Scottish Gypsy-Travellers: Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly on Tinkers' trauma

Over a period of more than a century continuing until the 1970s, around 10,000 children were taken from their families and put to work in communities which viewed them as little more than slaves. Of these, around 3500 were from Gypsy-Traveller families while others were taken from widowed mothers and lifted from the streets.

Many others, including adults, were forced to undertake psychologically disturbing ‘experiments’ as part of a process of ‘normalisation’. These were the Tinker Gypsy experiments. By any other measure it was a state-approved programme of ethnic cleansing.

Most were Scots and what happened to them is within living memory. Like all those other evils that civic Scotland enabled – our role in the Caribbean slave trade; the forced adoption of children of unmarried mums; anti-Irishness – our first instinct is denial. We don’t want anything to stain our wee-bit-hill-and-glen narrative.

Dr Connelly, an academic specialising in international community development and human rights, is seeking an apology from the Scottish Government about what happened to her people. In doing so, she’s also seeking to bring this dark chapter in Scotland’s history into the light; to tell our present-day Travelling and Gypsy communities that they count and that what happened to them shamed Scotland.

Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly (Image: free)

On January 8, she began a gruelling two-week journey by foot from her home in Montrose to Holyrood to highlight her campaign. She’d hoped to be met by Emma Roddick, Scotland’s Minister for Equalities, Migration and Refugees. Ms Roddick insisted she was unavailable, though. Her office has offered a meeting at a future date.

“I’ve been told I won’t be permitted to discuss anything to do with the Tinker Gypsy experiments; the child trafficking or the prospect of an official apology,” she said.

“They claim that, as there’s ongoing research, they can’t say anything right now. I think it’s about them wanting to control the narrative. I think they simply want me to contribute to an ‘action plan’.”

As a child growing up in a Gypsy-Traveller community Dr Tammi-Connelly had always known that “something had happened” to her family. It was only when she reached adulthood that the full extent of the horrors visited on her female relatives became clearer.

She cites the advocacy of Seamus and Roseanna McPhee who live on Scotland’s one remaining assimilation camp and that they all opted to work together on securing official acknowledgment of what had happened to their people.

“For me, it’s always been about the child trafficking, perhaps because that’s personal. But the ‘tinker experiments’ are chilling too and speak of an attempt by the state to eradicate an entire people and their culture.”

You can understand why civic Scotland has tried to conceal this part of our history. Unlike the campaign to pardon 17th century witches and our involvement in the slave trade this one seeks to shine a torch on events that happened in living memory. No one’s comfortable with the fact that Scotland eagerly participated in removing children and effectively enslaving them until as recently as the 1970s.

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It also belongs to a pattern – centuries old – of discrimination and marginalisation with the principal aim of dehumanising them. When you deem someone to be less than human it’s easier to justify violating them.

When Dr Tammi-Connelly visited Ontario to source more details about what had happened to Gracie, Mary and Margaret and those thousands of other Scottish children, what she discovered was more horrific than anything she’d imagined.

“Many of them didn’t have good outcomes,” she said. “They were treated horrendously. Among those places I visited were cemeteries where they were buried. The museums provided further details. One girl was shot and killed; others were impaled on pitchforks. They were regarded as sub-human.

“Quarriers bought a small plot of land in a place called Brockville and buried 39 children in unmarked graves. This is where the girls from our family had gone. Local farmers would pick out which children they wanted and a contract of indentured service would be signed. The children were told either that their parents were dead or that they were unwanted by them.

“I also discovered that some of the girls’ surnames were changed, which puzzled me. This area had been dominated by the Orange Order and I discovered through documents held in a local museum that these children were given new surnames that hid their Irish/Catholic identities.”

The anti-Irishness and anti-Catholicism which was a significant feature of Scottish political and cultural life continued well into the 1950s and, some believe, has never been fully eradicated. Dr Tammi-Connelly regards this as a constituent factor in the trafficking of Gypsy children.

“Most of these children identified as Catholic-Irish,” she said. “Some priests at the time beseeched Quarriers to hand them back to their families. But they’d already been trafficked. The government was paying decent money for each child transported like this. It was a financially-rewarding trade.

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“If you were from a Tinker Gypsy or Traveller family within a community that was already marginalised then you’d have been regarded as the lowest of the low. They followed a nomadic lifestyle, so who would miss them?”

Little is known of what happened to Margaret and Mary, but Dr Tammi-Connelly’s father eventually made it to Canada and made contact with Gracie, in the late 1970s. “She’d had a daughter and dad was able to speak to both of them. Her daughter told him that her mum was well able to remember her childhood in that roadside camp, but would never speak of Quarriers. It must have been horrible.”

In a December 2019 statement made during the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, Alice Harper, then chief executive of Quarriers, said: "We apologise to children migrated through Quarriers and to children who suffered abuse following migration.”

She added that “vulnerable children were sent away and we recognise that some also suffered physical and emotional abuse, including sexual abuse”.

When uncomfortable historical events threaten our sculpted and refined views of Scotland’s story there’s a tendency to be resentful. Why does it matter now? Can’t we move on? Best just to leave it be. Those days are long gone.

It does matter though and speaks of our primeval fear of difference, even though we convince ourselves that we value it; that we embrace diversity. Often though it’s only a distortion of diversity imposed on the ideological terms of a self-serving elite.

The modern state will always harbour suspicions of those who choose not to be rooted and thus are unable to be controlled according to social norms. They hint of endangering and disrupting our way of living. Thus they shouldn’t just be feared but must be hated. We can’t rid ourselves of them completely, but we can shove them to the margins as far as possible so that we won’t need even to look at them.

Emma Roddick (Image: free)

In this context Lynne Tammi-Connelly’s 90-mile walk in the dark of winter is hugely symbolic. This was the journey her people once made: never ending, but always with a purpose and honouring a way of life that the ghosts of their ancestors still called them to.

According to Dr Tammi-Connelly, there are around 20,000 gypsies and travellers in Scotland. “Very few of us are on the road all the time,” she says. “The authorities place large boulders to prevent people from pulling on to the roadside and the nature of seasonal work has changed.

“Now, I take to Ireland for a month, to travel the open roads. I use a motorhome as it’s less conspicuous. It’s an urge that passes down to us and you feel better for having done this. We just want our way of life to be accommodated; to be respected. We carry no threat and respect the law.”

She recalls the blessing performed by the priest a few years ago at Innerleithen. The family had placed a new gravestone where their relatives were buried. “He gave us a heart-warming tribute and spoke of how Irish travellers had been persecuted and how hard their lives were. He also said that this could quite easily happen again.”

Surely, in modern, enlightened, progressive Scotland the state would never seek to insinuate itself into the families of those whose beliefs are considered to be at odds with state orthodoxy?