The Romany Vardo of the English Gypsies
The Romany Gypsies seem to have taken to the wagon or vardo about the middle of the 19th century, as described by Charles Dickens in his Old Curiosity Shop (1840) ch. xxvii: "One half of [Mrs Jarley's van] was carpeted, and so partitioned off at the further end as to accomodate a sleeping-place, constructed after the fashion of a berth on board ship, which was shaded, like the windows, with fair white curtains... The other half served for a kitchen, and was fitted up with a stove whose small chimney passed through the roof. It also held a closet or larder, several chests, a great pitcher of water, and a few cooking-utensils and articles of crockery.
However George Borrow, Romano Lavo-Lil (finished 1873), reports that the caravans were not very numerous on the roads at this stage and many Romanies continued to live in bender tents up to the end of the century.
F.G. Huth, writing in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, described five main types of Gypsy and hawkers' living-wagons:
the Bow-topped wagon
, the Cottage-shaped or Ledge Wagon, the Reading Wagon
, the Brush Wagon and the Straight-sided Wagon (or Showman's Wagon).
It was probably in the Reading Wagon or the old type of Gypsy vardo, however, that the Gypsy
wagon reached its highest and most characteristic form. This was a wagon
with large wheels running outside the body of the van, which slopes outwards
considerably towards the eaves. During the heyday of the vardo the family
most widely reputed as builders were the Duntons of Reading.
After 1920 the travelling showmen who had toured the country in their Burton
wagons turned over their pulling power from horse and steam to petrol and
oil and by the 1930s very few of them travelled in the old way. The Romanies
still clung to their vardoes, although the economics of their way
of life was in upheaval due to the contraction in the horse-trading industry
and the changes from their traditional crafts to scrap-dealing and tarmacing.
Trucks and trailers now predominate, with only about one per cent of the traveller population still living
in horse-drawn waggons, but the tradition of the vardo is kept alive at events such as Appleby Fair, held annually in June.
Source: Huth, F.G. (1940) 'Gypsy caravans' in Journal of the GLS (3rd series), 19 (4), pp114-146
Finding aids and further information
- National Fairground Archive
- (1999) Walter Lloyd How to build a Bow Top ISBN 09535238-0-2
- (1986, 2nd ed) C.H. Ward and Denis E. Harvey The English Gypsy caravan: its origins, builders, etc.
- (1982, 2nd ed) E. Alan Jones Gypsy caravans: their history and restoration
- (1970) Denis E. Harvey 'John Pockett: Gypsy van restorer' in JGLS (3rd series) 49 (3-4), 1970, pp119-120
- (1940) Ferdinand Gerard Huth 'Gypsy caravans' [with photographs] in JGLS (3rd series) 19 (4), pp114-146
- (1938) Edward Harvey 'English caravan decoration' in Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (3rd series) 17 (3), pp38-46