RomMig

Eve Rosenhaft discusses emerging research on performances staged by Romani visitors to Britain at the turn of the 20th Century

“…sang English songs and danced the cakewalk…” This verbal snapshot of Romani girls and boys dancing the cakewalk on the pier gave us a startling insight into the experience of the travellers. At the same time it opened up a whole new line of inquiry into aspects of their journey and even into wider questions of Romani musical performance around the turn of the century. The cakewalk doesn’t figure in any account of European Romani performances that we have seen. Where, we wondered, did they learn it, and how unusual was its appearance in the Hamburg docks?

Like so many modern popular dances, the cakewalk originated with African Americans. It began as a social dance that involved exaggerated high-stepping, often danced by men and women in evening clothes, probably devised by enslaved Black people to parody the behaviour of the white planters. By the 20^th century it was also a model for elaborate individual performances   on the dance floor and in the context of show-dances. Around the turn of the century, the cakewalk became popular all over the world, entering the repertoire of dance bands and cabaret combos and even featuring in the classical compositions of Claude Debussy  As Astrid Kusser explains in her book Körper im Schieflage (2013), the cakewalk had arrived in Germany by the time our Romani migrants left for Britain, featuring regularly as a social dance in urban dance halls from 1905. 

How did the cakewalk enter the repertoire of Romani Germans? 

Romani musicians who played for non-Romani audiences always depended for their livelihoods on knowing what their audiences wanted, and this meant picking up on the latest trends in popular music, learning new tunes by ear and playing them back – though often in a characteristic style that added a touch of the exotic to the performance. A rare first-hand account of Romani musicians in Germany from the early 1900s confirms that even when travelling in the countryside and playing in wayside inns, ‘[t]hey play by ear and by heart whatever they think will best please their audience … low music-hall crazes [and] Gassenhauer [popular songs]’ (Bernard Gilliat-Smith, ‘The Gypsies of the Rhine Provinz in 1902-03’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society NS 1 (1907-08): 125-44: 129).

Another dimension of their story that is beginning to emerge is the evidence that, once in Britain, they worked together with English and Scottish promoters who organised venues, advertised their performances and shared the takings. We want to know more about those promoters, some of whom seem to have specialised in sponsoring Romani groups. At this stage we can hypothesise that they would have advised the performers on what songs and dances would sell, and also that through them the Romani visitors might have had the opportunity to share the stage with and learn from non-Romani musicians and dancers. 

Wherever and however it originated, the Romani cakewalk is an object lesson in the adaptability, enterprise and essential modernity of European Roma. 

In this Post, Felix Brahm explores further the project’s case study historical migration by discussing the media coverage of the return journey and arrival in Germany from Britain

In February 1905 and November 1906 respectively, two large groups of German Sinti and Roma landed in the port of Hamburg. Each group had travelled the United Kingdom for several months before being forcibly deported back to Germany. Their migratory experience and economic activities in the UK, the incentives and pressures to cross the channel in the first place, and their subsequent deportations form an important part of our research. While their journeys through Great Britain were accompanied by a massive media spectacle, with the travellers’ migration branded the “German gypsy invasion of Britain”, their return was covered much less intensively by the German press. However, the reports on these events that we’ve found are interesting, not only with regard to the information they hold on the emigrants themselves and their itineraries, but also in the way these reports differed in parts from the contemporary, highly stereotypical coverage on Sinti and Roma groups. 

The reporter of the Hamburger Nachrichten drew an image of the group which was in many ways typical of press reports on Sinti and Roma of this time, loaded with racialised and ethnocentric tropes. The reporter emphasised the dirtiness and raggedness of their appearance (“they all had one thing in common: unbelievable dirt and torn clothes”), but also drew upon exotic imaginary when describing the “peculiar picturesque” scene. He (or she, but most likely he) observed the “women and girls had brightly coloured ribbons and all kinds of ornaments in their hair, incredibly large rings in their ears, and many gold and silver rings on their dirty fingers”. “Unconcerned with the onlookers”, he went on, “four young mothers breastfed their babies amidst the crowd, the young people sang English songs and danced the Cakewalk, the women smoked their pipes, eight-year-old boys collected cigar butts.”

However, the article in the Hamburger Nachrichten (and subsequently the coverage in the Hamburgischer Correspondent and the Altonaer Nachrichten) also and surprisingly reported on the economic success of the migratory venture. Having departed from Germany (in late March/early April of the same year) with only four horses, they arrived back with 33. After speaking to members of the group, the correspondent of the Hamburger Nachrichtenreported that they were satisfied with the economic outcome – only to question whether horse trading could have been the main source of income and insinuate that it must have been begging and theft, fortune telling, and “incantation of spooks”. “Earnings” he put in quotation marks. He was back to the expected narrative when he lamented that “England got rid of the unwelcome guests”, while “Germany got them back”. 

Interestingly, the news coverage on the return of the 1904-05 group, in February 1905, differed even more from  familiar accounts. Unusually for press reports on Sinti and Roma groups in the decades around these events, these accounts showed empathy for the distress and traumatic experiences this group faced during their travels: The Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten stated that “the troop went to England some time ago, but it has been badly treated there. In the suburbs of London, the Gypsies were attacked and maltreated several times by the mob. The wagons that served as their homes were demolished.” The Berliner Börsen-Zeitung referred to the group as “unfortunate”, having been tricked by a dodgy emigration agent, pushed back and forth between the English counties (although this was similar to the practice between the German administrative districts), and exposed to a population incited against them by the “jingo press”. The probable reason why these reports differed in tone from the many reports we have on Sinti and Roma in Germany was simply that this happened in England: the fact that a group from Germany, allegedly from the Rhineland, was ill-treated in England superseded all other categories for the moment, creating some patriotic outrage and sympathy.

For us, the reports hold some useful information for further research, especially with regard to the mapping project. For instance, the report of the Hamburger Nachrichten on the return of the 1906 migrants specified that the group split up and intended to travel further to Wandsbek and Uelzen, Hanover and Stettin – possible routes that we will trace further.

In this post, Tamara West introduces us to one of the starting points for the RomMig project.

We first met the people – let’s call them the 1906 group for now – in this photograph during wider research undertaken for the HERA BESTROM project, and the incident that they were a part of became featured in one of the biographies that Eve Rosenhaft and I explored for that project. Of course, our new RomMig project will move far beyond this one group, collaboratively exploring the activities of many other people, journeys, and transnational backdrops in politics and policing. Still, this 1906 group remain an outstretched hand to welcome us back, to find out more.

In the first decade of the 1900s, large numbers of German Roma and Sinti left the country as a result in part of new discriminatory and restrictive laws, such as the 1906 Prussian “Directive on the Struggle Against the Gypsy Nuisance”. Amongst these movements was a temporary migration undertaken in 1906 from Germany to the UK, which was referred to in the British press as the “German Gipsy Invasion”. Our 1906 group were amongst these visitors, and it is possible to track their journey, via postcards and photographs taken at the time, as they travelled across Scotland and England.

The visitors, around 200 in all, arrived in small groups during April and May 1906. By the end of November the same year they were gone, forcibly returned via chartered steamships back to Germany. During the entire stay, their every move was tracked, reported on, and heavily policed. The newspapers reported daily on the visitors’ activities and whereabouts, questions were raised in Parliament, and photographs were taken and made into postcards. Our 1906 group were in several of these postcards and newspaper images- from Vinegar Hill in Glasgow, where they captured the attention of a visiting public, to Leek in Staffordshire where they traded at the local horse fair. For now, we don’t have the names of the individuals in the photograph, though we have police and newspaper reports that provide us with the names of people who were in the same places, at the same times. That they appear in so many images, in different places, illustrates the spectacle that they were caught up in. 

We’ll continue to find traces of them, and perhaps even piece together other parts of their lives beyond this one brief incident. The 1906 “invasion” was preceded and followed by other, smaller scale and widely reported visits, to the UK and beyond. We will be able to explore and map many other journeys, and work with communities to explore their contemporary relevance and personal meanings. We’ll set them alongside broader developments in regional, national and transnational policing, and we’ll seek to make visible these many layers. However, we will necessarily always return to our small 1906 group. We’ll keep asking who they were and what they might have experienced, in the hope they still have much more to tell us.