Note 24 — INTRODUCTION

Dr. Ranking, my friend for a quarter of a century, has a thorough knowledge of Rómani; I would trust his judgment as I would trust my own. I have never myself come across any Tinklers of the West Coast, but I have met scores in the Lothians and in the Border Country, and my observations on these tally closely with Dr. Ranking’s. The Lowland Tinklers have little or nothing of the Gypsy type, though they have a marked type of their own—a bleached, washed-out, mongrel type; their language has sunk to a mere gibberish, without the least trace of inflection, as different from the Welsh-Gypsy dialect as Pidgin-English from the English of Tennyson. None the less, side by side with such thieves’ cant as mort, woman, dell, girl, beenlightment, daylight, ruffie, devil, and patri, clergyman, that gibberish contains two or three hundred good enough Rómani words, as chúri, knife, drom, road, paúni, water, gad, shirt, and dústa lóvo, plenty money. Nay, a curious point is that it retains a few Rómani words which have been almost or wholly lost in the English and Welsh Gypsy dialects—shúkar, beautiful, háro, sword, klísti, soldier, kálshes, breeches, and pówiski, gun. On the other hand, Scottish thieves’ cant shows a much larger admixture of words of Rómani origin than does the English. We possess no early specimens of Scottish Rómani, but Scotland two centuries since would seem to have had as true Gypsies as any Stanleys or Boswells or Herons south of the Border. But the persecution of the race as a race lasted a hundred years longer in Scotland than in England, and it is probable that, whilst many of its chief members were hanged or drowned or transported to America, others fled southward—one finds to-day the Gaelic Gilderoy (‘red lad’) a Christian name among English Gypsies, and such surnames as Baillie, Gregory, and Marshall. Those who remained behind must have intermarried largely with Scottish vagrants, Irish vagrants, gangrel bodies generally: the Gypsy stream broadened out, and became correspondingly shallow. Nowadays, then, it is difficult to say of the Faa-Blyths, Taits, Norrises, Baillies, Douglases, or any other of the Tinklers I have met, whether they are more Gypsies or Gentiles; English Gypsies assuredly would not regard them as Gypsies. Still, they have all a dash of the Gypsy, stronger or weaker; and with these boat-dwelling Tinklers, whom Dr. Ranking describes, the dash was decidedly stronger. There can hardly be any doubt that the grandfather whom they spoke of as a keeper to the Duke of Argyll, was John MacDonald the younger, who at Inverary in 1859 had an ambition to become an underkeeper.24