Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 16, 1998

Under the title “The tartan tinkers who turned into the real-life Deliverance Clans and brought terror and evil to every American state”, the Scottish newspaper, The Sunday Mail, on 22 November 1998 refers to criminal groups in the United States which originated in Scotland. The author Maggie Hall, writing from Washington DC, focused on the plight of Patsy Hart. She lives in daily fear for her life after having “rescued her two small boys from the horrors of life with the Con Clans”.

However, she believes it worthwhile if other children are saved from “the Deliverance-style inbreeding and incest of the degenerate tartan tinkers”.

These people are “degenerate Scots Americans” whose “secrecy and cunning put them virtually beyond the law”. According to Patsy Hart, Con Clan girls are married off at twelve to teenage cousins. So many deformed and mentally retarded children are born that the Clan, also known as the Travellers, are seeking “fresh meat”. Patsy Hart was offered £75,000 for her sons a day after marrying a Clansman.

“These families of Scots and Irish decent have created their own Gaelic-based ianguage called Cant … And with their ill-gotten millions they build Southfork-style mansions — and then live in caravans parked in ihe backyards …

“The Scots Con Clans were foundcd hy Robert Logan Williamson, who landed as immigrant in the 1890s. His only qualifications to help him prosper in the New World were the survival skills he’d used as a tinker plying his dubious trade around Glasgow and Edinburgh …

“In the Fifties, a trball elder called “Uncle Isaac Williamson used to claim “We can trace our blood back to the Picts” … The Williamson Clan became such a target for the police that most changed their last name.”

The name “Con Clan” comes from the fact that men clan members practice home-improvement scams.

The article cites many types of crime but states that a pending court case could be the first to end in one of the man being convicte.

Two features of this piece are remarkable. One is the fact that a Scottish newspaper should carrying such references to a Scottish group without conducting a little reaearch into the Scottish Travelling communities which have been such a fruitfull source for folklore collectors.

The second that the description of the travellers should be in terms which are close to racism. Assume all the accusations are true, would members of any other ethnic group have been described in such hostile terms in a mainstream newspaper?