Dr John Sampson, the leading British authority on Gypsies in the early twentieth century, was essentially the product of Victorian Liverpool in its heyday, when it was the crossroads between the regions of the British Isles, the meeting-place of Irish, Scots, Welsh and English, and the chief link between Britain and America. Every year hundreds of thousands of Europeans sailed from Liverpool: whole communities of Germans, Dutch and Scandinavians settled in the city to profit from the transatlantic trade. The growth of the docks along the Mersey, with miles of quays, forests of masts and queues of sailing ships and steamships, provided, as the French historian Hippolyte Taine wrote, ‘one of the greatest spectacles of the whole world’. The docks provided all kinds of unconventional jobs and opportunities, legal and illegal, regular or fitful, and attracted every variety of human flotsam and jetsam, including tinkers, mumpers and Gypsies. The chaos and squalor of nineteenth-century Liverpool – ‘that black hole’, as the American consul Nathaniel Hawthorne called it – became notorious. The contrast between rich and poor was shocking to visitors from the south of England. In 1884 a correspondent from The Times described ‘the hordes of the ragged and the wretched men and women in the cruellest grip of poverty, little children with shoeless feet, bodies pinched’. At the same time ‘the superb carriages of the rich, and their freights of refined and elegant ladies, threaded their way among sections of the population so squalid and miserable that my heart ached at the sight of them’ (cited in Sampson 1997: 12).

It was in this city of contrasts that my grandfather, John Sampson, was brought up, in a middle-class family struggling on the edge of poverty. He had been born in 1862, in Schull in County Cork, Ireland. His father James Sampson, a prosperous and cultured Cornish mining engineer, had married a formidable Irishwoman, Sarah Macdermott. But soon after John's birth, James lost all his money when a bank in which he was a shareholder crashed with unlimited liability. He came to Liverpool in 1871 but fell ill and died the next year, leaving very little money: his widow had to care for their nine-year-old son John and three other children.