Jubilee of the Gypsy Lore Society

Abstract

THIS year the Gypsy Lore Society celebrates the fiftieth year of its existence. The occasion was marked by a jubilee dinner on June 11, over which Lady Arthur Grosvenor (president, 1913–14) pre-sided in the unavoidable absence of the president, Mr. Augustus John, and at which fifty-five members and guests were present. The Gypsy Lore Society was founded in 1888 by Charles Godfey Leland (“Hans Breitmann”) and David MacRitchie of Edinburgh. Leland's enthusiasm for gypsy studies, characteristically overpowering, dated from 1870, when he settled in England for a period of years. Although he wrote several books on the gypsies between 1873 and 1882, it was not until 1888, three years after his return to England, that his desire to promote a wider interest in the investigation of the gypsy problem took practical shape in the foundation of a society devoted to that object ; and indeed its formation was owing largely to his association with the organizing ability and scholarly habit of mind of MacRitchie, to whom also was due, with John Sampson and R. A. S. Macfie, the resuscitation of the Society in 1907, when it had been dormant for a period of years through lack of funds. Among the eleven original members, who formed the nucleus of the Society, were H. T. Crofton, Elizabeth Robbins Pennell, Leland's niece, famous as an interpreter of Ibsen's heroines on the stage, the Archduke Joseph of Austria, a fluent Romani linguist, Sir Richard Burton, the famous, if difficult, orientalist and traveller, Paul Bataillard, F. H. Groome, most eminent of the early students of gypsy folk-lore, and Walter Herries Pollock ; while one of the earliest adherents in the United States was Mary Alicia Owen, later known as an authority on the folk-lore of the American Indian, whose early studies of the traditional tales and beliefs of the negroes of Missouri, if modelled on the “Uncle Remus” of Georgia of Joel Chandler Harris, were directly inspired by Leland's encouragement.