MORRIS DANCING - A LIFE WITH BELLS ON

This year (2024) marks the 50th anniversary of my first getting involved in morris dancing. During that period I’ve been a member of about twenty teams, although some were short-lived and for one reason or another I only did a few dance-outs with others. I’ve also attended a practice of, or danced in public as a guest of, about another thirty teams. I’m the author of All About The Morris, a history of morris dancing (see Bookshop page).  In the late 80s and early 90s I was an official of the organisation Open Morris, firstly as editor of the magazine Dancing On, and latterly as Secretary, and in 2020 I was honoured to be made a Life-Member of Open Morris. Below are a few words about, and pictures of, some of the teams I’ve been in.

GIFFARD MORRIS MEN
My father was accordionist for the Giffard Country Dancers with me playing drums alongside him, and my mother danced with the team, so was only a matter of time before I got involved (in the summer of 1974) with their “twin-team” the Gifford Morris Men, based in Wolverhampton. Initially I was the team’s drummer and only started dancing in public in the summer of 1978. By then Gifford was in decline, affected by issues concerning women doing morris, which I was totally in favour of, and said as much, to the chagrin of the team’s foreman). Nearly all the teams I’ve been involved in since have been mixed – ie the dancers were both men and women.

BARLEY MORRIS
I joined this team in 1982 after hitching a lift with one of them to a folk festival. Wearing green ragshirts, and based at Penn, on the outskirts of Wolverhampton, they were one of the first wave of teams inspired by the Shropshire Bedlams, composing their own dances and tunes and dancing high off the ground. I created several dances for this team, one of which, Penn Cross, we still regularly perform at New Year. Another of my dances, Crooked House Molly (named after a recently-demolished Black Country pub), uses a figure I originally created for another of the Barley Morris stick dances.

MERRYDALE MORRIS
By 1984 I’d gained enough experience to start up my own team, which practiced in a scout hut within walking distance of my house in Wolverhampton. It was a Cotswold team, performing dances from the Adderbury, Bampton, Bledington, Bucknell and Ducklington traditions. I designed the costume and taught the team until I moved to Malvern in 1990. Sadly it only lasted a few more years.

BLACKADDER MORRIS
An attempt to set up a Wolverhampton-based team doing North-West Morris in clogs foundered after three practices, so several of us joined Blackadder, based in Cotteridge, Birmingham, although getting to practices involved quite a trek. Blackadder created their own dances, one of which involved someone doing five successive leap-frogs over a line of the other dancers – a role I eventually inherited. I loved the original kit – red dungarees with a snake symbol on the chest, worn over yellow shirts. The anglo-french ceilidh band Borborygme which I played in was formed from musicians associated with this team, which still flourishes.

MADCAP MORRIS
This was originally an annual Border Morris weekend for about 70 people held on the weekend closest to my birthday in December from 1986 onwards. The first four were based in Wolverhampton and involved a coach tour out to the Severn Valley on the Sunday. In 1990 it moved with me out to Malvern and the Sunday was a walking tour around the Malvern Hills. I organised it, did most of the teaching and calling, fronted the band, masterminded the catering (although others did most of the actual food preparation), and put up nearly half of those attending at my house. Latterly dancing started 4pm on Friday, continued through Saturday and Sunday and there was a short dance spot after breakfast on Monday before the last dozen or so people went home.

The public parts of the weekend were just Border Morris, but some Molly dances crept into the repertoire by the mid 90s, and in private there was a lot of Cotswold Morris, the occasional North-West Morris dance, lots of social dances, and late-night singing. By the mid 90s I started taking a Border team under the Madcap name off to folk festivals occasionally. Latterly Madcap did four events a year: Border Morris on New Years’ Day, a week of Cotswold (with one day off to perform a mumming play) at Broadstairs’ Folk Week in August, Molly at a local beer festival in November, and the original Border Morris weekend in early December, the last of which, announced as such, was held in 2019. My timing was spot on, Covid would have totally messed it all up anyway.

MEDLOCK MORRIS
Medlock were a Manchester University based Cotswold team that a I did a few dance-outs with in the early 1990s as a consequence of one of them being my partner at the time. They danced high off the ground, and most of them had wonderfully long hair.

BEACON MORRIS
Beacon Morris of West Malvern was originally founded by me in September 1990, following my move to Malvern. It failed to attract sufficient local support and relied on outsiders to make up the numbers for the occasional dance-outs it did up to 1995. The Beacon name was revived for dance-outs on New Year’s Day 2023 and 2024, and also for my 70th birthday gathering in December 2023. The latter stirred up some local interest and during the first four months of 2024 a series of well-attended practices were held in West Malvern Village Hall. A summer kit of black trousers, forest-green shirts, gold sashes, light green handkerchiefs and bellpads was created in April to enable Beacon to function as a regular side rather than just an occasional one. The photo shows the first performance in the new kit on 4th May 2024, dancing around the dressed wells and springs of the Malvern Hills. On the 7th May we danced at our local community-owned pub, the Brewers Arms, and on 28th May we danced at the Three Kings at Hanley Castle. In July we danced at a fete in west Malvern and in August we danced at The Swan at Newland.  Other performances are scheduled for the autumn, and our practices on Tuesday nights 7.15-9.15pm will run from 17th Sept through to 17th Dec 2024. Potential dancers and musicians are welcome to join us at any of these practices. Subs of £3 are collected at practices to pay for the hall.  The repertoire is mostly Border Morris but other types of morris, molly dancing and mumming may occasionally be performed. Contact Mike on 01684 565211 or mike@castlesalter.co.uk,  or just turn up.

FREAKS IN THE PEAKS
Members of teams based in and around Manchester and Sheffield came to the Madcap weekends in the early 90s and decided they’d occasionally like to meet up somewhere roughly in the middle (ie the Peak District) to dance some Border Morris. The first one was in the spring of 1996 and its still going. The format is similar to that of Madcap, ie a three hour rehearsal on Saturday, then dancing out in the afternoon, and a five mile walk on Sunday with dancing at a pub. It’s not as centrally organised as Madcap was (especially as regards catering) and less frantic, eg there isn’t five hours worth of dancing on Friday! Occasionally the weekends are held further afield, eg Ravenglass and York.

OLD MEG
What was originally an all-female Malvern-based North-West Morris team ran short of dancers in the late 90s and from the start of 2000 it agreed to take male dancers. I had previously served as the team’s drummer in 1991 but soon got bored because of the lack of opportunities to dance. After it became mixed I quickly became the team’s Secretary and masterminded its coach trip to London to perform at the Millennium Dome. Originally several of us took turns at leading the team in public, and I was in charge when we performed at the Wimborne Folk Festival in 2001.

RISING LARKS
This was another female North-West Morris team that ran short of dancers and in 2019 their leader, Sue, agreed to take me on, despite my living 200 miles from their base at Harwich. Actually there was a precedent for dancers’ partners occasionally joining in one or two dances, but I took being in the team more seriously and quickly got myself organised with notations and a crib-sheet with a view to being able to do a much wider range of the team’s dances.  Somehow I managed to make the majority of the dance-outs from 2019 to 2023, even though I only got to one or two mid-week practices per year. Principal highlights have been dancing at folk festivals at Rochester and Broadstairs and Folk East at Glenham Hall in Suffolk At Broadstairs the team usually does alternate days with the Cotswold team Leading Lights, composed largely of the same people, and I’ve been involved in that too, most recently in August 2024.