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

Lived Experience Testimonies

The overarching purpose of this research is to ensure that Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers have an opportunity to contribute to the Scottish Government’s response to the archival research and to inform the Scottish Government’s ongoing programme of work. Along with the lived experience testimonies, the research sought suggestions of how the Scottish Government and other institutions can learn, and move forward from, the impacts of past mistakes.

The main purpose of this report is to present readers with verbatim testimonies. Apart from the verbatim testimonies from research participants which are indented throughout this report, all the context and commentary is the author’s own. The research participants do not necessarily condone, or agree with, all of the context and commentary. All references to secondary sources and/or the associated archival research are captured in endnotes.

The testimonies below should not be read in isolation when readers are forming their responses. The substantial documentary evidence contained within the associated the archival research and its report are to be reviewed and taken into consideration. The testimonies presented below will augment readers’ responses by providing much-needed, detailed and corroborating lived experience testimonies.

The first open discussion took place at The Engine Shed, Stirling, on 24 April 2025 from 10am-12pm. The second discussion took place in private, at the request of the participants, on 25 April 2025 from 2pm-4pm. The third discussion took place in Perthshire, with the Minister for Equalities Ms Kaukab Stewart in attendance, from 11am-1pm. The testimonies and commentary presented below represent thematic transcriptions of the discussions and that focus on three main themes:

1. Nacken, Gypsy/Traveller and Scottish Traveller families being allocated deliberately substandard and/or inappropriate and uninhabitable/insanitary accommodation by state actors, sometimes as a part of housing and/or social ‘experiments’.

2. The displacement of families, especially the removal of children and/or the threat of removal, as a means to assimilate future generations of Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers into ‘mainstream’ populations. This included the transportation of children and/or families to places like Canada and Australia.

3. The significant and ongoing social, cultural, economic and psychological trauma engendered by the above themes, along with the related intergenerational impacts.

There is often a relationship between the themes and, consequentially, the details within the testimonies can overlap. The indented testimonies are reported verbatim with no editorial input apart from the brief commentaries that are provided for context and to aid the reader through the testimonies. All personal details have been removed for the confidentiality and anonymity of the participants.

As the archival research makes clear, there were numerous and varied housing schemes and sites throughout Scotland during the twentieth century and into the twenty first century. Many of these schemes and sites were referred to during the testimonies. I have adopted the term ‘state-sanctioned site’ throughout the below testimonies for anonymity and the clarity of purpose, which is to capture holistic lived experience, not the specific locations and details of the schemes and sites. Within the verbatim testimonies the square brackets and ellipsis – [...] – indicate an omission for either clarity of speech/narrative, or for the purpose of omitting personal information that was disclosed.

As noted above, many aspects of the testimonies presented below are reflected in, and corroborate, the archival research (AR) prepared by the researchers at the University of St Andrews. Where this is the case, I direct readers to the relevant chapter and section using annotations in bold such as ‘AR: 5.2’ (i.e. Archival Research: Chapter 5, Section 2). This cross-referencing is not exhaustive and is instead intended to provide directions to the wider, nationwide context provided by the archival research.

Theme 1: Housing

We begin with testimonies that are indicative of the first prominent theme, housing, and important points about nomenclature and terminology (see also Learning and Moving Forward below). The participant conceptualises one community of Travellers and uses the term ‘Traveller experiments’:

Not ‘communities’ because I can’t speak for other communities that’ve not been involved in Traveller experiments.

What I would say about one Traveller community, which is us, which was forced into living in degradation, isolation, and discrimination. AR: 4.2

Cramped conditions with very little facilities [...] therefore there was no freedom at all.

The participant also makes an important point about chronology and the impacts that the historical policies have had, challenging the perception that the material impacts belong only in the twentieth century:

[We had] no facilities until 2010, even now it’s substandard accommodation, which carries on the experiment, really.

[We] live in second-hand huts, [with] low energy ratings [i.e. inefficient], mould and damp [...] it’s not much better than [the original state-sanctioned accommodation dating to the 1940s]. So, in fact, we’ve not moved on at all. AR: 4.2

Another participant shares a similar experience:

I remember it, we were in a tent down from the hut and the tent was set on fire by someone. My parents managed to get us all out, just.

Someone from the council, someone from the cruelty [Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSSPCC),] and there was someone from the church, and a policeman, and they were all there. They said to my mum and dad, “the hut up here, this is where you’re offered [to live] and it’s an experimental hut”. AR: 3.9; AR: Appendix I

The testimony goes on to recount a situation where the family were offered a house nearby but sacrificed the house to a relative who had nowhere to go and a significantly larger family. It also captures the close association between housing and imperatives around schooling:

Then they [RSSPCC etc.] come back to mum and dad and said “well, you’ll have to take the experimental hut. If they didn’t take it, they were told, the children needed to be schooled because [...] at that age [the children’s] there was one already for school and we were the next [...] for the school. So, mum and dad had to take it. AR: 4.2; AR: 3.9

One bedroom [...], a kitchen that small [indicates one arms’ width], it was so tiny, there was no cooking facilities, white sink, two little cupboards above each other, that were it. And a toilet smack on the kitchen.

Now, there was nowhere to cook [...] no cooker, we didn’t have a fridge, we didn’t have electric, we didn’t have hot water [...] there was no way of having baths [...] That was awful, that way of living. AR: 4.2; AR: 4.3

One participant felt such dread at the prospect of living at one state-sanctioned site where they were placed that they ran away from home, going on to describe the sanitary conditions there:

The Church of Scotland and government etcetera [...] they come out with some pieces of wood, built the thing [...] a kind of kiddie-on loo, they put a big drum and a hole in the ground. Now if that’s not degrading. Even being the age I was, I had a slight idea because I’d been to toilets in the town, and saw a real toilet, and I thought “that’s out of order” [i.e. the inappropriate sanitary facilities at the site]. AR: 5.5

[Referring to tuberculosis and other bacteria] Heaven knows what some of these older Travellers have died of [...] I can always remember the smell and it was horrendous.

The insanitary conditions at the sites created by the Church of Scotland during the twentieth century is also captured in the archival research, with serious concerns about the encampments’ suitability being voiced before their eventual approval or rejection, and sometimes their subsequent abandonment. The archival research also uncovered evidence that there were instances where officials deliberately housed the families in substandard housing because ‘the provision of standard council houses for tinkers [Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers] might prejudice the success of the experiment’.^[17] AR: 4.4; AR: 5.5

Another participant raises the important point of psychological impacts, and the hardships brought about by the disruption to working practices the forced housing had:

The deep psychological impact at [state-sanctioned site] and the excruciating traumatic experiences we had as children, and teenagers growing up, and now, sitting there being the butt of public derision.

We were not like other children. We didn’t have support networks behind us [...] my parents were very poor and the reason they were was they were forced to sit there in [state-sanctioned site], in a forced assimilation programme. Which meant they couldn’t travel, they couldn’t have the jobs that Travellers had round the countryside, ways of making money. They were socially and economically crippled. We didn’t have any of the skills that Travellers have. AR: 3.8; AR: 8.1

One participant shares their experiences of inappropriate housing and goes on to describe their experience of the displacement of families and the separation of siblings:

I’ve had about ten different houses, I can’t settle, I even changed my name so that I wouldn’t be getting called [derogatory] names.

Living in these houses, my mother called it ‘concrete jungle’, she absolutely hated it but [stayed] for fear of the cruelty man [RSSPCC] taking us away because it happened to my mum. Her dad was taken from his family, there was seven brothers and two sisters, and they were split up all over the country [...] that fear was there inside my mother. AR: 7.1

When we were put into the houses, we used to crawl on our hands and knees for fear of the cruelty man [RSSPCC], or anybody coming to the door, terrified. We just lived in a bubble.

Another participant offers a thoughtful perspective on the way that social services operated in this context, that is, negatively impacting those they sought to help:

I think what you’ve been mentioning there is this ‘care versus control’ dichotomy [...] when does care graduate into control? And what that has then led onto here, especially at [state-sanctioned site], is a complete dereliction of social duty by the duty-bearers [...] I was born in a condemned property. AR: 8.1

Elsewhere, another participant explains their experience of housing policies in the middle of the twentieth century, again making the connection with schooling:

We moved into [state-sanctioned site] in ’65, or very early ’66, and we didn’t have any alternative [...] I was starting the school. There were two old ladies that appeared on the scene at a very early stage, and they were heavily involved with the Church of Scotland, and they insisted that we had to get a house. AR: 5.5

The only thing that was available was at [state-sanctioned site] which was horrendous, but we didn’t have an alternative [...] that building was ridiculous, it was loaded with asbestos, freezing cold, one cold-water tap, no electric, no bath, no shower, no cooker, no heating [...] I almost died in there with the cold. AR: 4.2; AR: 4.4

Readers might take basic amenities, that were lacking at the state-sanctioned sites, for granted and another participant makes an important point about the broader impacts of living on sites:

The thing that I think characterised nearly all of us was the life-chances were decimated. Whether it be marrying, whether it be [employment opportunities like apprenticeships].

I can attest to that because I was sent to a specialist in the hospital [...] and he had a letter on the table [...] and I read it, and it said that I “was a member of a Tinker family that lived in a hovel”. And that was from the doctor [...] that was the sort of information that was bandied about because of where you lived, more specifically than even being a Gypsy Traveller. AR: 8.1

A significant insight, therefore, and one that applies to most participants, is the stigma attached to the sites where they were housed and the impacts on their life-chances:

The doctors wouldn’t come to [state-sanctioned site] at all, and the council wouldn’t come to [state-sanctioned site]. I never seen a council person from ’65 to 1980 [...] they never once came out to do any repairs or do anything at all.

I had to leave the [state-sanctioned site], that was the only way that I could get married or get anything at all [...] being a Gypsy Traveller and coming from the [state-sanctioned site] has kind of followed me all the way, that stigma [...] coming from that building [state-sanctioned site] your chances were doomed [...] it really is terrible. AR: 8.1

I suffered all the punishment inside that building, I nearly died in there [...] when you went into the room, it was like opening the door of the fridge-freezer, you know, the cold mist [...] we didn’t have an option at all, we had to get a roof over our head.

There is also an abiding sense among the participants’ testimonies that the authorities were ‘directing’ Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers to certain locales and educational institutions. Referring to previous testimony from the discussion, one participant remarks:

That was one of the ‘directed camps’, if you like, [state-sanctioned site] my granny was in it just after the first world war, my mother was in it in the ’20 and ‘30s and went to the Tinker’s School [...] they would direct you, police and authorities, to the same camp, “put them [the families] in that wood”, or whatever.

The conditions were deplorable, degrading, there’s no way round it. What was important when you go to the [state-sanctioned site] was that they deliberately created substandard [accommodation] when they had an opportunity [...] to create something better. AR: 4.4

A further example comes from the aforementioned and so-called ‘Tinker’s school’:

The Tinker’s school, that was just a few sheets of corrugated iron, and a few [railway] sleepers nailed together, and an old wooden table and half a dozen chairs. They put the Gypsy Traveller kids in there because they didn’t want them in the school in [the town].

That school, the Tinker’s school [...] they put that on the road going down to the dump. It covered the whole of Perthshire just about and there were rats and everything running all over it, over the tables and chairs.

Some [children] were lifted who wouldn’t go to school and put on the Mars Training Ship in Dundee [...] the girls weren’t put on the ship; they were fostered out. AR: 6.3

Another participant describes experiences of forced housing policies and reaffirms the fear of the authorities removing children:

[Relatives] have photographs [photographs are shared with the group at this point]. My granda [and others] when they come out the war that’s where they put them, into the old army Nissen huts [...] you can see them pushing the huts together to make it a stable home for the family because then, there was big families. AR: 4.3; AR: 4.4; AR: Appendix I

They kept them [Travellers] there until they built what they called [state-sanctioned site] that’s where they put all the Travellers, they never had a choice about where they wanted to go.

They had what they call the cruelty [RSSPCC], the social workers, come about for the kids, if they weren’t at school [...] they were threatening to take them away and they had to hide the kids [...] I have heard of them being taken away and put into homes. AR: 6.2; AR: 6.3

They put them to a [Media?] school, not myself because I was younger but my older brothers [and others] they were all Travellers anyway. They were just put in there, they could do what they want, they weren’t taught [...] where does that [give] education to Travellers? They’re entitled to their education like everybody else but the just weren’t treated fairly.

One participant recalls the experience of a site, and its accommodation, sanctioned by the state that encapsulates the experiences of many participants when it comes to families being segregated from the local communities and society more generally:

There was ten of us, we had a one-bedroom wooden hut, no electricity, no running water, no baths or showers, and we were isolated, basically, from the rest of the town [...] no lights, nothing like that [...] you were in complete darkness. AR: 4.4

Although we were supposedly assimilated into the community at that point, there was no real assimilation [...] people really didn’t want to socialise with you [...] you were in a house that was termed as a ‘hovel’ and that was described by the council in writing. AR: 8; AR: 8.1

At the age of five, we were told that we had to go to school because if you didn’t there was always the threat of the cruelty man [RSSPCC] [...] you may be put in a home, that was always a threat that was hanging over your head.

You weren’t mixing with the other children at school, really, you weren’t accepted because it would always come back to [...] you live in a hovel, [and] you were a Gypsy Traveller [...] we had a lot of racist taunts, as you can imagine, a lot of bullying, physical and verbal, and nothing was really done about it. AR: 3.9

Theme 2: Displacement of Families

The misperception that the families were unable to care for their children, along with the legislation largely embodied by the Children (1908) Act, resulted in the displacement of many families. One participant remembers instances of children being removed from the extended family:

If you refuse the hut, they’re gonna just take the children there and then [...] and that happened, it happened to a cousin of mine. The [children] got took off and I remember the big black car coming [...] my mum and I were watching it, and they took them away and put them in the homes [...] in them days, that was their way of dealing with it, the Church had a lot to do with it, this is their way of dealing with it, take the children. AR: 5.5; AR: 6.2

Further testimony is provided by another participant who shares in the experiences of the other participants and who suffered being removed from his family into a children’s home:

I was born in a tent in a wood, we’ve travelled all my life round the country, camping here there and everywhere. We were eventually lifted into a home in the early ‘60s [...] We were put in a home called [children’s home] we were there for a long time. AR: 6.1

And it was just about the same old story, that they’re taking the Travellers’ children away from them into [children’s home]. AR: 3.5

Elsewhere, one participant recalls families being displaced abroad:

[Referring to the RSSPCC] My mum’s people were taken to Canada many years ago and never ever saw their relatives, or anybody, again. I think one of them died on the road to Canada but I’m not sure about that. AR: 6.5; AR: 6.6

I don’t think there’s enough being done. We can say this and say that and say the next thing but, in all reality, certain things should be done about this. I’ve had a horrendous life [...] I was terribly traumatised at school and at an encampment called [state-sanctioned site] which we were periodically sent back to.

Impacts are shared by the participants but not always in the same ways:

In 1956, my mum was living in one of the [state-sanctioned site] and they had nine children. The social services came and viewed it [the accommodation] and there’s a report [...] I saw, and it said [...] “as soon as [mum] has her twins, they’re to be taken into care”. AR: 6.2

I was crying to think, even before I was born, I was getting penalised because of who I was and where I lived.

[My brother] ended up being a manager in a big hotel [...] that boy, his manner and everything, was perfect. He was sent to that school [boarding school] at seven, and when he came back to our family, we didn’t bond with our parents, we didn’t bond with our siblings.

I ended up being an executive chef [...] I married, I’ve got children, my son is a [specialist scientist], he was the youngest one at [his university].

However, the same participant goes on to describe how the displacement of families during the twentieth century continues to have an impact on familial bonds and relationships:

This man [RSSPCC] was down at the house [...] they [the parents] were worried that they [RSSPCC] were going to lift all the children, so we were the sacrifice for the rest of them. AR: 6.2

I can truly say, the biggest thing out of this [historical policies] was I don’t have any contact with my siblings [...] that paperwork [social services report cited above], I can’t forgive them.

Similar testimony is offered by another participant about lifelong impacts of the assimilation policies and the negative impacts on the continuity of the community:

Our parents were threatened with getting the children taken off them too. I was only a year old, but my mother and father told me about it. It was a man called [...] who came with the Church of Scotland and social workers etcetera, and he said, “You either put your children to school or we’re going to take them off you”. AR: 5.5; AR: 6.2

The impact of the experiment, the Tinker experiment, goes beyond forced housing, there’s a deep psychological impact here, your lives have been ruined here [...] we have no lineage.

I take umbrage that it was a forced housing thing. It was, in one sense. But the forced assimilation has other wider implications [...] we’re talking about people’s lives and how they’ve been ruined right down the line [...] and it’s still going on today.

Another participant responds from an intergenerational perspective:

I’ve heard stories from my aunties about my granny being petrified that the cruelty people [RSSPCC] were gonna come and take the children away. AR: 5.5; AR: 6.2

Even to this day, I don’t tell them [professional colleagues] any of my history because if they find out who I am it affects job opportunities [...] I’ve heard the way they [non-Travellers] speak about [people] still in the Travelling community, it’s still going on today. AR: 8.1

I’ve heard so many horrific stories from my dad’s upbringing that’s affected our whole life [...] me myself and my brothers and sisters maybe went to twenty different primary schools; we just couldn’t get settled [...] it’s been horrific the prejudice we’ve had to face [...] I can see the generational trauma that we’ve suffered. I was always scared hearing about police, hearing about social work.

A separate discussion included testimony that resonates with the prevailing themes of substandard and often insanitary accommodation being offered to families, displacement of families, and the immediate and intergenerational impacts of these experiences:

In the 50s, we were put into [emergency housing] and it was the time when they were implementing the 200-day school rule [Children (1908) Act] that all Traveller children had to go to school, so that was the start of it. The conditions, it was condemned [...] and then the Travellers were moved in. AR: 5.5; AR: 6.2

Although I cannot present it here, the researcher has had sight of the original birth certificate of the participant which confirms their birth at an emergency housing site. The housing was not specifically earmarked for Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers, however the participant’s experience within the site, and the displacement of the family unit, is indicative:

It was one bedroom, there was no sort of flooring laid down, there was dampness, it was very damp [...] families got a shower once a week.

The conditions were so bad [at the emergency housing] that a lot of my family jumped over the bannisters and killed themselves because the conditions were so bad.

The participant explains that large families were cramped into emergency housing because the authorities were unable to provide suitable housing, and settled residents often objected to Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers being housed next to them. The participant goes on to describe her experiences with the RSSPCC:

[One day] the cruelty [RSSPCC], as they called it, came in and we were all [the children] lifted. I was taken into hospital, I was severely ill, I had double pneumonia [...] I had severe gastroenteritis. AR: 6.2

Once I recovered, I was in [...] children’s home and it was nice there, what I can remember [...] from there I went into [...] children’s home.

What then follows is an experience in social care including latent and direct violence, and petty humiliations such as broken toys for Christmas presents and ill-fitting clothing. However, the children were singled-out in more significant ways, and this testimony captures a crucial point about the impacts of the displacement of families:

The fathers [of the other children] took them out every week, whereas my family was not allowed to come and visit me or even take me out [...] I would watch them through these steel railings, always going out every Sunday from a four-year old up until I was fifteen.

I never got to see my other brothers and sisters. I met my brother [...] as I got a wee bit older, at the carnival, and he came up to me and told me that he was my brother [...] I didn’t know I had [other] brothers until I was fifteen when I left the children’s home.

They were in [...] children’s home but they were a lot younger than me, so I went to [...] children’s home and spoke to my brothers that I never knew I had. This was quite common.

I was separated from family totally, we were never allowed to mix, there were no arrangements made by the social work department to bring families together [after leaving the homes]. The rest of my family were put in all different places, that’s the point [...] I never got to have any contact with them in all the time I was in the children’s home. AR: 8.1

We were a family that didn’t land up being close because really there was no bond, no family bond, how could there be?

And that was the aim [of separating the families], it was to destroy the bond [...] aunties, uncles, cousins, I knew none of them [...] I never knew my grandmother, I never knew my grandfather. AR: 8.1

I never shared any of these experiences that a normal child would have, they were all taken from me. You could say I was an orphan, really [...] I never got to even know about my parents, they were never ever explained to me.

From an intergenerational perspective, the impacts are both understood and ongoing:

The family unit is very central in Traveller culture and the government at the time knew that and that’s why, I think, they tried to separate [children] from all [their] family.

It’s hard because you hear that in your own background and even though I didn’t experience it, it personally affects me knowing that my [family members] were born into such awful conditions.

In a lot of ways, I felt like I lost out on a culture and a way of life, because of that. That was my birthright, and I had that taken away from me. Thankfully, it hasn’t stopped me from interacting with the community.

In the same way, a further participant reflects on intergenerational impacts in terms of cultural continuity:

It’s almost like the trauma is [...] passed on because sometimes I imagine [...] what it would’ve been like to live as a Nacken [...] it makes me really sad.

It could’ve been a lot different if they hadn’t of done this to our people. I mean, I’ve always felt different. Growing up, I didn’t know much about my background [...] we knew we were Travellers, but we didn’t understand it, we didn’t know what being a Traveller is, the identity, the real strength of it. AR: 8.1

The intergenerational trauma, from this perspective, is felt at the emotional level and significantly as a curtailment of cultural identity and continuity. The participant continues:

It took me a long time to understand it [...] you feel ashamed about it because, you know, you feel that because you didn’t live it [...] it’s the lack of authenticity within yourself. AR: 8.1

Since learning more about my culture and identity and my background I don’t feel that anymore, but it still hurts.

Theme 3: Lifelong Impacts

The implementation of the housing policies and the displacement of families has had a demonstrable impact on participants throughout their lives. From an early age, there were negative repercussions for the families when engaging with wider society that persisted into their adulthood:

What a hassle at school – “you dirty Tink [...] get out of here, you’re not going in the toilet” [...] from the age of five I’ve been in no end of fights at school because of being called a ‘dirty Tink’. That is traumatising, all the way through [school] even when I was sixteen [...] it was an awful life, there was no need for that, we’re human after all. AR: 8.1

Even when I’m away from home, I daren’t tell anyone my surname because [...] as soon as you mention the name, that is it, “oh yeah, them, dirty Gypsies and Travellers and Tinks”. That’s what you get.

One participant reported an abiding sense of racism towards Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers that has not improved during living memory and was pleased to have their experience recorded:

I’ve had it at school, I’ve had it as an adult, I’ve had it from the police, I had it from my brother-in-law. It’s something you get used to, [but] it has caused me a lot of mental trauma [...] and it really is hard to let go.

I’m pleased to have accepted the invitation because I don’t normally do any type of meeting.

Another participant describes the lasting impact that social isolation has had on them, including discrimination in the workplace, limited contact with other Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers in different parts of Scotland in terms of practicing an itinerant tradition, and the curtailment of an ability to sustain their culture and heritage:

None of us are married [...] none of us have got children to carry on the lineage of our family, which is a bit of a disaster and it’s very disappointing for all of us, it’s distressing because that’s the end of the generation for us.

We were segregated from our own culture [through] the assimilation. We weren’t able to travel around and mix with Travellers and perhaps get married [...] we’re still isolated from the community. AR: 4.4; AR: 8.1

You’re isolated from your own culture, and you’re isolated from the settled community.

Participants mention the appearance of Professor Wolfgang Abel – an Austrian anthropologist and member of the Nazi Schutzstaffel – in Scotland in the late 1930s. What Abel was actually doing in Scotland is unclear, but his presence was widely reported, and he stated that he wanted to ‘meet gypsies, primitives and cave dwellers [...] to take certain head measurements – for scientific purposes’.^[18] It is clear that his presence in the 1930s has had a lasting impact:

Our families and all the cousins were subject to that in [...] in 1938. I was recently talking to a 92-year-old cousin who [...] remembered the German chap, Wolfgang Abel, coming with his wife and measuring their heads and getting them to make wee things with their fingers, which I think was [for] fingerprints. AR: Appendix I

A further participant recalls a similar episode:

Our family, forefathers, had heads measured and fingerprints taken by Wolfgang Abel, in [?] and Thurso. And this did happen. It’s so upsetting to read [...] exposés on this.

Whatever the intent, Abel’s presence was a humiliating and dehumanising episode, and one that understandably engendered fear. As one prominent historian has pointed out, given the lethal persecution of ethnic groups during the conflagration of the subsequent decade, it is not unimaginable that Abel sought other ethnic groups for the same purposes.^[19] However, it is also possible that he was gathering military and/or other intelligence under the cover of an anthropological interest, however deplorable that interest was. According to later reports in the press, Abel was taken prisoner when ‘off the American coast a foreign submarine was caught’, with the RSSPCC Inspector who directed Abel to the families, G.H. Shennan, being prompted to wonder if he was ‘a spy’.[20]

The impacts of the substandard housing are deeply felt by participants, with further mention of how access to basic amenities resulted in degrading and discriminatory experiences away from the state-sanctioned sites:

I was bullied and harassed [...] I regret coming back to this area because the discrimination and the prejudice I’ve faced here, in the school here, was acute.

We didn’t get electricity in the [state-sanctioned site] until 2010 so I used to study by candlelight. And we had no heating, no hot water [...] so I used to get things written about me at school [...] “smells of smoke” etcetera. Well obviously, my clothes did smell of smoke [...] we only had one open fire in the centre of the house and that was all [...] it was really cold.

Economically, we were crippled as well [...] with this forced assimilation.

It wears you down and at the same time you were humiliated at the school [...] it was a deeply degrading experience [...] and to gloss over it is wrong because you suffered not just physically but psychologically and the impact of that can never really be dealt with.

There was deep prejudice and discrimination [...] it was absolutely horrendous, [and] it can never be reversed, the deep psychological scarring.

The experience of ongoing discrimination was widely reported among participants, along with the abundance of community-based evidence that exists to support their testimonies:

It doesn’t matter where you go, you can’t escape it. I was in Alicante [...] with friends from [home] when someone from my hometown pitched-up and said, “Oh, don’t talk to him, he’s a Traveller who lives in a dilapidated old caravan.

There’s a wealth of community-based research being produced [...] and it’s well-evidenced that these were the long-term effects of the Tinker experiments but there seems to be a resistance to the acknowledgement of that fact.

And I think that really this is a stultifying exercise here today because you’ve got the expert opinion of academics of the highest standing from St Andrews University [archival research], you’ve got all the evidence, you’ve got the recommendations, and you’ve also got the advice on a victim-centred approach issued by the SHRC [Scottish Human Rights Council].^[21]

So, on that basis I think in taking next steps into consideration, there’s a clear pathway there and we know what the right thing to do is. AR: Recommendations

Elsewhere, a participant reported that discrimination was also common in the workplace:

There was direct racism aimed at me in one job [...] and there was also indirect racism at two of the other jobs I was in.

Another participant views certain policies in terms of the targeting Nackens, Gypsy/Travellers and Scottish Travellers as an ethnic group:

There is a cultural element because it was a particular culture and race and [...] ethnic group, we have ethnic status [...] we were rounded up as Gypsies, Travellers, Tinkers, whatever you want to call us, vagabonds, thieves, we’ve been called everything.

But we were rounded up as a specific group and put into these experiments, we were targeted for being put in industrial schools. For instance, [my forebears] passed the 11+ [primary education] but they weren’t allowed in the main school, they had the ‘tinkers school’ up at [state-sanctioned site] and that was one of the directed camps. AR: 4.2

The participant goes on to describe ongoing interventions by state institutions that took place during the latter half of the twentieth century:

The next stage was if there [were] still smatterings left after when the social work took over in ’68 from the RSSPCC, I think, looking at the files, a lot of the RSSPCC officers moved into social work. AR: 6.2

They were still going chapping doors [monitoring families] when social work took it over.

They then decided to have these ghettoes, and they deliberately made housing schemes of poor standard like Hunter’s Crescent in Perth, Shore Road in Inverness, Tore in Easter Ross [...] some in Cromarty too [...] Raploch [...] in Stirling, they’re all over.

There is a cultural disassociation when you’re taken out of your tent or your caravan or whatever [...] that’s your comfort zone, [it] sets your cultural perspectives. AR: 8.1

Several participants also reported that they have difficulty accessing records of their schooling and upbringing away from their families:

I can’t even get my school records, it’s absolutely ridiculous [...] why can I not get my school records? I’ve been to Perth, I’ve been to Glasgow, been all over. They’ve got my sister [...], they’ve got my brother [...], they’ve got my sister [...] and they’ve got my cousin [...] I feel like the invisible man.

Issues around education are felt elsewhere in the group, with the lifelong impacts of the housing policies being a significant factor:

When you go and get an education, a tertiary education, we’ve sacrificed at least thirty years between us, five graduates in the family [...] and at the end of the day, that’s not translating into equal outcomes. How can you operate in a professional capacity [...] in substandard [accommodation] with no electricity?

I’ve had to endure winters, in cold caravans in about minus twenty [below freezing], with frozen gas and the caravan pinned into the ground by icicles [...] in a damp bed, freezing.

The lack of basic amenities is a prominent theme, with significant impacts on participants’ lives:

When I started going on about ‘this is an experiment’ we need hot water and electricity, I was asked not to come back to the council buildings [this was] in 1999. AR: 4.4

We’re paying rent, we’re paying council tax [...] for facilities we didn’t have. Three years later I got their head of environmental services out to my caravan [mentions a report that was brought along to the discussion] and I thought that might help that their own head of environmental services saying, “If this was a house, I’d put a demolition order on it”.

We’ve been doubly discriminated against because of the experiment because when I asked, “Why are we not getting anything?” [the reply was] “It’s not sustainable, you’ve no children”. Well, wait a minute, whose fault is that? AR: 4.2

The impacts around life-chances and continuity of familial lines are echoed elsewhere:

Inclusion in a social experiment has affected our life-chances and our health [...] beyond integration there was social segregation and therefore no chance of marriage prosects, no offspring and no life beyond the experiment. Our family line will die out.