A dance for the Morris men of the Somme
As the centenary is marked, hears how the folk world was changed forever
There is a surviving photograph of six young Morris men taken shortly before the outbreak of the Great War. They are standing on what appears to be a village green and resplendent in matching flannels with bells and ribbons tied to their calves. Each man brandishes a pair of large white handkerchiefs hanging by their sides.
It is a picture of rural innocence that within a few years would be shattered. Their dancing outfits were swapped for thick woollen khakis and folk accoutrements replaced by trench tools and Lee Enfield Rifles. Instead of soft English grass under their feet was the mud of the Somme. Four of this band of brothers never came home.
The men were the members of the demonstration team of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, founded in 1911 by Cecil Sharp, and credited with inspiring the revival of the great Morris dancing tradition, which dated back to the 15th century.
When war broke out, the demonstration team volunteered to fight for their country. Young, fit and well-educated, they quickly rose through the ranks until they found themselves among the hundreds of thousands of British troops sent to the Somme in the summer of 1916 for a battle which raged until midNovember, with an average of 2,500 losses per day.
First of the Morris men to be killed was Sergeant George Wilkinson, 31, cut down on the opening day of fighting on July 1, which left 19,240 dead and remains the bloodiest 24 hours in the history of the British Army. Second Lieutenant Percival Lucas, a 36-year-old serving with the Border Regiment, and a skilled writer who helped edit the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s pamphlets, died in battle five days later.
On August 5, George Butterworth, educated at Eton and Oxford University and one of the great folk composers of his era, was shot through the head. The 31-year-old had been recommended for the Military Cross for his bravery and Top: the 10th Battalion Worcestershire Regiment with German prisoners at the Somme. Above: men of the English Folk Dance and Song Society was awarded it twice (the second time posthumously).
Another former Oxford graduate, Reginald Tiddy, was the last of the Morris men to lose his life. On the night of August 10, the 36-year-old Lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry was attempting to retrieve corpses from no man’s land when he was struck by a shell and killed. His body lies in the English burial ground at Laventie beneath a cross bearing the words “Greater Love Hath No Man”.
Morris men played a vital role in swelling the ranks of the British Army during the First World War. In 1914 many villages boasted their own teams – particularly in areas such as the Cotswolds, Cambridgeshire Fens, Pennines and Welsh Borders – and they fought and died, en masse.
The story of the Adderbury Morris side from near Banbury in Oxfordshire is an all too familiar one. Of five who volunteered only one survived the war. Percy Pargeter was another killed at the Somme; his brother Ronald died in France two years later.
But it was the massacre of Cecil Sharp’s demonstration team that was to have the greatest impact and altered the face of folk-dancing in Britain throughout the 20th century.
Now, a century on from their deaths, a troupe of young Morris dancers are heading out to the Somme in July to perform at the cemeteries and memorials where the names of their forefathers are recorded. The dancers are part of a side called Fool’s Gambit, whose 16 members hail from across the country and are aged between 17 and 25.
“The folk world was changed by what happened on the Somme,” says Morris dancer Edd Bennett, a 25-year-old accountant from Sheffield. “An entire generation of dancers who knew their local traditions by instinct were just wiped out.”
Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, mixed-sex Morris dancing was just beginning to be encouraged, but the death of so many of the demonstration teams put paid to that, and surviving members had far more traditional, misogynistic views about women dancers.
However, in recent years a new wave of Morris dancers has been coming to the fore. The oft-derided tradition has started to be seen as hip once more, with sides up and down the country reporting resurgent interest.
Fittingly, Fool’s Gambit is a proudly mixed-sex side. Rosie Wright, a 25-year-old from Warrington, is representative of the change from what she calls the “Morris man with the beard and beer belly”. The former Bath University student got into Morris dancing through her brother Thomas, and in France she will be playing a 150year-old fiddle that once belonged to her great-grandfather, Ernest William Wright.
He also fought in the Somme in 1916 but survived the bloodshed, only to be injured in the final years of the war with a shoulder wound that destroyed his dreams of becoming a professional violinist. Wright says she and her fellow dancers have already found themselves welling up on hearing such stories.
“One of the things I’ve loved researching this is you feel this shared connection of people who were just like us and ended up going into the military and dying on the Somme,” says Edd Bennett.
“George Butterworth was maybe two years older than me when he volunteered. It makes it strike home much more. When teams lost dancers, the folk community’s first reaction was to volunteer to help. That makes me immensely proud.”
The Morris men’s songs and dances also often proved to be vital in raising morale among troops. Letters from Reginald Tiddy to his father in the months before his death speak of performing and to his fellow soldiers. “It quite won the dear Tommies’ hearts,” he wrote.
Spreading their music is all these men ever intended to do with their lives, yet they died in a futile battle in a terrible war. A century on, if they could hear the tell-tale bells and boots over their graves, the Morris men of the Somme would no doubt muster a joyful salute.