A rare honour
Gloria Buckley is the first English Romany woman to get an MBE. A rare honour for a woman who only employs common sense, reports Jake Bowers
Gloria and Trevor Buckley at the Queen's Birthday Honours
As she stepped out with her husband Trevor into the autumn sunlight on October 30th, she admitted that she still had one nagging fear. She says: “I still think that one day someone will come up to me and say who do you think you are?” But she’s only ever a target for people’s affection and praise. Her straight-talking, common-sense approach cuts through the dull debates about where Gypsies and Travellers should live like a scalpel, and it has won her fans across the east of England. So has her humour. Her one-liners disarm most people. “We’ve been debating the issue of where Gypsies and Travellers live for so long that we’ve all become master debaters!” she says with a smile. Her MBE, she claims, stands simply for “Mars Bar Eater”.
She is not a site manager in any classic sense of the term, but a welfare officer, community relations manager, media relations manager and all-round guardian angel, as well as being a mother of two sons. She sums it all up as “spinning the plates and cracking the whip - just like a magician.”
Today, she refers to all of her site residents as “my campers” as a holiday camp warden would. It’s done partly in jest, but to local residents who sometimes fear Gypsies near them, her sites are no more remarkable than a holiday camp.
When asked whether concerns expressed about Gypsies and Travellers are justified, she does not duck the issue, but is also blunt in return. “We are part of the human race, a microcosm, and there is good and bad in our community as there is everywhere else. I know people have fears and concerns. I have them too, but there are sites that are run properly, and where that happens, there isn’t a problem.”
“We have shown we can run these sites alongside towns and villages. We can integrate into the community and play our part in community life. We have shown we can do it.”
She’s intolerant of prejudice and points out that she could so easily judge the settled community for the crimes committed by one of their number, but she refuses to. She recalls Ian Huntley, the man from the settled community who killed two schoolgirls close to one of her sites in Suffolk. The painful memory of the Soham murderer, which horrified Britain is etched on her face. “That man now has a roof over his head and regular daily meals,” she added. “But my people get chased from place to place because some of them make a mess.”
“My people have a lot to offer the community,” adds Gloria. We have pride and respect and we believe in family. We were organic conservationists before people started bandying those words around as fashionable. We never take more than we need because that leads to greed. And this is the century when everyone will be coming back to their roots and to nature.”
She talks of her father and mother, and the natural wisdom they passed on to her.
“We knew about star formations and the changes in the moon. We could read the hedgerows and the countryside. My people are originally from Hampshire, where they bred horses. They followed the army trading with them, and blacksmithing, long before the army did it for themselves. They also travelled with the great artist Sir Alfred Munnings, and served the King and Queen.”
“For us community means common unity. When we pull onto a site for example, we put our strongest at the entrance, and our most vulnerable at the back to protect them. My mother and father taught us survival, and we have never forgotten that. We never starved.”
Now she wants to see real and urgent action to provide more permanent and temporary sites for Gypsies and Travellers. She says it is essential because “they give our families choices, opportunities and privileges we’ve never had before. We want our children to become what they can be, through choices of their own. If we teach them to read, they’ll read to learn. But we don’t let schooling interfere with learning,” she adds, quoting Mark Twain.
“I think my people need empowering because with that comes responsibility, accountability and liability. And because we have not had many stopping places, generations and generations of our children have been let down. These are children who could have had the same opportunities and choices as everyone else.”
She concludes: “All over the world, people are demanding to be understood, but many are not willing to understand. If they were, conflict of any kind would be over. One of the real shortages in the world today is human kindness.”
Listen to an interview with Gloria Buckley at the Kent Gypsy Arts Festival here