MAYORS OF ENGLAND

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 151, 23 December 1938, Page 12

MAYORS OF ENGLAND

SOME STRANGE CEREMONIES

Few indeed of the three hundred or so of Mayors and Mayoresses chosen in their respective town and cities are elected or inducted with the ceremony peculiar to the Lord Mayor of London, whose election procession took place in London recently, says the "Manchester Guardian." Nevertheless, there are a few places where ancient tradition permits certain interesting departures from the ordinary. The Mayor of Lincoln, for example, is inducted to hishigh office by having an ancient, ring placed on his finger. At Cheltenham the heart of the new Mayor is gladdened with the gift of a gold-headed malacca cane —a reminder, perhaps, of those distant days when he was really expected to go out into the highways and byways and keep order in person.

Probably the Mayors of Dunstable and Grantham have to face the most interesting, though not the most agreeable, ceremonies. The Mayor of Dunstable, for his part, is well and truly "bumped," while he of Grantham, for some quaint reason lost in the mists of antiquity, is smartly tapped on the head with a mallet by the town clerk. Very likely, too, the Mayor of Bournemouth is not greatly enamoured of the practice, current in his borough, of kissing his successor when the latter takes office, and there seems a suspicion of a bad joke about the Brightlingsea habit of electing its Mayors in the belfry of the parish church.