Eccentriicity ? It's in our blood!

The British love an event – par t icularly i f it involves dressing up. These pictures celebrate our eccentricities and traditions during an array of weird and wonderful occasions.

Housewives race through the street clutching frying pans, villagers gear up on a grassy slope for the ancient cheese- rolling contest and a man hurls himself off a platform into thin air with dreams of flight. We love any excuse to gather together and take part in a ridiculous competitive event in which winning is certainly not the pri mary goal. Costumes are worn whenever possible.

Clothing is the key ingredient for the London choristers seen here performing an ancient pagan ritual. Uniforms and costumes speak volumes about status, role and purpose. I love the dignity of the mayor and the careful marshalling of the Bobby as young lads in their Sunday best look on at the weighing ceremony.

Now that they have been colourised, these scenes look just like their modern equivalents up and down the country today. The onslaught of modernity has not had much effect on the outfits of mayors, guardsmen and choristers, although the policemen and women these days don’t look nearly as smart!

All of these pictures speak of our desire to be part of a community. Neighbours, church, village, town, nation. It seems that Brits very much like to belong.

SCALES OF JUSTICE The newly installed Mayor of High Wycombe, Bucks, William S Toms, is publicly weighed on 9 November 1932. He’s weighed again at the end of his year-long term and if he’s gained weight he is assumed to have been lazy and booed, but if...

IN A FLAP Amateur birdman S Gordon takes a dive into the sea off Selsey, West Sussex, on 16 August 1976. The Selsey Birdman rally – in which amateur enthusiasts attempt to fly their homemade aircraft – was founded in 1971. It moved to the nearby resort...

DRAGON’S DEN Welsh women in traditional costume, with the Welsh symbol of the red dragon, take part in the women’s coronation procession for King George V on 17 June 1911. The gentleman on the left, with the beard, is dressed as a bard

MINE’S A SIXER! Children play conkers, a traditional English game in which horse chestnuts threaded on string are bashed together in turn, in Gravesend, Kent, on 3 November 1959. The first conker to break loses and children would keep tallies of how...