Article by Anthony Pasmore in ‘New Forest Notes’, New Milton Advertiser and Times, 05 April 2026

A Gypsy’s view of life in the Forest

Some time ago I received a request for permission to include, in a forthcoming publication, an extract from one of my late father’s books. The subject of the extract was the great freeze of 1962-3. I was happy to agree and thought no more about the matter.

Last month I received a copy of the new book – Living in a Kenner (house): My New Forest Romani Gypsy Family by Heather Cooper. If this was perhaps a book I would not have gone out of my way to buy, it was certainly a welcome change from the noxious stream of local authority reports and consultations from which I usually suffer. This was a book that I could actually read. It will be available from the New Forest Heritage Centre from 11th April.

I have to say straight away that I was brought up at a time when the Forest community lived in a state of constant cold war with the local Gypsy camps. Keepers, agisters and police were always trying to limit the activities of those who lived in the half dozen or so compounds. Landowners and residents nearby were in a perpetual state of fear of expected depredations on their property, real or imagined. Ms Cooper’s book therefore gives a rare opportunity to reflect on those days from the opposite side of the social fence which divided the Forest. Her story is derived largely from information supplied by her parents, who were raised in the Shave Green camp, although she herself was born after the compounds were closed down.

The book is a mixture of verse and stories covering life in the camps in the first half of the 20th century and then following her own family and others as they settled into, or struggled with, more conventional life after the 1960s. I am no judge of poetry, so I turned at once to the remaining text.

The Shave Green camp, as it was called, was in fact located in old sand pits on Brockishill, just west of the A337 half way between Lyndhurst to Cadnam. Why it should have been so named is unclear as Shave Green itself is actually nearly a mile further north.

Ms Cooper gives a vivid picture of life in the camp with all its difficulties and hardships, but also a great sense of community and mutual help amongst the residents. There was, for example, no water supply and water had to be collected from a tap a mile away. It follows, of course, that there was no modern sanitation. Accommodation was in flimsy huts made out of poles and fabric or, more luxuriously, in old vehicles. Cooking was in improvised stoves made out of old metal drums and the author tells us that remarkably good meals were produced.

The report of the New Forest Committee of 1947 describes the camps as then hardly reaching the standard of the Stone Age and that is not inconsistent with Ms Cooper’s account.

In those early post-war days, I lived very close to the Shave Green camp and, no doubt like most of the local children, I was warned to keep well away from Brockishill – especially when on my pony. I think this warning had more to do with the quantities of broken glass and sharp metal objects lying about than any direct threat to my safety. I followed the instruction to the letter and not until the camp had closed down did I see these dangers for myself.

Even as late as my early interest in Forest matters, complaints about Shave Green and the other camps came regularly before the Verderers. In 1951, Mr OT Price, a noted hunting gentleman, complained to the court of wire, six feet above the ground, strung between trees in the camp and potentially lethal to horsemen. Mr Terrance Despard of Bartley Manor was a regular complainant about alleged violations of his property by camp residents.

Ms Cooper sees these conflicts through entirely different eyes and that makes her writing unusual and historically valuable. Perhaps her view of Romani life is a little over-rosy in places, just as the recorded opinions of local people may be an exaggeration of the evils of the camp, but this was all a long time ago. Still, she does not shy away from noting some of the more bizarre aspects of camp and post-camp life. It was always alleged that when some residents of the Forest camps were re-housed in nearby villages, they used their new baths for storing coal. I thought this was probably a myth, and certainly the author does not mention it. She does, on the other hand, record the activities on one re-housed woman who was discovered using her WC for washing clothes in and extolling the virtues of this sanitary fitting as a valuable washing machine. Perhaps any of us might have done the same after half a lifetime trudging a mile each day for a meagre water supply.

To buy the book click on the book cover