Grand day out
A new documentary highlights the divisions which have emerged in the world of Morris dancing. Alex Preston reports
Princess Beatrice and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, her boyfriend, yesterday watched the Bahrain Grand Prix in Sakhir. They were later joined by her mother, Sarah, Duchess of York. The couple appeared to confirm their romance when attending a prize gala in New York last December.
It’s a vote that has divided families, leaving in its wake a raft of threats and plots and conspiracies. The losing side has accused the winners of manipulation and intimidation, while the winners believe the losers have stolen their victory from them. It’s a very English tale, one whose narrative says much about the state of the country today, about the divisions between the rural working classes and the multicultural metropolitan elite.
It is the story of the Morris Ring and its 2018 annual representatives’ meeting, when, after 85 years of maintaining single-sex status, the 111 collected “squires” of the Ring’s Morris sides (or teams) voted to allow women into the fold.
The controversy attracted the attention of filmmaker Richard Macer, whose grandparents met while Morris dancing. Macer spent the months leading up to and after the meeting following some of the leading sides of the Morris Ring, interviewing their often eccentric, always opinionated members.
The first Morris Ring side to accept women following the 2018 vote was Plymouth. The squire, Paul Reece, and his wife Marion had experienced first-hand the thorniness of gender politics in Morris dancing years earlier when they lived in Thaxted, Essex. Paul had asked the side to recognise Marion, who often played accordion at practices, as an official member, and, although the vote in 2009 passed, many traditionalists were unhappy.
Reece and his wife were shunned in the village and scorned by their former friends. “My wife received a coordinated campaign of hostile letters from the wives of members,” Reece says now. So, finally, in 2012, the Reeces left the town and moved 250 miles away to Devon.
Reece is a moderniser in a world whose very nature is backwardlooking. Morris sides are dying out – quite literally – and he recognises that it’s only by modernising that this prototypically English folk dance will survive. “Glass cases and dodos may
be fine on a museum shelf,” he says. “But sides need to be vibrant and an expression of their communities and their times.”
The Morris Ring is one of three umbrella dance organisations in the country, the others being the Morris Federation and Open Morris, and is the only one to have maintained a ban on women members. And while the squires did eventually vote to alter the constitution, there are many who are resistant to the changes.
One such individual is Barry Care, a former teacher and a vocal critic of allowing women into the Morris Ring. Care, who dances with his son, Simon, is a Betsy – a kind of pantomime dame who forms an integral part of his side’s dances. He looks uncannily like Grayson Perry as he leaps and prances in a red wig. His argument is that, he says, “the quality goes” when women join a side, stressing the need to maintain the “artistic purity” of the form. “I would love to see men’s Morris honoured for its traditional place in our heritage and see it persist and survive as an existing art form alongside everything else,” he says. It’s striking that, despite the vote, only around one in 10 of the almost 200 sides that sit beneath the Morris Ring’s umbrella have current female members. Change, it seems, happens slowly.
All of this is particularly strange given the central role that women played in the revival of Morris dancing in England. By the 1910s, the pastime had all but died out and, although Cecil Sharp, a central figure in the Edwardian English Folk Revival, is often credited with restoring Morris dancing, women were also a critical force behind the movement.
Mary Neal set up the Espérance Club in King’s Cross, teaching young working class women Morris dancing as part of a broader educational programme. In the post-war years, it was Neal and her “girls” who set out to re-energise moribund Morris sides, an irony not lost on those pushing for gender equality on the current circuit.
The tradition of Mary Neal lives on in a number of women-only sides. In Macer’s excellent documentary, by far the most engaging characters are those from Windsor Morris, an all-female side. I spoke to Sel Adamu, the side’s treasurer, who’s a member of three different groups and has been dancing for 10 years. I ask her what she thinks of Barry Care’s forthright views on women dancers.
“I know he has concerns around maintaining the standards,” she says, “but I disagree that keeping Morris male or single-sex achieves that. I’ve seen plenty of wonderful all-male, all-female and mixed sides, as well as plenty of terrible ones.” She also points out that a recent survey showed that women dancers were taking up the pursuit in significantly greater numbers than men.
Morris dancing continues to have an image problem. Whereas folk dance is celebrated in most other countries – think Scottish reeling or Spanish flamenco – it seems to be viewed with a mixture of condescension and outright loathing by many in England – note the wave of vitriol that followed David Cameron’s meeting with black-faced Morris dancers at Banbury Folk Festival in 2014.
I figure that Sel must occasionally feel uncomfortable in a world where it can often seem like the only other non-white faces are those who’ve blacked up in ceremonies that carry uneasy echoes of minstrel shows. Isn’t it a pursuit for old, white, rural men?
“Nonsense,” she says. “The Morris world is inclusive and progressive and definitely not dominated by men, rural or otherwise! In my experience, it has far fewer issues with racism than in the general population.”
In Macer’s film, he cleverly intercuts archive footage of Morris dancers from the Twenties and Thirties with shots of contemporary sides, demonstrating one of the central appeals of the dance – the sense that Morris dancers are literally stepping in the footsteps of past generations. Macer also captures the camaraderie that exists.
Pete Simpson, the current Squire of the Morris Ring, is a bluff, amiable man with a strong Birmingham accent. “Going out and having a dance, that’s fine,” he tells me. “We all enjoy that. But the bonding afterwards, the ritual drinking and eating and singing – what we call ‘having a session’ – is a very important part of it. It’s what helps build you as a group.”
Simpson tells me that his own side, the Jockey Morris Men, has no intention of opening to women dancers. The Morris Ring, he says, is unable to force sides to do so. “It’s because we’re a bunch of blokes who all like to get together on a Friday night. And while we all love our wives, we do like to get away from them one night a week.”
Morris dancing continues to have an image problem.
It is often viewed with outright loathing