In search of a disappearing culture
Sheila Stewart loves telling tales. The Perthshire traveller and singer - the last of her kin in Blairgowrie - sees the well-crafted yarn as her birthright. She refers to it as "the oral tradition", and today she is in her element. In body, we are in her home town, Blairgowrie; in spirit, we are hundreds of miles away in America.
Chosen to represent Scotland during America's bicentennial celebrations in Washington DC, Stewart was approached on Lincoln Mall by the Queen and Prince Philip. "The Duke of Edinburgh came up and said he wanted to hear me sing," she says. "His bodyguard apologised and said security wouldn't allow it. The duke just looked me in the face and said: F*** security'."
Whatever you make of it, this story illustrates that Stewart was then - as one of the Stewarts o' Blair - well-known in certain circles. With her balladeer mother, Belle, her sister, Cathie, and her father, Alex, Stewart belonged to a kind of Von Trapp family of musicians and singers. Her grandfather was nine times Scottish piping champion but couldn't read a note; her grandmother, the "glen newspaper", passed gossip and hawked wares.
That day on the mall, Stewart was approached by two Americans in sunglasses and cheap suits, who she mistakenly took for mafiosi. "They put me in a black limo," she continues, "and took me to the back of the White House. When I walked in, the Duke of Edinburgh came up and said: I knew I would hear you sing'. I spent an hour and a half performing for them and having my tea in the White House with President Gerald Ford. The two men who took me back to the mall said that, if I ever told anyone, they would deny it."
Her green eyes widen and she grins. Celebrated abroad if not at home, Stewart is now the last of the Blairgowrie Stewarts. At 71, she has shared a stage with Bob Dylan, sung for Pope John Paul II in Glasgow's Bellahouston Park and lectured at Harvard and Princeton. She has also had her hair pulled out, been insulted and been spat upon. A traveller, an itinerant, she prefers the label "tinker" and has reclaimed it as her own. "There was a great uproar a few years back that tinker' was derogatory and that we should be called travellers," she says. "When New Age travellers came on the go, they tried to jump on the bandwagon to claim all the things given to travelling people by law. I prefer to be called a tinker now because it gives me an identity away from those people."
Nobody knows when travelling people first arrived in Scotland, beyond the fact it was pre-12th century. As tinsmiths (the origin of the term "tinker") they were among the country's first skilled craftspeople. Unlike England's Romani gypsies, whose lineage can be traced back to India, their background and roots are unclear. Stewart thinks they were brought to Pictish Scotland with the Romans and then mixed, post-Culloden, with Highlanders and Irish travellers. In the absence of a written history, it will do.
Stewart's own family were pearl-fishers and berry-pickers, living variously on a bus, in a house, and on the road. Like those before them, they collected wool, mended pots and pans, picked tatties and sold scrap and rags. First outlawed by Henry VIII in England, the travellers' historical link with witchcraft preceded them, regardless of its veracity. In modern times, certain rights of protection have been granted under the Race Relations Amendment Act, although Scottish travellers don't receive the "minority ethnic" status afforded to gypsies in England. Awarded an MBE by Prince Charles last year, Stewart knows she is atypical of her community.
"Prince Charles said to me: You sing ballads? You tell stories? You're one of the tinker people, aren't you? Why people don't want to be called that nowadays, I don't understand."
Travellers themselves probably do. Guestimates suggest there are 20,000 travellers in Scotland, and fewer than 2000 still on the road. Most have integrated, settled down. Clampdowns on their wandering way of life and the rise of fixed campsites have done little to lift the stigma. Fellow traveller and author Jess Smith - sitting opposite Stewart today - remembers beatings from her classmates at school as commonplace. Faced with the choice of giving up her education or "curling up to die", she learned to run in and out of school with the bell. Smith was one of eight sisters, who slept four to a bed in a bus. The family pitched up where fancy took them, finding work and moving on. On good days, she says, it was like a holiday, on bad days more like hell. With grown children, and a long-settled life in Crieff, she describes the decision to write her best-selling 2003 memoir, Jessie's Journey, as a way of "coming out of the closet".
"I'd been staying in one place, bringing up a family, paying the mortgage like everyone else," she says. "But I was always waking up in my sleep with the thought that I had to write about my culture because it was disappearing."
The book's success prompted two more to complete a trilogy. As a result, Smith is now feted internationally, but not by her relatives. "I've been subjected to negative phone calls," she says. "A lot of my family are professionals and they're terrified what mainstream people will think if their backgrounds are discovered. We lived on a bus like sardines, we were so close, and now they want to deny my existence."
Like Stewart, she sees herself as the last in the line. Like Stewart, she wants to cling to her roots, not deny them. "Travellers know travellers", they explain, and their friendship goes back a long way. They used to see each other every year during Blairgowrie's berry-picking season, a one-time magnet for travellers from Scotland and England. They mention names like Ernie Ross, Big Willie MacPhee, characters from a shared past when the Wellmeadow would swell with tents and summer workers. Post-war, the town was rich in fruit farms, in part due to government grants designed to feed a vitamin-starved generation.
Smith describes the picking season as a time when sweethearts met and relationships blossomed. "It was a working holiday where whole cultures were brought together for the sake of a berry," she says. "For those weeks, there would be music and dancing round the sites. When we went away for the winter, like the hibernating hedgehog, the farmers would be counting their coffers."
The first to bring credibility to the art of the Scottish travellers was the late Perthshire folklorist Hamish Henderson of Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies. From the 1950s on, he made recordings of stories, personal histories, and the ballads of Belle Stewart. Their popularity would see the Stewarts performing at folk events around the world. Both women claim Henderson was unique in that, although the camps operated an open-door policy, few from outwith their circle would visit. Though religious, and known to all in the town, Stewart's father was refused a local burial, as he had never been registered as a parishioner. Most children went unchristened for the same reason, their spirituality, and their voting rights, ignored. Stewart says the bitterness she once felt has gone.
"I'm glad they turned their back on us," she says. "If we'd landed in society, our culture wouldn't have been kept intact, and our oral tradition would have been lost. I thank the people of Blairgowrie now for not accepting us back then."
The idea of society, in a homogeneous sense, with travellers on the outside, is telling. Both women say they were treated as "non-people"; Smith wants people to know that "their hearts beat, that they bleed"; Stewart is "adamant" that gypsies are "not animals". And both feel a sense of urgency. Stewart talks about lying in the ground "like a skeleton", her culture in the coffin beside her. They fear their inheritance will disappear in time like tears in the rain. They know the traditions they champion are now part of a "museum culture", and alien even to most modern-day travellers.
"There are some travellers now that leave a terrible mess," says Stewart. "They're not the educated ones from the old tradition. But that's not as widespread as people make out. Modern times have seeped into the travelling community and, just like elsewhere in society, there are those who don't give a damn."
As a member of the Secretary of State's advisory committee on Scottish travelling people in the 1980s, Stewart helped set up the Double Dykes traveller site in Perth, as well as upgrading plots in Montrose and Edinburgh. The problem, she says, is that travellers ordinarily have had little say over where they are put. As with native Americans and Australian aboriginals, respect for their culture has come with clearly set boundaries. In Rattray and Blairgowrie, they remain part of the community, hemmed in and stitched uncomfortably into the fabric.
"People are still not sure how to respond to having travellers around," says John Corrigan, a community education worker in Blairgowrie. "Lots of small towns look for identities that will bring people to the area. Here, folk look at the berries and other things, and yet for me the one thing people across the world know about is Sheila's family and the travellers."
Berry-picking still goes on in Blairgowrie, although it's done by a new breed of travellers. Eastern Europeans now harvest the crops and perform other low-paid work from which the tinkers once made a living. Neither woman seems sad at this turn of events. What bothers them is that their travelling language, Cant, and their music, with its "conyach", are now both at the point of of extinction. Roughly equivalent to the "duende" in flamenco - a difficult-to-describe term that denotes authenticity and spiritual connection - the conyach is essential to the ballads. Without it, they sound like songs; with it, they're something else entirely.
Stewart wants to demonstrate and clears her throat. Her choice of song - Queen Amang The Heather - is significant. As a young woman, it was off-limits, her mother's pièce de résistance. It tells of a meeting between a rich squire's son and a "lame shepherd's dochter" and sounds like nothing I've heard before: heartbreaking, shrill, as tight as a bodhrán, the voice both hunted and haunting.
"I was brought up learning that you have to show courtesy to the ballads," says Stewart, "that if you couldn't sing with the conyach you had to just shut up. It gives the song something special."
Only one verse of the hundreds written by Stewart's mother is in Cant, precisely, Stewart says, because it was a secret language, a headache for linguists. Hamish Henderson spent 25 years trying to pin the dialect down; Ewan MacColl, father of the late Kirsty MacColl, spent 20 years in pursuit of it. Grammatically, it has elements of Gaelic and traces of Latin and Romani. Aberdeen Cant is different from Perthshire Cant; on the islands it's different again. Stewart and Smith fire words back and forth that change between Crieff and Blairgowrie: a whammlin co-cavie (a boiling kettle); a pooskakoul (gamekeeper); monteclear (water). Stewart's budgie speaks Cant; Smith's dog barks it. "But my kids don't speak it," Smith says, "because they're halfbreeds." She explains the word "Gadgie", a Cant word for "man".
"It's been misinterpreted," she says. "Folk in Blairgowrie call us gadgies. Anything we use and have respect for, they will derogate it."
Set to give her 85th talk at the local Women's Rural Institute, she senses a positive change in the air. Invited for years to Europe and North America to perform, both Smith and Stewart say that this year, unusually, work offers have come mostly from within Scotland. The pair performed at last month's Celtic Connections and the BBC has raised the possibility of recording a documentary with Stewart and Dolly Parton.
The story - like all in Stewart's repertoire - is absorbing. Discovering some years ago that he was related to Stewart, acclaimed jazz guitarist Martin Taylor mentioned his new-found cousin to Parton. "She sent me a photo of herself, with a nice message on it to keep on singing," says Stewart. "I sent over a tape of me singing and she liked it. She said it took her way back to long ago, that my voice was like her granny's."
Stewart prefers singing to talking about singing, being heard to being talked about. Smith echoes the sentiment and says the proof of their craft is in the pudding. Both will perform in Rattray today as part of the annual Strathmore Arts Festival. It's a homecoming gig of sorts, to a town with mixed emotions. As well as giving workshops on traditional tinker crafts, they will sing ballads and share stories from their lives. Inspired in part by the Executive's current focus on "cultural entitlements", their inclusion at the event is a first.
"If you went out to the streets in Blairgowrie and asked people what they wanted for their cultural entitlements, they probably wouldn't know," says Perth and Kinross Council arts development manager Kirsty Duncan. "But one thing that hadn't happened for a long time here was a celebration of our very special travelling culture."
As Stewart and Smith guide me along the banks of the river Ettrick, it might seem long overdue. There are no tents today, just mud and memories. The river is swollen and branches float by. It was here that Stewart's husband died in an accident while fishing. It's also the place where dances were held and ballads written. For travellers, says Stewart, it's the place "where God intended them to stay, in the open air and as free as a bird". She remembers taking her mother out camping one night on the west coast, shortly before her death. The trip brought back memories of sharing stories and lighting campfires. Within hours, they were moved on by the police. Though Stewart has never been a gypsy of the crystal-ball variety, she knows the future lies in integration.
"The ideal scenario for me is to get more recognition for the travelling people," she says. "I don't do this for self achievement, I'm doing it for the tinker people. I want society to recognise that we offer more than a dirty layby."
Smith talks of passing on her knowledge before it's too late, and of being a thorn in society's side. It sounds depressing, and undoubtedly is, but both women smile and laugh.
Stewart pulls a face at Smith; Smith nearly slips in the mud. "We're getting closer to a positive understanding of our culture," says Smith. "A lot of travellers today should be doing the same to help their young. There's creativity there, there are clever wee weans, but their culture's been buried away. We're like a fox on the run - surviving, but only just."
Sheila Stewart and Jess Smith appear at the Travelling Lives exhibition at Rattray Church Hall today, 1-5pm.
| mediaplayer |
 Artist: Shelia StewartTitle: "From the Heart of the Tradition" Cat no: TSCD515 Track: "Queen Amang the Heather" Copyright owner: (P) Topic Records Ltd 2000 Web Site: www.topicrecords.co.uk Price: £13.25 incl. postage & VAT |
