Britain’s Water Gypsies: Commerce, Temporality and Exoticism on the Water

Millette, Holly-Gale (2013) Britain’s Water Gypsies: Commerce, Temporality and Exoticism on the Water. Social History Conference. 25 - 29 Mar 2013. (Submitted)

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Inland boatmen were British travellers who made a living by transporting goods along England’s canal networks, which began to emerge in the late 18th century. These individuals were almost exclusively male and their fortunes were tied to the commerce they engaged in. Until the mid-century, their commercial platform was regional and their commerce was limited to the transportation of coal, timber, aggregate and building material to the new centres of industry where cities were swiftly forming. Following the mechanisation and industrialisation of local manufacture, their trade platform expanded to include the products of the factories they helped build. The dissemination of local British goods regionally and eventually internationally, was made possible by this efficient use of Britain’s water-highways as throughout the nineteenth century local trade to global markets depended on these men and their boats. However, with overcrowding in urban areas following the repeal of the Corn Laws and mass internal diaspora, the late 19th century saw these men accompanied by, first their female partners, and then their families.

These Water Gypsies mimicked the fluid construction of their watery world as they constantly vacillated and transitioned within oppositional spatial boundaries: two-path/water’s edge; countryside/city; commerce/family; open exterior space/cramped cabin space. Their constant travel placed them outside of the margins of society and in a netherworld where their otherness was perceived, in a touristic way, as exotic, transitory, and earthy. The arrival of families on board the Butties of the commercial water traveller, linked them – in a seemingly ancestral way – to the Romani travelling peoples of Europe who, in Britain, where known as the Rominchal. Like the Romani Gypsies, Water Gypsies and their culture became an object of fascination to the Britons. Unlike the Rominchal, Water Gypsy families had a unique temporality – largely confined by the rise and then demise of the commercial use of the inland waterways in Britain. By the early 1950’s these families had, largely, disappeared from the waterways and from the public imagination.

As a working people, the commerce of Britain was transported – all or in part – on the same vessels in which they lived and the Victorian imagination fixed them in the frame of this co-dependency. By 1900, the image of the Water Gypsy was a mainstay on England’s waterways and was a great source of touristic pride to observers. However, the boundary between land and the canal was a one-dimensional one in which the voyeur gazed on the ‘romantic’ image of a travelling boat-family ignorant of their life-style and without truly engaging with their culture. This paper examines the connecting stories of the Water Gypsies. At issue is how their migratory and nomadic lives shaped their culture, their crafts, and their way of life; how British culture conceptualised these peoples in the same way it romanticised and exoticised the Rominchal; and how fixed frames circumscribed their culture as artefact.

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