I recently purchased a photo album for £20, which included a dozen or so photographs taken with a Kodak Brownie camera of Smiths, Boswells, Coopers, Powells and Hearns camped on Epsom Downs and in East Peckham, Surrey, taken sometime between 1899-1912.
These include four of a middle aged man called Mark Hearne, outside his tents with his family, camped on the downs with his donkey, and out working the streets with his grinding barrow, and two photographs of four children aged roughly 3-14, described by the photographer, as the 'Chavos of Render Smith'.
I am trying to track down some more details on these people. Fred Shaw of the Gypsy Lore Society took two photos at Saffron Green Lane, Arkley Hertfordshire on 10th April 1910, showing a Render Smith, wife Jemima (Miami) with two children Walter and Lydia [Liddy]. Presumably this is the same family. Charles Leland earlier refers to Render Smith in his 1882 book The Gypsies. I can't find any baptism for him though or any trace of this family in census records. There is a Surrender Smith, born circa 1834 on the 1861 census, who is apparently the same person who appears as Surrender Boswell, aged 8, on the 1841 census in Staffordshire, a son of Moses Boswell, and grandson of Viney Boswell. Obviously he is highly unlikey to be the same man with young children photographed in Surrey and Herts in 1910.
Mark Hearne may be the same man who appears on the 1881 census in Fulham, just a few miles away from where my photographer later took her pictures of him in East Peckham. He was then aged 30, his birthplace given as Watford, Hertfordshire, with a daughter Leander. Leander married her cousin John Hearne, son of Samson Hearn, at St James, Fulham, on Xmas Day 1895. Any more info on his family, or census sightings, would be appreciated.