Art, archives, war heroes and a family refusing to be forgotten
On Friday 26 June, I attended Nackens Now and Then at Killiecrankie Village Hall, near Pitlochry.
David McPhee, a member of Perth and Kinross Council staff—and, as far as we are aware, no direct relation to Shamus and Roseanna McPhee—opened the event to a standing-room-only audience.
One line from his welcome particularly stood out:
“We need more than just words.”
Those words stayed with me throughout the day, because this exhibition was created by people who have already given far more than words.
Shamus and Roseanna have spent years uncovering histories that Scotland allowed to be hidden. They have searched archives, preserved family stories, challenged institutions and carried memories that should never have been left for one brother-and-sister team to protect alone.
These families know so much history—not only about their own families, but about the experiences of many others.
Roseanna made one point particularly clear:
“The Tinker Experiment was not just a few huts in Perthshire. It was much wider.”
The exhibition proved exactly that.
History brought into the room
The room was filled with timelines, archival documents, official correspondence, family photographs, academic research and Shamus’s paintings.
The timelines traced centuries of Gypsy Traveller history in Scotland. They recorded the early presence of Gypsies in Edinburgh, the first official records of Gypsies in Scotland, the introduction of anti-Gypsy laws and the criminalisation of traditional camping.
They moved through the 1895 Scottish Traveller Report, the 1908 Children Act, the 1917 Departmental Committee on “Tinkers”, the experimental settlements of the 1940s and later legislation that continued to restrict where Gypsy Travellers could stop, live and work.
The language used within some of those records was chilling.
Gypsy Travellers were described as a “problem” to be managed. Their traditional way of life was treated as evidence of personal failure rather than as a culture deserving protection and respect.
Officials spoke about “rehabilitating” and “reclaiming” people, as though being a Gypsy Traveller was something from which a person needed to be rescued.
Other displays examined the disappearance of traditional and seasonal work, the closure of stopping places, the criminalisation of roadside life and the steady tightening of laws that made it increasingly difficult for families to continue living culturally.
Taken together, the timelines showed that the Tinker Experiment did not appear from nowhere. It emerged from centuries of law, policy and public language that had already taught wider society to view Gypsy Travellers as unwanted.
Who controls an archive?
Next to speak was Paula, an archive manager who had supported Shamus and Roseanna through RAJPOT in creating a knowledge base from the material they had gathered.
Paula spoke warmly but powerfully about why access to records matters:
“People must have access to their own history.”
One of the exhibition displays explained that archives are not neutral store cupboards where every part of history is preserved equally.
Someone decides what should be recorded.
Someone decides which documents should be retained.
Someone decides what counts as legitimate knowledge and whose voice is considered worthy of preservation.
For communities pushed to the margins of society, those decisions carry enormous power.
The display explained the need to read archives “against the grain”: to look not only at what has been recorded, but also at what is missing, whose voice is absent and why.
Gypsy Travellers were frequently written about by councils, churches, police officers, welfare officials and academics, but rarely allowed to record their own experiences in their own words.
Their lives appeared in official files as problems, cases and statistics rather than as families with names, relationships, cultures and rights.
That is why the work undertaken by Shamus and Roseanna is so important.
They are not simply collecting old documents. They are taking back control of a history that was recorded almost entirely through the eyes of the people and institutions that controlled and persecuted their community.
A family placed inside an experiment
For Shamus and Roseanna, this history is not distant or academic.
Their own family lived it.
Their great-grandmother, Helen Johnstone, was among the first tenants placed at Bobbin Mill in 1947. But the family had lived in the area long before the huts were built.
Before being forced onto the settlement, families had lived traditionally in tents in the surrounding woods. They were then moved from those living places and placed in huts as part of an experiment intended to stop them travelling and change how they lived.
The accommodation was deliberately substandard.
The huts were cold, damp and difficult to heat. Families endured severe winter conditions, poor sanitation and little of the support that should have accompanied any genuine attempt to improve their lives.
They were described as a “drain on the welfare state” and a “blight on society”, even though the same system frequently refused them access to welfare and basic public services.
The settlement was treated as a prototype—a possible answer to what officials called the “Tinker problem”.
The intention was not to support the community’s cultural way of life. It was to dismantle it.
Shamus and Roseanna also spoke about their mother, Agnes Johnstone, who attended a segregated “Tinkers’ school” from 1941.
They described how the children were sprayed with DDT, the same chemical that had been tested and used on troops.
(It has been shown, the exposure to DDT is linked to reproductive and developmental issues, endocrine disruption, and is classified as probably carcinogenic to humans.)
The children were educated separately from local settled children. Their segregation was not simply an accidental consequence of geography. It reflected a belief that Traveller children were different, inferior and in need of correction.
The language of “child welfare” repeatedly appeared around these policies. Yet the welfare of the children did not seem to include their right to remain connected to their families, culture or identity.
Welfare became another route through which families could be watched, judged and controlled.
James Johnstone: a hero at war, a problem at home
One of the exhibition panels told the story of James Johnstone, Shamus and Roseanna’s maternal great-grandfather, who served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders during the First World War.
He served in uniform, fought in some of the most brutal conditions imaginable and was wounded and hospitalised.
Yet when he returned home, he came back to a country that continued to view his family and community as a problem.
The wider First World War exhibition contained the stories of Scottish Gypsy Traveller soldiers, including men who returned injured or suffering from what was then described as shell shock.
The contradiction was impossible to ignore.
Gypsy Traveller men were considered British enough to fight and die for the country. They were expected to serve, sacrifice and demonstrate loyalty.
Yet their families remained subject to segregation, forced settlement, surveillance and the threat of having their children taken away.
They could be heroes overseas while being treated as unwanted at home.
One title in the exhibition made my eyes smile:
Heroes… Or Raj Hantle?
I did not need anyone to translate those words for me. I was brought up with the terminology.
Raj Hantle means “silly people”, and seeing those familiar words in the middle of an exhibition carrying so much grief, resistance and history gave me a small moment of warmth and recognition.
The title also held a bitter truth.
Were these men heroes, or were they the “silly people” some may have thought them to be for fighting for a country that continued to persecute their families?
To me, there is no question.
They were heroes.
Their families knew it, even when the country they served seemed determined to forget them.
The joy in Shamus’s paintings
Among the official letters, reports and painful family histories was the colour and life of Shamus’s artwork.
His paintings are bright, vibrant depictions of the life he has lived and the people he has known.
They show camps, families, horses, gatherings, landscapes and everyday moments. They are filled with colour, but they do not romanticise the experience.
There is humour within them, but also hardship. There is warmth, but also isolation. There is culture, family and resilience alongside the evidence of how people were treated.
Shamus has used his art as social commentary: a way of exposing mistreatment and using lived experience to enlighten others.
That is exactly how the paintings felt within the exhibition.
The official documents showed us how institutions viewed the community.
Shamus’s paintings showed us the human lives hidden behind those records.
They returned colour, dignity and personality to a history that was so often recorded in cold and dehumanising bureaucratic language.
Still hidden in Pitlochry
As I moved through the exhibition, I could not escape the contrast between the depth and importance of the history being presented and the present circumstances of the families whose lives it documented.
Here was a forgotten people, still hidden in Pitlochry on what feels like an unloved plot of land.
Roseanna told me that some of the holiday-style lodges now used on the site had been secured free of charge when a holiday park was renovating.
Her determination helped to make the accommodation more bearable.
But why should one woman have had to find unwanted holiday lodges simply to secure something better for her family and community?
Why was that burden left to her?
The original huts may have changed, but the sense of abandonment has not entirely disappeared.
One of the exhibition displays was titled “Conditions of Abandonment.”
That phrase felt painfully relevant—not only to the historical records, but also to the way communities can still be left out of sight and expected to survive through their own resourcefulness.
“I never knew”
At some point during the exhibition, a man appeared to have wandered in almost by accident.
I assumed he had been out walking, enjoying the beautiful scenery around Killiecrankie, and had simply stumbled across the event.
I am not sure he was prepared for what he found inside.
He stood beside me looking visibly shaken, taking in the documents, photographs, timelines and family stories.
Over and over, in a soft Scottish accent, he repeated the same words:
“I never knew. This is horrible. I never knew any of this.”
I tried to reassure him.
“Not many people do,” I told him. “That is why this is so important.”
He continued staring at the displays, still trying to process what he had learned.
Then, suddenly, the repetition broke.
In that same quiet Scottish accent, he said:
“My own grandmother was Gypsy. I just never knew this.”
Perhaps a connection that had been broken can begin to be restored.
That moment has stayed with me.
A man had walked into the hall believing he was learning the forgotten history of somebody else.
He left realising that it was also part of his own family history.
That is what erasure does.
It does not only hide a community from the wider public. It can separate people from their own ancestors, their own identity and the stories that should have been passed down to them.
His grandmother had not suddenly become Gypsy in that room. She had always been Gypsy.
What changed was that, through the exhibition, he had finally been given access to the history surrounding that identity.
Perhaps he will now ask questions.
Perhaps he will search for records, speak to relatives or look again at family stories that never quite made sense.
That brief encounter demonstrated why this exhibition mattered.
It was not simply about looking backwards.
It was returning knowledge to people who did not even know that something had been taken from them.
More than an exhibition
This was not simply an art exhibition.
It was a family archive, a historical record, an act of resistance and a demand to be seen.
It showed what can happen when communities gain access to their own history and begin challenging the official version of events.
The documents demonstrated that these policies were not isolated mistakes made by one council or one individual. They were supported and implemented across institutions over generations.
The paintings showed that, despite everything, the community continued to live, create, remember and resist.
Shamus and Roseanna have protected a history that Scotland failed to protect.
They have brought together official documents, family testimony, art and research so that future generations will know what happened.
But David McPhee was right.
We need more than words.
We need these histories to be properly preserved and publicly recognised.
We need community-led archives.
We need schools to teach this history.
We need support for people trying to recover family identities that were hidden or deliberately left out of the records.
We need resources for the families who have already carried this work for generations.
Most of all, we need to ensure that the people whose lives were shaped by the Tinker Experiment are no longer treated as an uncomfortable piece of history to be hidden away.
They are still here.
Their history matters.
And it belongs to them.
With thanks to the Moving For Change GRTHM grant for making this possible
