LETTER FROM BRITAIN

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 79, Issue 7147, 19 December 1949, Page 4

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

FOLK DANCE FESTIVAL OLD CEMETERY AS GARDEN OF REST

[By

A. K. Astbury,

Exclusive to

The Courier!

One has only to go to a folk dance festival in the United Kingdom to realise, once and for all, that the people of Britain do not take their pleasures sadly. We have just had, in Lancashire, the northern festival of the English Folk Dance Society, where lads and lassies from all over the north performed in such traditional dances as the Dirk Dance of the Kings of Man, the Morpeth Rant, and Lads a Bunchum. (In this case “Man” must be the self-gn/verning Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, which has its own Parliament and high court, and a government and constitution distinct from that of the United Kingdom; its own language, a branch of Celtic, is still spoken to a very slight extent. Morpeth is a town in Northumberland, northern county of England. “Lads a Bunchum” I give up.) To this festival came such performers as the Royal Earsdon Sword Dancers from Northumberland, dressed in red breeches, white shirts, and broad yellow sashes, their leader in tail coat and top hat. From neat Yorkshire’s steel centre of Sheffield came the Grenoside Sword Dancers, who each Christmas still dance their 1000 years old dance in the centre of the village, where in severe weather an arena has to be dug for them in the snow. The dance begins with a mock execution of the leader and ends with a clog dance. And from that real Lancashire town of Bacup came the Coconut Dancers, who on Easter Monday dance through the streets of the town from eight o’clock in the morning until eight at night. Their hands, faces, jerseys and breeches are black, and in their short red and white shirts they look exactly like stage pirates. These dancers, incidentally, devote a night a week a whole year through to train for their yearly Marathon. The steps are very complex, and it is said that new recruits need at least a year’s practice before they are ready to take part! The coconuts are wooden discs tied to hands and elbows; with these, and their clogs, they beat out urgent and insistent rhythms all day long. Dances of all Nations Nor is such dancing limited to the provinces. The other day I went to a gathering right in the centre of London where they were doing all sorts of folk dancing, but this time Swedish, Russian, Dutch, Polish, Czech, and many other kinds. Most of the dancers were Londoners, members of a society which specialises in the folk dances of other countries; a number of visitors from overseas were there too—an American oil geologist, a Swedish woman doctor, a young Dutchman—and it was interesting to see them throwing themselves with enthusiasm into their own dances in the heart of what to them was a foreign city. Folk dancers are considering their own special festivals for the bigger Festival of Britain in 1951. There is to be dancing in the new festival gardens to be set up in Battersea Park in London, and I havejio doubt there may be folk dancing too. A fun fair covering seven acres is to be opened there, and apart from this there Will be such novel features as a petrified forest, a maze, a fountain ballet, an aviary, and revolving flower beds.

Old Cemetery as Garden of Rest Almost the same day these! details were announced came news of another open space in London—Bunhill Fields. Who, not knowing Bunhill Fields, could guess that it was one of London’s oldest cemeteries, past which buses drive all day to and from London’s northern main line stations ? Yet this is doubly hallowed ground. Here lie the bodies of John Bunyan (author of Pilgrim’s Progress), Daniel Defoe (who wrote Robinson Crusoe) and William Blake, poet and painter. Here one may still see the graves of Susannah Wesley (the mother of John Wesley the evangelist) and Issac Watts (who wrote the hymn “O God Our Help In Ages Past,” published in 1719). It was here that victims of the Great Plague which afflicted London in 1665-66 were buried, and from 1788 until it was closed in 1852 it was London’s chief Noncomformist burial ground. It is a gloomy enough place. And I imagine no one will quarrel with the decision announced by the Corporation of London to make it more truly a place of remembrance by laying it out as a garden of rest, while yet retaining its graves and monuments of historic importance. For however well supplied we may be in London with open spaces we always welcome more. To many, parks and open spaces mean something more than fresh air—the chance for a sort of. urban nature study, watching ducks, observing the first rhododendrons to flower, following the starlings in flight. I stood and lihtened to a lark singing above a London common recently, and swans among the Thames-side docks always attract me. But I have been a good deal more interested to read recently that Britain’s only eagle, the golden eagle, is holding its own in the Highlands of Scotland, and that 16 eyries, or nests, of young golden eagles had even been raised in south Scotland last year. In Scotland, too, the ptarmigan, the only bird in Britain which changes its nlumage for protective purposes, is less rare than it was during the war, when wild cats and foxes destroyed many. And in Durham, in the north of England, a nine years old bird watcher has confirmed the old phrase, “It takes more than one swallow to make a summer” by seeing a single swallow ( a summer visitor to Britain) flying in the cold north in the late autumn. All that is now required to make the joy of the naturalist complete is for someone to see a viper near Belfast (there are no snakes in Ireland) or hear a nightingale near Loch Lomond . (they never sing in Scotland) !