MS 172/8 Tinkers and the
William Murdoch Duncan Collection
During the 1960’s to the late 1970’s one Newtyle resident, William Murdoch Duncan, became the village historian. He systematically gathered every scrap of information about the village and its inhabitants, past and present. He organised them into subject folders, following the Dewey Decimal Classification system more commonly associated with library collections. He collected information on historic buildings, businesses, antiquities, the Dundee - Newtyle Railway, organisations and people. The following is an extract he made from the Newtyle magazine of 1964 and is a personal reminiscence of tinkers. The accompanying photograph of a tinker man playing the pipes at a funeral comes from the Provost John Dunn of Brechin collection.
Tinker man
As an old lady at her cottage door once said to me ‘There were wanderers on the face of the earth long before the birth of the Saviour, and there will be wanderers till the end of time.’
Well, to take one type of wanderer as an example, the tinker is still with us, but his numbers have decreased and his mode of life has changed greatly.
Fifty years one could not walk far along a country road without coming upon a band of tinkers.
The odour of camp-fire smoke, which clung tenaciously to their clothing, would be wafted by the breeze and could be smelt a considerable distance away: by the rattle of their tin-ware and their high shrill voices their proximity was proclaimed long before they came into view.
Ragged, dirty and tousle-headed, they presented a fearsome spectacle to the more carefully nurtured cottage child.
They were usually poor, harmless creatures of mysterious origin. One theory is that they were remnants of the old clan system in Scotland, although, with a few exceptions, their names do not always fit into this pattern. Another suggestion is that they were descended from lowland serfs and failing to find employment took to wandering. There appears to be no direct link with the Romany or gipsy tribes.
In contrast to some gypsies (and some hawkers) the tinker was usually regarded as a trustworthy person. He, or she, would usually beg most peresistently once they had made camp at one of their usual stopping places, but seldom or never was anything stolen.
As a boy I can remember many regulars who encamped at an old disused lane at Kirkinch, known as the ‘Strip’. In this district there were Burkes, Flynns, Whites, Stewarts, McLarens, Townsleys, and doubtless many others, who were regular visitors during the summer months.
Their income in these days mainly came from the mending of pots and pans, and the sale and repair of baskets. These baskets ranged from large ‘skulls’ or ‘sculls’, for potato gathering to little delicate shopping baskets.
Now alas, the cane scull has been replaced by its equivalent in plastic, and the old tin or heavy metal pot by aluminium.
Normally they were not a nuisance except for importunate begging which usually took the following pattern, (if one can imagine the high shrill accent):
‘Have ye a wee bittee butter for the bairn’s piece?’
When this had been obtained it would be followed by similar requests for ‘a wee bittee bread’ or a ‘wee tickie sugar’.
Those who were charitable were usually rewarded by ‘God bless ye, lady!’
These days have now, and with compulsory free education etc., many are now in business.
No longer do they come to our doors with their donkey laden with ‘roasters and toasters and horn spuins to please the wee yins’. They arrive in a motor vehicle and offer gaily coloured overalls, scarves, nylon stockings, etc. One last relic of olden days survives when one of the girls goes round the doors and asks if you would like to buy ‘a wee comb, a bottle of scent, or a pirn of thread’.
The more timid children of bygone days would run a mile to avoid meeting a band of tinkers. Imagine the consternation of one such child when returning alone from a shopping expedition, on running into a gang. Trembling she passed them clutching her messages in one hand, and a penny change in the other.
Safely past, her sigh of relief was short-lived for bringing up the rear, was a tousle-headed laddie.
‘What’s that you’re carrying in your hand?’ he shouted
‘Rolls for my father’s tea’ she replied
‘And in your other one?’ ‘A penny’.
‘Gie it tae me, and I’ll sing you a sang!’
In terror she handed over the penny and fled. Some spark of honour must have resided in the young rascal’s make-up, however, because as she ran she would hear his voice raised in a brief jingle:
‘I’ll gie ye five shillins’,
And a bottle o’ the best,
If ye’ll show me the way
To the cuckoo’s nest.’
Such incidents were very rare, however, and one must bear in mind that keeping within the law, was, for the tinker, a form of self-preservation.
A creature of habit, he visited the same camping grounds year after year.
Not always a welcome guest, he gave as little offence as possible and avoided leaving any loopholes that would give anyone residing in the vicinity a chance to have the ‘law on him’.
He was aware of the legal time limits set for him to remain on a given site, and if any minor trouble arose, this time limit was usually invoked in order to get him to ‘Move along’.
Trouble, in the olden days, usually took the from of ‘breach of the peace’., and family quarrels were frequently inflated - not by looking on the wine whilst it was red, but by imbibing the spirit when it was blue.
In spite of all this the passing of the genuine tinker means that a little more of the natural colour on the palette of our countryside will have disappeared for ever.
‘Good pipers and brave soldiers’ was how a certain Colonel described them in the First World War, and with that salute we take our leave of them.
By R. G. Livingstone. Published in the Newtyle Magazine, August 1966
© Angus Council 1998 - 2008