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Marko: Stories of My Grandfather*

Ian Hancock

y grandfather Marko died in 1956, when I was barely into my teens. He was just ‘Grandad’ then, and I suppose I took his presence pretty much for granted. It wasn’t until later that I began to realize what a source of interesting stories his varied life had been. For a number of years I have been collecting narratives, oral and sometimes written, about Marko in his earlier years; from talking to family members, and others who knew him, I began to put together a picture of his life.

On a visit back to England in 1984 I persuaded my dad’s sister, my Aunty Nell who was then 77, to tape-record whatever recollections she had of her father, and before her death in 1994 she would periodically send me a cassette of these.

My own father was taken from my grandparents by the welfare authorities in 1918 at the age of six and a half, and put into a home where there were numbers of other Romani children similarly taken away from their parents, supposedly for their own good. While the removal of Gypsy children from their families for placement in institutions is well documented for countries such as Sweden or Slovakia or Switzerland, the fact that it was happening in Britain too, and that British Romani women may even have been coercively sterilized, is less well known. Len Smith, a Traveller acquaintance who lives in Hampshire, has begun to document such instances.

This particular home was at “the Mote”–Charlton House, part of a national organization known as the Caldecott Community. It was originally about a mile and a half from Sutton Valance (in Kent, not the same place as Sutton in Surrey where my mother was born), ten minutes from Headcorn Station, though it was relocated to Hertfordshire in 1929.

It still exists; its website describes it as being there to “help children grow emotionally . . . repairing some of the damage brought about by abuse, trauma, disruption or deprivation” in their early childhood.

In 1925, when he was thirteen and a half, my father ran away to join the training ship T.S. Mercury and later the T.S. Arethusa both of which were docked at Hamble near Southampton, two miles from the Netley railway station. Here he was put in charge of the wire gantlines, the gantry cables used for carrying a harness up to the masthead. He also took up boxing, and spent the rest of his life with a broken nose because of it. He later left the training ships for the merchant navy, and visited Australia, West Africa and the Caribbean; with the outbreak of war he transferred to the Royal Navy, where he served mainly in the eastern Mediterranean, until he was demobilized in 1946.  After that he found work as a travelling salesman in paper products, and kept this job for the next ten years until we left England in 1957.

His memories of Caldecott Community were not unhappy ones. He remembered the two headmistresses, Miss Phyllis Potter and Miss Lila Rendall, and none of the children wearing shoes (though all provided with shiny matching shoes for the photograph here!), and their being made to plant and harvest their own crops to eat. I visited The Mote just once as a boy with my father and only recollect seeing fields with neat rows of vegetables, and passing through a low archway into a big central courtyard.

My dear dad was the most valuable source of information about our family, even though my mother Kitty usually managed to steer the topic of conversation away from my grandfather whenever it was broached in her presence. Her own father was Jack Palmer, a Romanichal who sometimes stayed at 5 Beauchamp Road in Sutton in Surrey, four or five miles from Epsom Downs where he knew Marko well, since they both used to spend a lot of time in that district.  There’s a new book of photographs of Romanies in the Sutton area, including some of the Romani visitors to that town from Hungary (Evans, 2003). Jack was a rag-and-bone man (a “totter”) as well as an amateur boxer. The Palmer family, which is very large, was a branch of the Smiths, and originated in the area around Windsor and where the Heathrow Airport now is, west of London. Her mother was a girl named Cicely who was either Irish or English, and who was in service in a mansion close to Sutton; she was only in her mid-teens; her father Arthur was with his second wife at that time, a woman named Harriet. After she was born, Cicely gave her baby—my mum—into the care of Arthur’s sister Rose because Harriet refused to take her, and then she left Surrey permanently for somewhere in the Midlands.

When she was fifteen, by this time having already met my father, my mother was taken away to stay with Edith (“Ede”), the eldest daughter from Arthur’s second wife’s first marriage, and her husband Bob Jolly, a postman. Their house was at 90 Nowell Road in Mortlake, not far from Barnes Common and Watney’s Brewery, and connected to Chiswick on the north side of the Thames opposite by a footbridge. This was the area where a series of gruesome murders was to occur (described in detail, with a map of the area, by Seabrook 2006), around the same time that we left Chiswick to go and live in Canada,

Edith was puritanically strict. Mum tells of hiding lipstick and stockings in her handbag and having to put them on in secret once outside the house then later removing them before going home, because they were absolutely forbidden by Arthur’s tyrannical step-daughter whom, for the rest of her life, she would only refer to as “the deadly aunt.” She remembers running into Edith somewhere unexpectedly when she was wearing lipstick and nylons, and getting a sound slap in the face, in public, for it. It was just a few months before my mother seized an opportunity to get away from Barnes and the Jollys for good.

She had found a job at John Barker’s department store in Kensington High Street, and there she met a girl named Madge Orpwood who lived in Shepherd’s Bush, and with whom she became great friends. Madge’s mother Frances lived in Acton, and she asked my mother to come and stay there with her in Kingscote Road, since life was so miserable for her in Barnes. Madge’s mum was very kind to my mother, and when I was a little boy she was my “Nanny Orp”; it is after her that I was given my middle name Francis. They called me Hinkhonk because I couldn’t pronounce “Hancock” properly, and that was my nickname for many years. To get to Kensington, she would walk each day along the tow-path to Hammersmith Bridge and cross the river to catch the bus in Hammersmith Broadway.

By this time my father had moved in with Aunt Jess, where he slept in a closet under the stairs, and would time it so that he’d be putting the daily papers in the rack outside when my mother, who he’d originally met in Sutton, came past the shop. Later on he found another job selling books and papers in a shop in Ladbroke Grove closer to Notting Hill. With the outbreak of war, he went back to sea, this time to join the Royal Navy where he eventually became a lieutenant, a remarkable achieve-ment considering his background.

For the first three years of her marriage during the Second World War, before I was born and while my father was away at sea, my mother left Nanny Orp’s house and went to stay with some Palmers who lived near a village called Cookham, which is north of Maidenhead and some six miles from Windsor Castle (shown on the map).

Although my grandfather—and my father when he was on leave—both spent a lot of time in the Sutton and Epsom area before I was born, I only ever went back there with my mother to visit my grandfather and Aunty Rose fewer than ten times altogether as a child in the late 1940s and early ’50s. Rose had married a non-Gypsy man named Bill Harland, and their children were Molly, Frank, Terry and Joan; Molly was my parents’ bridesmaid and Terry was a “Desert Rat” then serving in the army in Egypt. I remember Uncle Bill carrying me on his shoulders around in their house, and going up to a stuffed animal’s head mounted on the wall, and saying “boo!”, and me being terrified.

My mother has never been enthusiastic about the Romani part of her background and was also openly critical of my father’s side of the family for being what they were—though now she’s in her nineties, she has mellowed considerably and has begun to talk more about it. There was always friction there because she really didn’t care for most of my father’s relatives, especially Marko, and her animosity had a lot to do with our eventually moving away from Britain altogether and going to live in Canada. The circumstances of her birth—out of wedlock at a time when this was viewed with far more disapproval than it is today, has also distanced her emotionally from her childhood.

My parents married in 1939 in St. Andrew’s Anglo-Catholic church in Staveley Road in Chiswick. I was conceived in Birkenhead in December 1941, when my mother visited my father there during his Christmas shore leave, but I was born in London. We lived in Chiswick at 34 Esmond Road, although in the early forties we stayed for different periods of time in a number of other towns too, including South Shields and Glasgow.

The first German V-2 rocket to be aimed at Britain landed a mile or two from our house, but mercifully it didn’t explode. Every time my mother would take me on the 55 bus to the free clinic in Meon Road and we’d pass under the railway bridge on Acton Lane, she’d say “that’s where the rocket fell”. This got a mention in a book about the development of space travel:

 

On September 8, 1944 the first rocket bomb, or V-2, fell near Chiswick in London, like a meteor out of space. This event marked the beginning of a new era in warfare (Coggins & Pratt, 1952:30).

Others in particular who have given me useful information about Marko are George Marriott, who was a contemporary of his and who organized the Gypsy Ex-Servicemen’s Association; Manfri Fred Wood, Keith Nichols, Toni Nathan Lee (who began, but never finished, recording a cassette tape of his reminiscences of Marko for me), Barrie Taylor and most of all a family friend and “uncle”, Albert Cook. We lost contact with Uncle Albert when we left for Canada in 1957, but Thomas Acton put us back in touch by mail in the early 1970s. Albert was Inmate Number 096510 in the Wandsworth Prison at that time, for the alleged theft of a shirt from Marks & Spencer, and Thomas Acton, working with the Gypsy Council, was attempting to effect his release.  He was also visited by noted Romanologist Donald Kenrick and by Anne Sutherland, now professor of Anthropology at Georgia State University and author of Gypsies, the Hidden Americans, who was living in Britain at that time. She, too, spoke in his behalf for his release; in all of his letters, he determinedly maintained that he had been wrongly convicted, and was only guilty of being a Gypsy.

Uncle Albert periodically travelled with Marko as a young man, and had also been in Hungary, where his own and part of our family both originate. His name is an anglicization of Kocs. Information he provided in this connection has been especially valuable, and I have supplemented it with the help of Dr. Várnagy Elemér of Pécs, who has made a study of Hungarian Romani genealogy. Of course Marko’s other children, as well as my grandmother and his sister Jess, both of whom survived him by several years, also spoke of him frequently, though not all of them at all kindly.

When I was very young, after the end of the war, groups of families, including my grandparents and my aunts and uncles, would go down into Kent and Surrey to pick hops, an occupation known to them as “scrooping” (see Bignell, 1977 and Schweitzer & Hancock, 1991). My recollections of this are not very clear, but I do remember sleeping on a blanket on the floorboards of a long building in Farnham, a lot of noisy children, and the times at the end of the day when the adults would gather at one or another public house, and we would be left outside for interminable periods under a blanket in the back seat of a car and usually mollified with gifts of potato chips (with the extra salty blue one) and bottles of Tizer and fizzy Idris lemonade. I drink Idris when I’s dry! went the racist advertisement, matching the paper gollywog I remember would be under the lid of each jar of Robertson’s marmalade.

I really remember Marko well only when he was an old man; in fact he was just 67 when he died, but I suppose to me as a boy he seemed quite old. I’m told that as a younger man he had a great deal of charm, and was something of a womanizer. He was thin, with black hair and angular features, and because of his musical skills and nice voice (a talent shared by his sister Jess) was very popular. For a while he was a street clown, performing tricks with balloons for children (the picture here of him doing this is from Galford, 2001:62), but he was a rat-catcher during the last years of his life, and my grandmother’s death certificate lists him as a “rodent operator”. I don’t imagine he ever used such a fancy title himself. Aunty Nell tells a funny story of Grandad’s rat-catching days:

When he was still new at it, he was in the basement of a bakery with an older hand who was showing him the tricks of the trade. Old Bill got a torch and said to my dad, “Now when I shine this torch onto the pipes, you get the neck of the sack ready, and when I shout out, right!”. Well it all went okay until Dad saw these bloody big rats coming towards him. He dropped the sack and ran, and the rat went with him. And Dad fell on him, and killed it. And the outcome was, “I’ve seen some funny rat-catchers in my time, but never one ’oo kills ’em wiv ’is arse!”

Most of my family, including Marko and my grandmother Gertrude lived in North Kensington and in Notting Hill near “Gipsy Square” (no longer on the map) in an area that used to be known as The Potteries, in streets such as Bomore Road, Latimer Road, Edge Street and Western Terrace (now renamed Lonsdale Road, where he lived at number 17, and where my father was born). Before the First World War there used to be kilns for the manufacture of bricks and clay pots, as well as a number of pig farms, between here and nearby Shepherd’s Bush. On Saturdays and Sundays throughout the 1960s I would regularly ride the 88 bus along Goldhawk Road to Shepherd’s Bush Market, a place where you could hear Romani, Yiddish, Urdu, Bengali, Jamaican Patois and several other languages being spoken around the stalls along by the arches below the metropolitan line tube station.

On one tape, Aunty Nell describes how they would periodically do a “moonlight flit” from one place to another because they couldn’t pay the rent; they would throw their belongings down from the window into a handcart and steal silently away in the middle of the night to a new place. On another, she describes how the police suddenly showed up at a place where they were staying in Acton, looking for Marko, who had managed to disappear via the back yard just moments before.

Notting Hill was one of the “metropolitan Gypsyries” of the Victorian era, described by Reverend John Hall and by George Smith, and was occupied by Romanies during the middle of the nineteenth century after a catastrophe in south London forced the resettlement of many Gypsy families from there to other parts of the city. According to an article in the Illustrated London News from 1879, some two thousand Romanies inhabited the London Gypsyries. An interesting description of the area appeared in the same magazine:

The ugliest place we know in the neighbourhood of London, the most dismal and forlorn, is . . . Shepherd’s-Bush and Notting-Hill. There it is that the gipsy encampment may be found, squatting within an hour’s walk of the Royal palaces and of the luxurious town mansions of our nobility and opulent classes . . . It is a curious spectacle in that situation, and might suggest a few serious reflections upon social contrasts at the centre and capital of the mighty British nation, which takes upon itself the correction of every savage tribe in South and West Africa and Central Asia.

George Borrow described the very street, Portland Place, in his Romano Lavo-Lil, where Marko lived for some time, at number 145. The whole area, with its once big sedentary Romani population (subsequently displaced by immigrants from the West Indies and elsewhere) was the subject of a study by Taylor in 1983.

Marko’s maternal grandfather was Imre Róbert Bencsi (or Benczi: Bálint Sárosi spells the name of the musician Benczi Gyula this way in his book Gypsy Music, on page 204). His descendants in Hungary today, or at least as recently as the 1960s, according to Uncle Albert, have a travelling fair of two shooters, a big wheel and shot gallery, plus a small set of gallopers. They travel the villages and have a yard at a village called Peste about 35 km from Budapest. The old fellow Imree is the son of an earlier Imree whose sister married an English traveller years ago, and worked for a time on their gaff. They have, by the way, a few relations at our park on Liszbet Ilan (letter postmarked December 8th, 1972).

According to other letters from Uncle Albert, and to information from Dr. Várnagy, the Bencsi family travels mainly in northwestern Hungary around Mosonmagyáróvar and in the region between the Einser Canal and the Rábca River near the Austrian border and some fifty miles from Vienna. The town of Peste he refers to is Uj Pest, twenty miles to the northwest of Budapest, and Liszbet (properly Erszébet) Ilan is an island in the Danube right in the centre of Budapest which has a big amusement park and funfair; I visited it in 1997 but it was closed for the winter. In one letter, he referred to the Bencsis’ being on the Gestapo list for incarceration by the Nazis during 1937 and 1938.

The sister Albert mentions was Marko’s great-aunt, who also came to England as a young woman with some of her family and with the Kocs’ in the second half of the nineteenth century; a third family which came in with them at the same time were the Laszlos. There was a significant influx of Gypsies from the Austro-Hungarian Empire into Britain during that period, following the upheavals resulting from pressure on the government from the former nobility and the clergy in the late 1860s. Others went to France, but most went to the United States, families such as the Dunas, Godlas, Horvaths and Baloghs; a family of Bencsis lives in Cleveland (Hancock, 1994). Kocs’ in the United States have respelt their name as Koch. Like Imre Senior’s sister, some of these married into British Romanichal fairground families, and since the publication of the earlier version of this essay in 1985 I have received mail from members of one British Romanichal family telling me that they also incorporated Hungarian Romanies into the family line in the late 1800s.

Albert Cook himself stayed two streets away from Aunty Nell and her husband Fred Saker in Winchester Street for some of the time, but was living in a trailer at the Wardley Street Caravan Site in south London when he got arrested.

In 1888 Marko’s mother Mary Maria married a man named Luther (both of them were born in 1868), son of an earlier Luther from the sprawling family of West Country Hancocks. The Hancock “family seat” seems to have been Wiltshire, with a movement to the Southampton area in the 1800s, and then on to London. The parish Register for Corsham in Wiltshire registered the birth of one Wellano (a variant of Wellenough?) Hancock on 22 June 1808 as the daughter of John Hancock and his wife Fellowphany, and lists the family as “people commonly called gipseys”. Fellowphany is an odd name; there was also a Thurza Hancock born in the family in Romsey in 1848, and other family names include Ailsa, Fear, Blackadder, Wippetty and Cotlaba. We christened our own daughter Fellowphany on 20 September 2003. Bob Dawson, who researches British Romani given names, says (in p.c.) that it is likely to be a form of Fallowfield with the common Gypsy name ending –phany.  That John Hancock was born in Romsey in 1777; in 1816 his brother James (who was a “hemp dresser and sack weaver”), had a son also named John, who was Luther Senior’s father—Marko’s grandfather. He also had a daughter Hannah, who married a Christopher Smith, who is listed as a “hawker and traveler” in the Somerset House records.

Mary Maria and her sister Sara, Imre’s daughters, were both born in a waggon in Pimlico near Vauxhall Bridge Road, where my Aunty Nell and Uncle Fred later lived (in John Islip Street) for many years. She and her husband Luther went to live in Campden Street, off Kensington Church Street on the other side of Holland Park Avenue in Notting Hill, and their son Reginald Aubrey (Marko) was born a year later in 1889.  According to the 1901 Census, they had moved two blocks away to No. 7 Cousens Court, off Edge Street. Perhaps it was nearby Aubrey Walk that provided the inspiration for Marko’s given middle name.

We remember Mary Maria, Marko’s mother, as ‘Granny Benge’. She had a daughter Jess and another son Frederick besides Marko, and she’s described as having been a tiny woman who had a pet parrot. She and her sister were always dressed entirely in black, and kept their heads covered all the time. Aunty Nell wrote about her Granny’s and her Aunt Sara’s unusual clothes in a note in the London News and Post (Saker, 1982:6).  

Marko’s sister Jess married a non-Gypsy, Fred McVety, and they lived at 68 Hammersmith Bridge Road where they had a cobbler’s shop and tobacconist’s next to the Oxford and Cambridge pub, across the road from the river (it was outside the shop that my dad would wait for my mum to come by, but there’s nothing but high-rises in the area now). For some of the time they would leave it to stay in a trailer near Sunbury-on-Thames outside of London.  As for their brother Frederick, he was killed in the First World War on the first day of fighting at the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, but had already fathered Caroline, Calvin and Ellen, none of whose descendants I have so far been able to locate.

When he was eighteen Marko married an English Traveller woman named Gertrude, my Nan, whose mother Elizabeth Lucy (her father’s first wife—he had three altogether), daughter of Liddie, was a King from the branch of that Romanichal family that lived in the Leatherhead area. Her half sister Nell also married a Romanichal, Sammy Cook—from the Kent and Surrey Traveller families and not related at all to Albert Cook (Kocs); their son Charlie kept a stall in Portobello Road Market, selling sometimes china sometimes vegetables, and the family was still there when I visited them in the ’60s. Nell Cook hated my grandfather, though she and her husband lived upstairs right next door to him in Bomore Road.  She was angry because he had put her sister in a family way. At the time that she married Marko, my Nan and some of her relatives were living in Upham Park Road in Chiswick, a borough which, along with neighbouring Brentford, still has quite a few Romani families resident there today, particularly in the area where the two districts meet near Gunnersbury Park. Barnes, Hammersmith and Chiswick were all listed as stopping places for Romanies in the London City Mission Magazine (for 2 January 1860). Lots of other Romani families lived in the same road, The Smalls and the Lights among them. Other Chiswick Romani families included Spraggs, Manceys, Collins, Worths, Burtons, Hollands, Hearns, Huxleys and Balls; the caretaker at the Chiswick Town Hall was a King (Mary Horner, in p.c.); a wonderful and familiar account of Gypsy life in Chiswick in the ’30s and ’40s was published by the Romany and Traveller Family History Society (Hearn, 2001).

My Nan was stone deaf, and towards the end of her life in 1979 she had lost most of her sight as well. When I would visit her in Dalgarno Gardens in the 1960s, I would have to guide her to the framed photograph of me on the wall and put her hand on it, so she would know who I was. Her wall was covered with family photographs, but she could no longer see them. Their children were Reginald John (my father, 1911-2000), Jessie Edith (1896-1975) and Frederick, who died of meningitis in 1915 at the age of nine months. “Reg” and “Redjo” were what my grandparents called my father, who outside the family was everywhere known by his middle name John. Following the Vlax practice, and since I learnt Vlax Romani, I have given myself the Romani name Yanko le Redjosko, “Ian, son of Redjo” that I use in some of my writings.

I came to realise early on that the British Gypsy families who had married with the Hungarian Romanies were something of a shunned group; the British Travellers were not at all well disposed to their own who “married out” with the foreign Gypsies. A group of Hungarian Gypsies came back to Sutton again in the 1930s (Evans, 2003:13).

It was only when we were with them—Nan and Grandad and Uncle Albert and some of his friends, people I didn’t know, as well as Aunty Nell and Uncle Fred and everybody, usually at holiday times—that I would hear “real” Romani being spoken by several people all at once. Marko knew at least some inflected Romani, and so did Uncle Albert, some of whose letters contain Romani, English Romanichal dialect and Hungarian mixed in with the English, but he spoke Pogadi (“Pikey talk”) better. I remember a little song my grandfather would sing to me to make me go to sleep while the gaslights were hissing, no doubt sung to him by his own mother, which began na ma maro, na ma mas, na ma kotor balovas, which means “I have no bread, I have no meat, not even a piece of bacon”.

Marko had a reputation as a ‘sponge’, and Aunt Jess used to say that he must have inherited his habit of cadging money from people from their dad Luther, whose name in her Cockney pronunciation came out “loofah”, like the sponge.

I also learnt to swear in Gypsy at that early age from listening to Marko. At school—Southfield Road School in Acton, and later at the Chiswick County School for Boys which we both went on to attend—another boy called Billy Gray who was also from a Gypsy family that lived in Oxford Road, and I, would get a kick out of calling our classmates rude names in Romani. In the earlier version of this essay I included some of those words, but it infuriated one old Romanichal man to see them in print. He told his son not to talk to me again, even though I’d previously been successful in getting that son out of prison in Virginia by organizing a petition to the State Governor.

Marko also knew Yiddish; for some years he was a peddler of sheet music, and would sell for the Jewish music agencies in the district around Aldgate in London’s East End, in Market Street (Petticoat Lane) and elsewhere. He called himself Reggie Marks, and passed himself off as Jewish. My exposure to Romani and Yiddish began with being around my grandfather. The first article I ever had published, over forty years ago in 1964, was in The Linguist and dealt with Yiddish in London. When I was a boy, Yiddish posters in Hebrew letters were a common sight on the walls and fences in bomb-damaged Whitechapel, and they fascinated me. In later life I made it a point to learn how to read and write that language, and I even gave a one-semester course in it at my university. In the early ’60s I was able to get lessons through an organization in east London called Di Fraynt fun Idish from an old couple, Soyre and Moishe Beckerman, who coincidentally lived in Ennismore Avenue, Chiswick, just one block away from Upham Park Road where my grandmother had lived as a child. I would show up at their home at seven o’clock each Wednesday evening, and they would give me soup and Yiddish lessons at the dining room table. Both are long gone now.

Billy Cribb, an Essex Gypsy man, also mentions Marko and one of his favourite hang-outs, a street named Club Row in Shoreditch, not very far from the music companies he worked for in Aldgate. There, a man used to sell sarsaparilla and hot banana fritters out of the back of a van, and the Romanichals would sell the caged finches they’d caught that morning, outside the “bird pub”, as the King’s Head (now “Les Trois Garçons”) was then called. This practice is in fact illegal—the newspapers ran an article as recently 2005 about a police raid on another “bird pub” in Bethnal Green where fourteen men were arrested on charges of “animal cruelty” (Seenan, 2005:5). The area looks very different now, with many of its old buildings having been torn down or replaced, but the Club Row Market is still there and on Saturday mornings it still serves as a meeting and trading place for Romanies, though today they are mostly the post-1990 immigrants from central and eastern Europe.

Since my father was a merchant seaman during those early years and was away at sea for long periods after he left the Caldecott Community, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and my paternal aunts and uncles and cousins. I remember very clearly Nan and Grandad’s flat in Peabody Buildings, a subsidized housing estate with endless cement stairs, whitewashed walls and long brick balconies in Dalgarno Gardens down the road from the Wormwood Scrubs prison (where Marko had spent some time):

I used to tramp the streets beneaf the stars
And knock off uvver geezers’ motor cars
I used to flog ’em dahn the Lane . . .
I’d never ’eard of Wormwood Scrubs.
One night a friendly rozzer noticed me
A-fiddlin’ rahn’ wiv an ignition key
’E said “you’re just the bloke we need
To fill a space in Wormwood Scrubs!”
’E put an ’andcuff on me wrist
I said “Wot’s this? I shall resist!”
So wiv me arm ’e done the twist
An’ then ’e ’it me nut.
And now I lie in bed and cahnt the stars
Be’ind a great big set of iron bars
I ’ear the motors going by
And ’ere I am in Wormwood Scrubs.**

There was no electricity in the Peabody flat, and the pervasive smell and the peculiar harsh greenish glow of the gas mantles on the wall are still a memory. I remember that there was highly polished brass everywhere. Under his bed, also made of brass, my grandfather kept two or three battered tin trunks, filled with ‘treasures’ appropriated in the course of his day’s work as a rat catcher. Often he would let me choose an item to keep from these trunks—once a broken fob watch, once a piece of Roman tile, and to me they were treasures indeed. When I stayed there, I would be given a bath in a zinc tub in the middle of the parlour floor, filled from buckets of water heated on the gas stove. There was in fact a bathtub, but I don’t remember its ever being put to its proper use. It was in the kitchen next to the gas-stove, and had a board placed over it that served as a table. I learnt later that washing and cooking in the same area was not appropriate in a Romani home. Marko used to make different things on this board to sell.

I remember also what I’d be given to eat: bread and dripping sandwiches, sugar sandwiches, bread soaked in hot milk, fried bread, and even an odd combination of bread dipped in milk and then fried, with jam on it—lots of food, but always lots of bread.  The milk was called ‘sterilized’ and came in bottles that had beer caps. My Nan had big lids on the board over the bathtub, on which she sprouted mustard seeds on bits of damp flannel; she would use the sprouts (that she called “creese”) to make sandwiches. I remember also that both of them would pour their tea out of the cup into the saucer and drink it from there, and also dip their bread into their tea.

Christmas time and Easter were very big family events; I’d see relatives then that I never saw at any other time. Marko would sing his songs, usually very rude ones, and my mother, always uncomfortable at such gatherings, would edge me into a corner and engage me in conversation to divert me from listening to him. He would sing all kinds of songs, and compose them, too. He used to sing “Jealous of you”, “Come inside you silly feller”, “Turn a winkle upside down” and Noel Gay’s “The sun has got his hat on”—songs hardly remembered today. I learnt a lot of them from my dad who’d inherited them, and who had a song for every occasion.

The sun has got his hat on
Hip hip hip hurray
The sun has got his hat on and he’s coming out today.
Now we all are happy
Now we all are gay
The sun has got his hat on and he’s coming out to play.

                *  *  *

I was workin’ once in a lunatic asylum
breakin’ up some stones
An’ along come a lunatic ’oo says to me
“Good mornin’ Mr. Jones.
’Ow much a week do yer get for doin’ this?”
Firty bob I sighed,
Then the ol’ man looked an’ ’e scratched ’is ’ead
an’ this is what ’e cried—
“Come inside yer silly feller come inside,
I fought you ’ad a bit more sense—
workin’ for a livin’? Take my tip,
Act a little silly an’ become a lunatic;
You gets yer meals quite reg’lar,
an’ two noo suits besides,
Firty bob a week, no wife an’ kids to keep
Come inside yer silly feller come inside!”

               *  *  *

You must turn a winkle upside down
To stand it on its ’ead
Stand it on its ’ead
Before it goes to bed,
In ’83 when aht at sea
It’s true what Nelson said,
You must turn a winkle upside down
To stand it on its ’ead.

              *  *  *  

Last week dahn ahr alley come a toff
Nice old geezer wiv an ’ackin’ cough
Sees my missus, takes ’is topper off
In a very gentlemanly way

“Wot cher!” all the neighbours cried
“Who yer gonna meet, Bill
’Ave yer bought the street, Bill”?
Laugh! I fought I should’ve died
Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road

Ev’ry evenin’ at the stroke of five
Me and the missus takes a little drive
You’d say, “Wonderful they’re still alive”
If you saw that little donkey go

When we starts the blessed donkey stops
’E won’t move, so aht I quickly ’ops
Pals start whackin’ him, when dahn ’e drops
Someone says ’e wasn’t made to go

“Wot cher!” all the neighbours cried
“Oo yer gonna meet, Bill
’Ave yer bought the street, Bill”?
Laugh! I fought I should’ve died
Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road

One of his party-pieces was a rude version of “Bye-bye blackbird” (“made her take off all her clothes, ’cept her shoes and her hose . . . ”). Aunty Nell talked once about his days as a minstrel:

When I see the buskers of today, I compare them with Dad, as he used to have three pals, who played the harmonium, ukulele and concertina. Dad sang, and sold the music and words, of a song sheet. He also was the bottler, and that’s the one that takes the money. Sundays was their best day; they would go all round the East End. He would even get money wrapped round a note asking for a certain song to be played and sung. People in those days would throw the money from the window. There were a lot of buskers in and out our street, such as two sisters . . . they used to push the barrel-organ all the way to the West End, every day. Then there was a man and wife, with a large harp, on the baby’s pram. She played, and he sang.

The accordion player was a West Indian whose name I don’t know, and the man who played the harmonium was a Romani named Peter Ball, but no one can remember anything at all about the man who played the ukulele. Aunty Nell referred back to that anecdote at the end of one of her tapes:   

When I told you about your grandad, used to be a minstrel, well I didn’t tell you this bit, about when I said to all the girls, twelve and thirteen, “that’s my dad, that nice-looking one, that handsome one; you see when he looks round! Dad! Dad!”. D’you think the bugger would turn round? He ignored me, because he didn’t want the girls to know he had such a grown-up daughter. That’s your grandad! Now that shows you what a bugger he was, dunnit!

One of the things he used to make on the board on the bathtub was team favours for the yearly Oxford and Cambridge boat race. On the boat race days he would make a big board, and cover it in black velvet, and pin on the little dolls and favours, he’d buy a gross of dolls, so many yards of pale blue and dark blue ribbon, and pom-poms for the head, then glue and tie the ribbons round the tummy  of  the  dolls, then stand down Porto-bello Market in the morning of the boat race selling them. Then afterwards; on the towing path at Hammersmith Bridge calling out “don’t forget your favours! Oxford or Cambridge!” Pity all those customs has died out now.

Something else he used to make, and sell very successfully around the public houses, was artificial dog excrement. He used to call this “faking jookal inder for the gawjas”. He had a coarse sense of humour, my old grandad, and it was no doubt this that put off a lot of people. It was a private source of amusement to him that people would actually pay money for this. He would make several of these small piles out of flour paste and pulped newspaper, and paint them when they’d dried. I remember seeing these objects in a row on the board over the tub; in fact I kept one myself as a souvenir for a long time.

During the war, people were subject to search by the police at any time, if they were seen carrying anything suspicious. One night, coming home from his rounds of the pubs, Marko had two of these things left unsold, wrapped in a piece of newspaper, tucked under his arm. He was spotted by a policeman who, seeing the small package, demanded to know what was in it. Marko told him—plainly—and of course the officer thought he was being a smart alec, so he asked him to open it up. When he saw what they were, he bought them both. On another occasion, in a pub, some of his pals got him to leave one of these on the counter, to trick the barmaid. When she saw it she screamed, swept it up and promptly disposed of it down the toilet, where it got stuck and blocked up the plumbing. Marko was never allowed back in that particular pub any more.

My Nan remained illiterate all her life because there was no educational provision available for the deaf, but Marko went to Fox School in Notting Hill for a while; it is still there, and he developed a very artistic copperplate hand. Those who remember him all remark on this. “If any of the costers in Portobello Market wanted a letter wrote”, said Aunty Nell, “they would ask dad to write it, and would give him a guinea for his trouble”. George Marriott remembers him from his days with the travelling shows when, for a small sum, he would with several pounds of heavy lead weights hanging from his right wrist write out your name, beautifully and without faltering.

One show with which he travelled belonged to Razzee Beach. Uncle Albert was with him in those days, and wrote of some of the times they had:

Pat Collins, who had the Midland gaffs in England, will tell you a few more details there, as Marko used to be on the tobee with his fair at all his gaffs of top places years ago. He also got with Razzee Beach’s fun fair of Uxbridge Road, Southall, Middlesex, where Sally Beach, now dead, used to be gaffer, and her brother William is now the boss . . . Nell and Fred did go down Kent in 40’s and you may ask them if they recall John Lee of Epping, the Palmers, Hollands, Loveridges, Biddies and Francombes who, with a few Penfolds made a proper seven days booze up every minute of the day with the board out for dancing, till nearly the whole police force of England were praying on their knees for us to leave off as they stopped all the booze coming into the village at Romford, so as we would have to go back to the vardo.  I remember my vardo was taken and left in Trafalgar Sq. and I do not know today who drove it there. I have a sus. it was Consuella Lee, but I do not know, as it left me speechless for £250 (letter postmarked 25 October, 1972).

Pat Collins was a well-known and very wealthy carnival owner between the two world wars, and is mentioned a number of times in Allingham’s book Cheapjack (and see especially Allen & Williams, 1991). A branch of the Hancocks that moved to Australia changed their name to Collins, for some reason. The Romanichal poet and spokesman Eli Frankham (Francombe) who passed away in 2001 was another one who remembered Marko.

Another of my grandfather’s means of livelihood was that of racing tipster. He did this much of the time, but especially during the big race events such as the Grand National and the Epsom Derby.

I was sent over to the shops to get a packet of BVD Cigarettes, Sporting Life paper, and a couple of bloaters for Dad’s breakfast. Then out would come the John Bull Printing Set, sixpence in Woolworth’s, and the scratch-pad, then Dad would pick out the Nat choice from the Sporting Life, and would stamp out the selections on all these pieces of paper and go down the market, again Portobello Road, selling them for half a crown a time, which is 25p.

Aunty Nell got this last bit wrong; decimal money was still new. 25p is twice that—five shillings. Grandad found his most profitable times on Epsom Downs and was frequently there, especially on Derby Day. The picture Hall painted of Gypsies converging on this famous racecourse each year hardly need be changed seventy years later, although there have been a number of attempts to forbid their doing so. Here, he called himself Marko the Tip, and teamed up with an African bookmaker called Ras Prince Monolulu. Monolulu was quite a well-known figure in his day; he came from Somalia or Ethiopia, and dressed himself in leopard skins and coloured feathers to attract a clientele. Uncle Albert remembered this too:

Old Marko who was with Ras Prince Monolulu used to go about with tips. Well, the prince did not like to play cards, but Marko all-ways teamed up and found a mug to play the piker on the trains. I recall that. To hell with gordios, and god bless the queen (letter postmarked 8 January, 1973).

In fact he once had a falling out with some of the other Gypsies over this, since there was constant resentment between the Gypsy and non-Gypsy tipsters and he was accused of getting too pally with the opposition. Not infrequently Monolulu was the cause of fights that had to be broken up by the police. It was because Marko repeatedly used my father, then just a child, as a bookie’s runner, that he was taken away and sent to the Caldecott Community. Bare-knuckle fighter Billy Cribb wrote about both Prince Monolulu and my grandfather in his recent book:

With Prince Monolulu there would also be a Romani Gypsy man known as ‘Marko the Tip’. Not only did we see them at the [Petticoat] Lane but they would be at every race track I remember visiting . . . Both Monolulu and Marko were real characters, the like of which the modern world appears to be lacking. Granddad often bought horse tips from these men until he sussed that they would sell the name of several horses to be the winner in the same race (Cribb, 2001:64).

Some of my relations continue to move around the south-eastern and south-western counties of England, and periodically I hear about one or another of them in letters, and sometimes the names of King and Cook and Palmer crop up in news items from the British press which are sent to me. I have met or corresponded with Palmers in Texas and Oklahoma, too, and have been told by Romanichal friends in Houston that Cooks related to them lived at one time in Shreveport, Louisiana. Together with Butch Lee, whose mother is a Palmer, I’m organizing a touring workshop on language, history and culture exclusively for the many Romanichals who live in the Texas-Arkansas-Louisiana area. But it is with my kin in London and Southend that I remain especially in touch. My cousin, Jacqui Harrison—another of Marko’s grandchildren, married a Romanichal called Edward Rumball (the same Romanichal family as the Gumbolds). Her father Jim’s family were Harrisons on his father’s side and Marshalls on his mother’s—a union of two prominent northeast London Romani families. She subsequently divorced him, and her present husband Lenny has a scrap metal yard in Fulham, in West London. They both came to visit us in Texas in 1998. In the late 1980s I received a letter from a Romanichal now living in Santa Clara, California, telling me that some of his people, the Bonds and the Crowes, have married into the Hancocks, and in 1978 attended a family reunion of Hancocks at which there were so many people that a football stadium (also in Fulham) had to be rented for the occasion.  I’ve found no evidence of that gathering. I received another letter (4 October 1999) from some Hancocks in New Zealand who knew of their Romani background and who were looking for more information about it, and from a Jimmy Hancock in Marietta, Georgia, also a Romanichal, whose mother was a Gordon (letter dated 13 May 1999). Ernest Hancock wrote to me from London after learning that his surname “is also borne by gypsies in Britain” from The Oxford Names Companion (Hanks et al., 2002: 276).

Some Hancocks, relatives according to Aunty Nell, operated a travelling funfair and bioscope in Wiltshire, Devonshire and Cornwall at the turn of the century called “Hancock’s Gigantic Carnival” and “Hancock’s Living Pictures.” It was burnt down in Plymouth shortly before the outbreak of the First World War by suffragettes and never rebuilt; they had started a small fire in a neighbouring lumber yard to protest the arrest of the women’s rights activist Emmaline Pankhurst, and it quickly spread to the Hancock property, which was uninsured (See Brown, 1988:109-112, Braithwaite, 1999:104-105 and Scrivens & Smith, 2006:126-129). It was the first funfair to feature the “Golden Galloper” roundabout, which was accompanied by a hand-cranked calliope, and after it was destroyed its place was taken by Whitelegg’s Fair. Sophie Hancock, who co-owned the fair with her brothers Bill and Charles (an epileptic) could reputedly swear for half an hour nonstop without repeating herself once, and lay out flat any troublemaker. Any family connection with those Hancocks, however, would date at least to the early 1800s.

The only address listed for several of the Hancocks in our own family record was the workhouse. One ancestor went down with the Titanic and drowned on April 12th, 1912 when he was only eighteen—that was Percy, the son of another Hannah Hancock and a man named Robert Rice.

There’s been one formal acknowledgment of Marko’s multi-faceted life: the Facing History and Ourselves annual European summer workshop on racism has created an educational module using the earlier version of this essay as its model (Zemo, 1997).

It’s been said more than once that Marko lives on in some of his children and grandchildren, but times and circumstances have changed, and it’s not likely that anyone quite so memorable as this “Romani legend”, as Ellen Galford called him (2001:62), will come this way again in our family.  I can’t argue with Billy Cribb who observed that the likes of him in the modern world is entirely lacking.

__________________________________________________
*Corrected and expanded from the original essay of this title which appeared in the Italian journal Lacio Drom in 1985.
**Ó S. Milligan, 1962

Works mentioned   

Allen, Freda, & Ned Williams, 1991. Pat Collins, King of Showmen. Wallsall: The Urlia Press.
Anon., 1860. “Missionary activity amongst the Gypsies for the year 1858”, London Missionary Magazine Annual Report, 25:17-18.
Anon., 1873. “Gypsy life round London”, The Illustrated London News, November 29th, 1879, p. 503.
Allingham, Phillip, 1934. Cheapjack. New York: Frederick Stokes & Co.
Bignell, Alan, 1977. Hopping Down in Kent. London: Hale.
Borrow, George, 1874. Romano Lavo-Lil. London: Murray.
Braithwaite, Paul, 1999. A Palace on Wheels. White Waltham: Carters Books.
Brown, Frances, 1988. Fairfield Folk: A History of the British Fairground and its People. Upton upon Severn: Malvern.
Coggins, Jack, & Fletcher Pratt, 1952. Rockets, Jets, Guided Missiles and Space Ships. London: Publicity Products (Random House).
Cribb, Billy, (pseud.), 2001. Tarmac Warrior. Edinburgh & London: Mainstream Publishing.
Evans, Kate, 2003. On Common Ground: Travellers in Sutton and Merton.  Sutton: SMTES.
Galford, Ellen, 2001. The Genealogy Handbook. London: Marshall Editions, Ltd.
Gerrish, Tricia, n.d. The Glove is Up! Devonshire’s Historic Fairs.
Hall, Rev. John, 1915. The Gypsy’s Parson. London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co.
Hancock, Ian, 1964. “Yiddish”, The Linguist, 26:274-275, 295-7.
Hancock, Ian, 1994. “The history of the American Hungarian Roma and their language”, Roma, 41:11-19.
Hanks, Patricia, Flavia Hodges, A.D. Mills & Adrian Room, 2002. The Oxford Names Companion. Oxford: The University Press.
Hearn, John, 2001. John’s Story. The Romany and Traveller
Family History Society, Oral History Series No. 2. Edited by Mary Horner.
Law, Barrie, 1993. Times to Remember. Strensall: The Romany Gypsy Photograph Collection.
Nichols, Keith, 1995. They Seek Him Here, They Seek Him There: True Tales of the Travelling Showman.
Aylsham: Barnwell & Sons.
Saker, Nell, 1982. “Down memory lane”. The News and Post, Friday, April 2, p. 6.
Sárosi Bálint, 1983. Gypsy Music. Budapest: Corvina Press.
Schweitzer, Pam & Diane Hancock, 1991. Our Lovely Hops. London: Age Exchange Theatre Trust.
Scrivens, Kevin & Stephen Smith, 2006. Hancocks of the West. Tweedale: New Era Publications.
Seabrook, David, 2006. Jack of Jumps. London: Granta Books.
Seenan, Gerard, 2005. “Pub raided in wild bird trade inquiry,” The Guardian, Monday, 7th February, p. 5.
Smith, George, ca. 1900. Gypsy Smith: His Life and Work. London: National Council of Evangelical Free Churches.
Sutherland, Anne, 1975. Gypsies, the Hidden Americans. London: Macmillan.
Taylor, Michael R., 1983. A Brief Survey of the History of Travelling People in North Kensington and Hammersmith, 1850-1965. London.
Zemo, August, 1997. Marko. The Facing History and Ourselves Berlin Summer Workshop on Racism and Anti-Semitism.