Markeaton Park: Baked hedgehogs and the watercress-picker

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Gipsies baking hedgehogs rolled in clay, West End kids camping by the brook and Tommy the watercress-picker were just some of the characters who frequented Markeaton Park in the 1930s – as Sam Bates, of Derby, recalls.

I USED to play around Markeaton Brook all the time as a lad. In the summer, there was an old boy called Tommy Donk, who was always there picking watercress out of the brook to sell.

He was from the West End. I can see him now. He carried a big, square, cane basket. He was fairly small, with white hair and moustache and metal-rimmed glasses.

He was always smiling and was usually paddling in the brook with either his boots or his white plimsolls hanging round his neck.

If he left them on the bank, the kids would run off with them while he was in the water and he had to go searching for them. He had so many holes in the toes of his boots and his plimsolls that you could see his toenails.

During the summer holidays, there used to be crowds of kids, 20 or 30, usually from the West End, at Markeaton, because it was handy for them.

They would camp on a bit of spare ground between the brook and allotments in Markeaton Lane. Most had no tents. They had old blankets, sheets, sacks and bits of old tarpaulin. For tent poles, their mums provided old clothes props or someone’s old bean pole, and they tied them down with old washing lines.

To transport all this lot, they used old prams and pushchairs, some with one wheel missing.

It used to take them all morning to get there and get their tents up. The first job was to make a fire. I think toast and tea was the main meal of the day. Usually, in the late afternoon, especially if it went dark or if it thundered or rained, they would start to take off for home.

They would run, pushing the old prams and pushchairs down Kedleston Road. The odd wheel or the string that held the old blankets in place would break, or the little kid riding on top of the pram would fall off.

But what used to fascinate me was when the gypsies used to camp near the brook in Markeaton Lane. They were real gypsies. There were usually about three vans and ponies.

They all had dark brown complexions and the women had black curly hair and gold earrings.

I used to watch them making clothes pegs out of branches of the willows on the bank of the stream.

They always had a fire going outside for cooking. They had a three-legged iron frame over the top of the wood fire, and a big, black iron pot bubbling hanging from it, bubbling away over the fire.

The meal was usually rabbit stew, as gypsies always had snares and dogs. They also used to cook hedgehogs.

They didn’t skin them. They used to get about half a saucepan of wet clay or mud, roll the dead hedgehog in it so it was like a ball of mud, and put it in the embers of the fire until it was baked.

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This article is from the Derby Evening Telegraph and is reproduced online here.