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By the Hampshire EMTAS Traveller Team

Due to current circumstances and the impact on schools of the lockdown, we have decided it would be a good idea to move our celebration of Gypsy, Roma, Traveller History Month (GRTHM) from its traditional month of June to October so no one will miss out on our planned events. 

To this end, we are putting on three roadshows across the county.  The roadshows will be in Basingstoke, Winchester and the New Forest and there will be something for everyone from talks to exhibitions to Stepping with FolkActive.  The roadshows promise to be lively, entertaining and informative and will give our audiences a chance to see how Hampshire EMTAS works with its schools and GRT communities.

The roadshows are drop-in events with talks taking place between 4pm and 5pm after which people will be invited to take part in a stepping activity.  Stepping is a traditional form of dance that was initially a type of sport for working class men in the north of England and for Travellers.  Each dance is created by the individual dancer and does not follow any set rules – it is energetic and is often described as tapping or drumming with your feet.  It requires no previous experience or expertise and when the live music is playing, it is impossible not to move your feet.  Come along and join in. 

There will also be an exhibition of the Life of Showmen displaying the rich history of Showmen in Hampshire through the decades and a display of all the entries to the a postcard competition (details below). 

These promise to be lively events with lots of interaction, music and dance so save the date! The EMTAS Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month Roadshows will take place on:

1st  October: The Discovery Centre, Winchester, 3.30 – 6.00pm

8th October: The Discovery Centre, Basingstoke, 3.30 – 6.00pm

22nd October: Applemore College, Hythe, 3.30 – 6.00pm

We hope lots of you will be able to attend a roadshow near you.  We will soon be sending out a Schools Comm with further details and we’ll be advertising the roadshows on our website as well as issuing personal invitations to all the schools, families and agencies we work with.  We look forward to welcoming you to one of these events and to getting to know you while you enjoy the exhibitions, talks and dancing. We hope to see you there!

The EMTAS GRTHM postcard competition

As part of our GRTHM celebrations, we are also holding a postcard competition.  It’s open to all GRT children and there are three categories: KS1, KS2 and KS3/4.  We are launching the competition in June and need lots of support from our schools to make this a big success.  The winning postcards are going to be printed and, in liaison with schools, sent to GRT children all over Hampshire in recognition for their improved attendance and/or attainment throughout the year.  The winners in each category will also receive a prize and both winners and runners-up will see their postcards included in a full-colour calendar, something they can share with their families and feel really proud of.  We will be in touch about the competition and how you can support your GRT children to take part in it very soon.

Meet the Hampshire EMTAS Traveller Team

The EMTAS Traveller Team consists of

Operational Lead:             

EMTAS GRT Officer:

Traveller Teaching Assistants:

Our work always has an education focus and comprises working in partnership with schools to support Traveller children and families.  At this time of year, we are heavily involved in transition work, supporting the move from infant to junior school for younger GRT children and from Year 6 to Year 7 for older ones.  New for 2019-20 is our GRT Excellence Award, a self-evaluation framework that can support schools to develop and embed best practice in relation to their work with GRT communities.  Also popular is our new GRT Reading Ambassador Scheme which is having a positive impact on children’s progress in reading in the pilot schools where it has been running.  We can also support with attendance, admissions and transport applications and we can provide cultural awareness training to school staff.

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By Hampshire EMTAS Specialist Teacher Advisor Claire Barker

As the summer fast approaches many of us will see our Traveller children and their families disappear for the last weeks of term or dot in and out as they attend the most notable horse fairs around the country.  The horse fairs are a valuable and treasured part of the Traveller culture and should be shared and enjoyed in our schools that have Travellers as part of their school community.

The season always opens and closes with Stow Fair which is held in May and October.  It takes place at Maugersbury Park and thousands of Travellers come to the showground to trade and parade their horses.  This particular fair has been an annual event since 1476 when a Royal Charter was given for a fair to be held.

Locally, in Hampshire, Wickham Fair is always held on 20th May unless that day falls on a Sunday and then the fair will be on 21st May.  This year it is an extra special event as this is its 750th anniversary.  King Henry III granted a Royal Charter to Wickham in 1269 to hold the fair and markets in the town.  It was not a Gypsy Horse Fair at this time but in later centuries it became one of the main English horse fairs for Travellers.  A condition of the Charter was that a fair had to be held every year on that day so during World War II a local Traveller placed a carousel in the Square to keep the tradition of the fair going so it could continue after the war.

Appleby Fair is the big event of the year for Travellers and it happens in the first week in June and goes on from Thursday to Wednesday with the main events happening on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  Like Wickham and Stow fairs it was also granted a Royal Charter.  King James II granted a charter to Appleby in 1685.  Many Romany historians claim this fair is older than five hundred years with some claiming Travellers from the Roman times travelled to Appleby to trade and parade.
The fairs and the events surrounding them form a vital heartbeat in the Traveller communities.  It is a time when Travellers from Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England come together to share their traditions and values.  They trade together buying and selling horses and goods.  They eat together and socialise and there is lots of catching up with families from far and wide.  The fairs are often times for family weddings, baptisms and birthday celebrations as the whole family is together.  Many young Travellers meet their future partners at the fairs.

Romany, Irish Travellers, Scottish Travellers, Welsh Travellers and Showmen come together to ply their goods and catch up on the year’s events. However, the Showmen tend to be at the fairs as service providers running carnivals and catering wagons for all of the Travellers.

Many of the families will take pictures and share them on social media and this provides schools the opportunity to discuss and find out about the fairs and the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

If you have a child from a Traveller community in your school and they are absent for a fair, take the time on their return to ask them to share the magic and experiences they have had.  Explore their world together and create a greater understanding of one of Britain’s oldest communities and what they hold dear.

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Written by Sarah Coles, Hampshire EMTAS Deputy Team Leader

Alexander Bassano [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In the Spring 2018 edition of History Matters, a Hampshire Inspection and Advisory Service publication, a Primary Practitioner said of the subject, “…history is exciting to children when they feel immersed in their learning. The more they see the relevance history has to them, the more excited and interested they will be.”  History teaching can, and should, help children see the links that exist between their cultures, traditions and religions and the present day and in order to achieve this, the history curriculum in primary phase is often worked into topics.  Lots of schools include a focus on The Victorians. 20 years ago, I taught it in Year 5.  More recently, I observed the topic being delivered in a school that had been experiencing a rise in its pupil diversity.

I was not surprised, on walking into the Year 4 classroom at the beginning of this topic, to see a display about The Victorians on the wall.  What did cause me to do a double-take was the choice of noteworthy Victorians portrayed therein: Queen Victoria (of course), Darwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Florence Nightingale.  What the display said to me was that the Victorian era had happened in a hermetically sealed capsule, with nothing of value contributed to human civilisation by anyone who wasn’t white or British or male, preferably all three.    

Whose history was this that the children were learning about? A balanced, world view of the nineteenth century it most certainly was not.  Then I started to wonder how the child from Poland, about whose progress I had come in to advise, would be enabled to make links with his own culture and heritage through this version of history.  Would it help him better understand the lasting value of contributions to literature from Poles such as Józef Korzeniowski, better known by his pen name, Joseph Conrad?  Or to medicine by Marie Skłodowska Curie, a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win this coveted and prestigious award twice.  But she didn’t feature on the display either. 

Also notable by her absence was Mary Seacole and for me, there was no excuse for this as there are plenty of resources to support teaching about this Jamaican woman’s role in the Crimean war and her contributions to nursing.  I wondered if she would still be skipping class the following year, when a couple of children of black Caribbean heritage would be learning about the (white British) Victorians.  Of course, she is not the only black person who made a contribution to society during the Victorian era.  Less well-known but just as important is the work of Lewis Latimer, the only black member of the Edison Pioneers, who developed the little filament in light bulbs to make it last long enough for the electric light to rapidly replace gas lighting in our homes, streets and workplaces.  Or Elijah McCoy, most famous for developing lubrication systems for steam engines.   

If education is really to prepare children for life in an increasingly diverse society, we are going to have to relinquish the Anglo-centric view of history that formed the diet of my own history lessons back in the 70s and 80s in favour of approaches that better represent the pupils in front of us and the communities that surround and feed our schools today.  Hampshire teachers are fortunate indeed to be able to access the Rights and Diversity Education (RADE) Centre, which is situated right next door to the History Centre.  Both centres contain a wealth of resources to help teachers diversify the teaching and learning experiences of Hampshire’s schools.  Back to ‘History Matters’, the article to read is ‘Teaching forgotten history: the SS Mendi’, about a ship that sank off the coast of the Isle of Wight on Wednesday 21 February 1917 after colliding with another ship, blinded by thick fog.  Nearly 650 people lost their lives in the tragedy, many of them black South Africans from the South African Labour Corps.  Now there’s something new to find out about, and a way in which we can raise awareness of the multiplicity of histories that are interwoven into all our cultural pasts.