The Yellow On the Broom by Betsy Whyte

 

When I was a young boy living in Crieff in the 1970s, every October the Meadows would be occupied by dozens of vans and caravans, filling the entire area between the back of Commissioner Street and the old railway cutting, where now stands the Cooperative supermarket and its car park. There were caravans and people everywhere, the sounds of living, the instant creation of a new, mobile community within the existing, settled one. These were Scottish traveller families, congregating for the tattie howking, or picking the potato harvest. Travellers were immensely hard working, and tattie howking – by hand in those days, of course – was especially hard work. It was a remarkable spectacle, these transient families meeting in common purpose as they had done at this time every year, back through generations.

When they arrived, my mother used to warn me to behave myself “or the tinks will take you”. We called them tinks then. We didn’t think it demeaning. We know better now, although it’s probably too late for it to really matter. I fervently wish my mother hadn’t tried to frighten me like this because the travellers were decent, compassionate people who would never have done me any harm, as my mother well knew. When she was a girl, back in the 1930s, one of her best friends was a tinker lassie and my mum regularly got into trouble with her parents for playing with her. One time, she got lice and her father washed her hair in paraffin. Still, she continued to play with her friend. So why she chose to frighten me in this way is a mystery.

Within a matter of years, this annual congregation of the travellers on the Meadows was a thing of the past. A way of life enjoyed by travellers over centuries was eradicated within a single generation. I’ve always thought that was a terrible thing. As it turns out, though, those 1970s meetings that I witnessed and thought were the continuation of an ancient tradition were, even then, showing signs of terminal decay. That much is clear on reading Betsy Whyte’s wonderful memoir, The Yellow on the Broom, which details Betsy’s early life on the road with her family in 1930s Scotland. They travelled constantly, going from job to job and place to place before one year, much to Betsy’s horror, over-wintering in a new Council house in Brechin. But the story she tells us, of itinerant life in the years before the war, was already the last gasp of a unique culture. Betsy wrote later:

 

The end of the war was ... the beginning of the end for the Scottish travelling people. With bewildering speed camping sites disappeared almost completely. Soon too, the farmers had machines which took over many jobs that the travelling folk had done. Even if a farmer did need workers, he was not allowed to have campers without providing flush toilets and running water, etc. Some farmers who grew a lot of berries did have those things put in, but for the majority it was not worth their while.

 

And, even in the 1930s events relayed in The Yellow on the Broom, the portents are there. There is one chapter, near the end, where the family go to all their usual camping points around Blairgowrie, only to find, on each successive site, “No Camping” signs had been erected. Travellers were always mistrusted and disliked and yet, for all that, in the old days a symbiotic relationship existed between the tinkers and the hantle – their name for non-Travelling folk. The travellers would request boiling water, or milk, or old clothes, and offer clothes pegs or baskets in return. The hantles and the tinks could co-exist, sort of.

But all that began to change. Ironically, partly it was due to the establishment of the welfare state. Before, people felt it was their duty to look after each other, even strangers, even outsiders. But with the advent of the welfare state we began to believe that it wasn’t our personal responsibility to look out for other people, but the state’s. That is a sad bastardisation of Beveridge’s noble vision behind the establishment of the welfare state but it is the truth, nonetheless and, in the less welcoming world that resulted, a way of life withered and died.

When I started working in Perth and Kinross District Libraries in 1981, my main duty was accessioning books – putting on the various stamps and labels, giving them a numerical accession number, jacketing them and so on. I remember once having to accession dozens of copies of The Yellow on the Broom. It must have been a reprint because the book was first published in 1979. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, other than to curse how many damned copies of it there were: the time went slower if you had lots of copies of the same book to accession because you had nothing fresh to look at. I remembered it, and I remembered what the book was about, but I never bothered to read it. I was young. History was interesting enough in an academic sort of way, but it didn’t really connect, even although, as it turned out, I was part of the last generation of hantles to witness a congregation of travellers and their once vibrant, now extinct way of life.

I’m glad, now, to have read The Yellow on the Broom, and to have entered the life of the clever, obstinate, short-tempered but kindly Betsy Whyte. I’m glad I know a little of how she lived, and I’m glad she had a happy childhood, oblivious that she was one of the last to experience it. Their life was very hard and it doesn’t do to romanticise it. All the same, the traveller way of life was vibrant and vital and meaningful.

Now it is gone and, in that, I fear we have all lost something a little precious.