Ever wondered how travellers afford nice cars, lavish weddings and designer clothes, well I have, it’s through bare knuckle fighting, where men can earn thousands of pounds if they beat their component. And these fights are ugly, the only rules no pushing, grabbing or giving up, unless you want to have a bruised ego.
This isn’t the only unusual tradition of travellers, according to last night’s My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding- from the perspective of the male, who consider shopping, the home and all that is in it, their children included, the women’s responsibility.
One man who embodies this is Paddy (Pictured) who runs a traveller site in Salford on behalf on the council. However he makes his real money from concreting and in the past fighting.
As one of the more well off travellers he lives in a mobile home with his wife, ‘woman’, decorated in the ‘versace look’, and buys a new car twice a year. At the moment he is driving a white sports car. The man even his has initials on the gate of his home and etched into the entrance of the trailer park ground. But despite this, you feel some empathy for Paddy, who has fathered ten children but only half of survived, of course he does have his 70 odd godchildren. Fourteen years ago his eldest son, then aged 18, died in a car crash with his cousin, something that appears to have hit Paddy particularly hard. But in the traveller tradition they celebrate the life of the dead with a memorial service on the anniversary of the dead each year. Their service consists of lots of drinking and playing their son’s music out loud.
At the other end of the scale is Violet Ann, a Romany traveller from Leicestershire, who unlike many girls from her community has been working for the past five years at a hotel, her manager did not know she was a traveller. She gives up her independence to marry at 22, considered old by travellers, which means moving 100 miles away from the family home (a house) and leaving her old life behind, something she finds hard to accept.
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