Policies affecting Nackens (Scottish Gypsy Travellers), Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers: lived experience testimonies

Introduction and Context

This report is aligned with the results of archival research commissioned by the Scottish Government and carried out by independent researchers based at the University of St Andrews (JAN469999, hereafter ‘the archival research’). Both examine twentieth-century policies affecting Nackens (Scottish Gypsy Travellers), Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers in negative ways. These members of Scottish society can be as diverse and heterogenous as this nomenclature suggests. Yet their naming, self-imposed, contested, or otherwise, is important because it signals a diversity of experience that those affected have had, and to a large extent, continue to have. It must also be recognised that some members see only one community of Scottish Gypsy Travellers, the Nackens, and that this community of belonging exists in its own right. For the purposes of this report, however, I often deploy the term ‘participant(s)’ for clarity and so as not to exclude others and their experiences.

Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers are among Scotland’s most marginalised and underrepresented ethnic minorities. Based on their lifestyles and working practices, they have long been associated with a sense of ‘otherness’ that signals their distinctive yet marginalised sociocultural identities. They have existed in Scotland as distinct from mainstream society since at least the twelfth century, and have experienced centuries of misunderstanding, hostility and prejudice.^[1] Researchers in this area have identified that much of their culture and history are yet to be critically investigated, and the Scottish Government are similarly afflicted with significant knowledge gaps.^[2] Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers continue to experience damaging sociocultural issues and deep-rooted inequalities that the present report, the archival research, and the Scottish Government’s ongoing work, therefore seek to address.[3]

Accessing an unprecedented number of archives, the researchers at the University of St Andrews were tasked specifically to investigate certain policies that are sometimes referred to colloquially as the ‘Tinker Experiments’. It must be noted from the outset that the term ‘Tinker Experiments’ is loaded with social, cultural and historical specificity that does not capture the participants’ experiences in a comprehensive way (see Learning and Moving Forward below). However, as the researchers at the University of St Andrews have revealed, the nature of the policies under analysis was undoubtedly a series of nationwide actions that resulted in the forced housing of Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers in sometimes deliberately defective accommodation and/or at inappropriate and often insanitary locations across Scotland. The archival researchers also presented strong evidence that the national and local governments, churches, charities, the police and the media played roles in these actions, and that in addition to forced housing, these policies resulted in the forced removal of children from their families. This included children being placed in temporary care, or children’s homes, or in institutions like ‘Industrial Schools’ away from their families, and the permanent removal of children through adoption in Scotland or abroad.

It can be demonstrated that certain legislation and policies targeted Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers, and that officials’ and others’ insensitivities to their lifestyles and working practices meant that they had disproportionately negative impacts on the families. The wider impetus towards social and educational reform and child welfare taking place during the twentieth century in the United Kingdom meant that marginalised members of society, whose lifestyles and working practices did not necessarily align with these reforms, were demonstrably mistreated by authorities. In Scotland, as the evidence presented below indicates, and corroborating the archival research, the reforms resulted in a disproportionate bias that was based on ethnicity and that this therefore constitutes racial discrimination as defined by the United Nations’ International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.^[4]

Taking the results of the archival research further, this report provides readers with evidence of how the policies affected, and continue to affect, Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers as lived experience. Researchers in the field of affective studies point out that ‘affect’, in this context, can mean not only the corporeal impacts on families and individuals in substandard housing or who are displaced from their families, but also the social, cultural, psychological and economic impacts that segregation and marginalisation lead to.^[5] Although the term ‘historical’ is used to refer to certain policies throughout this report, it is crucial to acknowledge that the testimonies below represent what the participants see as breaches of their human rights and that the impacts are being felt to this day.

Despite the unprecedented amount of evidence and exposition within the archival research, archives and other documentary sources can only go so far in capturing the impacts of certain policies. As the below testimonies reveal, the policies, while they affected people in different ways, amount to a trauma that has been felt across entire generations in the twentieth century, and which now affect current generations. Past research has demonstrated how Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers have particularly strong and extended familial bonds, and a high esteem for their ancestors, promoting mutual support to their members.^[6] It can also be demonstrated, using documentary evidence, that these bonds, and the intergenerational transmission of working practices and heritage, have been under threat by changing social and economic priorities since at least the end of the eighteenth century.[7]

As the archival researchers have pointed out in their report, a more recent piece of legislation that disturbed these familial bonds and cultural continuity at a generational level was the Children (1908) Act. One prominent researcher summarises the Children Act neatly, seeing it as part of reformers’ belief that Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers were capable of change, and that their characteristics were not inherent, and that the Act aimed to promote education as a prime tool in their reformation.^[8] Moreover, the legislation gave the authorities the power, without a warrant, to remove children to ‘a place of safety’ should their living conditions contravene any part of the legislation, which refers specifically to persons who ‘habitually wander from place to place’.[9] The lifestyles and working practices of Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers meant that they were often itinerant and were therefore targeted by the legislation.

Under the provisions of the Children Act, parents were also obliged to ensure that their children attended public elementary school during the months of October to March on at least two hundred occasions.[10] If families did not adhere to such provisions, on account of their itinerancy for instance, authorities could remove children from their families into state-sanctioned institutions, often separating siblings in the process. It is important to note that the targeting and discrimination of Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers did not entirely escape the public’s attention in the years immediately following the Children Act, with sympathetic citizens voicing their concerns in the media.^[11]

As such commentators recognised, the Children Act could be used to assert control not only over the education of Nacken, Gypsy/Traveller and Scottish Traveller children, but also their upbringing more generally. Viewed in this way, the Children Act could permit officials to take control of the early scholastic and cultural education of the children to assimilate new generations into mainstream society. The deliberate displacement of families during the twentieth century is a key theme, and one that has had serious repercussions in terms of inhibiting the crucial familial and cultural bonds that Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers cherish.

The researchers at the University of St Andrews provided a series of recommendations and next steps, including a formal apology from the Scottish Government and qualitative research with those affected to better understand their experiences. This information cannot come from any other source than the Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers themselves. The present researcher was therefore tasked with arranging a series of discussions to gather data and testimony based on lived experiences. This research is urgent because many of those involved are ageing and are among the last who experienced the often-traumatic realities of the twentieth century from a Nacken, Gypsy/Traveller and Scottish Traveller perspective.

The discussions were not designed to be representative, rather they were designed to start a new dialogue between Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers and the Scottish Government, seeking ways to move forward from the impacts that certain policies have had by gathering insights and suggestions from those who continue to be affected.