Maypole Dancing

When I was at Junior (Elementary) School our summer term 'day out' used to be a trip up to Linthorpe Park on the outskirts of town to dance (with lots of kids from other Middlesborough schools) around the Maypole. No doubt there were politicians from the local Education Committee there making speeches but I don't recall it. For us it was - after weeks of ruthless drilling by our teachers - a once in a year chance to escape our inner-city playgrounds on double-decker buses and head out to where there were real trees and loud tinny music playing.

I never knew it before but looking here on the internet - take a lookie here - I see that John Ruskin started to spread this dancing tradition into English schools in the 1880's. It was a good idea, and certainly up in the North East we made the whole business our own by playing local folk songs as our dance tunes - scratchy old 78 rpm records of accordion band renderings of "Bobby Shaftoe" and "Blaydon Races". I have some ancient 8mm cine film somewhere of ten year olds silently bobbing up and down around the Maypole and actually you don't need a sound track - you can 'hear' the music just in the way those blurry figures move.

The idea of our Maypole dancing was to make all kinds of fancy movements around each other holding the end of our ribbon tight until we had woven beautiful red, white and blue patterns in the air. It says a lot about the iron discipline in our school that the teachers could not only 'persuade' the sons of steel workers and coal miners to actually dance on the grass without fooling around but also that the actually scared them enough to ensure that they avoided mistakes like dropping ribbons or taking a wrong turn and messing the weaving up. Mind you, the rest of us would have beaten anyone who made a mistake to a pulp too!

I don't think it would all happen so easily now.