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.
