Gipsies May Be Barred From English Derby

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32030, 3 July 1969, Page 15

Gipsies May Be Barred From English Derby

(N.Z. Press Asxn. —CoptiriehtJ LONDON. The Gipsies may have come to theif last English Derby. Each year for the last 200 years they have moved on to the downs at Epsom racecourse and stayed for a week. It has been their traditional annual holiday, and they were there again this year.

But this time things were different The racing author!- : ties, who for years have barely ' tolerated them, made it quite

clear how unwelcome the gipsies were. Uniformed security guards hired for the occasion stopped the gipsies as they approached the course, and told them that under a 1936 act, ignored until this year, it was illegal for them to set up camp. The gipsies, who have spent many hundreds of years being told where they could or could not park, ignored the security men.. Public Support The public and the English press backed the gipsies. It was the romantic image of the gipsies that came to the minds of most British people, as they pondered the action of the authorities. But the

e romantic image was not altogether the reality. s The reality was gipsies i- arriving at Epsom in big cars f behind which they towed 1 luxury caravans, and shrewd, 6 hard-talking spokesmen for t the Gipsy Council who held ? their own in debate with the racing authorities. s They showed up as a people s well in touch with the 20th 1 century, touchy about any s moves to repress them. Hitler exterminated 600,000 of their race, and sterilised many of j the rest. t Authorities* Attitude s The racing authorities give t unromantic reasons for wanti, ing to remove the gipsies, i They say that the holes the s gipsies dig, and the bottles.

cans and other rubbish they leave, are a threat to hygiene, and to the safety of horses and riders, since the downs are used all year round as a training area. The gipsies see it in more general terms. “You’re trying to wipe the gipsies out like Hitler did,” one of them shouted at Lord Wigg, chairman of the Horse Race Betting Levy Board. Rather than being wiped out in Britain, their population, already 15,000, is increasing at the rate of 1000 a year. They , make their living “from whatever has to be done,” as one gipsy put it. “We deal in scrap metals, in cars and we do seasonal agriculture, hopping, fruit-

picking, tater picking, upping, swedes, mangel - wurzels, everything as is required. Firewood cutting, hawking, totting, begging, and we don’t like to take a regular job,” he said. Survival for the gipsies is becomingly increasingly difficult as England’s open spaces decrease. An old gipsy recalled: “Well, when we were camping, or what we used to call tenting, we used to go down through the country and visit a different place every night “It was a beautiful life, happy and healthy. People say that gipsies is thieves, but the thieves is those people who’ve taken over our old stopping places.”

Gipsies are happy at the British Government’s introduction of the Camping Sites Bill, although they realise the Government certainly did not have them in mind when it was proposed. Under the bill all local authorities will have to provide camping grounds. At present most local councils make the gipsies feel about as welcome as did the Epsom authorities last week. It is an offence under the Highways Act for a gipsy to camp “without lawful excuse.” The gipsies feel that the authorities will not be able to turn them away from the proposed camping grounds. After all, they say, they would not stay at One ground for long.