"CHARADE" : HARD TIMES IN OLD ENGLAND

My continuing digging at Dalton Castle has turned up a song. The Dalton News of 1886 ran a  column of games, riddles and poems called Charades, and this comes from a John Myers, a regular contributor of state-of-the-nation verse..this one is in the vein of Hard Times Of Old England, but it's references are very specific...a snapshot of a moment.

The News is a pretty good paper. The national and overseas news is thorough, there's lots of sport, local court reports and waspish colour stories .  A fair bit of it looks like syndicated material, and the "Charades" column  has no local references so I wondered if J Myers was a stringer, a pseudonym or a committee.  But Myers is a local name and there was a J Myers and family in Dalton at around this time...
First port of call is the Vaughan Williams Library at Cecil Sharp House, where me and Mike found a wealth of local material earlier in the year...

Nick  at CSH tells us.."Thank you for your email.  We don’t know anything about the song but could it have been by the same John Myers who was Secretary of the Dalton and District United Workmen’s Association, part of the Cumberland Miners’ Association?  Incidentally, trawling through local newspaper archives seems to be a good way of finding old songs, especially where things have been digitised.  Anyway, I hope that your recording goes well and we would be delighted to receive a copy once it hits the shops.

Best wishes.."

An excellent lead. Nick also points us towards his source.. "Lake Counties from 1830 to the Mid-twentieth Century: A Study in Regional Change" by J.D. Marshall and J.K. Walton, I've now got a copy, it's a good read although of the 17 local newspapers listed,  the one it doesn't mention is the Dalton News... Meanwhile I've set Mr Myers' words to a suitably austere dulcimer tune...here it is...just the tune...6 verses worth.

https://soundcloud.com/user-628037322/charade

And here on the right are  the words. Sing along why dont you? Watch this space for Mike's version.

In the meantime I'll keep digging through the Dalton News...next installment concerns the Slonk club, Hobble-de-hoys and ne'er do wells.

"INGREDIENTS SERVES TWELVE" TRH feat. DENNETT AT RADIOPHRENIA NOV 16TH

Some exciting news.. "Ingredients Serves Twelve" is scheduled as part of Radiophrenia, the international radio arts festival.  Radiophrenia broadcasts out of Glasgow  on 87.9FM in the Glasgow area and to everywhere else online. There's a link to the festival site here, including the full schedule and links for online listening.

http://radiophrenia.scot/listen/

November 16 6.30pm to 7pm

TYSON, ROSE AND HALL / "Ingredients Serves Twelve"

30 Mins, Recorded composition for broadcast.

Description:

November marks the point in the year when the cold and the darkness begin to set in. A time of reflection, of Souling from door to door, prayers exchanged for food, of sacrifice and bargaining,

"Ingredients Serves Twelve" is a composition for broadcast evoking the desperate rituals of the Blood Month. It comprises narration, vinyl cut-ups, original Field recordings, Cassette tape, a collection of BBC in - house Sound Effects discs donated by BBC Radio Cumbria and, as guest reader, Broadcaster Jennie Dennett.


Many thanks to all at Radiophrenia, it's great to be included in what looks like a bewilderingly varied programme of residencies, live and pre-recorded work and commissions.  Each day looks like a festival unto itself. 
Good friend and Octopus associate Jenn Mattinson is included too, her excellent piece "Out of Place: Delia Derbyshire in Cumbria" goes out on 8th November 2017 at 12:30 pm - 1:00 pm. A moving audio-evocation of a largely unknown period in the life of a great artist.

http://radiophrenia.scot/news/

ARCHETYPES AND TRADITION: MASK AND MUMMING

Following up some discussions about performance, ritual and the spaces they create..rough stuff, lots of cutting and pasting, not where I intended to go, but here we are.When looking for meaning or significance in folk and vernacular arts- in all performance maybe- we look for archetypes, the twelve primary types symbolizing basic human motivations. How useful these are might depend on whether we are looking at codified rituals/performances and the themes and characters thereof, or the motivations behind the ritual/performance and its survival.    An understanding might come from a look at the self-assigned social mores of  communities performing Mummers and Pace / Pasche Egg plays,and the structures operating within them, by mapping the archetypes - Jung's  "universal and inherited patterns which, taken together, constitute the structure of the unconscious" - onto social groups. Rather than the plays themselves, the enduring product of the tradition  is the continued will to expression arising from these structures. "The English Mummers as Manifestations of the Social Self" by Christine Herold offers some useful examples and perspectives. During the revival the tropes of Mumming and Pace / Pache Egging were assumed to  refer to pre- Christian rituals of rebirth and sacrifice.The plays  themselves though are comparatively recent; the oldest written script is from the 18th. If there was any single source it may have been an appropriation  by the community of an existing play with that theme, which was further disseminated and gradually coarsened and infused with new elements and characters.
Far from lost in the mists of time then, the roots of the plays are within reach. Collecting money at the end was as much of a motive as anything else, linking them with Plough plays or the hybrid of first footing and extortion that still went on in parts of Chesterfield when I was a kid. Even the term mummer can be traced to a common custom ; the mystery lies in the continuing desire to perform them, and in what assumptions of communal character are being played out and reinforced in doing so.Performance permits a..."cathartic expression of repressed motives." We can see this today in sick humour whether reflexive or provocative, and in the transgressive alt-narratives and  bravado oratory of the Brexit campaign where rituals of debate were employed to sanction the saying of what was portrayed as "unsayable" -although in fact said all too commonly but within closed circles.  In the ritualistic nature of Mumming Roger Faris finds a similar  mechanism; here  the ritual  provides a "disguised gratification" of a repressed "in-group hostility" --a "cathartic expression of repressed motives" in the relatively safe arena of ritual. 

Its ultimate purpose is "the direct gratification of forbidden hostilities . . . and then the subsequent recreation and renewal of the social order."What was missing in the political manifestation of this structure was an understanding of the process of recreation and renewal, of the value of consensus.Herold: "To settlements displaying a "marked lack of social change, . . . the stranger, is unpredictable, unreliable, not to be trusted, deviant, and, . . . potentially dangerous and malevolent."

This category of "potentially dangerous and malevolent" individuals includes women. (Roger T)Faris observes, in a community. the custom represents a traditional community's ritualized expression of its reactions to the Stranger, the Other: "To settlements displaying a "marked lack of social change, . . . the stranger, is unpredictable, unreliable, not to be trusted, deviant, and, . . . potentially dangerous and malevolent....in communities with a "rigidly virilocal marriage and settlement pattern, . . . women are" in fact, "most often the `strangers'."

The custom permits (maybe demands)  acknowledgment and a demonstration of the fear of the stranger or the 'other'. 

 Disguised performers in the role of 'other' take liberties with the communities rules, ragging and roasting each other and their neighbours. Those on the end of such treatment are given the opportunity to shrug this off, and to exercise hospitality to such a degree that they assuage and absorb the sense of threat and dread such characters arouse.

Applause disarms, absorbs and deflects the threat.

The heightened absurdity of the players appearance underlines its artificiality ("We are not really like this") while the antics of the performers have a root in the familiar and unspoken ("Yes we are").

All ends well. The community takes comfort in its own generosity.

"The English Mummers as Manifestations of the Social Self"

Christine Herold, Ödense, 1998

Mumming Script, Chesterfield 1933, EFDSS

LICENSE AND LIMINALITY

The Human Organs were out in Ulverston last weekend for the Lantern Procession. There have been 30 plus years here  of making and lighting and marching, and many more of fireworks and noise  but you can still find conflicting accounts of what the event is and what it should be, of  the clash it delivers between expectations and fears engendered when we gather in the dark. 

  We were in town for the finale this  year. We began at the end of Market St in near daylight. We were discreet; two debutants meant a steady fade in was necessary. Every corner seemed to have a  stall in place from about 5pm, their dayglo automata had cooed and whistled at each other across the streets as I came out of Tesco. We had a bit of mouthing off, done from a distance; easily dealt with, an  ice-breaker really..a few little kids came up for a parp, another decided to conduct us. Older kids demanded Beats; ("We are doing Beats. We can't do anything but Beats.") We got into our stride and ended up accompanying  a Silent Performance of Melie's Journey To The Moon and wandering back to our spot via the empty paths alongside the A590 before finishing up downwind of the mainstage and the firework finale.

   No -one knew quite what to expect this year;  the usual finale venue, a large park under Hoad hill withdrew amid questions about access and restrictions related equally to  safety and (further) building on the site. A stage went up in a town centre carpark, other performance sites were established, costumed stewards gently nudged and coaxed and the procession had made its looming, flickering way. It was good. Ulverston is well used to this and to the woozy herd instincts of  the procession and the sharper edges of its' flanks ;  any town with a history (however short) of self-supporting, autonomous quasi-carnival  should be familiar with the buffoon-ery that accompanies the main  event. The lads from the distant settlements making their way into town, the underage drink on the train kicking in early;  the temporary license bestowed by darkness, colour and crowds, and the seemingly upturned consensus on excess. A Fairground a few yards from the route provides  a locus for first-goes at the rituals of display; bottles and piss streams glint at its boundaries. 

There were complaints. Not many. Online mutterings that once wouldn't have made it out of the taproom; Didn't like the finale band. ( Laptops, beats, masks, Haribo fuelled K-Pop rather than our so-and -so knocking out Wonderwall.) (Kids loved it.) Didn't like the site. Didn't like the inconvenience. (why cant I drive through this crowd of candlelit paper lanterns and park my car?) Most of all, didn't like the kids. Drunk kids. Out of town kids.  Noisy, sweary kids. non-decorative, unaccepting, un-co-optable kids. Trying it on. Pushing  and shoving their way out of one life and into another. 

 It seems some of us now write the story on sunday that we want to read on monday. The local paper picks up the lead from the social media winge, Grey heads are shaken. A few even greyer heads note that 'twas ever thus, that absent from the old kodak photos and  Super 8 is the sound of glass underfoot. 

Spectacles, firefests,The Wakes, Lanternnight,  AFF's all- inclusive multi-platform reboot of the old carnival night buzz , these allow the creation of  liminal spaces and interzones, not always pretty, but valuable. And look at the rest of the year - not just here but anywhere where the bought-in and chucked-up arrives for the weekend and leaves with a couple of local caffs' takings under its belt. Where, on the crowded cobbles and around the 5-star streetfood kitchens, where amid the tophats and goggles, the bonnets and cemetery photo-ops and alcohol-free mulled wine is the artful  dodger?  

There's no room for such a being, and if there were room there's nothing in the assembly instructions that will tell you what it wants.

ON HOAD

The relationship between  hills and the people that live in the land around them is worth looking at. In the affection there is an echo of the security offered by hills as lookout points or shelter. There is something of the awe of their size and the fear for their stability. 
Having heard this affection expressed many times, the question was how  to represent it without exposing or intruding on the relationships and encounters that inspire it.
Accomplices were needed.


 The work needed to inhabit the hill and the Monument. It needed to be discreet, 
 unannounced, somehow within and of the place                                                                       
 This is the first go.                                                                                                                     https://vimeo.com/239623741