How we marked Christmas in days gone by
THE works’ Christmas party for children of employees seems to have all but disappeared from our annual calendar, although there are many who no doubt remember these annual events from days gone by.
If your dad worked at the Gloster Aircraft Company (GAC), as mine did until the factory closed in 1963, you probably attended the festive extravaganzas in the firm’s canteen.
Your first impression on entering the room as a youngster was of its overawing size. The great echoing chamber was built to feed hundreds of workerdiners at a sitting.
In fact, the GAC canteen was almost as big as one of the workshops where Hurricanes had been turned out by the thousand in the Second World War and it was, in a way, famous too.
The popular BBC radio Light Programme’s ‘Workers’ Playtime’ was broadcast from GAC’S canteen on many occasions, and stars such as Grace Fields and Frankie Howerd had broadcast from its stage.
Those parties are now only a memory, but there remains a wealth of Gloucestershire traditions associated with Yuletide that are still alive and well.
One of the most popular pantomimes today is Dick Whittington, based on a real-life character who came from Pauntley, near Redmarley D’abitot, the latter a local place name that has the distinction of sounding like the dashing cad from a Jane Austen novel.
Young Whittington really did make for London to seek his fortune, found it and became thrice times lord mayor of the city.
Age old mummers’ plays are performed on Boxing Day in the county, among them the annual production that takes place outside Gloucester cathedral.
In medieval times, Mitcheldean installed a boy bishop on the Sunday nearest St Nicholas’s Day (December 6) and this tradition was re-booted in the 1970s.
The chosen lad, usually a member of the local church choir, was dressed in lavish robes and paraded about with a crook preaching a sermon along the way.
Christmas is, of course, a time for giving. But for sections of the county populace it was regarded as a time for receiving, too.
Perhaps the best description of this is found in Laurie Lee’s ‘Cider with Rosie,’ where Slad’s most celebrated son recalls carol-barking in the 1920s. “We were the church choir. For a year we had praised the Lord out of key, and as a reward for this service we now had the right to visit all the big houses to sing our carols and collect our tributes”.
In Blockley, Winchcombe and other villages, Thomasing was another occasion when children were due tributes from local homes. Thomasing took place on St Thomas’s Day, December 2. Groups of kids sang festive songs, or recited such rhymes as
Please to remember St Thomas’s Day St Thomas’s Day is the shortest day Up the stocking and down the shoe If you ain’t got no apples money’ll do Needy residents of Leasebourne in Chipping Campden were given a St Thomas Day loaf on December 21. On the same day in Tewkesbury, estate workers knocked on the door of Beckford Hall, where the butler presented them with a sixpence, plus a slice of bread and butter.
The giving of such small gifts was
known as goading in Moreton-inmarsh, along with Tidenham in the Forest of Dean, while in Avening and Minchinhampton the word used was mumping.
In the Dean village of Yorkley, locals used to put a bowl of water in front of the fire before retiring to bed so that the fairies could have their yearly bath.
A Cheltenham tradition that is no
more is the Boxing Day gathering of the hunt outside the Queens Hotel. Half the town used to arrive to watch the spectacle of red-coated, black-hatted folk on horseback knock back a few stirrup cups, then clatter down the Prom flanked by a pack of barking hounds in the direction of Andoversford.
Oscar Wilde had something to say about that.