Elsewhere on this website it is recorded that hazel, Corylus avellana, was used by travellers or gypsies to make benders – simple tents – and clothes pegs.

However, Eva Petulengro, a ‘Romany gypsy’ born in Lincolnshire in 1939, recalls in her 2011 autobiography that willow, Salix spp., was used for these purposes:

‘A family of eleven makes for overcrowding … So when they stopped somewhere Naughty [Eva’s grandfather] would make rod tents, known as benders.  The supports are made from fine, young, supple willow which had be soaked overnight to make it more flexible and is then bent to shape and allowed to season … the covering was a waterproof woven material, ordered specially from a large mill, held together by sharpened hawthorn [Crataegus] pins.  Four people could sleep easily in each vardo [caravan], but when there were more, a bender would be used.’

‘I would watch as my uncle Nathan carved so expertly the clothes pegs which my mother and her sisters would later take out to their clients.  The other men in the family would join sitting on the steps of the vardo … They used willow, which was shaved and then cut into lengths of four or five inches, which were then split in half to make the peg.  A pile of Colman’s mustard tines … were cut into tiny strips and tacked onto the wood to make the joint of the peg.  Then the pegs were shaped and finished and it was my job to put them together into little bundles.’