Have You Any Gipsies in the Isle?

A Short History of Romani People on the Isle of Wight

Back in 1891, if you followed the woody fern-fringed edges of Parkhurst Forest to the quiet hamlet of Marks Corner, amongst the dappled light and young saplings, you might have caught sight of a collection of rounded tents, made from bent hazel sticks and sheets of dark cloth. Walking closer through the rustling leaves, you may catch sight of the occupants too — whittling wood with their knives, stoking their campfire, and speaking a language you didn’t understand. These people were members of the Island’s gypsy minority — many of whom were ethnic Romani — a significant but often overlooked group on the Victorian Isle of Wight.

Originating from Northern India, the Romani people left their homeland many centuries ago, travelling across Central Asia and Europe before reaching British shores as early as 1505. Living a nomadic lifestyle, they ventured into every corner of the UK, potentially reaching the Isle of Wight soon after their first arrival. Some sources even claim that Egypt Point near Cowes was named after a 16th-century gypsy encampment (with gypsies at the time often being called “Egyptians” from the mistaken belief that their origins lay in Egypt instead of India). Whilst these early days are still pretty hazy, by the reign of Queen Victoria gypsies and travellers had become a permanent feature of local life, with plenty of records still existing today to help recreate their lives here.

Gypsies camped at sites across the Island, particularly around Newport, often living in hand-made tents or brightly decorated wooden caravans known as ‘vardoes’. Temporary communities appeared on St Helens Green in 1891, outside Cowes in 1898, and on Bleak Down in 1900. With landowners sometimes giving permission to settle, more permanent camps established themselves too, such as those at Rowborough near Brading and at Marks Corner on the edge of Parkhurst forest. They were likely to have been an ethnically mixed group of people, but many (especially the men) had distinctly Romani first names including Dantisful, Vandelo, and Dangerfell (sometimes spelled Dangerfield) — all of which can be traced back to the Romani language. Some of the community were born and raised on the Island, whilst others came from Hampshire, Sussex, Bedfordshire, and Yorkshire — with records even showing that one Romani harp player from Wales briefly made his way to the Island in the 1830s.

To make their money they used the natural materials around them to make buttons, wooden clothes pegs, and wicker baskets which were sold by the women in the towns. Kate Barney, of Marks Corner, walked down through the woods to Cowes to sell her clothes pegs made from sticks of ash, and Patience Hughes would drive her horse and van, loaded with wickerwork, to park up and trade at Pomona Road in Shanklin. Some of the men were musicians and at least one — Joe Willett — was a boxer, taking on Harry Nobbs at a middleweight tournament in Newport in 1896. The Island’s travellers cooked over open fires, often eating rabbits poached from the local fields and copses — unless they got caught in the act, as Sampson Light was on Chillerton Down in the 1890s. They also ate turnips, watercress, and fresh wild garlic — a plant not usually eaten by other people on the Island. By 1842, for this exact reason, wild garlic had even become known as “gipsy onion” in the local Isle of Wight dialect — a fact reported in The Phytologist magazine by Ryde-based botanist William Arnold Bromfield.

Victorian visitors to the Isle of Wight occasionally crossed paths with the local travellers, too. In his semifictionalised account of his 1840s tour of the Island, writer and poet George Mogridge mentioned that “within a mile or less of Alum Bay, a gipsy-girl opened a gate for us that led to a beautiful common covered with furze and fern”. Similarly, the artist Alfred Vickers created a picturesque painting entitled “A Gypsy Encampment in the Isle of Wight” detailing a typical Romani ‘bender tent’ set up on the banks of a river — one of his many landscapes painted during his time on the Island. However, not all visitors were so lucky. London-born novelist James Redding Ware asked at Newport “have you any gipsies in the isle?” and was told, “well, sir, gipsies have come, but somehow they have gone away again, almost as soon as they got here”.

Whether they were visible or not, the Isle of Wight’s Romani community was a permanent presence well into the Edwardian era, by which time many had started to abandon their nomadic lifestyle and opt for bricks and mortar instead. Dantisful Lee and his family moved from their tents at Rowborough to 5 John Street in Barton Village, just east of Newport. Other gypsy families from the Smith and Willett families also moved to Barton and by the 1930s a few final references are made to gypsies living at Littletown, a hamlet just off Briddlesford Road. Today, fewer than a hundred people on the Isle of Wight still identify as gypsy, Romani, or Irish Traveller, however, many, many more of us have gypsy ancestry locked into our DNA — whether we know it, or not.