The young Wolverhampton wanderer and his Romany holidays

See the young Wolverhampton lad with a big beaming smile and wearing a jumper just right of centre, mixing with these Romany folk at their camp?

That's Walter Williams, who was just 13 or 14, and when they left they would take him away with them. He would not be seen again. Well, not for a few days, anyway.

It was just how things were in those far off days, when free spirited youngsters were given lots of freedom to roam by their parents, and if Walter wanted to go off with the travellers during his school summer holidays, that was fine by them.

Walter's brother Bernard Williams, who is now 90, got in touch to tell us more about this picture which we carried the other day showing a Romany camp in Bushbury Lane, Wolverhampton, in May 1940, which had attracted curious local children, including Walter.

"He was a wanderer," said Bernard, who lives at Shareshill.

"It was something to do for him. You made your own enjoyment. What you have to realise about that time is you could go more or less anywhere, no problem at all.

"He would go out and find things for his own enjoyment. He would sometimes come back with a rabbit and sometimes with a pheasant. Once he came back with a partridge and said to my mother 'cook that mother.' She cooked it, and he ate the lot himself.

"He used to smoke as well. I wouldn't say he got that off the gipsies. Children in those days mimicked the older ones and everyone smoked in those days.

"What they called the nubs, cigarette ends, he would save them in a tin and store them in the outside toilet. My father found them there. They would fall on his head when he pulled the chain. He didn't mind at all. He knew Walter could look after himself."

The family of 10 - eight children, and parents John and Maud - lived at 131 Keats Road. Their home was not far away from the camp, and as a child Bernard, who was born in March 1936, would also pop along to visit.

"We used to go to the camp and sing with them."

While the original caption with our archive picture says the camp was at Bushbury Lane, Bernard said the location was actually modern Underhill Lane.

He particularly remembers the lady on the left with a pipe.

"She was so different from everybody else. She looked an old lady to me - anybody older than 20 is old when you are a child. She gave orders and people did what she said. She is the oldest one, I would imagine, of the gypsies.

"Generally speaking most of them at the camp were ladies, as the men disappeared doing jobs during the day. The ladies would come round selling pegs made, I suppose, out of the branches of trees, and would read palms and things like that, although I never had mine read.

"The caravan I remember was like a half circle and would have all of these things decorated along the caravan. Inside they had all of this crockery, let's put it like that. They would stay a week or so and then move on. Where they went next, my brother would have been able to tell you. He would be away a good three days and then they would come back, and off he would go again and you wouldn't see him."

Walter, also known as Wally, has passed on, but had seen our picture in the past.

"He said 'that's me.' I think he knew the names of some of the people there, but I can't remember them. He died about 20 years ago."

Bernard said the travellers came to camp at the spot quite regularly.

"They stopped coming when Underhill estate started to be built because where they parked their horses and caravans, there was nothing there for them any more.

"There are houses there now. If you come out of Bushbury crematorium into what you called Bushbury Lane ­- it's now Underhill Lane - turn right, and once you leave where there farmer's field is, on the right, right next to the crematorium, you come to the houses. It's that corner there where they used to park."