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Women in the Morris. There are reference to women dancing, I won't say Morris, but women dancing in the 18th century. The reason why they didn't dance much in the 19th century was the Victorian attitude to what was right and proper. We have a problem therefore, which is: what is Women’s Morris, is it a separate entity and how is it to be used in this day and age.

My feeling about women doing Morris. One hesitates to recommend that women do caper dances, not because there's anything against women moving around but because they don't seem to have the strength in the ankles and thighs to do it. Those people who train are quite able to do it, there are women athletes who once they've trained are quite able to caper round as well, if often not better than the men. I don't think there's any inherent reason against it but the average woman for some reason or other, and I don't know why, doesn't caper very well. You can get a bunch of men up and usually they can get off the ground quite well with no problem at all but with women it doesn't seem right, you've got a problem, it's quite solvable but it needs training, recognising that ankles do need building up. The thing that Windsor discovered, just to pass on, that their boots didn't fit, thin elegant ankles tend to disappear.

Having said that there is no reason why the dances should be restricted to either sex, there's nothing sexual about them as with some of the continental dances but the essence of Cotswold Morris is leaping around, it's not a fast dance, it's speed is relatively slow, it's not a complex stepping dance style at all. It relies on the fact that compared to other styles like clogging and so on you get very high off the ground and you bounce in the step and have leaps and jumps and that's really what makes the Cotswold Morris have it's characteristics.

You have to practice of course to get up to this standard. One of the problems is that often the foreman hasn't a clear enough image himself of what they are trying to do and very often practice is ad lib. I'm a great advocate of a structured program during the winter, so you set off by saying by next spring we will have so and so, and you have a reasonable idea of what the objective is each night. You won't achieve it, but everyone in the side will know what you are trying to do, you can say at such and such a time we are going to practise stepping, we are going to have a go at slow capers. You can have a program of work from which everybody understands what you are trying to do rather than 'we were awful on Saturday we must have a go at Dearest Dickie', what I call pinballing through your problems.

These clubs which don't plan the practices, basically you must have a plan, an objective of what you're trying to achieve. Once you have a plan, you have something which you as individuals can contribute to, as a club you're not a reflection of what the squire thinks...... or perhaps you are.... some clubs are like that...... I won't say.

Morris is democratic but there is a consensus usually, I don't think any club runs as a dictatorship, someone has to have authority but that's not the same as dictatorship because you can always re-elect, you can have an extraordinary annual general meeting and get rid of him tomorrow. I've already said in practices, practice what you preach as it were, whatever you are going to do outside, do it inside too, because any slackness at practice leads to slackness outside, as I've said, not perhaps the first dance you do but as you get tired you lapse into habits of mind.

If you watch someone who's danced two or three years late in the afternoon you can always tell what tradition he did first because it's what he lapses back into, no matter what you're doing it's what he does with his hands and so on. It's the first things that you learn that you fall back into and therefore you must expect high standards of yourself in practice.

The other thing is it's soul destroying if you do a dance and flog away at it. I'm an advocate myself of clubs having quite a few dances from any one tradition. So that if, for example, you're working on Ilmington, you do Old Woman Tossed Up and Old Woman Tossed Up and Old Woman Tossed Up until you get it right, you do it and your problem is perhaps in the stepping or the body movements or so on so you have a go at Constant Billy or some other dance in the same tradition so that in an evening you do four or five different dances so that you still have the chance to get to grips with it but still have the novelty of changing from dance to dance. People must have novelty in what they do.

We've talked a fair bit about shows this weekend on and off, like these Border dances that provide a contrast, most people... if you do one tradition... it is a little difficult to capture people's interest unless you do it very well, people will admire excellence even if it's the same .......... what?........... Great Western is like going to the zoo, you look at the giraffe and you say 'good god, there's no such animal'.......they'll turn up with a giraffe dance now........

Pursuit of excellence...... well you can't expect more of people than is in them, it takes years to train, it's two or three years before a dancer knows what he s doing, at that stage he goes up a grade as it were and starts re-learning basics, re-thinking his attitude to get the next standard of excellence. It also means in the club that having learnt the basics you then do dances and people tend to say we did all the basics at the start of the winter practice season but as you get more skill and people get more skill week by week you have to go back because you get a fresh approach to your basics and you do them better. You keep coming back and I think turning over new ground all the time, even though the topic's basically the same.

Dammit all, in other fields of life you'd have one conversation about the weather and that would be the only one in your life, in fact you can talk about the weather every time you meet, about the wife and kids, so as you get more experienced there's something more to have a go at.

Do you actually tour together? Right, have you made sure that your repertoires are complimentary to give this contrast in the show in any way?...........(discussion).............Have you any feeling about doing non-Cotswold, border Morris?...........(discussion)..............

I got the feeling that the Seven Champions are ostracised by the whole world, or at least they think they are..........(discussion)...........

Usually the oldest traditions are those which are frowned on most. When kids tie straw round their shins and shuffle along the gutter with a collecting tin because they've forgotten the dance that goes with it but are preserving the folk memory of something people get the Police to stop them. Yet these are often preserving things three or four hundred years old. So many customs are basically dangerous or rough, we have a bonfire society near us at Hartley Witney. The main thing is a kapok ball in chicken wire on a lavatory chain which you have to keep swinging or it burns your hand. They do this every year on the four corners of the green, the procession winds though the Trafalgar Oaks so they're a menace to the vegetation let alone themselves, when they get to the bonfire they whirl them and sparks go everywhere. There have been many attempts to stop it but it's been going for so long that it's tolerated as a tradition.

When I was a boy at Botany Bay up at /Shoaling/ it was a great thing to put a cracker on the crown of trilby hats to make somebody jump, it seemed terribly funny except to the chap who suffered it. The Morris can't sail against society we are all on the street on sufferance. The Morris was always disrespectful, welcomed but not highly thought of, but not disreputable, that's important. You can't foul your own nest because you spoil it for everybody else. You have a responsibility to the rest of the Morris no matter how much you dislike them, let's say you have a responsibility to the Morris that follows you.

The one thing that we've cured by the use of words like 'museum Morris' and 'fossilised Morris' is the need to get over to older sides that the tradition is what people do now. We've no idea what people did a hundred years ago, you can look at manuscripts till you're blue in the face.

The only thing we know about the old traditions is what Sharp taught his pupils, and what his notes say. Our general experience of Morris is looking back at these notes, saying what Sharp teaches may not be what we as Morris men today would see. We would interpret it a bit differently now. Sharp made mistakes in transcription, he made mistakes when he saw people. He'd cycle into a village, find the local foreman, collect a dozen dances and be gone before lunch. First of all, it says a great deal for the man's ability, no one has ever been able to collect in the way Sharp could, he was a superb musician and had feel for people but at the same time he only looked at foremen and he never went back to his sources, he never went back and checked. One of the problems with the Travelling Morrice years later was that they went back and danced and the old dancers would laugh at them. After a titter or two they were kind enough to tell them what they were doing wrong......

(discussion).........

The tradition involves the way of life of the people who did it. In Abingdon, it's the Hemmings family, the best you can do is to produce a cardboard replica of the real Morris. The tradition is the rest of it as well, it's the characters, it's the performance. I keep saying if you go out with a display team that dresses up people say 'Morris' even in parts of the country where there is no knowledge of Morris but somehow or other people associate a dressed up show with Morris even if it's Country Dancing or Scottish or Mummers, Morris is a sort of folk word for all traditional displays....... (discussion)..

One has to remember certain things about the revival. The revival of Morris dancing started in 1905 by people who were committed to doing things for others. Mary Neal had been a pro-Boer and had been involved in demonstrations against the Boer war. She was involved in doing practical things for people in the East End of London. Then she set up the Esperence group to even out dressmaking activities and give these young women a steady job, she was involved in the society against the adulteration of food and she was a founder member of the London branch of the WSPU along with Mrs Tueke who became treasurer and also collected the Abingdon Morris, with Mrs Pethick-Laurence, she and her husband published the magazine 'Votes for Women'.

Sharp was a sort of fabian type socialist but he was very much committed to all this in the beginning and it was only when he tried to get folk song and dance into the board of education for schools that he found the political side embarrassing. He was finally forced to break away about 1910. By 1910, the suffragettes were militant, breaking windows, setting fire to hayricks, chaining themselves to railings and so on. Women discovered the Morris not the men, one year we upset everybody by sending a thing "please can we have our Morris back" signed the Women's Morris. If it hadn't been for them there wouldn't have been a revival, OK?

It was for social reason but they gave the occasional display to raise money for the suffragettes. In the end, Mary Neal and her friends were thrown out of the movement because they were considered too nice, they weren't militant enough. When the War started, Mary Neal turned the whole Esperence club (which by then was national) over to the Ministry of Pensions. She became a Civil Service secretary and her organisation was just absorbed in the Ministry. At the end of the war, she got a bit fed up with all the argument.

A paper like the Morning Post which is now incorporated in the Daily Telegraph, at least if you buy the Telegraph there's a little bit called The Court Circular and you must wonder why the Telegraph bothers. The Morning Post was the Society paper which listed all the guests at all the big house parties and so on. In the Morning Post they had a public argument about the Morris step "how far did you kick the foot?", "Was it so many inches or was it so many lengths of foot?", "how far off the ground should you go?"

It's inconceivable that today you should have such an argument but the people who were arguing, like Sharp, had tremendous standing in society at that time. Sharp had started lecturing about folk song and had become a very well known authority, he had discovered English folk song and besides was a great musicologist anyhow, had become a national figure. Mary Neal also was a national figure, partly for the revival of Morris and the fact that school children everywhere seemed to be doing the Morris and partly because of the public activity in the votes for women.

At the end of the First World War, Mary Neal said no, no way can we have this bitter quarrel going on and she sent a circular to all her helpers saying join the EFDSS. People like Clive Carey and so on joined and integrated in the twenties and she went off to live somewhere in Sussex and settled down and bought a cottage, I can't remember where exactly. She belonged to some organisation, kibocift, or kibocraft something like that, they had this....... there was a romantic thing that started in the twenties.... the great blue dome...... this great //dolls house// in the country ......they started hiking.... people became rangers..... I did know the chap who was chief.........shanty man, she had a cottage with an ever open door, that sort of thing. The trouble was the chap who then took it over became para-political and they adopted a green shirt...... and green jodhpurs, and they were known as the Greenshirts along with the Blackshirts and they became a neo-fascist organisation. So she dropped out of that one too. She was the first folk person to get an honour from the crown, she got an MBE for services to folk dance and song, the first one in 1937.

The Travelling Morrice, which has had a tremendous influence on the way we do things, the Cambridge Morris invented the idea of Squire and Bagman, the traditional phrases are Secretary and Captain. Squire was the word for the clown, you called the Clown "Squire" as a sort of in joke, it didn't mean he was the leader. The Cambridge men invented the annual feast, the ale, they invented the idea of ring meetings and the way they are structured, they contributed a tremendous amount. The people who started it, Heffer of Cambridge and Rolf Gardner who died a few years ago, a great man he managed to do //////gan//////on//// all the way through his sixtieth birthday. When I knew him he lived about ten years waiting for this, looking forward to it.

He belonged to group at Cambridge after the First World War who first of all recognised .... they said the thing that was wrong with the EFDSS was that it was aimed at women and also aimed at excellence by examination. The whole thing was geared to getting certificates and medals to, in the end, learn all the Morris, all the sword and all the Playford. By the time you had acquired your gold medal in everything you were too old to do any more. It was a complete life schedule of folk dance and was very sterile.

In 1922 Rolf Gardner wrote an article which got a lot of comment saying the EFDSS should convert itself into the English folk festival society, and could concentrate entirely on having workshops and running big festivals all over the country where the best performers of dance and song should be got together to display to the public. Of course, Sharp excommunicated him for this, he was due to perform in Cambridge in a show that Sharp had written called 'Old King Cole' and he was asked to leave, they said "we don't want people like you in the EFDSS". It's funny that fifty years later the EFDSS consists almost entirely of exactly the sort of person that Rolf Gardner and his friends were. Festivals.... this is the life of the folk world at moment.

The other thing is that he and his friends had links with Germany and the countries round the Baltic and they struggled very hard in the twenties to establish a relationship with the peoples of Northern Germany. They thought that the future of the world depended on it. One of the ways he worked on it was his other passion, work camps in the country. Fifty years ago professional people were completely divorced from the country, so he arranged with his uncle Balfour Gardner and they bought a farm near Shaftesbury and they started getting work gangs together to work in the spring and harvest and they got people over from Northern Germany as well. They called this organisation after a year or two The Springhead Ring. The Ring is a sort of Germanic concept and The Springhead Ring fitted this idea of getting people together. the Morris Ring picked up the same concept. Rolf Gardner invented Plough Sunday as distinct from Plough Monday where we take the plough into church to have it blessed, got country people to raise sides to dance rather than professional people and he ran a campaign, rather lost, with the society where he said it should not be concentrating on the sort of person it did but should get farmers, country people to establish their links with the seasons in terms of ways of expressing themselves, stop having mechanical farming and get people to recognise the seasonal round and celebrate it. Not in any ritual way but in spring when you feel good you have your barn dance and party and things like this.

I say this about Rolf, he had three farms in the end when I knew him and he'd get his friends to do 'Dido and Aeneas' with them all playing in the orchestra or singing. He and his friends entertained themselves by having a opera in his garden. These were people with a different social background to us but they had a very idealistic view of things, romantic but also a forward looking view. Rolf for example organised the flax growing in this country during the last war, got it all going and made us self sufficient, he was a tremendous organiser, tremendous ideas, he was almost considered a nutcase because he was always propounding views which twenty or thirty years later people consider common sense.

It's people like that who motivated the travelling Morris in the early days. People today are not aware of any of it, not aware of how prominent some of these people were in motivating the revival now people do things the way they are today because of the way these people set it up, the attitudes they promulgated that have come to be accepted. The converse, of course, is what we do today will set the pattern for the future, particularly in period when we won't be able to travel in the same way, folk will have to be parochial. I don't see us being able to nip down to Exeter in quite the same way. I'm not talking about the next three or four year but the next ten to twenty which is the time that people in this room will be influencing the Morris.

Society will have changed in many ways. I think the fact that we've got the Cotswold Morris into the four corners of Britain says a lot for the future of folk. I'm very keen to see the Morris alive, not preserved. People kept it alive by inventing dances, improving dances, we are preserving the heritage by trying to do it well, by entertaining the crowd. That's what I think is our heritage, and I like the word heritage because a heritage is something to be used not preserved. The heritage of the country side is not to lock it up but to make it available to be enjoyed on today's terms. The heritage of mediaeval buildings is that you preserve what you can of them but you actually make them usable. It's the same with the Morris you preserve it by preserving the characteristic things about it.

Within that framework there's a awful lot of things you can do for self expression and to bring life into it. It's the enthusiasm that you bring to Morris that will keep it going. If you have the attitude "I'm going to do Bucknell on the appointed day" and nothing else you are sterilising it not reserving it. The need nowadays is not to got out once or twice a year but to meet on a weekly basis as a hobby.

The final thing I want to say to advise you is about overdancing. We are all aware of the argument that too many sides dance at the best spots. What I want to put to you is that too many sides dance too much. We receive many programs for our friends in Morris every year and if you look at them you will find that many sides dance out on a weekly basis over a period from May to September. When you go to see these sides they have worn the edge off their enthusiasm, they lack excitement, sparkle, it's still good but you can well imagine that if they had a shorter season or

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