For generations, Scottish Gypsy Travellers were pushed from the road, separated from their children and placed in isolated, substandard settlements. This is not only a story about the past. Its consequences are still being lived today.
By Violet Cannon, Proud Gypsy Traveller CIC
A man appeared to have wandered into the exhibition almost by accident.
I assumed he had been out walking, enjoying the beautiful scenery around Killiecrankie, when he came across Nackens Now and Then and stepped inside.
I am not sure he was ready for what he found.
He stood beside me, visibly shaken, looking at timelines, official documents, family photographs and stories belonging to Scottish Gypsy Traveller families.
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 said. “That is why this is so important.”
Then the repetition stopped.
He looked again at the displays and quietly said:
“My own grandmother was Gypsy. I just never knew this.”
He had walked into that hall believing he was learning somebody else’s forgotten history.
He left realising that it was also his own.
That moment perhaps explains better than anything why we all need to understand the Tinker Experiment.
It was not only an attempt to change how Scottish Gypsy Travellers lived. It helped separate people from their families, their culture, their ancestors and, sometimes, even the knowledge of who they were.
What was the Tinker Experiment?
The first thing to understand is that the Tinker Experiment was not one project, carried out in one place over a few years.
It is the name now commonly used to describe a much wider collection of laws, housing schemes and institutional practices intended to stop Scottish Gypsy Travellers from travelling and “absorb them” into settled society.
The Scottish Government commissioned the Third Generation Project at the University of St Andrews to investigate policies operating mainly between the 1940s and the 1980s. The researchers found that the roots stretched back much further and that some related practices continued beyond the period they had originally been asked to examine. (Scottish Government)
This was not simply about offering families houses.
It included:
- forcing people into settled accommodation;
- placing families in deliberately poor and isolated housing;
- closing traditional stopping places;
- restricting traditional work and trading;
- monitoring families through police, councils, churches and charities;
- segregating children in education;
- using the threat of child removal to force parents to settle;
- placing children in industrial schools and institutions;
- sending some children overseas through migration schemes;
- and attempting to weaken or erase Scottish Gypsy Traveller culture and identity.
The St Andrews research found three repeating patterns: dehumanisation, systematic control and forced assimilation. Professor Ali Watson OBE, who led the research, said the policies were not designed to support Gypsy Traveller culture: “It was the exact opposite.” (St Andrews News)
Why did it happen?
The Tinker Experiment happened because Scottish Gypsy Traveller life was viewed as inferior.
Travelling was treated as a problem rather than a cultural way of life.
Living in a tent or caravan was treated as evidence of failure or neglect.
Traditional employment was described as suspicious, outdated or unproductive.
Strong extended-family and community relationships were seen as barriers to becoming part of settled society.
Institutions often presented their interventions as welfare, education, rehabilitation or improvement. But those apparently helpful words hid a belief that settled society was superior and that Gypsy Travellers needed to be changed.
The official records reveal just how racist and dehumanising that thinking was.
Gypsy Travellers were described as belonging to a “different stage of human development”. “Tinkerdom” was called a “social disease”, while one witness said families were “positively just like cattle”. Officials discussed having people “extirpated as a class”, “ending the gypsy race”, trying to “detinkerise” children and seeking to “gradually abolish tinkerdom”. (Scottish Government)
These were not only insults shouted in the street.
They appeared in official investigations and discussions about housing, education, policing, welfare and children.
They influenced what governments, councils, churches and charities believed they had the right to do.
It did not begin with the huts
Many people associate the Tinker Experiment with the wooden huts and converted military buildings created after the Second World War.
But the history is much older.
From the sixteenth century onwards, Scottish laws sought to expel, punish and criminalise people identified as Gypsies. Later policies gradually shifted from openly attempting to remove people from Scotland towards forcing them to abandon their way of life and become absorbed into the settled population. (Scottish Government)
The research identified the Church of Scotland’s Kirk Yetholm scheme in the nineteenth century as an early example of an organised housing and education “experiment” intended to assimilate a Gypsy Traveller community. Church involvement continued through home missions, welfare work, schooling and supervisory roles. (Scottish Government)
By the end of the nineteenth century, officials were openly considering compulsory education, child removal, industrial schools and training ships as ways of ending Gypsy Traveller culture.
Reports in the early twentieth century continued to refer to a “Tinker problem”. Committees discussed housing, schooling, welfare and policing as connected methods of forcing change.
The huts of the 1940s were therefore not the beginning.
They were one stage in a much longer process.
What actually happened?
Families were forced to settle
Traditional stopping places were closed, camping was increasingly criminalised and families were moved on by police.
This created an impossible situation. Families were prevented from stopping legally, then blamed for roadside camping and described as a burden when they needed help.
Later laws allowed police to force Gypsy Travellers onto official sites or move them out of council areas where no space was available. The St Andrews researchers argue that this extended the policy environment of forced settlement and police harassment into the late twentieth century. (Scottish Government)
People were placed in deliberately poor housing
Families were housed in Nissen huts, wooden cabins, disused buildings, converted military accommodation and isolated camps.
At Bobbin Mill, near Pitlochry, the accommodation failed to meet ordinary council housing standards. Families sought normal council homes, but officials were concerned that giving them decent housing would interfere with the purpose of the Experiment.
The hardship was not simply an oversight. Poor conditions were sometimes treated as a stage through which families had to pass before proving themselves suitable for better accommodation.
Some proposed sites lacked drinking water, sanitation, electricity, waste disposal and safe access to schools. One Perthshire site was beside a river and railway and had an electricity pylon in the middle. A critic reportedly observed that its only advantage was that it kept the families out of sight. (Scottish Government)
Housing was used to break up communities
Officials believed that small numbers of Traveller families would be more easily absorbed into settled communities than larger family groups.
Families could be dispersed into separate houses or isolated sites, weakening the extended networks through which culture, work, childcare, language and family knowledge were passed down.
Housing was therefore not only about where people lived.
It was also used to change who they lived beside and how culture survived.
Everyday family life was supervised
The policies reached into employment, welfare, parenting, education, movement and traditional trading.
Men could be directed towards approved work. Families could be monitored by councils, police, welfare inspectors, missionaries and other appointed supervisors.
Hawking and trading were restricted. Access to support could depend on whether families complied with expectations about settling and sending children to school.
People were constantly being watched, assessed and judged on whether they were becoming less visibly Gypsy Traveller.
Children were used as leverage
One of the clearest findings from the archival research is that the fear of losing children was used to pressure parents into settling.
A child-welfare leader explained that the strongest method of forcing families to settle was not prosecution or imprisonment, but the fear that their children would be taken and sent to industrial schools.
Officials believed children could be separated from their families, educated into settled society and prevented from continuing Traveller culture. (Scottish Government)
The message to parents was brutally simple:
Settle, comply and change—or risk losing your children.
Children were sent to segregated schools
Traveller children were sometimes educated separately from other local children.
The St Andrews research describes conditions at the isolated Aldour School near Pitlochry. Records referred to frozen pipes, cracked windows, a smoking chimney and winter temperatures that rarely rose above 10°C.
The existence of the segregated school was then used to justify refusing Gypsy Traveller children admission to Pitlochry High School unless their families took up permanent residence and behaved like settled families. (Scottish Government)
Shamus and Roseanna McPhee have also shared how their own mother, Agnes Johnstone, attended a segregated “Tinkers’ school”.
At the exhibition, they described the children being sprayed with DDT and educated apart from other local children.
The language used around this was often “education” or “child welfare”.
But education should not require a child to give up their identity.
And welfare should not mean separating a child from their family, culture or community.
Children entered institutions and care
Traveller children were sent to industrial schools, training ships, children’s homes and other institutions.
Some families became overcrowded because the accommodation provided was completely inadequate. Rather than providing suitable housing, authorities could board children out or place them in care.
The research also found that Scottish Gypsy Traveller children appear to have been disproportionately caught within wider child-welfare systems, although the full number cannot be known because ethnicity was rarely recorded. (Scottish Government)
Police monitored families
Police visited camps, recorded family movements, enforced stopping restrictions and shared information with councils and child-welfare bodies.
They monitored schooling, housing and mobility.
A chief constable, asked how “tinkerdom” might gradually be abolished, replied that the easiest route would be through the children. (Scottish Government)
This is important.
The removal and assimilation of children was not a side effect of the policy.
Children were seen by some officials as the quickest route to making the community disappear.
Churches played an active role
The Church of Scotland did not simply observe what was happening.
The research found regular reports about “Tinker welfare”, church-led housing and education schemes, home missions and the appointment of church members and volunteers to supervisory roles over Gypsy Traveller families.
The report concludes that churches sometimes advised government and local authorities and, at other times, led the way in assimilationist work. (Scottish Government)
The Church of Scotland formally apologised in June 2025 for the historic wrongs carried out in its name. (The Church of Scotland)
Racist research was carried out on families
In 1938, German anthropologist Wolfgang Abel visited Traveller communities in Caithness.
With assistance from local officials, including police and child-welfare personnel, he photographed people and took physical measurements as part of racial research.
Abel later became associated with Nazi racial science. His work attempted to classify people according to supposed biological and racial characteristics.
The presence of this material in the exhibition was deeply disturbing because it placed Scottish Gypsy Travellers within a much wider European history of racial classification, eugenics and attempts to decide which people were valuable and which needed to be controlled or erased. (Scottish Government)
Traditional work was steadily removed
Gypsy Traveller families traditionally survived through seasonal work, hawking, tinsmithing, forestry, agriculture, fishing, horse dealing, scrap collection and other mobile trades.
Changes in laws, licensing systems and employment practices made many of these forms of work increasingly difficult or unlawful.
The community was then stereotyped as idle or dependent after institutions had restricted the work and movement on which families relied.
“Canada’s Little Slaves”
One of the most painful displays at Nackens Now and Then was headed:
Canada’s Little Slaves
It told the story of three girls—Margaret, Mary and Gracie—from a Scottish Traveller family.
Their parents were described as a pedlar and a basket maker.
Family research by Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly traced how the girls were removed from their mother, placed in institutional care and eventually sent by Quarriers to Canada. They passed through Fairknowe, the organisation’s receiving home in Brockville, Ontario, before being placed into domestic service. (Crowdfunder UK)
The term “Canada’s Little Slaves” has been used to describe British Home Children who were sent overseas and used as cheap domestic or agricultural labour.
Some were treated well. Many others experienced exploitation, violence, loneliness and the permanent loss of connection to their families.
The St Andrews research confirms that Barnardo’s and Quarriers operated child-migration programmes. Quarriers sent 6,987 children to Canada, although not all were Gypsy Travellers. The researchers could identify only a very small number of Traveller children because institutions did not routinely record their ethnicity. The report specifically directs readers to Dr Tammi-Connelly’s family research for further evidence. (Scottish Government)
That distinction is important.
We do not yet know exactly how many Scottish Gypsy Traveller children were sent overseas.
The missing figure does not prove that very few were taken.
It shows how thoroughly identity could disappear from the record.
A child might be recorded as poor, neglected, orphaned or destitute—but not as a Scottish Gypsy Traveller.
Their name might change.
Their siblings might be separated.
Their family might never be told where they had gone.
Later generations would then have no clear record connecting that child to their community.
As Professor Watson said at the exhibition:
“What is the easiest way of getting rid of someone’s identity? You don’t record it.”
The gaps in these archives are not empty spaces.
They are people.
How widespread was it?
The St Andrews researchers found evidence of at least one form of forced or discriminatory housing policy in 27 of Scotland’s 32 present-day council areas.
The report describes the Tinker Experiments as a national collection of policies and actions rather than a handful of isolated local mistakes. (St Andrews News)
“The Tinker Experiment was not just a few huts in Perthshire. It was much wider.”
The buildings differed from one area to another.
Some families lived in huts, Some were placed on camps or official sites, Some entered isolated council housing, Others experienced the Experiment through education, policing, welfare or child removal.
But the intended direction was often the same:
Stop travelling.
Break up extended communities.
Move families into settled accommodation.
Separate children from cultural influences.
Absorb the next generation into settled society.
The researchers also warned that they had uncovered only part of the history.
Records were missing, incomplete or inaccessible. Some institutions never recorded what happened in a way that allows families to be identified today.
Absence from an archive does not necessarily mean nothing happened.
It may mean that nobody in power believed the family’s story was worth preserving.
Bobbin Mill: the Experiment is still living history
For Shamus and Roseanna McPhee, this is not distant or academic history.
It is their family history and the place in which they grew up.
Their great-grandmother, Helen Johnstone, née MacDonald, was among the early families placed at Bobbin Mill in 1947, although the family had lived traditionally in the area long before the settlement was created.
Their great-grandfather James “Jimmy” Johnstone served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders during the First World War.
He fought for his country, was wounded and returned to service.
Yet after the war, he and his family belonged to a community that the same country continued to treat as inferior and unwanted.
Gypsy Traveller men were British enough to fight and die.
Women were expected to contribute through farm work, forestry and munitions.
But their families could still be segregated, forcibly settled and threatened with the removal of their children.
That contradiction was captured in the title of one piece of work displayed at the exhibition:
Heroes… Or Raj Hantle?
I did not need anybody to translate those words for me. I was brought up with the terminology.
Raj Hantle means “crazy people”.
Seeing familiar words in the middle of an exhibition carrying so much grief and resistance made my eyes smile.
But the title also contains a bitter question.
Were these men heroes—or were they the “crazy people” for fighting for a country that continued to persecute their families?
The smaller voices carrying the biggest histories
The national report and formal apologies matter.
But they did not appear because powerful institutions suddenly decided to investigate themselves.
They happened because Scottish Gypsy Traveller people refused to stop speaking.
Shamus and Roseanna McPhee spent years preserving documents, family memories and testimony.
Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly researched the removal and overseas migration of children.
The late Kevin McKay, Ken MacLennan, Colin Turbett, Clare McGillivray of Making Rights Real and other community members and allies helped move the campaign forward.
These may be considered smaller voices because they do not have large organisations, communications teams or substantial budgets behind them.
They are not smaller in knowledge, importance or courage.
Too often, institutions arrive after communities have spent years carrying out unpaid research.
They publish reports and receive recognition, while the people who preserved the history continue struggling for resources and visibility.
At the exhibition, an archive manager named Paula said:
“People must have access to their own history.”
She was right.
But access is not enough.
Communities must also have the resources to preserve, interpret and present that history themselves.
The apologies
On 25 June 2025, First Minister John Swinney formally apologised on behalf of Scotland.
He said:
“The Tinker Experiments should not have happened.”
He also acknowledged that an apology should be the beginning rather than the end of the conversation. (Scottish Government)
The Church of Scotland apologised on the same day for historic wrongs carried out in its name. Perth and Kinross Council later apologised in January 2026. (The Church of Scotland)
These apologies matter.
Families fought for years to hear them.
They place what happened into the official record and make denial more difficult.
But an apology cannot return a stolen childhood.
It cannot reconnect every separated family.
It cannot restore years spent in cold and inadequate accommodation.
It cannot automatically rebuild cultural knowledge that was interrupted or lost.
And it cannot be treated as the conclusion.
In January 2026, the Scottish Human Rights Commission published No Man’s Land, a human-rights assessment of the Tinker Experiment.
It concluded that the harm is not only historical. Survivors and descendants continue to experience unsafe housing, cultural loss, stigma, discrimination, poor health and barriers in education and employment.
The Commission called for transformative reparations, including financial compensation, rehabilitation, cultural investment, community development, further investigation into harm to children and culturally appropriate accommodation. It also said redress should be designed and led by victims. (scottishhumanrights.com)
As Professor Ali Watson said at the exhibition:
“An apology is just the first step.”
Why should everyone know?
We should know because this did not happen hundreds of years ago to a community that no longer exists.
Many of the people affected are still alive.
Their children and grandchildren are living with the consequences.
Some families remain on sites created through these policies.
We should know because this history explains why many Gypsy Traveller families distrust councils, police, schools, social workers and other institutions.
That distrust did not come from nowhere.
It was created through experience.
We should know because the language of the past still echoes today.
Communities are still described as problems to be managed.
Roadside life is still criminalised.
Planning systems still make culturally appropriate accommodation extremely difficult to secure.
Parents may still fear that being open about their housing, culture or mental health will bring judgement rather than support.
We should know because policies described as being in people’s “best interests” can cause immense harm when the people affected have no power in designing them.
Most of all, we should know because every community has a right to its own history.
Not only the history written about it by governments, churches, police and councils.
The knowledge held by families, elders, artists and small community organisations matters too.
Was this only happening in Scotland?
The term Tinker Experiment refers to the particular history uncovered in Scotland.
But the laws and policies were developed before devolution, when Scotland was governed through Westminster and the Scottish Office. Ideas about settlement, child welfare, education and assimilation did not stop neatly at the border.
The St Andrews research itself refers to an English scheme in Surrey that was considered an example for supervised Traveller settlement in Perthshire. It also shows that laws regulating caravans and traditional stopping affected Gypsy Travellers across Britain. (Scottish Government)
This does not yet prove that one identical, centrally organised Tinker Experiment operated throughout England. But it gives us every reason to ask more questions. Was the Tinker Experiment really the beginning of this history—or simply the point at which one part of it became visible in the records?
At a time when policies and ideas travelled across Britain, were similar programmes of forced settlement, segregated accommodation, child removal and cultural assimilation happening in England?
Were those stories overlooked because historians and archivists did not consider Gypsy and Traveller lives worth recording?
Do you or your family remember being forced to settle?
Were relatives placed in huts, camps, segregated sites or isolated council housing?
Were children threatened with care, removed from the family or sent abroad?
Did your relatives leave Scotland for England because of what was happening?
Please share those stories with us.
The smaller voices—those held within families and rarely written down—may contain the missing pieces of a much bigger history.
