Just come across this site. I’m not convinced that my great-grandmother, MARTHA SUMMERS, had Gypsy blood in her at all, although I’m told she “had a presence about her” and that she “had the look,” in that her eyes would turn fierce and intense when angered. Martha, it would appear, was quite daunting
She was born in Notting Dale in (I think) 1874 and her father (my great-great-grandfather), Benjamin Summers, was a coachbuilder. The 1881 census noted many Travellers still living in caravans in Notting Dale.
As soon as the sun went down in the winter months it’s reported that this was Carnival Time, when it was “thronged like a fair … in the side streets were side shows including vendors of patent medicine and itinerant musicians.” Dogfights were commonplace, as were early morning bare-knuckle fights, one of which resulted in a local Gypsy being tried for murder.
If Martha had Gypsy blood in her, who knows? But this was the atmosphere my great-grandmother was born into. She had eleven brothers and sisters, their birthdates spanning 22 years, seven older siblings and four younger, but even though my own father spent years studying the family tree and, indeed, wrote two books on genealogy, my great-grandfather’s lineage remains a mystery. It just stops at his own grandparents (my great-great-great-grandfather). We’ve never been able to trace the Summers family further back than that. Certainly, as mentioned, Benjamin Summers, who married a girl from Bethnal Green, was a coachbuilder, and he himself had nine brothers and sisters. His father was also a coachbuilder, but all we know about his father was that he was known as William, and his wife was called Ann. And that’s it.
With eleven brothers and sisters, plus nine uncles and aunts and I can’t imagine how many cousins, there’s no doubt they would have been a formidable family with close links to the indigenous yet itinerant Gypsy composition of the neighbourhood, even more so through Benjamin’s work as a coachbuilder.
By the time my great-grandmother, Martha, was twenty several houses for ‘Ladies of the night’ had opened in the area, charging roughly a shilling from evening until mid-morning, but I’ve a feeling she’d moved a mile or two down the road to Kensal Green by this time, although that area itself was suffering huge social problems of its own at the time and, let’s face it, still is.
