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(missing)..the Traditional day is June 19th, which was the Horse Fair day in Abingdon. This used to have a fairly elaborate custom. The day before, they used to dance around Ock Street. If you don't know Abingdon, there are really only two roads, Ock Street, O-C-K named after the river which runs east-west, the road does as well as the river; and the Vineyard which runs north-south around the edge of the old Abbey grounds. In the days of the Abbey, Vineyard was in Abbey and Ock Street wasn't, so it was a continual battle between the people. Well, not a battle, needle, between those who lived in Vineyard and those who lived in Ock street. Well, the custom was to go round on the day before, the eve, which fits with the old idea that the day started at sunset, so the eve was rather an important part of the custom. On the day itself, they would have an election for Mayor of Ock Street. Who, despite what newspapers say nowadays, in fact, he was elected as Mayor of Ock Street for the year to represent the views of the place. They would chair the elected Mayor up and down the street, drinking at each hostelry as they went. The custom itself ran on until about 1885 on an annual basis, but the Horse Fair itself started to die down and therefore the reason for the custom was disappearing.

Thomas Hemmings was the last Mayor who was elected every year for something like twenty-five years. I think that when interviewed, he claimed that he'd been arrested on most of these occasions for being drunk and disorderly. He also had another endearing habit, which was that he couldn't wait for the Morris, so the night before the night before, as it were, he put on his kit and walked up and down and round and round, waiting for it all to start. It was rather funny, it's a story that many people living in Ock Street remembered, despite the fact that he died in 1885. Another thing about folk memory, if you go to Bampton and show old photographs to people, they'll name everybody on it, although you know bloody well they had all died before these people were born.

The Mayor Making died down, the last true Mayor Making was 1902 and a rather strange affair actually. They didn't all have kit, only one man of the whole set had full kit, they were just wearing what they could. It stopped at that time. Tom Hemmings was a young boy of about 14 or 15 at this time and one or two others who participated in the later revival of Abingdon were boys at that time and could well remember the Morris. The Abingdon Morris was discovered by the revival because an antiquarian mentioned this funny habit of having the horns and other regalia. Mary Neal and Cecil Sharp went together on April 1st 1910 to see the Morris. April 1st was not a very good choice of a day, because they wrote to the Morris to say they were coming to see them, and quite honestly, the Morris didn't believe it.

They collected the Morris. They then invited some of the Abingdon men up to London and they danced in London the evening before Edward VII died. Now, this made a tremendous impact on the Abingdon men, another thing which made an impact was that the Lord Mayor of London attended this display and had a drink out of the chalice they had. Over the years, this has escalated from the Lord Mayor to Edward VII, and all the older men I've talked to firmly remember that it was King Teddy who actually saw them dance the night before he died. He'd been in coma for ten days however, that's how a folk memory goes.

There was enough interest in the revival in 1910/11 for the Mayor Making and all the ceremony to go on. It ran on to the war. The war, of course, killed a fair number of dancers, as it did in most places. In Abingdon, the ceremony was not reconvened in the twenties, but in 1930, as it turned out, with the support of the local paper to get an interest in Morris, they got together a set and dressed them up and danced in the yard of a pub to have photographs taken. Although it got a splash in the two local newspapers there was no interest in it at all. 1935 for the Silver Jubilee, the Town council asked the Hemmings family to participate in the procession. Unfortunately, a few weeks before the Silver Jubilee, James Hemmings, who was one of the two old men that Sharp had met, had died. So his younger brother, Henry, was carried in a chair through the procession. They didn't actually dance on the day although there were several dancers in the village. The next year the King died and so on until we get ourselves to 1936.

There was a Ring meeting in 1936 at Wargrave at which William Kimber and Jinky Wells attended and 36 Ring dancers. They were all able to camp on somebody's lawn. Though the thought of a Ring meeting like that is quite incredible nowadays. They had these two there to teach them on the Saturday morning and on the Saturday afternoon tour they went into Abingdon. As they were dancing, an old man and coal cart turned up and got very excited and dashed off to get his old friend Jinky Wells and they proceeded to do a double jig. They did the double jig `Flowers of Edinburgh', which was rather amusing because Jinky Wells danced it like a Morris dancer and Henry Hemmings, who was the old coalman was a Step dancer, so he did clogging steps while the other did Morris steps. It didn't seem to worry them very much. As a result of this ???????? discovered that there were a fair number of Morris dancers still alive. At that time, people outside Abingdon were not aware that there were traditional dancers around.

If you read Sharp's Morris book describing Abingdon, he talks about two old dancers and you get the strong impression that there were just two old dancers that were left there and that when they died that was it, the Abingdon Morris was dead and gone. If you read it carefully it doesn't say that, it says "thanks to all the dancers", because they had seen the complete side in 1910 and again in 1921.

They arranged to collect tunes and some of the dances from people and it all fell apart. In the 1937 Coronation celebrations, the Morris team, or at least the Hemmings family, decided they would have a Morris team turn out and Kenworthy Stoker actually saw them advertised. That was the first they knew that the side was together. So they invited Abingdon across to the EFDSS staff conference at Wargrave Hall early in 1937 and they danced on the lawn there and formally became the Abingdon Traditional Morris dancers. At that time, they called themselves THE Traditional Ring Morris dancers. They joined the Morris Ring and asked Major Fryer to become their president. They were all old men at the time, I think the youngest was about forty. The youngest one was Charlie Hemmings, who is the present Mayor and Charlie's 79 this year, so in '36/'37, he'd have been 37, he was the youngest by a few years. It's a well known fact that Jack Hyde, who was bagman from 1948 for about twenty years or so, he had been invited to join the side in 1910 to dance with Tom. But his family was a little bit superior to the rest and it was thought not quite appropriate for somebody with his background to dance, so he didn't actually become involved in Morris until well into its revival. The revival is extremely well documented because Major Fryer attended most practices and wrote letters to Kenworthy Stoker, of which copies have survived, describing how they conducted the practices and how the dances were recovered. The most interesting thing about it is that they were run like a business meeting with a minute book and at each practice they discussed the dances and remembered bits and then the next week they would start off by formally reading the minutes of the previous practice. Can you imagine that in modern clubs?

Because of their age, none of them were called up in the last war and they were one of the few sides to dance right through the war. They did a lot of fund raising, Wings for Victory and things like this. They finally disintegrated in 1944 when their musician Harry Thomas died.

Harry Thomas had married into a remote branch of the Hemmings family and he learned all the tunes on a one row melodeon which as you know has its limitations and he played all the tunes in C. In Abingdon, they were great sticklers for getting things right but they never persuaded Harry Thomas to play the tunes they sang to him. The most classic example was Jockey, the Abingdon Jockey is twelve bars long B music, but Harry Thomas only played ten bars, so they just had to trim the dance a bit to suit. Also, because certain notes are missing on a one row melodeon, he had to twist a lot of the tunes around, so things like Brighton Camp came out in a weird sort of variant to suit his box. I think they've kept the tunes fairly constant ever since. I think it's rather delightful, Major Fryer learned from Harry Thomas, Len Barber learned from Major Fryer, John White learned from Barber. Every time it was passed on, don't change the notes, don't change the rhythm, don't .. Of course, they always played the tunes quite differently from each other, about the only thing you can say about them is that they are all the same length tunes. But otherwise, the speed and so on have changed, as you would expect.

The side disintegrated in '44 because they lost the musician. Then the Mayor, Henry Hemmings died and so they were a bit leaderless. Major Fryer was demobbed in '46/'47 and a deputation came over to see him. There had been some rather interesting fuss within the club because all the money that they had had been given to Major Fryer to put in his bank account. The bagman had been calling on this throughout the war for small amounts off Major Fryer and at the end of the war he demanded all the original sum back. So one began to think there was something a bit suspicious going on. Still, they got rid of the old bagman and started an interesting phase in 1949. They elected a new Mayor and started all over again, but there was a running battle between one branch of the Hemmings family and the rest of the Morris. This is how it happened.

The ex-bagman was secretary to the Pig Club. The Pig Club was a relic of the old allotment society, allotments were given to people when the Enclosure Act occurred, in which to keep a pig and have half an acre. The idea of keeping the pigs together meant it was worthwhile clubbing together on sties and looking after them. In Abingdon, the only thing that survived was the club, no-one kept any pigs. It consisted of an annual outing to the seaside. They set out toward the sea but they didn't necessarily get there. I don't know whether works outings actually go on any more. Where you all pile on a coach with beer and you make it to first pub then the second pub. About two o'clock, you decide it's time to turn round and perhaps you'll get to Weymouth next year.

So, in the Pig Club, was every Morris man who wanted to go on the annual outing. They would wait till Mayor Making was announced which, strictly speaking was the Saturday nearest 19th June although it would vary a bit from year to year to suit their convenience. As soon as they announced the date of mayor-making... that was the day of the Pig Club outing so they then moved mayor-making to the other Saturday but for some mysterious reason the coach wasn't available. The worst one was the Saturday nearest 19th June turned out to be 22nd August. This is the sort of thing that was absolutely delightful.

There was the time also, when Charlie Brett first stood for Mayor, when he had a chance, that was when all the Hemmings had either died (the old ones) or had given up. He was a postman at this stage and took on the round including Ock Street and knocked on everyone's door for a fortnight and handed over letters personally to remind them to vote. When on the Friday he went round distributing voting papers, he already had a list of who was on his side and who wasn't. There was a little rule that if they were on his side they got two voting papers, one for the man and one for the wife, and if they weren't they got one voting slip for the house. The trouble was, of course, when they came to count the votes there were about five or six for other chap, so they surreptitiously filled in some blank forms, so that the other chap wouldn't feel too bad about it. A very democratic election, where all the people who stand are Morris men, they all had the same policy whatever it's meant to be, but it has become part of the life of the town.

For years, Alderman Stimpson (who died a year or two ago) was returning officer and general organiser and had the big grocery shop in the middle of Ock Street so he had a centre of interest. He got the Mayors of Abingdon to come along and make the presentation. So, every year we were subjected to the same speech about the town having two mayors, a joke which got a bit thin. But what we do find, is that the mayor of Ock Street was a very useful stand-in for the real mayor, for social things like presenting long service awards and things like this, and in Charlie Brett's time he did many jobs of that sort for the Mayor of Abingdon. Once they got twinned, with I think, three different towns on the continent and Mayor of Ock Street had an interesting role in representing the town. A strange situation when the original concept had been one of opposition to the town.

Abingdon went through a terrible patch in the early sixties, when they couldn't get enough men to practice, if they could get three men they were happy, and each time they went out over a period of years, they thought it would be the last time they would be seen. Then the local Rover Scouts at Longworth(?) wanted to go to one of these world jamborees and wanted to learn the local dances and were taught the Morris. They liked it so much that five joined the club, just like that, and that then made them viable. They could then dance on Saturdays during the rest of the season and, of course, the townspeople then got interested as well and they built up a club which at its peak had some thirty odd people.

The older men Tom, Charlie, Jack Jones wanted the Abingdon men to be recognised throughout the Morris world and danced by the rest of the world. They had set up that at one of the Cecil Sharp House instructionals that Abingdon would be done and it only fell down when they wanted a side to go to the instructional and some of the younger men weren't prepared to travel up. So they didn't have a side, so Jack had to cancel it. That's been used ever since as a excuse for saying that Abingdon doesn't really want their dances done by other people. The present side certainly don't want to, as club policy, but they've also got rid of a couple of the Hemmings family, not that they were called Hemmings. A lot of descent is through the female side but there have been several members of the Hemmings family involved and they wouldn't have two of them in there. So, this year a second side has formed, called Mr Hemming's Morris dancers, which consists of five old dancers, all of whom are distantly related and they do the Abingdon dances in the old style. The Abingdon side threatened to sue them except that you can't sue someone for doing dances that have a tradition of 200 years.

This business of splits is another great characteristic of traditional things. Although it is to be regretted, if it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing twice. There is always more than one way of thinking about Morris. There are those who do it because it is a local custom done for local people and those who do because it's fun and ought to be spread around and those who do it for the money. You usually find with any sort of active clubs there are two factions and this often leads to splits. It happened at Adderbury in the most recent revival, it certainly happened at places like Padstow and so on.

At Bampton, the earliest known reference is 1804, written about in a history by a man, William Giles, who wrote a few years after that event. Jinky Wells was brought up by his grandfather and he says his grandfather's grandfather danced in the Morris which also takes us back to about 1800. But really very little is known about the Morris as it was done, other than what Jinky said; that they had a pipe and tabor player until 1868 and then pipe and tabor players became extinct in that part of the world. Everyone had used Bob Potter of Stanton Harcourt for the last 10 years of so of Morris in that part of the world.

After trying all sorts of fiddlers, mostly from the Wychwood Forest area, they settled down to a man called Butler and followed it by his son Dick Butler. These, I think, were violinists rather than fiddlers because they played for social dancing all over the place. There are memories of Dick Butler playing as far away as Bidford upon Avon. He and his father are both known to have played at Hunt Balls in big houses so they were obviously proficient musicians. The nicest story about Dick Butler is in the 1897'ish period. In that period, Bampton was much more to the west than it is now, half the people lived in the manor of Weald which no longer exists. All the cottages have fallen down and everybody lives in council estates. The Morris used to start at the farm at the far end early in the morning and work their way through all the home-made wine in all the cottages. The Morris dancers could survive this sort of diet because they were dancing but the fiddler had a bit more of a problem. Apparently by the time they got up to the end of the lane turning to The Eagle, the fiddler was in a bit of a state (in this particular year) and as he went round the corner he caught the top end of his fiddle under a drainpipe and there was a crack and he was reputed to have said "Good God" - and walked home and never had any more to do with the Morris.

Jinky Wells dashed home saying "it's alright lads" and brought out his home-made fiddle which was made out of a cigar box or something similar and played for the rest of the day. He got hold of a proper fiddle and started his career of playing for Bampton. One of the problems with Jinky was that although he played very well he didn't know all the tunes so he had a bit of a problem for a few years adapting the dances around to fit the tunes he did play. One of the tunes he didn't know Trunkles. After they had tried a variety of things, they settled down to doing the dance to Shepherds Hey. Of course, the trouble with Shepherds Hey is that it's a different length tune.

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He (Jinky) didn't have a regular job with anybody, he was self employed. He had a half-acre field on which he grew beans each year, which supplied fairly for his needs and he did jobbing, he had a hand cart. Most of the people in the village remember him as that funny little man who never did a days work in his life. It isn't quite true but that's the sort of image he had at the time. I mentioned earlier in the week, he met Sharp. I think it was through Jinky advertising locally, as far as Oxford, that built up the numbers of people from other villages coming to Bampton on Whit Monday to see the Morris and bring trade and money into the town. Unfortunately, he was also asked to teach a boys side at Anscott(?), which he did, that produced a crop of dancers, some of which were later invited to join the Morris. One of these influx was a very good organiser and very quickly became Secretary of the club and from then onwards there was a continual battle about who the Morris actually belonged to.

Jinky Wells considered, that as his grandfather and great grandfather had been in the Morris and had been Foreman in their time, that it was really a family possession. The Tanner family had provided the Captain of the side for many years and they were firmly convinced it was a Tanner family affair. In the end, it came to a head in the 1920s when they started getting double bookings. They always went to the Tanner bookings and not to Jinky's, so in the end they decided to get rid of Jinky. They told Jinky "we don't want you this year, You've done well for the Morris but we don't want you." Jinky was very upset and said "I'll show you", so he went off and raised his own side, got together all the kit and things like this. The trouble was he wasn't really a teacher of Morris, so all the youngsters who got in, really had to go and find other old dancers as well to help them learn the dancers.

It produced a nice interesting bit of needle in the village, it started in 1926 when the old'uns, as they were called, had Bertie Clark, who played in a sort of Palm Court Orchestra type band before and never played folk songs or dances. They had to get Sam Bennett over, as well, to actually tell Bertie how to play rough, he always toured with a music stand. Bertie played for the old'uns for many years, up to 1939, when he could, and when Jinky Wells died, they went over and asked Bertie to play for the other side as well. The two sides got going in 1926 and if you ever get to Cecil Sharp House to read some of the old copies of `English Dance and Song', the magazine, there are fascinating accounts of the two sides. A very derogatory account of the young'uns who couldn't really dance the first year, saying many went to see the other side and they weren't much better, the ways of doing heys were astronomical. They couldn't discover any rhyme or reason behind the way they did it. In the old days, when the sides didn't practise much anyway, just one or two get togethers before Whitsun, as in fact happened during the fifties. Still, the two sides kept going, calling on musicians, swapping dancers from one to the other quite cheerfully, everybody being very friendly, except for the two leaders of the clubs who either didn't like each other or who kept public animosity alive anyhow.

Came the war, many joined up, Jinky ran the Morris during the war, calling on dancers that were available, sometimes in uniform, certainly dancers from both sides. At the end of the war, they decided to have one Morris club and they elected themselves Francis Sheargold as president and Arnold Woodly as Bagman or Secretary, as they called it. For a few years everything went well, with Arnold teaching everybody and Francis organising the Whit Monday. Then they had the usual row, one did it for the money and wanted to minimise the number of dancers, and maximise the shareout of the bag. The other one was more concerned about where they danced and who they danced for, what I would call the social climbing aspect of it all, and these weren't reconcilable in the end, so they went their own way. In the early fifties, we had the two sides back again which one could fairly describe as a Men's and a Boy's sides at that stage. Arnold's side, although he had a few boys in it, the men he had as well were the same height as the boys. They had a little team and a big team.

The two sides went on till 1959. Arnold had liver trouble and the back trouble, kidney problems, and he was in hospital more than he was out and there was no way he could look after this other side so it collapsed. All the people who supported Arnold refused to dance with Francis, so when Arnold's health recovered about 1970, there was a strong group prepared to come and support Arnold, so he had no trouble getting a dozen men together to dance. Then Francis had a very low spot, I think about 1960, when he had four dancers. that's when Bertie Clark had died. They got the fiddler over from Whitchurch, Russell Wortley for fool, and everyone was rather convinced they would give it up. It was suggested to Francis by Frank Purslow that Reg Hall would make a good permanent musician. Reg was asked to come and play for them, along with another musician, who turned up on the day, saying "I don't know many Bampton tunes and I've got to go at 3.00." Reg was very successful and there was enough outside interest to keep enthusiasm going through the sixties. Arnold's side turned out in 1971 and, of course, has been going since. Arnold had done a awful lot of the teaching in the village and most of Francis's dancers had started by being taught by Arnold Woodly so there was a fair consistency of style. The Society did its best for Bampton Morris, it invited both teams to the Albert Hall, so it was fair. They both worked very hard, they danced together and for some reason or other on the Sunday, you know it's, most English sides invited to London, if they stay over Saturday night, are expected to dance at Sunday afternoon fair at Cecil Sharp house. It's not unusual considering what you get out of it. The Bampton boys, Arnold's boys, weren't prepared to go along in kit and dance. They'd dance in ordinary clothes but they thought it was not worth putting on kit just to dance at Cecil Sharp house. So Arnold said "if you don't do it, that's the last time you dance for me." So that was the last time they danced for him.

He already had a younger side he'd taken to the Albert Hall, it was effectively his older men who weren't necessarily that active. So what happened, the next year, was that we had three sides at Bampton, Frances's side, who considered themselves the original dancers. Arnold who considered his side the traditional dancers, because his uncles - the Buckinghams, had kept the dance alive, and their uncles had been the Tanners. So the Woodlys considered this family owned the Morris. The third lot, who were unjustifiably, at least to start with, called the Swindon mob, because one man happened to live in Swindon. The fact is, when you examine where the people came from, you find that this third team had more Bampton people in than either of the others. But it didn't stop them thinking of them as the other lot.

So even that sorted itself out rather nicely, Francis tended to look after the third side and when they danced out of the village he called on the best dancers from both sides. There was a fair bit of interchange, as before between Arnold and the Francis area. Those who've been to Bampton the last year or two, Francis's side, who've stopped trying to be competitive with Arnold and just got on with the dancing, are by far the better dancing side. There's always a problem with two sides, one thinks it's got a position to maintain or got to be superior, and they try too hard and they overdo it and it all looks strained and rather phoney. So you've got these sides and fifty odd dancers each year turning out which at least bodes well for the future of it.

The third Cotswold side, Chipping Campden, had danced up until the stopping of Dover's Games in 1854 and then stopped. The Guild of Handcrafts moved out of London in 1902 and revived it by employing Dennis Hathaway to raise a side using the services of, I think it was his father-in-law who was an ex-Morris dancer, and one other. Dennis Hathaway was brought up just outside Longborough and although he had never danced for Longborough, he was very familiar with the Morris and brought into the Chipping Campden dances many elements of Longborough, the hands, the shaking of the hand. They danced for quite a few years, Sharp went to see them. There was a problem over that. They met Sharp at a flower show, there was already a story about how Sharp had borrowed a set of bells and didn't return them quickly enough. Then Sharp didn't buy them any beer so they weren't prepared to dance for him. That's another unlikely tale because Sharp was very meticulous about things borrowed and meticulous about providing people refreshment and giving them money for things done, even though he was in a rather taut financial state himself during this period, he was extremely generous to people he worked with. Still, for some reason or other, the men and Sharp didn't hit it off at all. Any number of situations, I think anybody who collects, no matter how nice you are, you just can't reconcile yourself to all. Dennis Hathaway had a Boys side so Sharp watched the Boys side dance. Dennis had also got the dances how he liked and updated them to suit himself, so what Sharp collected wasn't what the men's side had done.

By 1912, the old men’s side started bringing in the boys and people like Don Ellis, who for many years ran the Chipping Campden Morris, had started off as a boy at that sort of period. They stopped during the Great War. They started again in 1922, when they had become a bit of a road show with a jazz band, a real jazz band, not a kazoo one, and jazz band and Morris did the local villages. They turned out most years in the twenties and thirties.

Now the Travelling Morrice, the Cambridge people had arranged a tour in 1931 in Germany which fell through because of the difficult conditions touring Germany. So they arranged a Cotswold tour and went into Chipping Campden postering and people locally said we've got a Morris team already. They went to see this side and afterwards arranged to give a joint show. Which, in fact, was very good from Chipping Campden's point of view, because then the Travelling Morrice went to see them every other year and ended their tour there. So at least every other year the Chipping Campden Morris got together and danced. There was a period certainly after the last war when Chipping Campden didn't turn out at all in the years in between they only turned out for this tour. So, I think, we can thank the Travelling Morrice very much for having kept them alive.

About 1960, the Chipping Campden Men came over to Bampton on the Whit Monday at a time when Bampton got the idea they ought to invite other sides in. They first of all thought of inviting the traditional sides. Campden came over and it was rather a special occasion. They'd heard so much about it already and it was one of the most incredible experiences of my life and of many others to see this side dance. They got enormous size sets, enormous distance off the ground in the stepping. To people who've seen the typical Campden side which is a bit slack, it's difficult to get across, but that's how they danced. Well, that sparked them off and they became like a normal side dancing many times a year, even visited Sidmouth. They had a boys side on and off to try and pass on the tradition, but the boys side at Chipping Campden have not been very successful. Well, I better stop now and let you get on with the dancing.

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