Interview: Sheila Stewart - Setting the record straight for the travelling community

'DID I see the show? I watched every one of them! My reaction was that Channel 4 did not do any research into the travellers' way of life. It was terrible. They were on one subject and one subject only – money." Sheila Stewart, MBE, is on the edge of her seat describing how she felt, watching My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (BFGW), the four-part series that managed to outrage and astonish travellers and settled folk alike.

Stewart describes herself as "an unaccompanied traditional ballad singer, storyteller and author", and an ambassador for travelling culture. She sang before 300,000 people – including Pope John Paul II – in Bellahouston Park, and for former president Gerald Ford, during the United States' bicentennial celebrations. She has lectured on travellers' culture at Princeton and Harvard universities, and sat on the Secretary of State for Scotland's Advisory Committee on Travellers.

Her third book, A Traveller's Life, is just out, and the timing couldn't be better, given the curiosity about her way of life that was sparked by the telly programme. But, as she explains, they got it wrong right from the title.

"Travelling people have always been here. We're an ethnic group dating back to the 12th century, through the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. Gypsies came over in 1564 from India, and moved to different countries in Europe. The stragglers that were left came to England, but couldn't get to Scotland because we were fighting the English at the time.

We never had gypsies here. The people in the show never mentioned gypsies. They kept saying, 'We're travellers.'

"We were actually called tinkers. A tinker is a skilful man that makes tin pots and pans and plates and cups. The word tinker got very derogatory because long ago we moved about and never stayed in one place very long. That was in order to follow the work. We were the first ever to start recycling, with rags and scrap, and we did all the farmers' work for them. That is a true traveller."

Travellers in England and Ireland did campaign to be called gypsies, but they had a very specific agenda, she explains. "There was a clause in the Race Relations Act that protected gypsies but there was never a clause protecting tinker people or itinerants. They wanted to be protected, so they started calling themselves gypsies. But not in Scotland. We're a different ethnic group altogether.

"Two years ago I came in from America and as I was walking through Heathrow I saw a sign saying, 'Travellers' Lounge,'" She breaks off to laugh. "Everybody that travels is called a traveller now, so that word doesn't have any significance to me at all. I went back to the word tinker, because that gives us our status."

She found BFGW utterly alien. "That's not the way we live. And grabbing? (The show described how boys pull girls away from their friends] That never was here. It must be a modern term. Travellers never say things like that. In fact, travelling people in Scotland never got married. If you were on a site and you liked a guy and he liked you, what you did was you got together at night, and the two of you ran away. You stayed away a week, and when you came back you were married, because she was soiled. No other man would take her. So that was their marriage. Ministers wouldn't marry travelling people."

Stewart was born on July 7, 1937, in a stable at the back of a hotel in Blairgowrie. Her mother, Belle, was an acclaimed singer, as was her uncle, Donald. Stewart's father, Alec, was originally a piper and storyteller.

Belle, who went on to receive the British Empire Medal from the Queen, was born in a bow tent. "That's the way they grew up. Like Indians in wigwams, they were used to tents." But the family moved into a house after Belle's father died, in order to stay together. "My grandfather choked on drink and his vomit killed him. My granny was left with three small kids. If a tinker woman was found with three small kids and no husband, the authorities would come in and take the kids away. So my granny went up to the big house in Blairgowrie, and the owner gave her a house. Once she got into the house, the authorities couldn't come – though later they did take some of my cousins away to a home. As a girl I stayed with my granny, and I never knew anything else. But later on when we used to do the farm work, we stayed in tents."

Does she understand some of the prejudices? For instance, mention travellers, and people are quick to complain that they don't pay taxes, and that violence escalates when they're around. Shaking her head, she says, "But that's not right! My father was a rag dealer. He paid his self-employed stamps; he paid taxes. My father was in the army for six years and he fought for his country. He came out and took shellshock and had to go into an asylum. But the local people still didn't have any time for us. The only time they have time for us is because I won that." With a jerk of her thumb she points to her MBE.

Her book describes a life of grinding poverty that's nothing like the lavish excess displayed on the telly. But what about the message that a traveller woman's life holds few options? "That's what annoyed me.

Travelling men made the goods but it was the women who did the hawking, and they also read palms and things like that. The (show] said all they do is look after their man and clean. A load of nonsense. The woman was the person who made the money. They weren't well educated, I agree. None of them could read and write – men or women. Long ago, tinkers weren't allowed into the classrooms."

So, the community was discriminated against for lacking education, while also being denied that education? "That's right. We stayed in Rattray all our days, and when my father died in 1980, the minister here wouldn't bury him because he's not part of the congregation and didn't give money to the church. But they wouldn't let us into church."

Nevertheless, they are a spiritual people. "We had our own religion. We know there's a higher power. Every morning my granny would get her basket – she walked right round the glens to sell her wares – and when she opened the front door, she stood there and said, 'May God be foremost.' That means God come with me and protect me. We're not accepted by society, but God will accept us. Johnny Faa, from the Borders, was the first tinker man ever identified in Scotland. The myth of Johnny Faa was that he walked so far that he walked straight to the gates of heaven. So that means travellers will be accepted in heaven. That's the kind of preaching we have."

For all the hardships and the bullying, she's glad, ultimately, to have remained outside the mainstream, because that kept traveller culture intact. "We kept in a bubble of our own, and I got the ballads and the stories and the songs, the way of life. If we had blended in with society, that would have been lost. My kids are now blended in, and they're not interested.

"The stories are instructive. I tell the old folk tales of what happened long ago, and they're more or less for adults. Same with the ballads. My uncle Donald chose me to carry on the tradition because when I was two-and-a-half I sang him a song. He knew I was the one. I've sung to the Pope, at the White House, and to the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh. All of that is fantastic, but I'm still fighting for the travellers to be accepted. And I still need to. When I see shows like the one on Channel 4, it makes me boil. That is not the true way of travellers' life. That is mythical, like a fairytale. When will television say to themselves, 'We'd better put on a show that's true to life'?

"I worked with the Secretary of State for Scotland's advisory committee for about four years and I got a lot of the designated sites for travelling people in Scotland. I had to go to the councils and fight them to give me a piece of land to put the travellers on legally. I involved the travellers – usually they build sites without consulting them about what they want. The land is owned by the council so travellers pay something like 50 per week to live there. They provide their own caravans, but pay for electricity and pay council tax."

"It's just a community like I'm sitting in this community. I have lived in this house for around 12 years. For 55 years I have tried to get communities to see that we are not animals, we're human beings like them. If the Queen died and was cremated, and my mother died and was cremated, and the two urns were sitting there, could you tell one set of ashes from the other?"

• A Traveller's Life is out now from Birlinn, priced 9.99.