SCALDIE n

In the language of the Scottish Travellers a Scaldie is a person from the settled, house- dwelling population. The definition given for Scaldie in the Dictionary of the Scots Language ( HYPERLINK "http://www.dsl.ac.uk" www.dsl.ac.uk) is, “An unfledged young bird, a nestling” but the evidence for this meaning is sparse with only one citation from Ulster in S MacManus’ Land of the O’Friel’s published in 1903: “I got . . . a linnet’s nest with scaldies.” So the Travellers’ meaning of Scaldie may be a development from this.

The settled population were viewed with wariness by the Traveller community and, of course, the Travellers were viewed likewise by non-travellers. An example from The Yellow on the Broom by Betsy Whyte writing in 1979 gives a flavour of this mutual suspicion when camping in the berry fields: “We children and young people were given strict orders not to go near the tents of the scaldies (the lower-class town dwellers) as many of them were sure to be hotching with vermin or consumptive...”. Betsy Whyte however did acknowledge that the Scaldies had their own problems: “If no money was coming into a house the scaldies suffered much more than we did, as few of them could turn their hand to anything that would bring in a few coppers”.

Jess Smith writing in 2012 in her history of the Travelling peoples, The Way of the Wanderers: The Story of Travellers in Scotland, recalls when both Travellers and Scaldies made a living in the summer months also in the berry fields: “During the Glasgow Fair Fortnight many came from there to make a few extra shillings at the berries, Perth scaldies (our name for non-tinker folk), caveys from Caithness (so-called because of folk- tales about the last of the Vikings hiding in caves at Caithness)...”

Today I wonder how many of the now, mostly settled, Traveller community would call non-Travellers Scaldies.

Scots Word of the Week is written by Pauline Cairns Speitel of Scottish Language Dictionaries