World War One. Gipsy Roll of Honour.

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Helo

Just go to the photo of Alfie Gaskin and click on the name of the person who put the photo up, it says Caskinhunt, then you find yourself on their profile, you can then send them a message that will aleart them via email, if the person does not reply you can then send a mesage to a moderator who will advice you how to make a new post asking whatever questions that you need the answers to, they have people on Rootschat who can and will help you, i will be writing more on this thread soon so you post will be archived and people will not see it much, so if i write more posts and your post gets relegated back a bit i will re post your post before mine so your request stays in the public domain, if you make contact with Caskinhunt i do hope you find what you seek

michael

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Hello! I would be really interested to hear more about Alfie Gaskin, if you have the time please. I am a military historian from Bury St. Edmunds (some of my work here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUFT4ft6SEk) - I'm also a Gaskin. My grandfather was Marky Gaskin and his father John Henry Gaskin (my namesake).

I go to the battlefields often and would love to hear more about Alfie, how I relate to him and where he is buried to visit myself.

Thank you in advance.

Hi thank you for the enclosed. Made interesting reading.

This picture is Alfie Gaskin originally from Sudbury, enlisted into the army in 1917 at Byker Showground, Newcastle. He was killed outside Ypres.

[norosesnoroses]

Hello! Thanks for the reply. I have done a lot more research on Alfie and have now learned his full story.

I saw you write somewhere about gypsy round ups by the army to force them to sign up? Is that right? Could you tell me more about that please?

Helo

Just go to the photo of Alfie Gaskin and click on the name of the person who put the photo up, it says Caskinhunt, then you find yourself on their profile, you can then send them a message that will aleart them via email, if the person does not reply you can then send a mesage to a moderator who will advice you how to make a new post asking whatever questions that you need the answers to, they have people on Rootschat who can and will help you, i will be writing more on this thread soon so you post will be archived and people will not see it much, so if i write more posts and your post gets relegated back a bit i will re post your post before mine so your request stays in the public domain, if you make contact with Caskinhunt i do hope you find what you seek

michael

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 Hi
 That is good news that you in rapid time have managed to learn the full story of Alfie Gaskin, that must be some record you just set, you are indeed a person of high caliber in the world of researching,
you are right about what i am writing regarding the Gipsies, i have been researching for several yeares, if you just keep looking in now and then more will be revealed, you are of course most welcome to join in my research and also ask as many questions as you see fit, this is an ongoing research i hold much information that i have not wrote yet, i will though have to curtail the way i am putting everything down, the Winter Family will be the last in depth family that i research fully in my own way, i just could not possibly have the time to carry on writing the way i do, i will complete the Gipsies Roll of Honour and the talk of what happened and why, i think everyone should know the truth, hopfully i will achieve my aim of finding and sharing this truth through this research, in the future others may then write up more information of the life's of the Family names that i find, it is of the most importance that this story is written, i have not tip toed down through the past yeares placing my feet like a frightend child wondering whether if this is the right thing to be doing, i do not descend on a rickety old stair case, i am just there, seeing with my own eyes, i will do my own best to help them, if you keep looking over the time all your questions will be answered.

michael

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part one

Hi all
 As i come to the end of my researching days i myself start to question more of the information data that i find and evaluate or not evaluate would be the right thing to say, how does a person know what a writer of records is thinking, or there motive, motives, it gets deep, the truth of my thoughts now are i am responsible in my own way for sharing data from past writers as evidence, in this day much of such data would be labled fake news, i consult many old books and gather vast amounts of information and then of course use such information in the narative of my research, what i am trying to say is i feel i must warn everyone who reads research data from people writing of the past like me, well be carefull for evan though people like me are genuine and have tryed to relay their research to others without corupt thought or malise not to mention just false propergander which somtimes to a person may be inocent of such intent yet a person or persons finds themselves court up and sneard intangled without the knowledge of knowing that you as a reader or writer are doing the fase bidding of long gone mindsets that truthfully have drod this world known by the name of research, knowledge they say in some form or other is power, but what is power if only control.

 I just want to be right by everyone evan when i get things wrong i want others to know i was just trying in a right manner, if you read these statement below then look at the research later that i will show you that may chalenge what is wrote, i will only show evidence it will be up to you to think as you do, for truthfully to i must try and let the truth speak as words have there own language

 This is wrote in this book below which i have used has evidence in my research about the Winter family regarding their lifes up to the times and behond World War One, i have used it and showed everyone such things on here, but are such things true, am i guilty of not saying i think these words to me do not feel right, this is the book and words below

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39665/39665-h/39665-h.htm

A
HISTORY OF THE GIPSIES:
WITH
Specimens of the Gipsy Language.
BY WALTER SIMSON.
EDITED, WITH
PREFACE, INTRODUCTION, AND NOTES, AND A DISQUISITION ON THE
PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF GIPSYDOM,
BY JAMES SIMSON.
1866

Page 45
When a child will become unruly, the father will often say, in the most serious manner, “Mother, that canna be our bairn—the Tinklers must have taken ours, and left theirs—are you sure that this is ours? Gie him back to the Gipsies again, and get our ain.” The other children will look as bewildered, while the subject of remark will instantly stop crying, and look around for sympathy; but meeting nothing but suspicion in the faces of all, will instinctively flee to its mother, who as instinctively clasps it to her bosom, quieting its terrors, as a mother only can, with the lullaby,

“Hush nae, hush nae, dinna fret ye;
The black Tinkler winna get ye.”[10]

 And the result is, that it will remain a “good bairn” for a long time after. This feeling, drawn into the juvenile mind, as food enters into the growth of the body, acts like the influence of the stories of ghosts and hobgoblins, often so inconsiderately told to children, but differs from it in this respect, that what causes it is true, while its effects are always more or less permanent. It has had this effect upon our youth—in connection with the other habits of the people, so outlandish when compared with the ways of our own...........................

[10]The Gipsies frighten their children in the same manner, by saying that they will give them to the Gorgio.


Page 97 extract

This family, I believe, are the Winters noticed by Sir Walter Scott, in Blackwood’s Magazine, as follows:

“A gang (of Gipsies), of the name of Winters, long inhabited the wastes of Northumberland, and committed many crimes ....... I have little doubt they are all hanged.”[50]

50]It is but just to say that this family of Winters is, or at least was, the worst kind of English Gipsies. Their name is a by-word among the race in England. When they say, “It’s a winter morning,” they wish to express something very bad. It is difficult to get them to admit that the Winters belong to the tribe—ED.

to be continued..........

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 Part two

So this below is the quote from the book of 1866 (but is it true).........now you will see how it evolved in to the later years as a fact of truth, i have much more in depth material about people and so-called facts but i will only stick strongly to a loose basic showing of what i have found for i will not judge for these accounts need a far more educated person than i am to Analise the evidence, i only wish to not blame or accuse but just to say i think the history of the Gipsies as yet to be wrote, i just want to be right by the Dead and the Winters have in my mind been stigmatised along with many other Gipsies, just see what you think as these writings continue


“Hush nae, hush nae, dinna fret ye;
The black Tinkler winna get ye.” 

Reason.com
CONSPIRACY

 The Legend of the Child-Snatching Gypsies
An old fear rears its head again.
JESSE WALKER | 10.30.2013     

 extract

………….A Scottish tale claims that the economist Adam Smith was abducted by Gypsies (or possibly Tinkers) at age three; he was then either missed by his uncle or spotted by a stranger, at which point either the uncle or some scouts retrieved him. (The stories are also inconsistent about where the snatching supposedly took place—another sign that we're dealing with legend rather than firm fact.) Generations of British parents have warned their kids about Gypsy bogeymen lurking in the shadows, waiting to snatch incautious children. The idea even crept into lullabies:

Hush nae, hush nae, dinna fret ye
The black Tinkler winna get ye.

One 19th-century writer acknowledged that such lore resembled "the stories of ghosts and hobgoblins, often so inconsiderably told to children." But the Gypsy tales, he rushed to add, were true.


                      ISAA

 Independent scholors ossiation of Australia
 Romani In Australia: Invisible and Marginalised 
‘Others’
 In Australian History
 
 2020
Romani stereotypes
Kidnapping children

extract   

Rumours of children being kidnapped by ‘gypsies’ have circulated for centuries, even creeping into lullabies:

Hush nae, hush nae, dinna fret ye
The black Tinkler winna get ye.'


Narrating Gypsies Telling Travellers
A Study of the Relational Self
in Four Life Stories
Martin Shaw

extracts

Page 165
 
 Smith’s consciousness of the child-stealing stereotype is evident in the prologue of
 Jessie’s Journey
 
“Come with me, reader, and share a traveller’s campfire. I promise we won’t steal your children or fleece your pocket.You might even get a wee bit closer to understanding us” (x, original emphasis).

Page 168-169

  The transmission of expected behaviour to dependents is also involved in Smith’s reversal of the child-stealing stereotype. Henderson commented on a Traveller “persecution complex” that he found to be embedded in Burker stories:Although the ‘flattie’ (non-tinker) population for long feared that the tinkers were child-stealers (witness the lullaby

 ‘Hush ye! Hush ye! Dinna fret ye!
The black Tinkler winna get ye’),

the folklore of the tinkers shows clearly and even poignantly that they lived inmuch greater fear of the ordinary population than the ‘flatties’ did of them. (“Tinker”2636, original parentheses)
 

In my interpretation, the meaning behind Smith’s story goes beyond the threat of the Burkers;it is a metonymy for the perceived vulnerability of women and children in relation to unfamil-iar others. The threat, or the potentiality of threat, from “outside,” which is embodied by the“Burkers” is a defence system characterised by a recommendation of caution and suspicion.And although the particular threat of the Burkers is fixed in the past (“in those days”) the message that the Burker myth relays is functional. In a way the “black Tinkler” of Hender-son’s nursery rhyme and the Burkers of Smith’s Traveller story are each other’s mythical an-titheses, but serve similar purposes in different environments.

i have not been able to find the vertion that speaks of Hender-son’s nursery rhyme, but Henderson is a writer of the middle to late 1900s so he was also thinking as these writers think
 
BURY ME STANDING
The Gypsies and their Journey
Isabel Fonseca - 2011 
 
 Page 227

extract

 'Hush ye, hush ye, dinna fret yet /
The Black tinkler winna get ye,'
goes a not very soothing Scottish lullaby.


Migrants and Cultural Memory:
The Representation of Difference
Edited by
Mícheál Ó hAodha
 2009

extract

page 16
 
The belief that travellers might steal children is demonstrated in this lullaby from Scotland quoted in a Dublin publication with only a simple statement, " here is a Scotch lullaby connected with the tinkers:-

"Hush ye hush ye, dinna fret ye,
The Black Tinkler winna get ye."
 
(Hush you, hush you, dont wory you,The Black Tinkler wont get you".)
Helen Weldon Tinkers, Sorners, and other Vagabonds. The New Ireland review. vol.XXV1(sept.1906.-feb 1907.)sept.pp.43-47,p.44

to be continued.......

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part three

The Way of the Wanderers:
The Story of Travellers in Scotland
 
Jess Smith - 2012 
 
extract
 
A typical example of this attitude is this so called lullaby which used to be sung to children.

 'Hush ye, hush ye, dinnae fret ye;
the black tinkler winna get ye.

extract below the lullaby
 "I think there were theologians whose sole task was to sit at a desk and write the most awful inhumane lies about the Gypsy/Travelling people wherever they were to be found. The passage of time only seemed to make things worse.  Nations throughout the western world held these same hateful attitudes to Gypsies, which makes one despair of human nature".



LOKI'S GAZETTE
August 27, 2013 ·
by petilliavonschkanken ·
in mythology & folklore. ·

ON THE CULTURAL EMBODIEMENT OF THE TRICKSTER:
TINKERS’ TALES AND LORE
 
extract

“Hush ye, hush ye, dinna fret;
the Black Tinker winna get ye yet,”

goes one old Scottish lullaby, echoing the fear with which Gypsies (“Tinkers,” “Travelers,” or “Rom”) have long been regarded. Like other groups of cultural outsiders, superstitions about the Gypsies abound: accused in centuries past of witchcraft, child theft and cannibalism, today they are still disparaged as fundamentally shiftless, crafty and dishonest. To some extent, this portrayal holds a kernel of truth if one judges by gadjo (non-Gypsy) values — for Gypsies prize the enjoyment of life, family ties and group loyalty over such “gadjo foolishness” as a life of hard work for the sake of wealth. And while Gypsy ethics dictate fair treatment and honesty among themselves, tricking the gadjo out of a bit of hard cash is another matter . . . often (to people with few other trades open to them) a matter of survival.


A Brief History of Everyone
Who Ever Lived:
 
Adam Rutherford 
2016 

 extract

There are dozens of documented cases of Roma or Irish Travelers being falsely accused of stealing children over the twentieth century, and back through modern European history, to the extent that it features in a nineteenth-century nursery rhyme:

Hush nae, hush nae, dinna fret ye,
The black Tinkler winna get ye.

According to Thomas Acton, a professor of Romani studies at the University of Greenwich, there isn’t a single verifiable case of Roma stealing non-Roma children in history. 


ITINERANT MINORITIES IN ENGLAND AND WALES
IN THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES:
A STUDY OF GYPSIES,
TINKERS, HAWKERS AND OTHER TRAVELLERS

Thesis presented to the Department of Economic and Social History, University of Sheffield,
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,
October, 1981

by
DAVID MAYALL
Vol_ 1"
1981

extracts
Page 225
 
A crime that was believed to be the exclusive reserve of the gypsy race was that of child-stealing: "When they saw the gipsies they drew back behind their mother and the baby carriage, for there was a tradition that once, years before, a child from a neighbouring village had been stolen by them. Even the cold ashes where a gipsy's fire had been sent little squiggles of fear down Laura's spine, for how could she know that they were not still lurking near with designs upon her own person? ... She never really enjoyed the game the hamlet children played going home from school, when one of them went on before to hide, and the others followed slowly, hand in hand, singing: 'I hope we shan't meet any gipsies tonight: I hope we shan't meet any gipsies tonight! ' And when the hiding-place was reached and the supposed gipsy sprung out and grabbed the nearest, she always shrieked, although she knew it was only a game". 132 

132 F. Thompson, op cit., p. 36.

Page 226
 
Also, an old Scottish rhyme sung to fretful children:

"Hush ye, hush ye, dinna fret ye,
The Black Tinkler winna get ye". 133

Having taken the child from its true parents, it was claimed that the gypsies then blackened their captive with a dye made from green walnut husks, galls and logwood, in order to make them appear their own. 134 It was said that the stolen children, when old enough, were married into the gypsy fraternity in order to ensure that the resulting mixed blood gave stamina to the race. 135 elsewhere the practice was linked to the tribal and historic superstitions of the race. 136 As with all such claims, examples were provided. Adam Smith, the economist, was allegedly carried off by gypsies when only three years of age, to be rescued from obscurity by his uncle, 137


133 Report of the Departmental Committee on Tinkers in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1918), p. 5 (hereafter, ta1. Cttee. on Tinkers).. 134 Mr. Ellis, 'The Nuisance ... ', in V. Bell, op. cit., p, 76. 135 'Gipsydom', Bow Bells, Vol. 5 (18671, p. 275. 136 The Tent Folk', The Nation (12 October 1907), p, 44. 137 Chambersgs Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts, Vol. 16, No. 139 (1847X, p. 11; W. B., "Gipsies of the Border $, loc. cit., p. 163.


to be continued..............

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part four


GIPSIES
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
BY
MARGUERITA NEEDHAM

THESIS
FOR THE
DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS
IN
ENGLISH

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
1920

extracs

page 12

Especially is this true of the Spanish Gipsy, who lives among the rocks and precipices of the mountains, and makes a living from raids and visits upon the towns- sometimes residing for months as an inoffensive Gipsy in Seville or Cordova- only to end by some smuggling venture carrying him through the passes to a safer retreat. Repeated edicts for two hundred years were passed to exterminate these tribes; and many a group was doomed to be burnt, whipped, or branded. The Spaniards of the time accused them of driving with the Moors a nefarious traffic in Christian children. Yet the Gipsies thrived magnificently.1
1. Morwood, V. S.: Cur Gipsies in City. Tent, and Van, Chapter III,

extract

Page 16-17

Ofttimes Scottish peasant-mothers would sing to their babes of these black tinklers:

"Hush ye, hush ye, dinna fret ye,
The black Tinkler winna get ye,"

which was quite reasonably and independently converted by Gipsy mothers for the purpose of hushing their children and keeping them home near the tent,- to a warning against the gringo folk. And, after the middle of the sixteenth century, the "sturdy beggars' children"- inclusive of all the little Gipsies in Scotland- were by laws made liable to a youth of enforced servitude, unless their parents settled down; so that Gipsy mothers might well sing to their children to beware of the gringoes. Coal and salt masters might apprehend and put to labor all vagabonds and sturdy children. "The truth is, "says Mr. Macritchie, quoting Mr. Simson, "these kidnapped individuals and their children were made slaves of to these masters. The colliers were emancipated only within these fifty years," .... and to this day some of the Lothian coal miners are of Gipsy extraction. 
 

Gypsies and the British Imagination,
1807-1930
 2006

Deborah Epstein Nord 
 
extracs
 
pages 10-12. ........  As in Guy Mannering, the the mystery of the Gypsies ancestry makes it way into the numerouse fictional narratives in the form of stories of vexed personal identities and displaced protagonists. In Scotts novel, Harry Bertram has been seperated by his past and has no idea that he his the son and heir of a Scottish Laird…………… The father of the painter Augustus John warned his children that if they “walked abroad on market days they would be kidnaped by gypsies and spirited away in their caravans, no one new where” This possibility became a staple of nursery rhymes, the premise for the plots of popular fiction, and evan lullabies that mixed comfort and threat: 

Hush nae, hush nae, dinna fret ye;
The black Tinkler winna get ye."

……………..Kidnapping stories and Gypsy narratives, as well as the larger tradition of foundling or bastard plots, also signal something of the fundamental mystrery of individual origins that, even in an age of  scientific sophistication, haunts human psyches. Uncertainty about identity and fantasies about parentage form the basis for Freuds theory of the "family romance." According to Freuds schema, the childs feelings of resentment or sexual rivaly lead him( the child is male for Freud) to imagine that he is adopted, in reality the offspring of parents of higher social standing, whose superiority elevates the childs image of himself and simultancously diminishes the stature of the "adoptive" parents, primarily the father.

Page 24

The threat of kidnapping became a staple of nursery rhymes, lulabies, and teasing to coax children into proper behavior. but the opposite notion, that a Gypsy child could end up in the English world, had great imaginative force as well. Parents might scold a naughty or even an unconventional child by saying the "tinkers" had stolen their real offspring and left a Gypsy in her place…………………….. According to Walter Simpson a contempory of Walter Sott and the author of an ealy series of articles on Gypsies, too, had their own version of family romance:" If you enquire at the Gypsies respecting their desent , the greater part of them will tell you they aresprung from a bastard son of this or that family of noble rank and infulence, of their own surname.“


Dictionary of Gypsy Life and Lore
Harry E Wedeck - 2015 
 
Fear of the Gypsies in nineteenth century Scotland a mother would quiten a terrified child by crooning:
 
Hush nae, hush nae, dinna fret ye;
The black Tinkler winna get ye.

They frighten their own children by saing that they would be given to the gorgio, the non-Gypsy.

to be continued.......

[panished]

part five

I also read  this book online, so you can see right from Simsons book of 1866 the tale as sure evolved and the narative is used by many of the writers of the works i have just shown you 

The Witch of Clatteringshaws   
 by Joan Aiken - 2010 - ‎Juvenile Fiction
 quote – Mothers use him to threaten their children—

“Hush ye, hush ye, dinna fret ye,
or the Loch Grieve Monster will get ye!”


so far and that is only so far i do know there may be more evidence out there i am just trying my own best, well Walter Simons seems to be the person who started all the talk of the Black Tinklers, he quotes Sir Walter Scott in his writings as a noted writer, I  think his dad was connected to Scott they are all along the border countrys of Scotland i have been researching and indeed although modern writers through time tend to body slam his writing I have enjoyed reading about Scotts life his life and works, I wish I could say more but I am writing only in a skeletal way for you all and trying in this way also to not write in inkwell haste, I am balancing my words so as to stick to the point. I have much more information than what I write here, so this below is what Sir Walter Scott wrote about in the year 1828 

Pocket Library of English Classics

The Works of Walter Scott. 
Tales of a Grandfather;
being stories taken from Scottish history.
in three volumnes, Vol.1. 1828
preface Abbotsford, 10th Oct. 1827.

Chapter V11. of the Exploits of Douglas and Randolf.

Page 126

The poor woman, who new nothing of this, sat quietly on the wall, and began to sing to her child. You must know the name Douglas was so terrible to the English, that the women used to frighten their children with it, and say to them when they behaved ill, that they "would make the black Douglas take them."And this soldiers wife was singing to her child,

“Hush ye, Hush ye, little pet ye,
Hush ye, Hush ye, do not frey ye,
The Black Douglas shal not get ye.”


Sir WALTER Scott, wrote Tales of a Grandfather. A history of Scotland for his grandson James, Scott  wrote in his journal in 1827 that he wanted to find his way between what a child can comprehend and what shall not yet be absolutely uninteresting to the grown reader.

to be continued..............