Gipsy families have a very long association with the Great Marlow area. In the Victorian era they often made camp in fields at Little Marlow, up Gypsy Lane, next to Little Marlow Road, around Marlow Common, in Berwick Rd and at the top of Dean Street. There is also some evidence for camps at least sometimes at Medmenham and Well End. A good many of the Marlow visiting gipsies had family connections to Oxfordshire gipsy families. As well as that county they often visited Berkshire locations but much more distant connections such as those into the West country are also evidenced.
By the end of the 1800s a certain number of gipsy people had chosen a settled life in Marlow. Dean Street was their main home and some of their descendants still lived in that immediate area in 2019 when I spoke to them.
The gipsy women of Dean Street went out into the nearby woods to gather deadly nightshade to sell to London chemists who used the plant in beauty and other preparations. They also gathered wood to be made into skewers by their menfolk. Those skewers* also went to London. Many non gipsy people did participate in this trade but it was a gipsy speciality. They rarely had permission to gather the wood they used which caused friction with local landowners.
The gipsy families linked to Marlow who were still living an itinerant lifestyle focused on wooden peg making, comb making and horse dealing. Some paid agriculture labour, general hawking and the operation of sideshows and other fair stalls also helped the finances. Locally fortune telling booths and stalls selling cherries seem the most common fair time businesses for gipsies.
Marlow Fair was held every October*. It was focused on selling horses, pigs and cattle but for many in town was largely a time to enjoy the steam powered roundabouts and sideshows which clogged Quoiting Square, West Street, the High Street and sometimes Spittle Street and the Causeway too. As well as to run stalls gipsies came to sell horses and to just meet up with each other. Simmering arguments between individuals and families could then have an airing. Plato Buckland himself was accused by fellow gipsy Charles Smith in 1896 of assault during the fair but Charles withdrew the accusation in court. Most confrontations were between men but Charlotte Guess was assaulted by Frederick Chapman during a row in 1891.
A perennial problem for all gipsy families in the 1800s was finding somewhere to pitch their tents, or later in the century their wooden caravans, between their usual camps and allowed stops such as at the fairs. Continual convictions of Marlow gipsy families for camping at the roadside and in particular for having their loose horses wandering about on the highway while the family was resting occurred both in the immediate vicinity of Marlow and elsewhere. Mark Guess husband of the Charlotte Guess above was one of those convicted of obstructing the highway at Marlow in 1888.
Sadly I found no reports of a gipsy wedding at Marlow but the funeral pyre of the caravan of elderly gipsy Plato Buckland of Marlow, made nationwide headline news in the 1920s. Reports suggested he was 100 years old, that claim was out by some years but he did have a long term association with Marlow. He was a horse dealer while the mother of his children and partner Anne Williams was a hawker . Unusual names are often used in gipsy families. The name Plato was hereditary in the wider Buckland gipsy clan going back to at least the 1700s.
In 1896 both Anne and Plato successfully gave evidence in defence of their son Owen Williams when he was accused of being part of a gang of men who had violently robbed a young man* of cash and a bottle of gin in Little Marlow Road. Anne testified that Owen was at home making clothes pegs at the time of the alleged attack. Plato said the group of gipsy men other witnesses had seen in the vicinity was only himself, his son Nathan and others (but not Owen) going to the Rising Sun in Chapel Street to see about a possible horse deal.
A search of the gipsy vans turned up none of the stolen items. Owen was set free.
In 1912 he was himself the victim of an attack by two other gipsy men near Maidenhead after a horse deal turned sour. Attacked with a reaping hook and whip weighted with lead weights for maximum effect, he suffered a nasty head injury before the police rescued him.
The reports of Plato's caravan burning funeral show how both the public and press romanticised aspects of the gipsy way of life. Sadly this did not translate into tolerance or kindness when a gipsy family needed somewhere to stop and camp as the convictions for so doing show. Fundraising comic sketches and musical performances put on at the early Marlow Institute and elsewhere in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods sometimes featured locals dressed in the character of "gipsies" and behaving in every stereotypical "gipsy" way (I.e nothing like a real gipsy) as a comedy act. Whether the real things were baffled, amused or upset by this we'll never know. The same thing would happen everywhere in those times.
*A special post about Marlow skewer makers is on the blog here.
*Marlow Fair history posts here for Victorian times, and for Edwardian times here
*The accuser was Humphrey Millen jnr of the The Ferns, Little Marlow. The defence implied he had drunk the gin and presumably also spent the money himself! That said he and his family do seem to have good character by other reports.
Other last names I have found in gipsy families associated with Marlow (Great or Little)
Beldham /Beldam
Buckland
Eyres
Fletcher
Frith
Fuller
Ingham
Price
Williamson
©Marlow Ancestors.
Research Sources:
Census England and Wales transcribed by me from microfilm.
Crime research of Jane Pullinger.
Newspapers in the custody of the British Library, via the BNA. Accessed September 2020. Maidenhead Advertiser 1912, Bucks Herald 21st November 1891 and 8th February 1896.
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The Artnet website has an image of gipsy children at Marlow in its sales archives.
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