A gipsy’s curse

Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough 23 September 1891

Mrs Hall was having a bad day. The owner of a travelling doll-stall was attending the Crossgates Show in a fairly well-to-do area of Leeds. Also at the show was Mrs White – “a gipsy-looking woman”, as the papers claimed – who ran a pea stall. No one knew what happened next, but Mrs White accused Mrs Hall of using “threatening language” and had her brought up before the magistrate. Mrs Hall claimed that, after an argument broke out between the two women, Mrs White had shouted: “The damnation curse would fall on her, her child, and her husband” – and that since then Mrs Hall had lost her baby, and her husband had been in the infirmary.

Mrs White, dressed in a brightly coloured dress and “wearing a large resplendent hat to match”, quickly took the floor and, declaring that a “wordy warfare” had taken place, accused Mrs Hall of threatening her life. The judge, perhaps afraid of Mrs White’s alleged curses, found in the latter’s favour and bound over Mrs Hall for the sum of £5 and ordered her to stay out of trouble for the next six months. News story sourced from britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and rediscovered by Fern Riddell. Fern regularly appears on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking