An effective and compelling novel about travellers in Scotland reveals the appalling, systematic racism that this group has faced and still does, finds Chris Bambery

Salvage is a novel based on true, shocking events, unknown to the vast majority of the Scottish population. This is the forced removal by the state of young children from their Traveller families, with many sent thousands of miles away to ensure a complete break with their parents and siblings.

This was a deliberate policy to destroy Traveller communities, and their way of life which had a rich cultural tradition, particularly of music and song. It was driven by racism, encouraged by the established Church of Scotland, who were keen to see ‘sinners’ removed from Presbyterian Scotland. It was closely connected to the Church’s vile anti-Irish racism and sectarianism against Catholics in the inter-war years.

In 1895, the Liberal Secretary of State for Scotland and vice-president of the Scottish Education Department, Sir George Trevelyan, presented a report to parliament at Westminster, after hearings around Scotland, entitled The 1895 Scottish Traveller Report. The report described Travellers as ‘habitual offenders, vagrants and inebriants’ who needed to be ‘absorbed into the labouring population’. It recommended the ‘extirpation’ of the Travelling community through ‘enforced assimilation and the removal and the trafficking of children to the colonies.’ Increasingly, the churches became involved in home missionary work, striving to reclaim the sinners and banish ‘the increasing evil’.

In an appendix to the 1895 report, there is a submission from the Committee of the School Board of the Burgh of Wick and Pulteneytown which states: ‘The tinker community is composed of a tribe or family quite alien to the local population, among whom they do not mix in social life or intercourse, neither work nor help in any way to alleviate the burden of local taxation, but by their mode of life, their obscene ways and conversation, their squalor and drunken habits, are a menace to our very civilisation.’ Travellers did work but not with fixed hours. In many parts of Scotland they suffered apartheid, but often they were valued as fiddlers, singers and pipers and were seen as servicing the settled communities.

Between the 1895 report and the 1960s, thousands of children were forcibly removed from Traveller families. Some would be adopted, but because of racism and the trauma suffered by the children, that was a small minority. The overwhelming majority were sent to or under the care of charities such as Quarriers and Barnardo’s, or industrial schools, and then on to Canada and Australia as domestic servants or as labourers on farms or industry as a source of cheap labour.

Some 2400 Traveller children were trafficked across the ocean in this way. The children were told their parents had died, or did not want them, and they and their families lost all contact.

Subsequently, the resulting Departmental Committee on Tinkers took evidence again, in 1917, redoubling the campaign to ‘anchor the tinker’ via rehabilitation, reform and enforced de-coupling of cultural bonds. The ‘tinker census’ of October 1917, gave the total number of Scots Travellers as 2,728, of whom 171 were children in industrial schools.

A 1918 report boasted of the ‘success’ of this draconian, racist approach: of those children who had left industrial schools in the previous seventeen years, many of the girls had gone either into domestic servi0ce or mill work, while the boys had taken up ‘various trades’ or joined the army or navy. Overall, just over a quarter, 27%, had ‘relapsed’ and rejoined their families, a figure that gave the committee hope for the success in ending the Travellers’ way of life.

Surviving racism

Scotland’s Traveller community originates from two groups. On the one hand, there were descendants of Scots in both the Highlands and Lowlands who were artisans able to repair armour, weapons, cooking utensils and who were silversmiths to whom people brought silver and gold to be melted down and to be converted into brooches, rings, and clasps for girdles, or to decorate hilts of swords and daggers.

The end of feudalism and the clan system brought this to a close, and these tinsmiths (thus tinkers) became travellers mending pots and pans, working ‘piecework’. This was a system of payment where the labourers were paid for work done, rather than how long it took them to do it, giving them a measure of freedom, enabling them to also take on seasonal work such as harvesting berries or potatoes. The second group were Roma who first came to Scotland in the sixteenth century. The two groups became one in many ways. Travellers either sought stable camping grounds or found lodging in the poorer parts of towns and cities.

Salvage centres on the snatching of Nash Lacklow’s five-year-old sister, Jenny, from a Traveller campsite in Lanarkshire by council officials and police, while the Travelling men were at work, and her removal to children’s home. Fast forward to 1983 and Nash, now living in Edinburgh, knows he is nearing death. He recruits his granddaughter Emma, a student at Edinburgh University, to try to trace Jenny. That Emma has reached Edinburgh University coming from a working-class and Traveller family is no mean feat.

Scottish society is changing. That leads to tensions between Emma and her traditional father, and while Emma meets obstruction from council officials, by generating publicity for the case, doors open and records are traced. But racism, not least from the police, is still on view here.

In Salvage, Mark Baillie, who has Traveller heritage, starting with Jenny’s abduction, brings to life the story of the Scottish Traveller community from the late 1920s into the early 1980s. His descriptions of working-class Edinburgh and of Tranent remind me vividly of my home city when I was young. Nash’s wee council house looks onto a stately home built from the profits of slavery, making a connection between how racism abroad helped spawn racism at home.

The common term for Travellers when I was young was ‘Tinkers’, which was and is a racist one. In 2008 a landmark ruling established that Scottish Gypsy Travellers have ethnic status, a protected characteristic under the terms of the Race Relations Act (1976). Aberdeen Employment Tribunal Judge Hosie in his summation stated that the evidence was ‘overwhelming’ and that he was satisfied that Section 3(1) of the Act, gave Scottish Gypsy Travellers the protection of the Act.

But today, the situation for Scottish Travellers still raises fundamental human-rights concerns, particularly the rights to health, education, housing, family life and cultural life and the requirement to be free from discrimination. Salvage is a compelling novel, though given the subject matter not a comfortable one at times. It is a very good introduction to a very dark chapter in Scotland’s recent history and one I would encourage you to read.