In 2008, an Early Day Motion was tabled by Julie Morgan MP and 70 other Members of Parliament to encourage recognition of the importance of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller history and culture. This chapter examines the changes that brought history to the fore as a subject within Traveller education and the tensions over the ‘ownership’ of history (from above, below, state, school or community), but argues that in the partnerships between Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (GRT), schools, libraries and other service providers, the Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month (GRTHM) provides a safe place within which critical narratives of the history of GRT groups can help in the reconstruction of more equal relationships.

The belief that history is an essential part of the curriculum in the improvement of the education of GRT communities is relatively recent. In the 1960s, Travellers and teachers alike believed that what was necessary to bring Traveller children, then widely and deliberately excluded from school altogether, into mainstream society was basic literacy and numeracy, and history was simply irrelevant to them. Across Europe at that time, the great majority of literate non-nomadic GRT still simply disguised, or at least downplayed, their identity in order to avoid racism, whether in the white-collar occupations of the capitalist world or the intelligentsias of state socialism, unless they were also part of culture or folklore industries, where just occasionally Romani ethnicity could be a plus. Kalinin (2000, 2010) and Lemon (2001) show how a private ethnic solidarity could help Roma succeed on an individual basis within the communist bureaucracy. Those still nomadic in the West often disguised their occasional literacy to avoid being held to account by an increasingly regulated world.