Gypsies and Gentlemen by Nerissa Wilson

Author:Nerissa Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1985-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

All the Fun of the Fair by Ernest Proctor.

As the fairgrounds became more and more mechanized and the entertainment grew fast and furious, some of the early innocent charm of the stalls and merry-go-rounds was lost for ever.

Bertram Smith, the Simple Life adherent, reserved his greatest affection for Black Jim, a city-dweller who spent most of his life in Liverpool hauling cotton bales. Black Jim was completely unmoved by the prospect of an approaching runaway traction engine but would lose his nerve completely at the sight of a plough or a passing flock of sheep. He was placid; Bertram Smith recorded that he had ‘an occasional trot in him’; and he proved to be the wrong horse to take along on a tour of Wales.

The hills there were difficult for caravans in any case, being so long and steep. When Black Jim was confronted by a particularly grim mountain road while harnessed to Smith’s first caravan, ‘Triumvir’, he decided to make no attempt to mount it; indeed, he ‘sat down and wept’ in the road. It was only when a team of four horses was gathered that the caravan reached the summit, ‘with all the thunder and eclat of a cavalry charge’.

Another Simple Life enthusiast and socialist reformer, Dugald Semple, who lived in a converted omnibus for years before building his own caravan, advised readers of his books to be kind to their horses, and to remember that they were man’s ‘partner in civilization’. Frances Jennings, a semi-paralysed artist who travelled round the countryside, summer and winter, in a converted coster’s barrow drawn by a donkey called Eva, often mentioned the donkey in her letters. The references were full of the irritation that one traveller might well feel for another after several weeks in close proximity and uncomfortable surroundings.

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