The virgin and the gypsy

Jan Morris delves into the family history of a neo-gypsy philanderer: The Scholar Gypsy by Anthony Sampson, John Murray, pounds 16

Anthony Sampson has always been a surprising man. Westminster, ChristChurch and Royal Navy, he was an unlikely editor of the irrepressible black magazine Drum in the South Africa of the 1950s. The son of a lifelong ICI company man, his streak of subtle irreverence, even puckishness, has given unexpected excitement to his best-selling works about political economy and big business. Even so it comes as a shock to discover, from this most delightful of his books, that he is the grandson of a neo-gypsy philanderer whose pagan funeral ceremony made the front pages of the Daily Mirror.

I say "neo-gypsy" because John Sampson (1862-1931) was not merely a supreme authority on Romany language and culture, but so dearly wished to be a gypsy himself that he spent long periods of his life wandering and roistering among the gypsy families of Wales. He was the first Librarian of the young University College of Liverpool, but this did not inhibit him: on the contrary, the work of scholarship which arose from his eccentric meanderings, Sampson's Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales, made him an academic celebrity of European stature.

He was by no means unique in his passion for the gypsy life. Philology was all the rage when he was a young man, encouraging a new interest in the origins and nature of the gypsies, while George Borrow's classic books about the Romanies had created a cult following. This was popularly personified by Augustus John, a lifelong friend of Sampson's, and it was given some formal status by the Gypsy Lore Society (a body of such lasting and eclectic influence that when, in 1953, I wrote a slapdash article about the gypsies for The Times, I was taken aback to discover that the paper's famously ascetic editor, Sir William Haley, was an enthusiastic member).

So grand-pere Sampson rambled incongruously and colourfully through life, assiduous in his University duties, indefatigable in his studies of the Romany language, addicted to the wind on the heath. His blamelessly conventional wife Margaret was induced to go and live, with their three children, in an isolated Welsh village with gypsy associations: and there at weekends and in the holidays Sampson would bring his mixed bag of friends, male and female - artists, scholars, researchers and lots of gypsies, who sang, drank, played harps and fiddles and generally lived it up in and out of Sampson's gypsy caravan "Esmeralda".

They called him "The Rai" - the Gentleman Gypsy - and Anthony Sampson portrays him with an endearing mixture of affection, scepticism and astonishment, with a touch of reproach thrown in. He was certainly a rum fellow to have as a granddad, and the pictures in the book, showing him amongst a gallimaufry of friends, colleagues and boldly whiskered nomads, are oddly disturbing. In a fine drawing by August John, when the Rai was about 40, he looks your ideal Arnoldian Scholar gypsy: unshaven, unkempt, with a gleam of yearning in his eye and a properly poetic expression of eager tristesse. By the time he is 65, though, and ready to pose for a formal photograph, something much more enigmatic appears. He wears pince-nez now, holds a pipe in his hand and is fairly portly; but his tie is skew-whiff and he smiles at the cameraman in a curiously self-amused, secretive and ambiguous way.

This is perhaps because he was by then a bigamist. Much-loved by his family and friends, adored and admired by the gypsies, a stalwart of the University, a scholar revered by philologists everywhere, but a down-to- earth, two-timing bigamist. Even Anthony Sampson, it seems, was surprised to discover this disconcerting circumstance when he set out to explore his grandfather's life. He had long thought there was something queer about the old boy. There was his own father's reluctance to talk about him. There was the unexplained "Aunt Mary" who sometimes turned up at the family home. Rumours of loose living gave spice to the great scholar's reputation. And it is not everyone's grandfather whose ashes are scattered on a Welsh mountainside to a recitation by Augustus John, smoking a cigarette, and the music of gypsy fiddles and harps - "twanging a plaintive melody", as one reporter put it.

Anthony Sampson sub-titles his book "The Quest for a Family Secret", and much of it is based upon a long trawl through the archives of the University of Liverpool, but to be honest it is not much of a mystery story. I guessed the truth very early on, and even identified the bigamous wife long before the book's denouement. This does not matter in the least. It is a lovely book, full of fun, colour and surprise. The lost world of the rural gypsy is beautifully evoked, and incidental pleasures abound, from the soldiers' version of Tipperary ("It's the wrong way to tickle Mary") to the roster of knife-grinders, taverners and hurdy-gurdy men who frequented the Liverpool underworld of the 1880s.

Of course the legal Mrs Sampson was upset to discover that he had married somebody else, too - who would not be, deposited in Betws-Gwerful-Goch while your eminent husband sported himself under an assumed name with a research assistant in Liverpool? Anthony Sampson's father, the Rai's only son (a decorated and much-wounded hero, by the way, of World War One), seems to have been sadly affected by the liaison, which he never revealed to his own children. But such was the Rai's evident charm that he remained in friendly enough contact with his true wife until the day he died, and the mysterious "Aunt Mary", who turned out to be his illegitimate daughter by the Other Woman, pursued a well-balanced and successful scholarly career of her own.

As for the readers of this book, I defy anyone to think ill of old John Sampson for long. He was your true romantic. He loved things free and wild and individual, and he did lasting honour to the gypsy nation by studying its language and its culture with such heartfelt scholarly devotion. Anthony Sampson says that the Rai was sharing "the last fling of the Romantic movement before the 20th century closed in upon it", but I think he would have made himself quite at home in our own times. He would have climbed the trees with the road protesters, he would laugh with Eddie Izzard, and he would surely have been in his element in the company of his grandson Anthony, drinking brandy and talking subversion with the merry black wits and bravos of Johannesburg.