five - Friends, Families and Travellers: organising to resist extreme moral panics

Summary

Who are New Travellers?

This chapter seeks to give insights into the early development of the support group Friends, Families and Travellers, which began to organise around the needs of ‘New Travellers’ in 1994, but in the 21st century has put its experience and expertise at the service of the whole GRT community. Its transition, from its original name ‘Friends and Families of Travellers’ (1996) to its present name ‘Friends, Families and Travellers’, perhaps encapsulates the transition from an ‘external’ help and support network to an organisation that places a greater focus on community participation.

‘New Travellers’ built a very specific identity and image during the 1960s, something that was rather more than the trickle of individuals and families into commercial nomadic lifestyles as opportunities arise, such as itinerant workers following the agricultural seasons such as the hop picking in Kent, or various recycling opportunities that arose during the Industrial Revolution. In time, some of these people have assimilated into the existing Gypsy and Traveller communities. But over the course of the past couple of generations, this trickle turned at times into more of a steady stream, motivated in part by economic changes and also in part by ideology.

The mostly young people in this movement, in the literal sense of the term, have often been called New Age Travellers (Lowe and Shaw, 1993; Stangroome, 1993), though seldom by themselves, as this term was more of a media construct. The participants were more likely to refer to themselves as New Travellers, or more likely just as Travellers. Here we shall use the name New Travellers, to distinguish this group from the traditional communities. There has been very little integration and they have remained quite distinct from the Gypsy and Irish Traveller communities, who have tended to regard them with suspicion. While traditional Travellers tend to travel in extended, multi-generational family groups, New Travellers, at least in the earlier years, have generally chosen to travel in quite large groups of unrelated individuals and nuclear family units, with the vast majority being of a similar age, typically from the late teens to early thirties. This is of course a generalisation – there will be some who do not fit this pattern.