By Dr Violet Cannon, Proud Gypsy Traveller CIC
This report began with history.
But somewhere along the way, it became personal.
When I first started learning more about the Tinker Experiments, I thought I was trying to understand what had happened to Scottish Gypsy Traveller families. I knew it mattered. I knew it was serious. I knew it belonged in the public record.
What I did not fully understand was how much of it would reach into my own family story.
I am a Romani Gypsy woman with Scottish Gypsy Traveller ancestry on both sides. Like many of us, I have always carried pieces of family history that did not quite sit in a straight line. Names. Places. Movements. Fragments. Silences. Stories half told. Things known but not explained.
Then I met Roseanna McPhee.
Because of Roseanna, Shamus and Dr Lynne and others who have carried this history for so long, some of those pieces began to join together.
Roseanna did not hand me a neat story.
She handed me a file.
A 315-page archival file that she had found almost by accident.
And that file helped expose something families themselves had not been told.
Roseanna has described growing up on one of the Tinker Experiment sites without knowing that was what it was. But there is an important part of that story she wants recorded accurately.
Although Roseanna had found the 315-page archival file, she did not read it in its entirety until 2017. At the time, her focus was Bobbin Mill and trying to improve the conditions there. She had been extracting the references that related directly to Bobbin Mill, without yet seeing the much wider picture contained within the records.
Shamus McPhee did read the file from beginning to end in 2017. What he saw convinced him that Bobbin Mill could be part of something much bigger, and that further research was essential. His subsequent paper, The Uglier Side of Bonnie Scotland, published by Hipatia Press in the International Journal of Roma Studies, helped persuade the Scottish Government that independent research was needed. That research would go on to validate what Roseanna, Shamus and others had been saying. Without that work, Roseanna believes there would have been no apology.
In 2017, Roseanna also enlisted the help of Dr Rhona Ramsay, who was then studying for her doctorate. On 29 November 2018, Roseanna was part of a delegation that met with the Equalities Minister and asked for an apology.
Even then, Roseanna says she did not understand the full enormity of what had happened: how widespread the Tinker Experiment had been, how many different strands it had, or how many institutions and other actors had been involved.
She had suspicions. But she was fighting for Bobbin Mill.
It was only with the publication of the St Andrews archival research on 25 June 2025 that, in Roseanna’s words, the wider picture became “crystal clear”.
I think that distinction matters.
Finding a record is not necessarily the same as immediately understanding everything it contains. Roseanna was living with the consequences, fighting to improve conditions and trying to make sense of the evidence in front of her. The scale of what she had uncovered only became visible piece by piece.
In some ways, that makes the story even more powerful. The history was not sitting neatly in one document waiting to be discovered. It had to be pieced together over years — by people asking questions, returning to archives, comparing records and refusing to stop looking.
That is what erasure does.
It does not simply hide history from the wider public.
It separates people from their own history.
It makes families doubt what they know. It turns harm into rumour and policy into personal shame. It leaves generations trying to explain what happened to them without access to the paperwork that explains what was being done.
That is why archives matter.
That is why community-led research matters.
And that is why What Was Taken? exists.
The report is finished. Now I want people to be able to hold it.
What Was Taken? Britain’s hidden story of Gypsy and Traveller assimilation, survival and repair – Beyond the Tinker Experiments has grown far beyond the piece of work I first imagined.
It brings together archival and published evidence, the work of campaigners and researchers, more than 60 conversations with Gypsy and Traveller people, and around 40 interviews undertaken with First Nations people during my research in the United States.
It looks at assimilation not simply as something that happened in one place or under one policy, but as a process: settlement, child removal, education, housing, policing, welfare, the loss of language and cultural knowledge, and the quieter pressure to become less visibly who we are.
It also asks what survived.
Because this cannot only be a story about what was done to us.
It has to be a story about the people who refused to disappear.
Before I put the full report online, I am trying to raise a relatively small amount of funding to have it professionally produced and printed.
There is something important to me about that.
So much of this history exists because somebody kept a piece of paper.
A government file. A letter. A photograph. A family document. A record somebody perhaps never expected us to find.
I want copies of What Was Taken? to exist physically too — to go into the hands of survivors and families, campaigners, policymakers, researchers, libraries and archives. I want copies sitting on shelves where they cannot simply disappear with a broken link or a changed website.
Once that is in place, the report will also be made publicly available through the Proud Gypsy Traveller website.
But even as I prepare to release it, something happened that reminded me why documenting this history still matters so much.
The fight over what happened is not over
On 6 October, Roseanna contacted me again.
She told me that, in a meeting the previous day, the Head of Equalities at the Scottish Government had, in her view, cast doubt on whether harm had been done at Bobbin Mill at all.
Roseanna has now made a complaint to the Scottish Human Rights Commission, has said that they will not attend further meetings until the matter has been investigated, and is asking for a formal written apology.
I want to be careful here. I was not in that meeting, and the Scottish Government should have the opportunity to account for what was said and what was meant.
But the fact that Roseanna left that conversation feeling that the harm experienced at Bobbin Mill was once again being questioned is important in itself.
Because this is a woman who grew up there.
A woman who spent years finding, reading and piecing together what the records were actually telling her.
A woman whose research helped drag this history into public view.
And she is still having to argue that the harm was real.
That stopped me in my tracks.
Because we have seen this pattern before.
The Romani Holocaust was denied, minimised and pushed to the edges of public memory for decades. Recognition did not arrive automatically because the evidence existed. Survivors had to speak. Families had to remember. Researchers had to find records. Campaigners had to fight for recognition.
Evidence existing somewhere in an archive is not the same thing as a society accepting what that evidence means.
That distinction matters.
Because denial is not always somebody standing up and declaring that something never happened.
Sometimes it is softer.
Was it really that bad?
Was that actually the intention?
Can we really say people were harmed?
Are we applying today’s standards to the past?
Do we have enough evidence?
And suddenly the people who lived through something find themselves having to prove it all over again.
Because Roseanna found the file
The Tinker Experiments did not emerge into public consciousness because institutions spontaneously decided to tell the story.
People fought for it.
Roseanna and Shamus McPhee have spent years telling the truth about Bobbin Mill and the Tinker Experiment. Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly and others have worked to bring histories of child removal and institutional intervention into public view. Researchers, campaigners, artists, human-rights organisations and, most importantly, families themselves have carried pieces of this history when official memory did not.
Some did it through archives.
Some through testimony.
Some through art.
Some through law and human rights.
Some through campaigning.
And some simply by refusing to be quiet.
That matters to me personally.
Roseanna helped me put together parts of my own story.
When someone trusts you with a truth that has already cost them so much, you have a responsibility not to flatten it, soften it or take ownership of it.
I have tried to hold that responsibility throughout What Was Taken?
The report is not the final word.
It cannot be.
The people who lived these histories must remain the authorities on their own lives.
But I hope it adds another piece of evidence. Another record. Another thing that cannot so easily be pushed back into the dark.
Because Roseanna found the file, more of us could begin finding the missing pieces.
Because survivors spoke, the silence was broken.
And perhaps the lesson from the Romani Holocaust, the Tinker Experiment and so many other buried parts of our history is this:
Evidence does not end denial. People refusing to let the evidence be buried does.
The report is nearly ready to leave my hands.
But the fight over what was taken — and who gets to say what happened — clearly isn’t over yet.