I don't think you can understand the Morris today without knowing first of all, its roots, where did it start, how did it develop and what kept it going, then why was it was revived yet again.
The first known revival of the modern era was Darcy Ferrars. He'd been born in Yorkshire and he was a professional pageant master. Amongst his triumphs was the Ripon millenary festival, the 1000th anniversary of their charter at which he organised a sword team and a Lancashire Morris side. When he moved down into the area of Bidford-on-Avon and discovered they had the Morris in that part of the world as well, he employed a Mr Trotman who'd been a dancer locally to get together a side of youngsters.
He did this really in the best possible way. He had two local dancers and he paid other Cotswold Morris men like Harris from Bledington and Michael Johnson from Ilmington to come across and dance with the side and teach them dances. When one sees the Bidford dances, you wonder how a Bledington or Ilmington or Longborough man actually copes with the situation. But obviously they did because the bills for paying the people their expenses, their fees, exist.
There were one or two interesting incidents of people writing back and saying how they borrowed his bells and could he have them back. Having mentioned bells, I've heard sets of the old Bidford bells from the 1886 get-together. They were of what they call dutch metal, they were silver, and they tinkled rather than clattered. Modern bells, it isn't a particularly beautiful noise, but they used to make bells (I imagine they'd be expensive if you could get them today) so they had a lovely sound. At Bidford, and there's a set of bells in the Ashmolean museum as well, which, if you can persuade the curator to let you ring them, have this lovely musical quality about them rather than this rough jangle. It's worth thinking about if your side can afford sets of bells at about £30 a pad. That would stop you doing Flowers of Edinburgh!
Darcy Ferrars got a side together and took a great deal of care about the way it was done without any real knowledge of the product. He didn't know anything, nobody knew anything about that. His notes for the dances, he wrote down the tunes and he wrote down the dance notations in a time before there were words to describe it. Most of these papers that exist are in Cecil Sharp House library, so we have a fair degree of knowledge of it.
He raised this side who were late teenagers. He got a pipe and tabor player for them and toured all round the country. They performed in Bath, near Clifton, in the Midlands and in London. For a couple of seasons they became quite well known, appeared in the national press or reports of them did. He would dress as the Lord of Misrule and deliver a lecture. They would also dance at the function. There's a very important point because that did raise a certain amount of interest nationally and a certain awareness that there was Morris dancing in the Cotswolds.
Now, Percy Manning lived in Oxford presumably as a don (he must have been a don) and he was an antiquarian. He suddenly realised that there were things to do and he employed what was euphemistically known as a geologist assistant (the people who knew him said he was cad). He was a man called Carter who was paid to go walking through the Cotswolds looking for Morris relics. He found pipe and tabors, the mace, which was sort of platform of flowers which was sometimes carried in the Morris, swords, cake tins (I think he bought one of the original Bampton cake tins). He also interviewing dancers, getting lists of names of people who danced, details of the costume, whether people were alive, what happened to them. That's how you discover that at about 1870 quite a few Morris sides emigrated en-bloc to New Zealand. He gathered quite a lot of information.
Percy Manning gave papers to the folklore society (I think two papers) and he arranged in the end that a side be got together at Headington Quarry and this side was then used to illustrate a lecture in the Corn Market (I think it was the Corn Market) in Oxford about 1896/1897, that was a very important thing.
The way Manning did it was very good. He found one of the previous squires, that's Trafford, paid him money to get costumes, (he got a set of cast-off costumes from the local cricket club, caps, whites and so on), paid really for them to hire a hall and get the gear and do regular reconstructions as well, got a bunch of youngsters in with the assistance of some of the older dancers.
Now, this particular revival didn't involve Bill Kimber or his father. There was one good reason why Bill's father wasn't involved. As Bill Kimber told somebody during the First World War, his father got Methodist and he tried converting the team to be teetotal. As a result, he had to live the other side of Oxford but apparently it didn't last very long either, because Harry and Arthur Kimber remember Bill Kimber's father as a man who certainly wasn't a teetotaller in any way at all. That had caused problems with the old Headington side and lead to the break up in 1887. So they got together but Kimber's cousin Dick was involved in that particular revival.
That itself got interest and got things noticed, so that when the Guild of Handicrafts, which was an artistic organisation based on London, decided to move out of London, they chose Chipping Campden and they were already aware of Morris, mummers and things like this. So in 1902, once they had settled in, they got the local side at Chipping Campden together. Again, getting one or two old dancers, a musician (Denis Hathaway, who is the grand-father of the present musician of Chipping Campden) to raise the side, play its music, lead it and so on. This as always had a slight knock-on effect so Headington had been stimulated, Campden had been stimulated, and as I mentioned yesterday this stimulated Ilmington to keep going, so there were these things running on.
Now, we're all aware of the next great incident and that was Sharp visiting his aunt at Sandford cottage in Headington; not Headington Quarry but Headington village, about a mile or so away, at Christmas. The Morris turned out at Christmas, a hard Christmas, and did the area. So Sharp didn't discover Morris, the Morris discovered Sharp, a very important distinction that. Sharp was a bit enthralled so he said, and next day he asked Kimber to come back and he noted down Kimber's tunes. He used Kimber's tunes because he'd already collected a few songs of Somerset and if you look at Sharp's ([blank tape])
Sharp was already getting old by this time, he'd had a long spell in Australia at the Conservatoire, I think in Adelaide, which was something that Clive Carey did later. Sharp, in fact, had rowed for his boat in Oxford. I mention that because living quite close is a woman whose father who also rowed in this boat with Cecil Sharp. So, the one relic of Sharp I have, is a photograph of him rowing for his college in Oxford.
He was getting on, he had been at the Hampstead Conservatoire in London teaching very orthodox music and had discovered, through his friend, songs down in Somerset, had started collecting and had published his first book. That produced enough interest for him to start lecturing on a more or less full time basis.
He had no real interest in dance at this stage, he was a musician very much concerned with the quality of what he discovered. His published lectures were of that sort; how the traditional process honed out all the rubbish and what was left contained a large element of quality tunes and quality works. Of course, this was a novel thought in the Edwardian times, so he did quite well, well reasonably well, and became a national authority.
In 19, well, I'll start another thread to the story, which is Mary Neal, which led up to Neal and Sharp meeting. Mary Neal was the daughter of a Manchester businessman, middle class, at a time when middle class women had absolutely nothing to do in their lives because there were too many servants and it was always considered indecent for them to do anything. She didn't like it, along with friends, and they came into London to join the East London Methodist Mission, which was a soup kitchen and doss house type affair, which she realised was not going to be very effective for people.
She got involved in political campaigning, she had been on the anti-Boer War demonstrations because there was a group of people who firmly believed the Boer War was initiated by London financiers to get control of the mining industry in South Africa and they had no regard to the Boers and their rights. She certainly had been arrested for activities on that.
She realised that to do something useful for people, the best thing was to give them a job to give them something to do. So, she raised the Esperance Guild which was a organisation of young seamstresses in London where they could have a full days work all through the year.
Something one doesn't realise today was that `the season' was finite and that all the well-to-do wanted their clothes all at once. So (there was a direct function of demand if you know what I mean) that everybody wanted everything yesterday and then didn't want anything for the rest of the year. So through her friends she arranged for a steady load of work at a reasonable wage.
Of course, that then left her responsible for the social side of it. She had a friend, McIlwain who she asked to be a sort of musical director of this organisation who introduced the girls to singing and things like this, but only German Cantatas which the girls didn't like much.
One day, when Sharp had published a book and given a lecture in London which they were aware of, they tried the folk songs and the girls immediately responded to this. So successfully that she wrote to Sharp to ask if there were any dances to go with these songs. He replied "I don't know but I did meet a Morris side in Oxford six years ago; The name of the man was Kimber, if you go to Oxford or somewhere around there you may find them."
She went with a friend to Oxford, found out where Kimber lived and invited Kimber up to London. In about July 1905, he and his cousin came up to London and were asked to teach the dances. There's a problem here because Kimber himself had never been a member of the old traditional side. Although he'd gone around with them as a boy and danced with the side as a boy, as quite a lot of people do today, it didn't mean that he'd received terribly formal instruction. Well, he taught the dances within his knowledge and was invited twice more before Christmas.
Now, Kimber being a good honest sport, when he discovered what he was to be involved in, went back and asked the dancers in the village how the dances went. He went to the old men, so, of course, a story grew up. Every old dancer in the village claimed to have taught Bill Kimber how to dance.
Because of this estrangement between with Kimber's father and the other people he adopted the policy of when he talked to somebody and learned a tune or a dance he then went back to his father to check it. His father, of course, being a bit bloody minded, wouldn't actually teach William anything but he couldn't resist telling William if he was wrong. So Kimber had to go through this tortuous business of checking with his father to make sure that he wasn't doing anything wrong. Consequently, in his first four visits to London he actually taught the dances with distinctly different styles, different ways of doing movements as he got more and more accurate.
Now, that was important because in later years, when Sharp decided to break with Mary Neal's organisation; the question of Kimber's authenticity, on which Sharp was placing a lot, became very important.
Mary Neal, of course, had all this evidence in the notes they had taken on Kimber's various visits, on how, in fact, he had really changed the dances. They didn't mind him doing it because they were much more aware of all this background. Sharp didn't come into the Mary Neal affair till a year of so after this had started, late in 1906.
Mary Neal ran a public performance of song and dance in the Kensington Town Hall in December 1905 which got rave notices in the London press and quickly found there was a demand for this sort of material in the rest of the country. Within eighteen months, she found that she had to set up an almost national organisation where she used her girls who had learnt the dances direct from traditional dancers to go out and teach the dances elsewhere. Within only a few months she'd claim that they had engagements in every county in England. It caught on, it was the thing of the moment.
This sounds all nice and idyllic and Merrie England, but let me remind you of the Pankhurst family who moved to London in 1906 and founded the London committee of the WSPU of which Mary Neal was a member. I don't know if people remember they had a TV series two or three years ago about the votes for women - "Shoulder to Shoulder". There was in fact a reconstruction of the first committee meeting in London and they actually gave a name in the cast list, a name and a character, for everybody except one woman and that woman was supposed to be Mary Neal. She and Mrs Pethick-Laurence were involved in the Esperance club at that time, also Mrs Teuke(?) who had lived in S. Africa and met Mrs Pethick-Laurence on the boat coming back from South Africa after her husband had died. She asked what she could do and she became, I think it was, the secretary. It's Mrs Teuke who collected and published the Abingdon Morris in the Esperance Morris book, if you ever have access to that.
So, we have these two things. We have something starting out as, I won't say a do-gooding exercise, but trying to give practical help to people in poor conditions. In trying to respond to this, they got involved in things `Folk'. Also, you may remember, they were also involved in things like the Society against the adulteration of food (putting chalk into flour). They did a lot of work in things of that sort, and earliest days of the revival was involved with sufferagettes.
The Esperance Guild actually danced to collect money for the sufferagette organisation at one stage, but of course the militant side of the movement thought folk side of the organisation was somewhat daft and they off-loaded them as soon as they could. By 1908, Mary Neal was off the committee, joining one of the non militant sufferage organisations.
This had other effects. If you read the Morris books you find that McIlwain declined to do any work to support Sharp on, I think, the third book - book three and later ones although his name's on it. Because he got fed up with the way Votes for Women Movement was going and because he had ill health he ducked out officially on the grounds of ill health. He didn't want to be associated with it.
By 1910, the whole votes for women business was so odious, that Sharp, in trying to make the folk movement song and dance in schools festivals respectable, had little choice but to cut himself free from it. Unfortunately, those people who remember those days, like Miss Jean Smith, feel the break was somewhat artificially arranged; there was not that difference in the objectives of the organisations. In other words, Mary Neal was trying to do something for people but also trying to revive the dances. She set up a national organisation for collecting, publishing and teaching traditional dance and music with very prominent people like Sharp involved, to make sure that the thing was disseminated in its pure form, with regard to the society from which it was drawn. Not just thought of as `this is a rather pretty thing for middle class people to do'. It was done with care, but they did make mistakes, they did bring in dancers who slavishly believed what the traditional dancers said and unfortunately, in Abingdon's case, the two old men set out to deliberately mislead. We know that because these two of the men who went up, Tom and his brother James, even in their eighties were rather pleased with what they'd managed to achieve. They got well paid for not teaching the Morris to everybody, but I'm jumping on in my story a bit.
Sharp's collecting started seriously in 1908, August 1908. That's nine years, almost, after the Headington Quarry Morris had discovered him. He was holidaying in Stow-on-the-Wold and he asked Billy Wells who had written to a national paper saying that the Bampton Morris had been going for 200 years, unbroken tradition on the Whit Monday, and invited him across. They got up a side of Sharp, his wife and kids and the people they were staying with and Billy Wells taught the Bampton Morris to Sharp for five pounds, at least he was given five pounds at the end. That was the start of a long running wrangle in Bampton because Billy Wells considered that was his money. For many years, he'd been doing one man tours of clubs, playing and dancing simultaneously and doing it very well. He had a very high reputation in the Cotswolds. I've met people who remembered the tales of Billy Well's performances – a one man band, one man show, he was used to earning money like this. The trouble was they thought he'd sold the Morris, so by 1926, they got fed up with Jinky and kicked him out of the Morris side.
Jinky wouldn't be put down and got up a side of his own. So, from 1926 on, there were two sides known as the old'uns and the young'uns. What happened, of course, was to learn the dances, the men ignored the two leaders and learnt it off each other, and they used to swap around the sides as necessary to keep the sides alive. After a few years, the old'uns were the young'uns; typical British sort of behaviour.
Sharp got Jinky Wells to go across, he'd already come across Winster and Eynsham. He produced a Morris Book Three first edition. Now, if you read the first edition, it's a pretty rough book, the dances are a bit scrappy. Perhaps you don't appreciate that the first two Morris books weren't actually written around the dancing of a traditional dancer at all. Florrie Warren, who was the chief dancer and teacher at the Esperance club; one of the girls there wrote down what she did. There was no question of having Kimber dance over and over again till it was sorted out, they had her dance. The dedication of the first two volumes shows this, it says `this is the way the dances are done in the Esperance club', not by traditional dancers.
Book three, when first published, was a bit rough because it was the first one based on direct description of traditional dancing at a time when the jargon hadn't really been sorted out. Patterns and so on weren't clearly understood.
Sharp didn't do much more collecting in 1908. He was still finding singers, finding musicians but all of a sudden there was a flood. He got into the Stow area and first of all found the Longborough man, Harry Taylor then came Fieldtown, he then found Sherbourne, found Ilmington, and a whole flood of dances. Not that he found many of them, quite a few of them he was told about. His field notebooks that I've seen have names and addresses `try so-and-so', beginning to signal that people existed.
There are quite a few references in the notebooks to the names of people that he never managed to follow up, there are several dancers who lived south of the Thames that he didn't follow up at all. Obviously, more leads were offered than he could do. He had the period where he worked Longborough, Fieldtown, Sherbourne, many visits, and he did it the following way. He'd get the man to sing the tune or play the tune until Sharp knew it and could whistle it. He'd then stand opposite the man either as no 1 or no 2 depending on what the man had done and mimic him - the man dancing, until the man himself was satisfied with what Sharp did.
So, those three traditions are recorded extremely well and also include touches on how they are done, which have come to us through Sharp's direct teaching to the members of the EFDSS. There are things there which Sharp taught which we can have high confidence in the path of the tradition. Now, I say this because in Sherbourne all the jumps end with the hands straight out in front. There's no sign of this in Sharp's papers and yet it's something we know Sharp taught right from the moment he first collected Sherbourne and started teaching it to people. We have very high confidence that at that period Sharp collected and taught precisely what the people did. Also, of course, these are areas over which Travelling Morrice worked later and found traditional dances and found that the quality of Sharp's collecting was extremely high.
After 1912, well by 1910, Sharp had discovered Longsword and Rapper and his interest had got diverted very strongly that way. Other people like Butterworth and Clive Carey, who was working for Mary Neal, started collecting in the Cotswolds, so other people started providing us with information from 1912 onwards.
Then we have the war, we know Sharp visited the States rather than doing field-work and by this time, 1919, he was old and in ill health. Also probably because he'd done a lot of lecturing and teaching, he started forming very definite ideas about the Morris. When he collected Adderbury in 1919, the impression one gets of the Morris is one which strictly fits the pattern of all Morris which had been published before. Mary Neal and Janet Blunt and her three friends who collected from Walton(?) during the period 1914-1918 had got a much better picture of Adderbury and the things it didn't have, things that it did and the variety that was in it. In fact, it was a much more flexible tradition than Cecil Sharp put over. Also, when Sharp went out in 1922, almost his last tour to Abingdon, he met people who were present during this. Sharp got a little short tempered with Abingdon and was driving the old men to say things, almost putting words in their mouths. Although they didn't mislead him in any way. Things like the Princess Royal dance that Sharp finally published is, in fact, two dances run together. People answered questions in the way that Sharp was prompting them to answer.
When he got to Brackley we have another situation. The men danced for him, several men danced, as it was a active side, they never did the same thing twice. They did a dance and Sharp said "do it again", so they thought there was something wrong with the way they did it, so they strung it together a different way, then they strung it together another way. Now, we've talked to Maud Karpeles about that, a person who was present with Sharp and noted down the dance order. She said at that time Sharp had trouble with his eyes and was having real difficulty coping with the situation, and he looked at this and imposed on it the pattern which he was used to. In other words, there was a standard set of figures which you did in a standard sort of way. Sharp being the authority at that time, people were not really prepared to challenge him. I'm trying not to run Sharp down, we must remember he was human, it was a tremendous achievement and what he did was more than adequate for the folk revival for twenty or thirty years.
Have I given you an image? Mary Neal starting it with the folk dance aspect of what she was doing, Sharp coming in and all of a sudden finding a big flood of material over a small period. Then, in a sense, having become the great authority, fossilising it in a sort of way, so at Sharp's death we get a potentially poor situation. During the war, Mary Neal's people, she'd moved her organisation into the Ministry of Pensions, she became an Under-secretary in the Ministry and at the end of the war she refused to revive the arguments that were going on there. She wrote to all her staff saying "join the EFDSS" and she washed her hands of the whole thing and went off into a different sort of activity for the rest of her life. The EFDSS, of course, had lost an awful lot of its men. I think you will appreciate that an organisation based on Chelsea polytechnic, the women who learned physical training there, was already biased toward the women's organisation. So, during the twenties, after they'd lost a lot of men, there was a real struggle to get together a men's side.
At Cambridge, there was a basically a revolt against this domination and the Morris men under the influence of Heffer and Rolf Gardner decided they'd organise a tour. Now, this tour was supposed to be to North Germany because they were very idealistic and thought that one way of cementing relationships between these two countries was, in fact, for us to show friendship and go and share our culture with them. Well, unfortunately, they didn't get any support from the powers-that-be for this. So, the Germans said what about doing a tour of the Cotswolds. In 1924, they sort of postered the Cotswolds and set out on a bicycling tour and, much to their surprise, discovered that there were traditional dancers living.
Now, the Travelling Morrice, or Cambridge Morris at that time, were the most active side. You can't imagine that Morris then were lucky if they had six at practice, often borrowed someone from another side to do a show. Tours were unheard of, the Travelling Morrice tours were a sort of unique thing that went on. One or two other sides formed, and it was the Cambridge Morris Men's idea that the way to keep them all together was to bring two of them each year to an annual feast as honorary members of Cambridge Morris. You can imagine the rate of growth of the revival from the fact that this was possible, for short periods. You could actually get all the Morris dancers in the country as members of the Cambridge Morris men. Of course, it didn't last forever and about 1934, it was realised in the six or seven clubs that were active that they had to have some other way of doing it. After a meeting in Gerry Newnam's rooms at the University of Cambridge, they decided some other organisation should be formed.
Why is it called `The Ring'? It harps back to Rolf Gardner again, his connection with North Germany. He had this idealistic view of people working on the land. He thought, well, his father and Uncle, Balfour Gardner the composer, who also farmed at Fontmell Magna, south of Shaftesbury, they organised sort of work camps so that their professional friends, doctors, musicians and so on could attend at spring and at harvest time to - sort of get to the land, a sort of attitude of mind, people discovering that there was a real world out there somewhere. He set up something called The Springhead Ring, this way of linking people together, which included these professional friends in this country and in Northern Europe. They ran a magazine called `North Sea and Baltic' which illustrated areas of interest.
This rather romantic view of things was why they chose the Ring as being a sort of Germanic symbol. The Ring adopted the purely Cambridge idea of the squire and bagman. The traditional phrases for the leader was the captain or master, the courtesy title Master Thomas Wright or Master William Gibbs as Foreman and they talked about the Captain of the Morris side. The squire was really the fool, there were all sorts of names for him, of course. It just seemed to suit at the time, the traditional side didn't have a bagman of course, they had a ragman, someone who carried the coats and the collecting box, more often the fool was given the job of collecting. This is the way traditions develop, of course.
Let me just round this off. The Ring formed, it didn't flourish very quickly. The 1938 Ring meeting still only had 80 men, the really big meetings didn't start until the mid 1950s, I think 1960 was the first time we reached 200 men at a ring meeting. Also the revival just rediscovered the tradition about 1936, for 12 years the inheritance of Sharp had been adequate. People suddenly realised Bampton didn't dance Bampton like they were doing, they realised that Kimber didn't do Headington the way they were doing it, because nobody asked Kimber for years how it was done. They suddenly realised there were dancers in Brackley and Bledington who were alive and could be talked to, and who had more dances, more tunes and more things. From there onwards, we have this acceleration away of information on the Morris. Real research was done listing origins, getting together materials culminating in the Black Book. We can trace all that from about 1936, when things got away and people suddenly realised that the past is very interesting but it shouldn't be a brake on the future. Tomorrow, I'll talk about something completely different - the traditions outside the Cotswolds.