs vary in being passed down over the years, and how a family can handle a vocabulary made up of words from English, Scots, Romany and the cant. This unique collection will be essential reading for folklorists, musicians, historians and linguists as well as providing much entertainment
for singers and the general reader.

You can order this book from Waterstones.

Waterstones Link

In Their Own Words

Gypsies and Travellers in their own words compiled by the Gypsy Roma Traveller Achievement Service is a fantastic read, and gives amazing insights into the lives and times of Travellers in this country.