The collections of ‘Gypsy’ materials at Liverpool University Library comprise two separate but interrelated sections: the Gypsy Lore Society Archive and the Scott Macfie Gypsy Collections. The archive of the Society records not only its members’ scholarship, but also Robert Andrew Scott Macfie's phenomenal powers of organization and persuasion; Macfie's ‘personal’ collection, given on his death in 1935, formed a nucleus for continuing donations from members of the Society and later additions. Together they document the interests, research, fieldwork and publications of the main figures in the Gypsy Lore Society from before its revival at Liverpool in 1907 up until the Society's move from Liverpool on the death of Dora Yates in 1974.

The Gypsy Lore Society

In November 1887, W.J. Ibbetson suggested in Notes and Queries that ‘the Anglo-American Romany Ryes [Gypsy gentlemen] should form themselves into a club or correspondence society, for the purpose of compiling and publishing by subscription as complete a vocabulary and collection of songs as may be attainable at this date, and also of settling a uniform system of transliteration for Romany words, which is a great desideratum’ (Ibbetson 1887: 397). In May of the following year, David MacRitchie, a qualified accountant from Edinburgh who had given up his profession in favour of intellectual pursuits, sent out a circular announcing the newly formed Gypsy Lore Society: ‘The President is Mr. C.G. Leland, the Vice-President Mr. H.T. Crofton; and the following have already promised their support:- Mrs Pennell, the Archduke Joseph of Austria, Sir Richard Burton, Monsieur Paul Bataillard, Mr. F.H. Groome, Mr. J. Pincherle, Mr. Walter Herries Pollock, and Mr. W.J. Ibbetson’.

This first period of the Society lasted four years and produced the three volumes of the ‘old series’ of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, but by 1892 lack of funds had paralysed its activities. The Society fell into abeyance for fourteen years and many of the original contributors had died before MacRitchie's determination to revive it, or ‘set the old vardo in motion once again’, as he put it in a letter of 31 December 1906, began to seem feasible.