The Reading, established by the Dunton family at Reading,
Berkshire, but made by various builders, is slung between tall wheels and is
straight sided with a pronounced outward slope from floor to roof (see
illustration) The body is beaded tongue-and-groove match-board with upright
chamfered ribs. It has a high-arched roof, since about 1900 built with concealed
gutters and clerestory skylight of the mollicroft kind. Some, made to order for
well-to-do customers, are luxurious and lavishly carved and gilded inside and
out. Poorer travelers had to be content with carving limited to the front and
rear porch-brackets, but the basic design is always the same: sloping walls and
wheels outside the body. It is the type most liked by Gypsies and the home most
characteristic of a good Romani family.
The
earliest pictures show a somewhat austere design, sometimes with the rib
construction apparently on the inside, a plain arched roof with no skylight, no
gutters, and the carving restricted to small triangular brackets supporting the
porches fore and aft. Around 1885 vans appeared with corner stanchions that had
been lathe-turned, porch-brackets carved in three-dimensional design of flowers,
leaves and entwined stems, and carved pieces between the ribs along the bottom
sills and under the eaves. The windows were divided into many panes and the
shutters into elaborately moulded paneling.
Although somewhat decorative and
graceful, these early versions look rather prim and pokey. Sometimes they were
nicknamed ‘kite wagons’ from the high arched roof and sloping
sides.
 
One of the last
Dunton Reading wagons in regular use on the road was lived in by the Romani
horse dealer ‘Norfolk’ Fed Walker, with his wife and young family till he sold
it in 1967 to a dealer and one-time traveler. It was renovated and further
embellished at great cost, overturned, restored once more and traveled the road
again for a time till sold to an antique dealer for the reputed sum of
£4,000.
Barrie Law's Orton & Spooner Video
©From The English Gypsy Caravan by C.H.
Ward-Jackson & Denis E. Harvey 1973 Edition
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