gypsy travellers tv series

10 great films about Gypsies and Travellers

Jonas Carpignano’s The Ciambra, about a young boy growing up in an Italian Romani community, is one of the rare films about the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community that avoids stereotypes of criminality or mysticism. Here are 10 other films and TV shows that honestly show the vibrant culture of the GRT community.

12 June 2018

By Christina Newland

Jonas Carpignano ’s new film The Ciambra is a neorealist fable about a young boy growing up in the Italian region of Calabria, part of a secluded neighbourhood of Romani people. In a nation where highly publicised hate crimes against Gypsies and Travellers have been relatively recent, The Ciambra looks at the mistrust with which the GRT (Gypsy, Roma and Traveller) community regards the rest of society. As the young protagonist Pio’s grandfather tells him: “It’s us against the world.”

When it comes to depictions of the GRT community in cinema, the feeling can be pretty similar. Travellers frequently find themselves stuck between invisibility or ridicule, and as in real life, misunderstandings about them abound. Romani people are stateless, but have been living for generations in Europe and Great Britain; Irish Travellers are Celtic (‘Pavee’) in origin – all suffer endemic poverty, social exclusion and open discrimination.

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In some ways, it might be easier to write a list of films wholly ignorant of the travelling communities they portray – in the UK , for example, the obnoxious ‘reality television’ series and films that turn travellers into punchlines or employ racial epithets. Still, some films and filmmakers have sought to counter the popular narratives of their people as criminals or mystics. Their work has run the gamut from abstract fiction to harrowing documentary; they have depicted Eastern European slums and modern travellers’ camps in Essex.

Some of the filmmakers showcased below offer honest and diverse portrayals of their own Gypsy communities; all of them attempt to purge centuries of collective myth-making that obscure a vibrant culture.

Sky West and Crooked (1966)

Director: John Mills

Sir John Mills ’ pastoral drama Sky West and Crooked is an open-minded portrayal of the travelling community in rural Britain. Its central focus is an oddball romance between Brydie ( Hayley Mills ), a troubled West Country teenager, and Roibin ( Ian McShane ), a broodingly handsome young man from a nearby travellers’ site.

Examining small-town prejudice and siding firmly with its two outsiders, Mills’ film intelligently portrays the mistrust between the settled community and the travellers and underlines how foundational fear of the unknown is when it comes to racism. Kids under the age of 10 parrot that they’re “scared of gyppos”, clearly never having interacted with anyone outside their country village. With poignant empathy and a smattering of real Romani words, Mills’ film attempts to bridge the gap between communities in a heartening way. Considering this was made in the 1960s, it’s shocking how few British films since have come with such a progressive perspective.

I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967)

Director: Aleksandar Petrovic

Aleksandar Petrovic’s I Even Met Happy Gypsies has the distinction of being one of the earliest internationally released features to be made in the Romani language. Because of the tendency of nomadic people to pass down culture orally, it’s a language that has long struggled to be recognised and written into the annals of linguistic history.

Soundtracked by genuine Gypsy melodies and unafraid of depicting the shocking poverty of isolated traveller sites around what was then Yugoslavia, Petrovic ’s story is one of small-time dramas and family machinations, filmed with a heightened black and white realism that gives it a stylised documentary feel. The subject matter, too, is ultimately fitting – ritualised courtship, elopements, domestic strife and a girl seeking to escape the cruelty of a domineering stepfather – all feel deeply relevant to the close-knit, family-oriented Traveller community.

Where Do We Go from Here? (1969)

Director: Philip Donnellan

This short documentary comes in at just around the 60-minute mark, but its activist intentions are as vital today as they were almost a half-century ago when they were filmed. This BBC doc attempts to shed light on the enigmatic lifestyles of British Travellers, particularly at a time when more traditional nomadic habits were being displaced by an increasingly industrialised nation and pressure to find a fixed abode.

Director Philip Donnellan was a documentary filmmaker for the BBC for decades, making dozens of films on the struggles of the working class and with a particular interest in GRT issues. He allows generous time in his film for insightful interviews with his subjects, many of whom still maintain prominent family names in contemporary English Traveller society. At a moment in the 20th century when questions about alternative ways of living were becoming increasingly germane, this film turns a fresh eye to the ethnically nomadic people who had been populating Britain for hundreds of years.

Angelo My Love (1983)

Director: Robert Duvall

Robert Duvall ’s overlooked feature stars a young New Yorker that the director had a chance encounter with on the street. The boy’s street-smart manner belied his age, and Duvall was intrigued to learn that the kid – Angelo Evans – came from a cloistered enclave of Romani people.

The loose narrative of the film focuses on a stolen family heirloom, but this is a thin premise for a vérité romp through the chaos of the real Angelo’s life, featuring actual friends and family along the way. His rough-and-tumble and often comical interactions – not to mention his light hustling – are captured with a pseudo-documentary style. Swirling around old-fashioned values of the community – family pride, masculine honour and the like – Duvall makes a surprisingly ethnographic character study out of his collection of on screen incidents.

Time of the Gypsies (1988)

Director: Emir Kusturica

As Serbia’s arthouse director du jour, Emir Kusturica has dealt glancingly with the Romani community in Eastern Europe for many years. Often, this is in the mode of magical realism, which presents certain questions about the superstition around Gypsy people, and the claptrap associations with the mystical attributed to them.

Time of the Gypsies doesn’t help much on that front: its main character, the bespectacled Perhan, is telekinetic. But what Kusturica lacks in cliché-busting he makes up for in other ways: he is masterful in his tragi-comic sensory overload-style depiction of Traveller life. Squawking chickens, muddy-faced children and noisy encampments seem to overwhelm the characters within, and their response to that impoverishment is what one might expect: denigration, crime and outright begging on the street. The magical powers might be a foolhardy touch, but the rest of the picture is unfortunately accurate.

Latcho Drom (1993)

Director: Tony Gatlif

Tony Gatlif – a prolific European Romani filmmaker who almost exclusively makes films in the Romani language – perfectly married form and content in this French film . Its title means ‘safe journey’, referring to the fabled ancient migration of Romani people from India into the nations of Europe. The film is a quasi-historical documentary that meets with the far-flung Romani diaspora in various countries and examines their cultural practices and differences.

Brilliantly, Gatlif employs no voiceover or interviews for his non-fiction film, using traditional music and dance to evoke the moods and impressions of the people on screen. “Why does your mouth spit on us?” croons a female Gitano singer sorrowfully, bringing back the centuries of discrimination, enforced sterilisation and holocaust brought upon her people. It’s a moment that speaks for itself in reverberative, literal terms.

Pavee Lackeen (2005)

Director: Perry Ogden

Perry Ogden’s gentle fiction film is about a real Irish Traveller girl and her family, as they stop on an unfriendly roadside outside Dublin. Ogden underlines the stark contrast between the Maughan family’s trailer and the lights and colours of contemporary urban life in Ireland. Since the governments of both the UK and Ireland regularly fail to allocate legal sites for Travellers to stay in, they are often forced to camp illegally on roadsides and lay-bys.

There’s no judgement in Ogden ’s gaze, and he charts the frequent misunderstandings between the travelling and settled communities with real sensitivity. The community officers and various bureaucracies may want the family to integrate, but there’s a refusal to see that it may mean the Maughan family would be subsuming their ethnic identity as a result. Yet the safety and continued education of the children in the family is of concern, and so Pavee Lackeen offers a measured look at both sides.

Knuckle (2011)

Director: Ian Palmer

Ian Palmer’s documentary was over a decade in the making as he gained intimate access to two Irish Traveller families locked in a series of violent feuds. James Quinn McDonagh is the central protagonist of the tale – a bare-knuckle Gypsy champion with a shaved head and solemn features. A rival clan, the Joyces, have a long-held hatred of the McDonaghs over an old brawl that landed one family member in prison and another dead.

Knuckle may not do much to quell stereotypes of Irish Travellers as belonging to a violent, honour-driven society deeply in thrall to old-style masculinity, but Palmer, trusty with a handheld camera, does present the reality of what he sees: engaging, brutal and sometimes bizarrely funny. There’s a real failure to more pressingly get to the heart of what drives these bare-knuckle fights – or to truly understand the families of the men who go through this primitive, trying behaviour repeatedly. As bitter a pill as it is for some to swallow, the iron-clad tradition of bare-knuckle boxing in the Traveller community is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker (2013)

Director: Danis Tanović

A Bosnian festival favourite and winner of the Berlinale Grand Jury Prize, Danis Tanović ’s upsetting drama is played out by a non-professional cast who genuinely experienced the events of the film.

Filmed in an unobtrusive style, the title describes Nazif and his wife Senada, who have two children and live on Nazif’s scrap-dealing income. Because of their ethnicity, the two are refused admittance to their local hospital after Senada suffers a miscarriage. They are then forced to undertake a painfully long journey while Senada grows increasingly desperate and in need of medical care. The shocking endemic racism recalls the cruellest days of America’s Jim Crow era, where the Travellers are turned away by the institutions that they are most in need of.

Peaky Blinders (2013-)

Creator: Steven Knight

Although it took a few seasons to fine tune, this historical gangster drama about a gang of vicious British criminals is one of the most accomplished televisual depictions of Traveller history. With its colourful and nuanced set of central characters born of English Traveller blood, it offers something new – anti-heroic, dashing and complicated protagonists from Gypsy stock.

Set in the Black Country of Birmingham in the early 1920s, Steven Knight ’s series focuses on the Shelby family, a bunch of strapping Romani-born lads who come up out of nothing to build an organised crime empire. Chief among them is the charismatic and coldly feline Tommy Shelby ( Cillian Murphy , whose angular face and cutting blue eyes are put to excellent use here), a shell-shocked First World War veteran who returns to his decrepit hometown with a desire for more.

Featuring Romani language from the second season onward and input – even supporting roles – for actors and writers from this background, Peaky Blinders has an implicit importance that goes far beyond the machinations of its often extravagant criminal plot twists. When someone speaks disdainfully of Tommy’s background, he sarcastically drawls, “I sell pegs and tell fortunes.” This isn’t your romanticised view of Gypsies. If anything, it’s a reminder that English Travellers have been around for a long time, and even back then they were sick of your stereotypes.

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A Gypsy Life for Me

Still searching for a stage on which to audition, Harley the performing pony gets his first taste of the TV big time as Gypsy Journalist Jake Bowers promotes his talent show for Travellers on ITV's This Morning.

This week, travelers invade the prestigious home of arts and entertainment, London's Southbank Centre. The centre's hosted hundreds of cultural events but never a Gypsy knees up and our cameras capture the chaos at this third heat of the hotly fought competition.

Jake is hauled to his sponsor's for an ear bashing. He's forced to admit that there's a problem with numbers at the upcoming heat in the North West.

Hundreds of travelers and gypsies have gathered in a field in Essex to celebrate God. Journalist Jake Bowers is covering the Light and Life Christian Convention for The Travellers' Time.

Romany Gypsy Violet Cannon, an activist and author, visits the Lee Gap Horse Fair in Yorkshire. Violet introduces us to her Dad, who's been selling horses here for years.

Dale Farm in Essex, Britain's most controversial Travellers site, has run out of time. The resident's notice of eviction has run out, and the bailiffs are moving in.

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Roisin Mullins

DOCUMENTARY

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Explorer Ed Stafford spends two months with Gypsy and Traveller communities across the country, as he delves beneath the stereotypes and reveals the challenges of living in modern-day Britain

In Manchester, Ed learns how to live off the land and hears about the persecution the community faces, before experiencing the cycle of eviction in Cornwall

Ed hears about the persecution the community faces, and experiences the cycle of eviction

Ed attends the Appleby Horse Fair and a protest against the proposed new Police Bill

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Screen Rant

Peaky blinders: the true story behind the shelby family’s romani heritage.

Cillian Murphy’s Thomas Shelby and many other characters on Peaky Blinders call themselves “gypsies,” but what is the true story of the Romani?

Peaky Blinders season 6 explores the Shelby family's Irish-Romani Gypsy heritage, but doesn't fully explain the distinct traditions of the Roma people.
The Shelbys are specifically of Irish-Romani descent and refer to themselves as Gypsies, but their lifestyle differs from other Gypsy characters in the show.
The use of the term "Gypsies" in Peaky Blinders is historically accurate, though many Romani people now prefer terms like "Rom" or "Roma."

The Shelby family’s Gypsy heritage plays a large role in Peaky Blinders and is a foundational element of the show’s storyline as well as a defining attribute of many characters – but many viewers still want to know what kind of Gypsy Tommy Shelby is. Tommy Shelby and his kin are Irish-Romani (sometimes spelled Romany) Gypsies, a unique cultural and ethnic group present in Britain since the 1500s. The award-winning Peaky Blinders is directed by Steven Knight and has run for 6 seasons, the most recent hitting U.S. Netflix in June 2022.

Peaky Blinders season 6 delves further into the Shelby family's Irish-Romani Gypsy heritage. However, it doesn't explain much about what makes Roma distinct from other nomadic cultures like Irish and Scottish Travelers. For example, the reasons why Irish-Romani Gypsies don't mention the names of their dead is a uniquely Roma tradition. Many viewers still want to know exactly what kind of Gypsy Thomas Shelby is, as the Peaky Blinders Gypsy connections to real history aren't explained in full.

Peaky Blinders: 5 Things That Are Historically Accurate (& 5 That Aren't)

Where the shelby family comes from, tommy shelby and his family have irish-romani heritage.

Set in the early 20th century in Birmingham, the Peaky Blinders Gypsy storyline follows the Shelby family through their criminal dealings, detailing their rise from the slums of Small Heath to wealthy, powerful aristocrats with global reach. The Shelbys are specifically of Irish-Romani descent, but they refer to themselves and other Romani with the blanket term “G ypsies ” in the show. Tommy Shelby, the gang’s leader, along with his siblings, Arthur, John, Ada, and Finn, have Irish-Romani heritage on both sides and consider themselves Gypsy.

Their paternal aunt, Helen McCrory’s irreplaceable Polly Gray , is the daughter of “ Gypsy Princess ” Birdie Boswell, and their mother comes from the Lee family. Additionally, several of the important Peaky Blinders Gypsy characters come from the Shelby family’s Gypsy ties like Tommy’s close friend, Johnny Dogs, and Aberama Gold, who is Polly’s love interest and Tommy’s hired assassin. John Shelby's wife, Esme, is also a Romani Gypsy in the show, with her character playing a huge part in Peaky Blinders season 6 because of her Romani heritage and her connection to the Shelby family.

When preparing to begin filming Peaky Blinders in 2013, actor Cillian Murphy said (via Independent ) , “ Steve Knight, the creator of the show, took me to Birmingham, where he's from, to meet his buddies so I could record their accents. I spent time with Romani Gypsies. I learned about extreme poverty .” As with Peaky Blinders' adaptation of the real-life Birmingham gang, the Peaky Blinders, the show reveals much about the Romani heritage and traditions but also takes creative rather large liberties along the way.

Peaky Blinders True Story: How Much Really Happened

Peaky blinders uses real-life romani history, thomas shelby's gypsy heritage has many true elements.

Because he doesn't live in a wagon in Peaky Blinders, many viewers unfamiliar with Irish-Romani culture wondered if Tommy Shelby really is a Gypsy. He and the Shelbys refer to themselves as such, although they live a notably different life to other Peaky Blinders Gypsy characters in the show. While many Irish-Romani and Roma Gypsies do live in nonstationary settlements, the belief that no Gypsies can have permanent abodes is a misconception. Peaky Blinders' protagonist Tommy Shelby has Irish-Romani Gypsy heritage, but like many real-life Romani families left the nomadic lifestyle several generations before the 1900s.

Of greater significance to the Romani people is living in groups consisting of immediate or extended family. In the early 20th century, the Romani camps would have been covered wagons or vardos (wooden wagons) like in the show. While Peaky Blinders refers to the Romani people as Gypsies, and the term is being reclaimed by contemporary Roma and other traveler communities, it was considered pejorative for many decades. Alina Bradford states (via livescience ) that “ some people consider that a derogatory term ” and points out that many Romani people still refer to themselves as “ Rom ,” “ Roma ,” “ Roman ,” or “ Romany .”

As some fans point out, Peaky Blinders has a history problem, but the use of the term Gypsy isn't a symptom. When the Romani people first distanced themselves from the term “ Gypsies ” is unclear, and it was likely because of the historic persecution associated with that term and its propensity to be used as an umbrella term for all contemporary nomadic cultures. However, in recent years many Romani have started to reclaim the label. The use of the term by both Roma and non-Roma was common at the time of Peaky Blinders, and is historically accurate, even if today its use is still debated even within Romani communities.

Peaky Blinders: 5 Historical Facts The Show Gets Right (& 5 It Gets Totally Wrong)

Is the gypsy language in peaky blinders real, the show made many errors with its portray of irish-romani language.

Peaky Blinders is a British period drama , but it takes some liberties with accuracy like many other entries in this genre, and there are discrepancies in the language spoken by the show’s Romani Gypsies. Throughout the Peaky Blinders Gypsy storyline, Tommy, Aunt Polly, and several other characters speak what they call “ Romani ,” but the language used in the show is a version of Romanian, whereas the Romani people are believed to come from India.

Stephanie Pappas (via livescience ) follows a recent genetic study from Current Biology claiming that the modern Romani people spread across Europe after originally migrating from northwest India, and their language reflects that. Regardless of origin, Peaky Blinders' version of the Romani language takes center stage in Peaky Blinders season 6, episode 1 when Tommy and Lizzie's young daughter, Ruby, becomes ill and begins speaking Romani. When Ruby mutters the Gypsy curse "Tikna Mora O Beng" through her fevered state, the " Gypsy" phrase unsettles Tommy, who believes it to be a threat sent from the beyond.

Tommy Shelby Gypsy Curse: What Was Ruby Shelby Saying In Romani

"tickna mora o'beng" means "devil".

Ruby's words in Peaky Blinders season 6 cause Tommy to insist she wears a charm of the Black Madonna. The words the Peaky Blinders Gypsy Ruby says, " Tickna Mora O'Beng", loosely translates to " devil " in Romani , according to creator Steven Knight ( via Digital Spy ). It didn't matter what Ruby's words meant as far as Tommy was concerned. The fact it was " gypsy stuff" was enough for him to panic. Tommy wasn't raised in a nomadic Gypsy settlement himself, but he shares many of the beliefs. Tommy's paranoid curse superstition when it came to Gypsies was standard for the 1930s, though, even outside of Romani culture.

In the general populace, it was largely based on commonly held racial prejudices. Many believed that the Romani people dabbled in the supernatural. Polly's séances and Grace's cursed necklace would have been seen as legitimate by the majority of everyday people. Of course, there is literally no evidence to support these prejudicial associations with witchcraft, curses, or magic. There's plenty that explains why these stereotypes were so deeply entrenched, though. Historically, Gypsies have often been persecuted and scapegoated for their supernatural ties, and those stereotypes really stemmed from Romani Gypsies being seen as outsiders due to their nomadic way of life.

10 Characters Based On Historical Figures In Peaky Blinders

Were the real peaky blinders romani, the real peaky blinders gang had a diverse membership.

The Peaky Blinders gang that historically operated in real-life 1920s Birmingham drew men from many cultural backgrounds, including Irish-Romani Gypsies like the Peaky Blinders Gypsy characters. Many Romani Gypsies in the real Peaky Blinders came from an area known as The Black Patch (near modern-day Smethwick). The Black Patch was a huge Gypsy camp in the UK in the early 1900s, but the thousands of residents were forcibly evicted in 1909 to make way for a public park. Unfortunately, the forced "moving on" of Gypsy camps, Romani and otherwise, still happens in the UK and Europe today.

In the time of the Peaky Blinders, many of the thousands of evicted Gypsies from The Black Patch and similar settlements made their way to urban population centers like Peaky Blinders' setting of Birmingham . There they found the abject poverty and squalid conditions that birthed gangs like the Peaky Blinders. However, Tommy Shelby, his family, and other Peaky Blinders Gypsy characters are fictional and were created for the show. It's not known who founded the real Peaky Blinders.

Judging by contemporary newspapers, a man named Thomas Mucklow may have been the first to organize the already-existing clusters of criminal youths under the Peaky Blinders name. There's no evidence that Mucklow was an Irish-Romani Gypsy, however, and Mucklow isn't one of Birmingham's known Gypsy family names (but it is a common English one). The truth is that the real Peaky Blinders were drawn together by the unlivable poverty they shared in the slums of Birmingham in the early 1900s rather than a single ethnic background like the Irish-Romani Shelby family in Peaky Blinders .

Peaky Blinders True Story: How Close America Came To Allying With Hitler

Romani or otherwise, the show got one thing right with the shelby family, peaky blinders accurately captured how deadly the real gang was.

The Peaky Blinders Gypsy portryal problems aside, the series did get something right about the Shelby family: the real Peaky Blinders gang was just as deadly. While the show does take a fair amount of historical liberty, it can't be denied that the real Peaky Blinders gang was a force to be reckoned with, and while they may not have been as homogeneously Gypsy as the show depicts, the series does at least portray their level of violence accurately as well as the struggles of the period. The real Peaky Blinders were founded in the working class Small Heath area of Birmingham.

One shocking event that happened in Peaky Blinders season 1 is mirrored in history, as an Irish police officer was called to restore order to the West Midlands, but was held up by corruption among his colleagues. The main difference between the real Peaky Blinders and the Shelby family is the latter's reach. The Peaky Blinders gang was mostly involved in robberies, racketeering, and violent crimes. Regardless, their menace was the same, and the real gang terrorized Birmingham for as long as they could. So, while Peaky Blinders isn't wholly accurate in its history, the fictionalized Shelby gang was just as violent as their real-life counterparts.

Peaky Blinders

My Big Fat Gypsy TV Series

It was the smash hit TV documentary of 2010, watched by almost everyone in the Gypsy and Traveller community and millions of others. Some loved the way it showed largely Irish Traveller weddings, others moaned that there were almost no Gypsies in it.

But whatever you thought of the documentary My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, you may want to watch Channel 4 at 9pm on January 18th. Because Channel 4 have produced 5 more hours about Gypsy and Traveller culture to be shown over the next month. We here at Travellers Times don’t know what’s in it. Because Channel 4’s press office wouldn’t tell us or show us.

Series Producer Vicky Hamburger had this to say about the difficulties of trying to make a series about Romany Gypsy and Irish Traveller community: “I wasn’t prepared for was how lively the process would be. Making a series with people who live outside the regular rules of society has been exhilarating. Time and again, having planned a shoot, whole teams would wait around on location for days, being repeatedly stood up by our contributors."

" In one extreme case, a family had left their site when the director turned up to film. With phones not being answered and a vague clue they’d moved to Kent, he spent 48 hours touring the county’s caravan sites. He never did find them.”

“When we would eventually pin down contributors and question where they’d been, we would often hear: “We’re gypsies - we can’t commit.” And therein lays the difficulty of making a series with people who seem to have no concept of forward planning.”

“I am often asked if I now feel more or less affectionate towards these people. Honestly, I am full of fondness for them. The UK Gypsy and Traveller communities are a spirited group with admirable family values and strength in the face of adversity.”

For those that can’t wait to see what they did manage to film, the Channel 4 website has some sneak previews at http://www.channel4.com/programmes/big-fat-gypsy-weddings . But they do seem to have repeated the same mistake of the original programme by largely filming Irish Travellers, who make up perhaps just 10% of Britain’s Gypsy and Traveller community, which already has some viewers steaming.

“It is so annoying that this program is called BIG FAT GYPSY WEDDING.” says one person who has commented on the channel 4 website. “The people featured are not Gypsies at all. Gypsy is the name given to Romany people who travelled across Europe from India. This program just gives people more ammunition to throw at the Romany community, I being one of them. All this program does is embarrass and humiliate the Romany Gypsy community. Why don't you call it MY BIG FAT IRISH TRAVELLER WEDDING as it isn't anything to do with us? I can trace my Romany ancestors back 500 years in this country. Can any of the people featured in this country?”

But others are definitely looking forward to the biggest ever series about Gypsies and Travellers to be made for British TV. Geena has also commented on the Channel 4 website, she says: “I love this and I have told everyone to watch it because as a gypsy myself I hate the way I get singled out because of who I am. I would love to have that sort of dress. I have drawn mine already and got it made. Only 3 more weeks to the big day. Can’t wait.”

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No Place to Call Home: Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers by Katharine Quarmby – review

S ettlement, as Bruce Chatwin is quoted as saying in Katharine Quarmby's forcefully written book on modern nomads such as Gypsies and Travellers, is a relatively new habit of humans, who have been settled for only 10,000 years, a blip in the evolutionary calendar. But it is a new habit that has produced a "settled community" that is hostile, bigoted and suspicious of any peoples who do choose to wander or travel. Hinging on the notorious and violent eviction of the Irish Traveller encampment at Dale Farm, the book roams more widely than that scrapyard in Essex, to the persecution of Gypsies and Travellers through history, and the persistent and unpleasant scapegoating of a people who were different from the moment they arrived on this island in the 16th century and try their best to remain so.

Five hundred years ago, there were vagabonds from Ireland and others supposedly from Egypt, hence the word "Gypsy" (although the Gypsy language Rom has more in common with Sanskrit spoken in northern India). In 1554, the Egyptians Act gave the crown power to remove Gypsies from England "by any violent means necessary", and to hang any who stayed for more than a month. Overseas in Romania, the Romany people – related to Gypsies, though Quarmby never makes it clear how – were flogged, burned with lye and made to wear a three-cornered spiked iron collar. Nomadism threatened the enclosure and control of the land by a modernising nation state, and to the norm, which was "bricks and mortar". After a brief period of the romantic, fortune-telling Gypsy figure beloved by Charlotte Brontë and other Victorians, the hostility grew to its height in the Holocaust, when up to half a million Roma were murdered by Nazis and their allies, in the camps and elsewhere. Auschwitz, writes Quarmby, "was just a peak period in Gypsy genocide," though you wouldn't know that from the 11 volumes of transcripts from the Nuremberg trials, in which the annihilation of Roma is covered in seven sentences.

Onwards, then, into the modern version of the anti-travelling hostility of the settled. It is a depressing litany: lye and flogging then, verbal abuse now, and widespread ostracism by pubs and other establishments that bar Gypsies (even when, as in the case of one London pub, they were socialising with a senior lawyer and a police officer). There's prejudice, that Gypsies and Travellers are assumed to bring criminality with them, when in fact, at least during the great Gypsy fairs of Stow and Appleby, crime decreases. And also murder, of the 15-year-old Johnny Delaney, kicked to death in a Cheshire park in 2003 for being "only a … Gypsy" (the elision, oddly, is Quarmby's), and a Crown Prosecution Service that only issued guidance on hate crimes against Travellers in 2011. And finally, institutional hostility, from a Conservative government that repealed the requirement for local councils to provide legal sites for Travellers' caravans, as set out in the 1968 Caravans and Sites Act, and instead in 1994 passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which even the Association of Chief Police Officers thought "criminalised the act of living in a caravan".

So this is a book fuelled by righteous fury, because there is plenty to be furious about, including shameful rates of literacy among Gypsies and Travellers, and tales of exclusion that would have NGOs running to assist in a developing country. The EU considers Gypsies, Roma and Travellers vulnerable ethnic minorities, although the differences between Roma, Kalderash and English Romanichal Gypsies are never clearly spelled out by Quarmby. (A glossary would help.) The average bouncer might not distinguish between "dirty pikies", but Quarmby shows a complex set of communities, where English Gypsies can disparage Irish Travellers so blisteringly that you "couldn't have got a more negative reaction from talking to the members of the Conservative Association".

Her affection for Gypsies and Travellers is clear, and the portraits of the McCarthy sisters, the Townsends and other evicted Dale Farm families are sympathetic. It's a shame that the passion veers into bias and sentiment, so that anyone opposing Gypsy or Traveller sites is referred to by their surname, while all likable characters are first-name only, or that politicians are "beady-eyed" and one Dale Farm opponent is the "sainted Len Gridley", all sarcasm intended. Better editing might have helped, but this detracts from the dense and impressive research, as do the elisions. Where were the men of Dale Farm during the eviction process? Quarmby writes of vulnerable women and children, of the questionable mass of activists who turned Dale Farm into their cause and brought violence with them, and of the "control-freakery state" that wanted them out, but says only of the menfolk: "Very few men agreed to be interviewed which helped to keep some unhelpful complications out of the Travellers' side of the story."

What complications? She doesn't say. But here are some others that appear far into the book: in one survey, 61‑81% of Irish Traveller women reported being victims of domestic violence; within Gypsy and Traveller communities, "being a leader has always been tied up with being able to use your fists". There is complication, too, in her other piece on the other Dale Farm. Quarmby writes at length about a greenfield site in Meriden in the West Midlands, transformed without planning permission over a bank holiday weekend into a caravan site for Travellers. This gave rise to a permanent protest camp, run by a group called Raid, which claimed its presence was ecologically protective, and a protest against the unfairness of people who get away with flouting planning laws. Their 24-hour surveillance cameras pointed at the caravan site seem unpleasant, but so does the phrase "doing a Gypsy war", which Quarmby is told by a young Traveller woman. "You just pull on [with your caravan] and fight the council." For opponents who watch as fields or greenbelt sites are covered with gravel or concrete – a hard fact of illegal sites that is surprisingly absent from Quarmby's telling, or masked behind the word "occupation" – this will be an inflammatory revelation. For Travellers, it is a case of needs must. If there are so few legal sites – and two-thirds of those are on industrial land, or near sewage works – what choice do they have?

Is the future more confrontation, hostility and trouble? The final chapters are cautiously hopeful. Gypsy elder Billy Welch thinks the solution lies in Travellers opening up and opting in. After all, two-thirds of them now live in settled sites. Only 30 families travel all year round. Times are changing. "We live in a democracy," says Welch, "and we don't use it. We are our own worst enemy." His solution is to get Travellers to vote. Others want more exposure, more bridges to be built by magazines such as the Travellers Times, edited by the young Damian le Bas, or by the art of his parents Damien Sr and Delaine, or the Romany Theatre Company and radio plays of Dan Allum. "I've often heard or seen Travellers portrayed on radio, TV or film in such a cliched way," Allum tells Quarmby. "It's either over-romanticised or showing the bad side. I guess it shouldn't be surprising, as so few people know anything about the Gypsy community, it's so secretive and tight-knit."

Quarmby's book is a whole-hearted effort to lift some of that secrecy. Its sentimentality can grate, but her passion never does. As an exposure of the modern troubles of these unique, tight-knit communities of Travellers, it sets you travelling on the right road.

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Gypsy rose and ryan anderson have not filmed together since separation, gypsy rose blanchard not shooting scenes with ryan ... all about her own journey.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard 's moving on from Ryan Anderson , and not just in her marriage ... she hasn't shared a second of camera time with him since their split, and we've learned that's not going to change anytime soon.

"Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up" production sources tell TMZ ... the estranged couple didn't shoot together after the breakup, and the production's going to focus more on Blanchard from here on out.

We're told the doc crew filmed the fallout between Blanchard and Anderson ... but, now it doesn't make sense to shoot them together because not only do they not live together, but quite frankly their lives are moving in totally separate directions.

Our sources are making it clear, neither Gypsy nor Ryan requested not to shoot with the other -- producers just decided on their own it didn't make sense, now that they're getting divorced.

We're told production did a one-on-one shoot with Ryan to wrap up his part in the series, but it's Gypsy's life they're interested in documenting -- and, they no longer need to shoot Ryan because he was just an extension of her.

The production's still filming, but plans on wrapping soon.

We broke the story ... Gypsy filed for divorce from Ryan last week, a couple weeks after announcing her split via social media. We've since learned she and Ryan had a big blow-up argument after Gypsy threw out a bunch of food Ryan hoarded, in her eyes, in their fridge.

They were married for about two years ... though Gypsy was imprisoned for almost all of that time, only getting out back in January.

Looks like they're putting some space between them, as cast and crew call it a wrap on Ryan's part in Gypsy's life.

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Gypsy Rose Wants Spousal Support from Estranged Husband Amid Divorce

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A Gypsy Life for Me

A Gypsy Life for Me follows the lives of Gypsies and Travellers entering 'Travellers Got Talent' and 'The Gypsy King and Queen'. The series also offers singing, dancing, conflict, and a few ... Read all A Gypsy Life for Me follows the lives of Gypsies and Travellers entering 'Travellers Got Talent' and 'The Gypsy King and Queen'. The series also offers singing, dancing, conflict, and a few interesting fashion choices. A Gypsy Life for Me follows the lives of Gypsies and Travellers entering 'Travellers Got Talent' and 'The Gypsy King and Queen'. The series also offers singing, dancing, conflict, and a few interesting fashion choices.