May
Day in South London: a history
Neil Transpontine
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Ancient Festivals
3. The Merry Month of May - Middle Ages to Puritans
4. Milkmaids, Chimney Sweeps and the Jack-in-the-Green
5. Reinventing May Day
6. The Workers' May Day: origins to 1930s
7. The Workers' May Day After the Second World War
8. The Counter-Culture and the Folk Revival
9. Anti-Capitalist May Days
10. 21st Century May Day
10. Conclusion
11. Bibliography
1. INTRODUCTION
For centuries people have been celebrating the height of Spring, and the first
signs of Summer, at the beginning of May. This pamphlet examines the diverse
ways they have done so in London South of the Thames.
It is a story of milkmaids, chimney sweeps, kings, socialists, pagans, Christians,
school children and anarchists. A story of maypoles, May Queens and Jack-inthe-Greens.
A story too of subversion and conflicts with the authorities: May Day has often
been a focus of religious and political contention, and continues to be so down
to the present day. At the time of writing (2011), the UK Government is consulting
on plans to abolish the May Day bank holiday and replace it with one more in
line with its political thinking - perhaps something more straightforwardly
nationalistic like a 'UK Day' or a Trafalgar Day. Whether or not this proposal
goes ahead, it demonstrates the discomfort that May Day in its various forms
has caused ruling elites over the centuries.
This text started out as a talk and has developed through participation in various
May Day events in South London over the past few years. The first talk was given
in 2003 to South London Radical History Group at the Use Your Loaf Social Centre
in Deptford High Street. After further research, a revised talk was given in
2005 to South East London Folklore Society, then meeting at the Spanish Galleon
in Greenwich.
Short versions of the talk were given at May Day events organised by the Strawberry
Thieves Socialist Choir in Brockley at Toad's Mouth Too (2004), Moonbow Jakes
(2005), and the Brockley Social Club (2007). Then, in 2010, I gave a talk at
the Deptford Arms as part of a lovely May Day folk evening organised by Kit
and Cutter that also featured the singing of Martin Carthy.
In a sense then, this pamphlet has emerged out of the story it describes. I
can only hope that it goes back into the stream to inform those who come after
to celebrate the May.
2. ANCIENT FESTIVALS
Beltane
If we pick up one of the many books available on 'Celtic spirituality' or neopaganism
we will find confident descriptions of the ancient festival of Beltane.
For instance according to Glennie Kindred (2001): 'In the Celtic Pagan past,
this was the night of the "greenwood marriage" where the union between
the Horned God and the fertile Goddess was re-enacted by the men and women to
ensure the fertility of the land. It was a night to spend in the woods, to make
love under the trees, stay up all night and watch the sunrise, and bathe in
the early morning dew. On this night, people walked the mazes and labyrinths
and sat all night by the sacred wells and healing springs'.
This is though an imaginative reconstruction - in reality we know little about
the precise content of religion and rituals in the British Isles before the
Romans. We do though at least know that a festival has been held at this time
of year for as long as records exist - although of course before the adoption
of the Roman calendar the date '1st of May' did itself not exist.
In his authoritative overview of seasonal customs, the historian Ronald Hutton
(1996) notes that May Day is something of an exception to 'the almost total
absence of concrete evidence concerning pre-Christian seasonal rituals in the
British Isles'. Early Medieval Irish documents refer to the burning of
fires on Beltane or Beltine at the beginning of May, between which cattle were
driven to protect them. A ninth-century document links this custom with the
Druids (Hutton 1991).
Records of similar practices are found from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and South
West England until into the nineteenth century. As well as fires, Beltane was
associated in some areas with other customs, such as hanging rowan branches
around doorways. It is common for writers to refer to Beltane as associated
with a god 'Bel'. There was a god called Belenus who was worshipped in what
is now Austria, although there is no evidence of this deity ever being associated
with Ireland or British Isles. Bel may just be derived from the Celtic preface
meaning 'bright' or fortunate (Hutton 1996).
There are though no records of Beltane fires in the south of England. The custom
was presumably tied up with a pastoral economy where animals were driven out
to new pastures in the summer months. If the custom was observed in the London
area it must have died out before written records came into being.
We can only speculate where in what is now South London Beltane or some other
seasonal festival may have been observed at this time of year in prehistoric
times. Remains of pre-Roman monuments and settlements have been found in various
locations. Along the River Thames these include a burial mound by what is now
London Bridge, and a wooden structure by the mouth of the River Effra in Vauxhall.
There are surviving traces of Iron Age hillforts at the south end of Wimbledon
Common and at Keston Mark in the London Borough of Bromley, on a hill above
the spring that is the source of the River Ravensbourne (misleadingly, both
sites are known as 'Caesar's Camp').
Doubtless those who lived around these sites marked the turning of the seasons
in their own way, but we do not really know how.
Floralia
The Romans celebrated the festival of Floralia from 28 April to 3 May in honour
of Flora, the personification and goddess of flowers and greenery. Like later
May Day festivities in the British Isles, it was sometimes associated with license
and indecency - prostitutes apparently claimed the festival as their own. The
festival included theatrical performances and public games, known as the Ludi
Floralia.
There was a substantial Roman settlement in Southwark around the south end of
London Bridge, and numerous other Roman sites south of the Thames, such as a
temple in what is now Greenwich Park. It is quite probable that a Roman spring
festival was celebrated in such areas during the centuries of Roman influence
following the invasion of 43 CE, but as with the pre-Roman period there are
no records to confirm this.
Flora remained an important image of the season, long after the organised worship
of the Romans died out. An image of Flora can be seen to this day in Camberwell
Road, with a codestone relief depicting a figure with a garland of flowers now
embedded in the wall of a block of flats. This was originally displayed in Dr
Lettsom's mansion in Grove Hill, an 1809 description of which states that 'The
front is adorned with emblematical figures of Flora and the Seasons' (cited
in Walford, 1878). In the mid-19th century, there was also a Royal Flora Gardens
in Camberwell, a pleasure garden in Wyndham Road.
3. THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY - MIDDLE AGES TO PURITANS
Maying
O the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!
O, and then did I unto my true love say,
Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer's Queen.
(Thomas Dekker, 1600)
The Roman festival of Floralia was associated with the wearing of garlands of
flowers, and this has remained a common feature of May Day celebrations through
the ages. This is not surprising as the proliferation of flowers is such a feature
of the natural season, as is the shift to a warmer climate more suitable for
outdoor celebrations.
In early modern England, May Day was one point in an annual 'calendar that
drew on celestial, pagan and ecclesiastical elements'. In addition to
'the natural calendar of the seasons' there was an 'agricultural rhythm
of cultivation, harrowing, planting and harvest... further modified by the cycles
of lambing and calving, droving and herding, and the autumn slaughter of animals'.
Then there was the 'ceremonial calendar of the Christian year', marking
the life of Christ and the saints (Cressy 1989).
By the Middle Ages the whole 'merry month of May' was associated with
communal celebrations in England, particularly the holidays of May Day and Whitsun.
Festivities included games, fairs and communal feasts (often known as 'ales'),
with music, dancing and sports. Hutton (1996) suggests that the weather was
one of the reasons for this: 'Commoners, unlike royalty and the aristocracy,
lacked large buildings in which communal festivities could comfortably be held
in bad weather'. The warmer weather in May enabled outdoor gatherings,
and in addition 'it lay conveniently between the heavy work of ploughing
and sowing, and that of hay making'.
The custom of going out to collect flowers and greenery on May Day, sometimes
known as 'Maying' or simply 'The May', is described in the London area for as
long as written records exist and no doubt had its origins in an even earlier
period. It did not die out until late in the nineteenth century, by which point
urbanisation meant that many people would have had quite a journey to find flowering
hawthorn or other suitable foliage.
In his Survey of London (1603), John Stow wrote that 'in the month
of May, the Citizens of London of all estates, lightly in every Parish, or sometimes
two or three parishes joining together, had their several mayings, and did fetch
in Maypoles, with diverse warlike shows, with good Archers, Morris dancers,
and other devices for pastime all the day long, and towards the Evening they
had stage plays, and Bonfires in the streets'; and that 'on May day in the morning,
every man, except impediment, would walk into the sweet meadows and green woods,
there to rejoice their spirits with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers,
and with the harmony of birds, praising God in their kind' .
Henry Machyn, a London merchant, recorded in his diary in 1559 that 'The
first day of May' was marked 'with streamers, banners, and flags, and
trumpets and drums and guns, going a Maying' and at the Queen's place at Westminster
'they shot and threw eggs and oranges at each other'.
A more hostile account is given by Philip Stubbes in his The Anatomie of
Abuses, first published on 1 May 1583: 'Against May, Whitsunday, or
other time, all the young men and maids, old men and wives, run gadding overnight
to the woods, groves, hills, and mountains, where they spend all the night in
pleasant pastimes; and in the morning they return, bring with them birch and
branches of trees, to deck their assemblies withal. And no marvel; for there
is a great lord present amongst them, as superintendant and lord over their
pastimes and sports, namely Satan, Prince of Hell'.
Bringing in the May was sometimes accompanied by dancing, processions and other
pleasures. Stubbes claimed that 'of forty, threescore, or a hundred maids
going to the wood overnight, there have scarcely the third part of them returned
home again undefiled' - although demographers have found no evidence of
a 1 February baby boom nine months later.
One of the first references we have to May Day in South London comes from 1492
when King Henry VII is recorded as having paid ten shillings 'to the maidens
of Lambeth for a May' - presumably a garland of flowers, perhaps accompanied
with some kind of performance. The King's interest seems to indicate that May
Day customs were observed at all levels of society. This vignette also suggests
another feature of May Day: as well as being a time of popular celebration,
it was also an opportunity to earn some extra income. As we shall see, this
was an important aspect down to the 19th century.
May kings and queens
A feature of the May festivities was sometimes the crowning of a mock-king.
Once again, Stubbes (1583) provides the most colourful description of this:
'the wild heads of the parish conventing together, chose themselves a grand
captain (of mischief) whom they ennoble with the title of my Lord of Misrule...
they have their hobby horses, dragons and other antiques, together with their
bawdy pipes and thundering drummers, to strike up the Devil's Dance withal,
then march those heathen company towards the Church and churchyard, their pipers
piping, drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their
handkerchieves swinging above their heads like madmen, their hobby horses and
other monsters skirmishing among the throng'.
The May King or Lord was sometimes accompanied by a female counterpart - an
instance is recorded at Kingston - but frequently not. The prominence of the
May Queen seems to have initially been a literary invention of early seventeenth
century London-based poets such as Michael Drayton and William Brown. Hutton
(1996) remarks of these urban pastoralists that 'their difference in priorities
from genuine rustics is shown in their constant descriptions of pretty May Queens
in preference to the more common village lords'.
Robin Hood
Robin Hood and his entourage were also sometimes associated with May festivities.
Kingston in Surrey was known in the 16th century for its Robin Hood plays held
over five days in May, featuring all the usual characters of Little John, Friar
Tuck and Maid Marian, the latter usually played by a man in drag.
On May Day 1515, Henry VIII and the Queen 'rode a Maying from Greenwich
to the high ground of Shooters hill, where as they passed by the way, they spied
a company of tall yeomen clothed all in Green'. The staged pageant included
'Robin Hoode' leading a band of 200 archers. 'Robin Hoode desired the King
& Queene with their retinue to enter the greene wood, where, in harbours
made of boughs, and decked with flowers, they were set and served plentifully
with venison and wine, by Robin Hoode and his men, to their great contentment,
and had other Pageants and pastimes' (Stow, 1603). The company included
Lady May, Little John, Friar Tuck and Maid Marian.
Another account of this event is given by Sebastian Giustinian, a Venetian ambassador
to the court of Henry VIII at the time. The Venetian party had arrived in London
shortly before, travelling by road from Dover to Deptford where they were met
on 16th April by fifty of the King's horseman to accompany them into London.
On the first day of May 1515 'his Majesty sent two English lords to the
ambassadors, who were taken by them to a place called Greenwich, five miles
hence, where the king was, for the purpose of celebrating May Day. On the ambassadors
arriving there, they mounted on horse-back, with many of the chief nobles of
the kingdom, and accompanied the most Serene Queen into the country, to meet
the King. Her Majesty was most excellently attired, and very richly, and with
her were twenty-five damsels, mounted on white palfreys, with housings of the
same fashion, most beautifully embroidered in gold, and these damsels had all
dresses slashed with gold lama in very costly trim, with a number of footmen
in most excellent order'.
The party then proceeded to Shooters Hill: 'The Queen went thus with her
retinue a distance of two miles out of Greenwich, into a wood, where they found
the King with his guard, all clad in a livery of green, with bows in their hands,
and about a hundred noblemen on horseback, all gorgeously arrayed. In this wood
were certain bowers filled purposely with singing birds, which carolled most
sweetly, and in one of these bastions or bowers, were some triumphal cars, on
which were singers and musicians, who played on an organ and lute and flutes
for a good while, during a banquet which was served in this place; then proceeding
homewards, certain tall paste-board giants being placed on cars, and surrounded
by his Majesty's guard, were conducted with the greatest order to Greenwich,
the musicians singing the whole way, and sounding the trumpets and other instruments,
so that, by my faith, it was an extremely fine triumph, and very pompous, and
the King in person brought up the rear in as great state as possible, being
followed by the Queen, with such a crowd on foot, as to exceed, I think, 25,000
persons'. After Mass and more feasting at Greenwich, the day finished with
the King taking part in a jousting tournament.
May Day seems to have been celebrated regularly by Henry VIII at Greenwich as
the start of the summer season. In 1536, his then Queen Anne Boleyn sat with
him in the royal box to watch the May Day jousting. It was to be her last public
appearance - the following day she was arrested, and on May 19th she was beheaded.
The daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth the 1st, was also
an enthusiast for May games. Machyn records that on the 25th June 1559 there
was a special performance for her at Greenwich of 'a May game' featuring
a giant, St George and the Dragon, Morris dancing, Robin Hood, Little John ,
Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, and the Nine Worthies of Christendom.
These Elizabethan May games were evidently very lavish. For the 1559 games,
the City of London's Ironmongers company sent 'men in armour to the May
game that went before the queen's majestie to Greenwich' and in 1571 'the
Merchant Taylors sent 187 men in military costume, as their proportion towards
a splendid Maying' (Timbs, 1866).
Queen Elizabeth is also linked with another South London May Day. On 1 May 1602,
'the Queen went a-maying to Mr. Richard Buckley's at Lewisham' (Lyson,
1796). Local legend has it that this occurred by an oak tree on what is now
One Tree Hill, and that as a result this tree became known as the Oak of Honor
- giving its name to the surrounding area of Honor Oak.
Maypoles
In the political and religious conflicts that shook England in the 16th and
17th century, popular festivities were often a focus of controversy. As the
most visible symbol of May Day, it was the maypole itself that was frequently
targeted. Philip Stubbes (1583) was typical of the Puritan reformers who regarded
it as a kind of pagan idol: 'But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence
is their Maypole, which they bring home with great veneration... Then fall they
to dance about it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the Idols,
whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself'.
Under Edward's Protestant regime of the 1540s many seasonal festivities withered
in the face of official hostility: in 1549 the Corporation of London even instructed
property owners to prevent their servants from attending May games (Hutton 1994).
It was in this climate that the local maypole in Wandsworth was sold off in
1547/8. It must have been replaced, because a century later it was destroyed
once more, being dug up in 1640-1 shortly after the Long Parliament had dispensed
the King's 'Book of Sports' which had given some protection to popular festivities
against the puritan onslaught. In 1644, Parliament passed an ordinance banning
maypoles which were described as 'a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition
and wickedness'.
In Bermondsey, there was a maypole at Horsleydown. A painting by Joris Hoefnagel
of a fete there in around 1590 shows a very tall wooden pillar opposite the
Tower of London, approximately where Potters Hill Fields park is now situated.
Opposition to the local maypole was led by Edward Elton (c. 1569-1624), the
vicar of St Mary Magdelen. Elton was a prolific puritan, the author of such
works as 'The complaint of a sanctified sinner answered' and 'A plaine and
easie exposition upon the Lords prayer in questions and answers'. In 1617,
after preaching against the pagan evils of May Day, Elton led a mob to cut down
the local maypole.
A contemporary account records: 'Some of these practitioners, with friends
of the Artillery Garden, intended sport, but Parson Elton would not have it
so, and desired the constable to strike out the heads of their drums, and he
preached against it many Sabbath days. Further Elton and his people assaulted
the said Maypole, and did, with hatchets, saws, or otherwise, cut down the same,
divided it into several pieces, and carried it into Elton's yard' (cited
in Clarke, 1902).
Another 17th century South London maypole is shown on a 1681 map near to the
present Elephant and Castle junction, set up in the middle of the 'King's Highway
to Southwark', (now Newington Causeway)'. The fate of this maypole is unknown.
Repression and rebellion
The chopping down of maypoles can be seen as part of a broader assault of popular
celebrations. According to Ronald Hutton (1994): 'All over western and central
Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reformers attacked popular
festivity and tried to enforce a stricter standard of sexual morality and of
personal decorum... Vagrants, fornicators, and suspected witches were all persecuted
with a new intensity, and formal entertainments tended to replace spontaneous
and participatory celebration'.
For the radical historian Peter Linebaugh (1999), May Day 'was always a
celebration of all that is free and life-giving in the world. That is the Green
side of the story. Whatever else it was, it was not a time to work. Therefore,
it was attacked by the authorities... In England the attacks on May Day were
a necessary part of the wearisome, unending attempt to establish industrial
work discipline'.
But the picture is more complicated than a straightforward desire to suppress
all festivities: 'Maypoles and May games provided easy targets for reformers
of manners... But a vigorous tradition of May revels survived the Reformation
and withstood the hostility of puritan critics. May games, May bowers, May fairs
and maypoles enjoyed a popular vigour, sometimes encouraged and at other times
frowned upon by local authorities... The royal orders of 1617 and 1633, known
as the Book of Sports, authorized "May Games, Whitsun Ales, Morris Dances
and the setting up of Maypoles"' (Cressy, 1989).
It may be true that in the Cromwell period there was less official tolerance
of May Day customs, and that after the restoration of the monarchy following
the English Civil War there was something of an officially-sponsored return
of popular revelry - in 1661 a 134 foot maypole was erected in the Strand 'to
replace the one removed in 1644' (Hutton, 1994).
It would be simplifying matters though to say that 17th century Royalists were
always more inclined to festivities than Parliamentarian Puritans, or that in
the previous century Catholics were always more tolerant of them than Protestants.
Under the Catholic reign of Mary Tudor the Privy Council banned May games in
Kent because 'lewd practises... are appointed to begun at such assemblies',
while in the seventeenth century Deptford Royalist John Evelyn condemned May
customs - although to be fair a major concern for him as a tree enthusiast was
that people were cutting down 'fine straight trees' to be used for
maypoles. Evelyn denounced 'those riotous assemblies of idle people, who
under pretence of going a Maying, (as they term it) do oftentimes cut down and
carry away fine straight trees, to set up before some ale-house, or revelling
place, where they keep their drunken Bacchanalia... I think it were better to
be quite abolish'd amongst us, for many reasons, besides that of occasioning
so much waste and spoil as we find is done to trees at that season, under this
wanton pretence, by breaking, mangling, and tearing down of branches, and entire
arms of trees, to adorn their wooden idol' (Evelyn, 1662)
Many Protestants were happy to celebrate a calendar of holy days and Saints
days, with May 1st being marked as the feast day of the apostles Saint Philip
and Saint James. Not all were averse to people enjoying themselves, for some
the issue was rather that the secular celebrations should be kept completely
separate from the sphere of the church.
What united rulers of whatever stripe, Royalist or Parliamentarian, was 'the
fear of riot and rebellion during a period characterized not only by dramatic
religious change but by inflation and harvest failure' (Hutton,1994). May
was a prime month for such rebellion: the Peasants Revolt 1381 and Jack Cade's
rebellion 1450 both started during the May Whitsun holidays. In 1517 the events
known as 'Evil May Day' took place in London, an uprising of apprentices that
targeted the houses of foreigners living in the city - arguably an early 'race
riot' and a reminder that popular rebellions are not always propelled by emancipatory
impulses.
In May 1640, there was a revolt of Southwark apprentices during the May holidays.
The focus was the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, a key ally of Charles
I who was to be executed as a Royalist a few years later in 1644.
John Evelyn recorded in his diary on April 27th 'the Bishop of Canterbury's
palace at Lambeth being assaulted by a rude rabble from Southwark'.
Seemingly a few days later it was attacked again: 'placards suddenly appeared
throughout the City urging the apprentices to rise and free the land from the
rule of the bishops. At a public meeting on St. George's Fields, the City apprentices
and the sailors and dockhands, now idle through lack of trade, joined up with
the glovers, tanners, and brewery workers of Bermondsey and Southwark who were
on holiday for the May Day celebrations to hunt "Laud, the fox"' (Browner,
1994).
On May 11th Laud himself recorded: 'Monday night, at midnight, my house
at Lambeth was beset with 500 persons of the rascal riotous multitude. I had
notice, and strengthened the house as well as I could, and, God be blessed,
I had no harm.' A young rioter was condemned at Southwark soon after and hanged
and quartered. The king issued a proclamation 'for the repressing and punishing
of the late Rebellious and Traiterous assemblies in Lambeth, Southwark, and
other places adjoyning'. Laud's fellow royalist the Earl of Clarendon wrote
that 'this infamous, scandalous, headless insurrection, quashed with the
deserved death of that one varlet, was not thought to be contrived or fomented
by any persons of quality' (Walford, 1878).
In 1649 May 1st was again eventful. It was on this day that radical Leveller
prisoners in the Tower of London, including Greenwich-born John Lilburne, published
'An agreement of the free people of England'. On the same day the Scroop's
Horse regiment unanimously agreed not to obey Cromwell's decision to send them
to Ireland. At least five other regiments joined them and set up a Council of
Agitators. Having mutinied at Salisbury, they joined with other mutinous regiments,
until on May 14th they were surprised by Cromwell at Burford. Hundreds were
captured and imprisoned in Burford church, and the next morning three were executed
in sight of their comrades.
4. MILKMAIDS, CHIMNEY SWEEPS AND THE JACK IN THE GREEN
Milkmaids and Bunters
Whether due to repression, or simply changes in taste, May games in London seemed
to have declined somewhat by the eighteenth century. May Day was though kept
alive by specific occupations: in particular milkmaids. There are reports of
Milk Maids in London celebrating May Day from the mid-17th century, and indeed
there are images from the 14th century of milkmaids dancing and carrying flowers,
although these cannot definitively be linked to May Day.
On May 1st 1667, Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary 'Thence to Westminster;
in the way meeting many milk-maids with their garlands upon their pails, dancing
with a fiddler before them'. Pepys also recorded another seasonal tradition
of May dew being good for the complexion: 'My wife away down with Jane and W.Hewer
to Woolwich, in order to a little ayre and to lie there tomorrow, and so to
gather May-dew tomorrow morning, which Mrs Tuner hath taught here is the only
thing in the world to wash her face with; and I am contented with it' (28
May 1667). In Tudor times, Queen Catherine of Aragon is also said to have gathered
May dew in Greenwich Park (Timbs, 1866)
The milkmaids' 'garland' consisted of (often borrowed) silver plate decorated
with flowers and ribbons which they carried on their heads. Accompanied by musicians
they would go dancing through the streets collecting donations. This custom
was seemingly in decline by the time Hone's Every-Day Book was published
in 1826, with its lament that 'In London thirty years ago, When pretty milkmaids
went about, It was a goodly sight to see, Their May-day pageant all drawn out.
Such scenes and sounds once blest my eye, And charm'd my ears; but all have
vanish'd, On May-day now no garlands go, For milkmaids and their dance are banish'd'.
Milkmaids were associated with one of the longest surviving maypoles in London,
to be found 'near Kennington Green... the Maypole was in the field on the
south side of the Workhouse Lane, and nearly opposite to the Black Prince public
house. It remained til about the year 1795, and was much frequented, particularly
by milk maids' (Hone, 1826).
As well as the milkmaids there are also references in the 18th century to 'bunters'
May Day - bunter being a term for a prostitute. According to Roy Judge (2000),
'The Bunters were, in fact, a kind of parody of the Milkmaids' custom, with
their pewter in place of silver... giving a deliberately grotesque show as public
entertainment'. A 1770 print purporting to depict this includes the verse 'What
Frolicks are here /So droll and so queer/ How joyful appeareth the day/ E'en
Bunter and Bawd Unite to applaud /And celebrate first of the May' (The
Humours of May Day.).
The Jack in the Green
By the beginning of the 19th century, May Day was associated more and more with
another occupational group - the Chimney Sweeps. Robert Southey commented that
'The first days of May are the Saturnalia of these people, a wretched class
of men, who exist in no other country than England' (Southey, 1836).
In his 'Sports and pastimes of the people of England' published in
1801, Joseph Strutt, described the Chimney Sweeps' May Day: 'The chimney-sweepers
of London have also singled out the first of May for their festival; at which
time they parade the streets in companies, disguised in various manners. Their
dresses are usually decorated with gilt paper and other mock fineries; they
have their shovels and brushes in their hands which they rattle one upon the
other; and to this rough music they jump about in imitation of dancing. Some
of the larger companies have a fiddler with them, and a Jack-in-the-Green, as
well as a Lord and Lady of the May, who follow the minstrel with great stateliness,
and dance as occasion requires. The Jack-in-the-Green is a piece of pageantry
consisting of a hollow frame of wood or wicker work, made in the form of a sugarloaf,
but open at the bottom, and sufficiently large and high to receive a man. The
frame is covered with green leaves and bunches of flowers interwoven with each
other, so that the man within may be completely concealed, who dances with his
companions, and the populace are mightily pleased with the oddity of the moving
pyramid'.
Another observer of this custom complained: 'Unfortunately, the apparently
innocent and somewhat child-like capers of the Jack-in-the-green and his jovial
troop engender and increase the vice of drinking. At each halt, more refreshments
are produced, and sobriety is not a distinctive quality of the poor in general,
or of chimney-sweeps in particular' (Thomson & Smith, 1877).
Henry Mayhew (1850) was told that costermongers (market traders) were also involved:
'This kind of street performance is generally got up by some master sweep
in reduced circumstances, who engages all the parties and finds the dresses.
There was only one regular sweep in the school that my informant joined. Many
of the Jacks-in-the-green are got up by costermongers. "My Lady" generally
has 3s. a day, and is mostly the sweep's or costermonger's daughter or sister
- anything, indeed, said my informant, so as she can shake a leg about a bit.
The Clown gets 5s., the Jack 3s. or 4s., and the drum and pipes 6s. There are
generally from five to six persons go out together, and the expenses (not including
dresses) will be about 30s. a day, and the receipts about £3'.
The folklorist Roy Judge (among other things a Peckham teacher) wrote the classic
study of 'The Jack in the Green' (2000). He rejects the notion that
the Jack in the Green represents some kind of pagan survival from ancient times
of a Green Man figure, noting that the first descriptions of a Jack in the Green
on May Day date from the late 18th century. The pyramid of greenery may have
evolved from the milkmaids garland which became increasingly more elaborate,
with the structure carried on the head evolving into something that had to be
carried by hand.
Within South London, reports of Jack in the Green have been found from Borough,
Camberwell, Clapham, Greenwich, Tooting, Wandsworth and Lewisham where on May
Day 1894 'a Jack with a Queen of May, two maidensproper, one man dressed as
a woman, and a man with a piano-organ' were spotted dancing and collecting money
'In the High Street, at the inn near St Mary's Church' (cited in Judge,
2000).
The chimney sweeps' May Day seems to have been in steady decline from the middle
of the 19th century and had more or less disappeared by the end of the century.
Acts of Parliament in 1842 and 1875 had prohibited the use of the child labour
of 'climbing boys' whose presence was a source of sympathy and therefore charity
on May Day. It is important not to be too carried away by the picturesque scenes
of the Chimney Sweeps' May Day - behind the Jack in the Green and the dancing
there was acute poverty. May marked the end of the peak season for sweeps, making
the search for extra income through ritualised begging a necessity. As William
Blake wrote in his poem 'The Chimney Sweeper':
'And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery'.
The Jack in the Green survived a while longer. In around 1900 the Jack was spotted
in Bermondsey 'Walking along Jamaica Road I saw what looked like a big bush
hopping from one side of the road to the other, and bobbing up and down. This
being the first time I had seen a Jack-in-the-Green it scared the life out of
me' (cited in Judge, 2000).
The Kentish Mercury reported on 18th May 1906: 'It is not more than 3 or
4 years since such a band were seen in the streets of Deptford. Jack in his
greenery, twirling, and the male and female dancers with him pirouetting something
after the traditional style - but there was a sad falling off. In olden days
the dancers used to be sweeps, to whom money collected was a sort of annual
perquisite and sweeps were very jealous of their privileges in this direction
being usurped, latterly however, this rule was by no means adhered to'. A photograph
survives of the Deptford Jack in the Green on the back of which is a note from
the photographer Thankful Sturdee, believed to have been written in about 1934,
which reads: 'Jack in the Green. Fowlers troop of Mayday revellers. 'Jack in
the Green' was an old institution in Deptford and regularly kept up until about
twenty years ago, when the police stopped all such customs' (see Crofts,
2002).
One of the last descriptions we have is from St Thomas Street, SE1 from 1923
of 'a man enclosed in an openwork cage of greenery dancing upon he road,
accompanied by a girl in fancy dress, money being collected in a sieve'
(Judge, 2000)
Horse
Parades
A final group of workers associated with May Day was those working with horses.
May Day 1860, saw 'the decorations of horses belonging to the several railway
companies and other large establishments' in South London. The annual procession
from the South-Eastern Railway Company from the Bricklayers Arms on the Old
Kent Road 'created some sensation in the locality' with the streets
crowded and the horses 'preceded by a band of music'. In the evening
'a supper was provided for the drivers, presided over by the principal officials,
at which about one hundred sat down'. However another custom had already
faded away by this date: 'The procession of mail-coaches which formerly
drew such crowds to witness at the General Post-Office on May-day, no longer
exists' (South London Chronicle 5.5.1860).
An annual May Day parade of horses was held in this period at Wellington Wharf,
Lambeth by Eastwood and Co. Ltd. The event had outgrown the Wharf by 1899 when
it was moved to Battersea Park and featured nearly a hundred 'gaily bedecked'
horse drawn vehicles. In the same year St Olaves Board of Works in Bermondsey
agreed to give 5 shillings to each carman and dustman in its employ for the
'parade of horses on May 1' (South London Press, 6 May 1899).
Local Council workers also held a parade. In 1892 'the Bermondsey dustmen
and other servants of the Vestry turned out with twenty-two teams', and prizes
were awarded to the most effective of them' (The Graphic, 7 May 1892).
May Day Cart Horse Parade, Bermondsey 1892
This event was still taking place at the turn of the 20th century: 'On Tuesday
the annual May Day parade of the horses belonging to the vestry of Bermondsey
was held. Twenty four horses, with their carmen, paraded in Spa Road... at the
conclusion of the judging, the parade was continued through the streets of Bermondsey
until 1:30 pm, the carmen being given the remainder of the day as holiday'.
Prizes were awarded for the best cared for animal (SLP, 5 May 1900).
In 1920, May Day horse parades were put on in Lee by employees of Mr. A. Manchester,
horse and steam contractors (based at Dacre-Park) and at theWhitbreads bottling
store in Lewisham, the latter a revival of 'a popular feature before the
war' (KM, 7.5.1920).
5. REINVENTING MAY DAY
Much of what came in the 20th century to be understood as traditional May Day
custom actually only dates back to the 19th century. The rise of industry and
urbanisation fostered a dream of a return to a pastoral idyll, as seen for instance
in the popularity of Arthurian romances and the paintings of the Pre- Raphaelites.
May Day was one of the arenas where this dream was manifested, and Hutton (1996)
suggests that it was 'substantially recreated by the Victorians' prompted by
'acute anxiety about the weakening of traditional social bonds' and
'a hankering after an idealized past, characterised by order and harmony'. Likewise
Judge (2000) sees 'The nineteenth century Arcadian view of May Day' as
rooted in the fact that 'the problems presented by the aftermath of the Napoleonic
Wars and of the Industrial Revolution were enough to make a dream of rural innocence
and peaceful tranquillity most attractive'. Still, as we shall see, this dream
could be put to use for revolutionary ends as well as conservative ones.
While there were still some surviving May Day customs in the 19th century, more
influential in the Victorian recreation of the festival were accounts of Tudor
celebrations and romantic imaginings such as Tennyson's 'The May Queen'
(1830). Interestingly the May Queen, a seemingly marginal figure in the
Middle Ages, came to be the centre of the Victorian May Day. And while in previous
generations May Day had been celebrated by adults, the Victorians and Edwardians
increasingly organised it as a children's festival.
May Queens
One of the longest established modern May Queen customs in South London seems
to have been in Walworth in Southwark, and actually pre-dates the Victorian
period. According to the South London Observer, the first May Queen
ceremony there took place at the York Street Independent Chapel in 1798
'when Walworth really was a village' (SLO 6 May 1949). The ceremony was
still being held in the same location 170 years later - now renamed the Browning
Hall in Browning Street in honour of the poet Robert Browning who was baptised
at York Street Chapel. A report from 1967 claims that it had been uninterrupted
'with the exception of 1940' (SLO 11 May 1967). The May Queen was presented
with an emblem 'enscribed with the names of previous queens' (SLO, 5 May 1950).
The format was for children to nominate their own 'Queen of the May', who was
crowned by her predecessor at a pageant also featuring maids of honour, page
boys and heralds. Newsreel film of the 1920 May Queen ceremony in Walworth shows
the May Queen being crowned at seven o'clock in the morning. The Queen and all
her attendants wear white dresses, and all have foliage in their hair as well
sashes of greenery over their shoulders. Several of them are also carrying branches.
After the coronation they make their way on a pony and cart for the procession,
with Girl Guides at the front and Scouts behind (British Pathe Newsreel 3 May
1920: There is also British Pathe newsreel film of the Walworth May Queen from
1927, 1928 and 1929.). In the 1920s at least, the May Queen and her maids of
honour were treated to a trip to the seaside - in 1926 they were taken to Littlehampton
for a weekend (SLP, 14 May 1926).
These features - white clothes, election by peers, crowning by the previous
year's Queen, a supporting cast of assistants - recur repeatedly in descriptions
of various children's May Queens from the 19th century down to the present.
Another well-established May Queen festival, and indeed one that has continued
into the 21st century, is the London-wide event held on Hayes
Common in the London Borough of Bromley. The first Bromley and Hayes May Queen
Festival was held in 1907. In 1910, it featured a procession with a 'Jack in
the Green' and the May Queen's carriage, which made its way from the public
gardens next to Bromley's Free Library to Hayes where there was singing and
dancing round the maypole. The event was organised by Joseph Deedy of 62 Bromley
Common (Bromley Record, June 1910). In the following year, Deedy founded
the Merrie England Society to encourage May queen ceremonies, especially in
the London area. It established a London-wide May Queen festival at Hayes Common
where by 1930 hundreds of schools were taking part 'and little girls brought
along May-dolls, of the nineteenth century sort, in prams' (Hutton, 1996).
Becoming London May Queen was seen as a major honour. When Betty Wadsworth (aged
11) from Deptford High Street was crowned London May Queen in 1930, a reception
was held at New Cross Cinema with the Mayor of Deptford in attendance. Betty's
father was an international footballer who was playing for Millwall at the time
(SLP, 9 May 1930). The event sometimes received national coverage:
in 1921, the winner of the Daily Mirror's children's beauty competition
was crowned London's May Queen at Hayes (British Pathe newsreel 12 May 1921).
Often the May Queen was just one element in a wider May Day pageant. We have
a detailed description of one such 'May Day Festival' put on by Bermondsey Settlement
Guild of Play at Bermondsey Village Hall in 1898: 'The children were all
very prettily attired as merry maids, foresters, villagers, morris players,
milkmaids, and shepherdesses. A real May tree in full blossom and quantities
of freshly plucked flowers... were used in decorating the middle of the hall,
the maypole being crowned with flowers and banked up with them at the bottom.
A rustic throne covered with evergreens was provided for the May Queen'.
There was dancing round the Maypole 'to music of the time of Charles II'
and singing of old English songs. The May Queen was 'a cripple girl who
had been elected by the members of the Guild of the Brave Poor Things'
(The Times 2 May 1898).
An account of the same event two years previously suggested that the urban dwellers
of this part of London could have no conception of the rural delights which
May Day was intended to celebrate: 'the fact that Bermondsey could boast
a May Queen at all is distinctly creditable to the authorities of the Bermondsey
Settlement, who are responsible for this pleasing and picturesque revival. It
would have been better still, of course, if the affair had been the spontaneous
outburst of a popular yearning for that faint and far away past when there were
still green fields and spring flowers round Bermondsey Spa, vanished utterly
long ago, save for the name of Spa Road. But there is not, probably, much spontaneous
yearning after Arcady on the part of the latter-day population of that delectable
region, and so one must, perforce, be content with what can be done by the organising
efforts of those who devote themselves to the noble work of bringing all the
sunshine and springtime that they can into the sombre existence of our London
poor. How, indeed, can the Bermondsey Board School boy or girl know anything
of the glories of Nature's great Renaissance as it is going on far away from
the smoke and smother of ignoble London' (The Graphic, 2 May 1896).
These May events were often self-consciously nostalgic. In 1920 'The Childer
Chaine', a young people's organisation linked to the Belgrave Hospital for Children
in Clapham Road, held a 'May Fair and Sale' in at St John the Divine Parochial
Hall in Frederick Crescent (Camberwell). The South London Press reported
that 'The hall was most effectively transformed into an Old English Village...
The many stalls were constructed as representative of the "Good Old Days"
and the stallholders and workers were attired in costumes of the period'.
The event included 'a maypole dance by children of St George's School, Camberwell,
a Jack-in-the-Green procession, dances by members of the English Folk Dance
Society' and 'a mummer's play, "St George and the Dragon"' (SLP
14 May 1920).
All kinds of organisations seem to have been involved in organising such events
through the first half of the twentieth century, including churches of all denominations.
Bermondsey Settlement was initiated by a Methodist preacher; the temperance
Band of Hope held a May Day concert with a May Queen at Robert Street Chapel,
Plumstead in 1907 (Woolwich Pioneer 3 May 1907); and in 1950 the Roman Catholic
Our Lady of Seven Dolours, Friary Road (Peckham) hosted festivities with a May
Queen elected by St Francis Infants School and 'wearing a white silk confirmation
gown with blue trim'. The Guide movement was also active; in 1948 for instance,
Peckham Rye Guides and Brownies elected the May Queen for the May Day Revels
held at St. Antholin's Church Hall in Nunhead.
In Stockwell, the local Church of England vicar was the driving force: 'at
St Andrew's National School, Stockwell Green.... the girls give a very charming
display on May Day... The girl who is chosen Queen for her good conduct is the
heroine of the day... After a pretty dance round the Maypole, the pageant concludes
by the Queen's receiving homage from the other girls. The revival is due to
the Rev. J.H. Browne, the vicar of St Andrews' (The Graphic, 7 May 1898).
Schools were clearly also a focus. In 1908, 'The seventh annual May day
Festival was held at Choumert road Girls School' in Peckham, where eight
year old Edith Hollands was crowned Queen and there was a 'rustic romp round
the maypole' (SLO, 6 May 1908). A Downham May Queen was crowned at Pendragon
Junior Girls School 'attended by heralds, train-bearers and a crownbearer'
(KM, 1 July 1938: For other examples see Kennington Road Girls School,
SLO 8 May 1908; St Chrysostum Girls Club, Peckham, SLO 10 May 1946.)
Other events were organised by socialist and co-operative movements. In the
early part of the 20th century, the Woolwich Children's Co-operative Guild held
an annual May Day festival. In 1905 it took place at the Co-operative Hall,
Parson's Hill: 'In olden times such gatherings were wont to be held on the
village green: for Woolwich in the twentieth century the green had to be the
Cooperative Hall, with a brilliantly be-ribboned and be-flagged maypole in the
centre'. The hall was 'festooned... with a profusion of spring flowers'.
As well as the crowning of the Guild Queen and maypole dancing, the children
performed a piece called 'The Yearly Round' featuring children representing
the seasons, the months of the year, farmers, milkmaids and 'the Spirit of Co-operation'
(WP 5 May 1905). In 1915 Woolwich Socialist Sunday School organised
a May Day outing to Eltham Public Park (WP, 7 May 1915).
Return of the Maypole
The maypoles of the Middle Ages seem to have usually been just stripped tree
trunks. Maypoles with ribbons were however known in France and seem to have
been introduced into England to feature as part of the entertainments of the
Pleasure Gardens of London, such as those at Vauxhall and Ranelagh in Chelsea.
Horace Walpole wrote of a 1749 visit to the latter that 'in one quarter
was a maypole dressed with garlands, and people dancing round it to a tabor
and pipe and rustic music, all masked' (Walpole, 1840). The supper boxes
at Vauxhall featured paintings of May Day scenes by Francis Hayman.
The Victorians codified a series of maypole ribbon plaiting dances which were
popularised through schools. A key vector for this transmission was Whitelands
College in Roehampton, where generations of teachers were taught the dances
as part of their teacher training. John Ruskin - art critic, philanthropist
and Camberwell resident - had an important role in this. He was a friend of
the College Principal, the Reverend Canon John Faunthorpe, and in 1881 helped
initiate the first May Day festival there. Students at Whitelands have elected
an annual May Monarch ever since with the main concession to modernity being
that in 1986 the rules were relaxed so that a May King could sometimes be elected
instead of a May Queen.
Maypole dancing became a feature of school life in South London and elsewhere.
In Bermondsey for instance, the opening of the new Tanner Street playground
on 11 May 1929 featured a Maypole dance by infants of Riley Street School (Bermondsey
Labour Magazine, June 1929). Maypole dancing was not always confined to
May - it featured for instance at the Shirley Street Sports Day in Bermondsey
in July of that year (BLM, September 1929).
The maypole also featured in the May Day Fetes held at St Mary Cray in the 1890s
organised by local paper mill owner, E.H. Joynson. The Graphic reported
(10 May 1890): 'Of all pretty revivals, one of the prettiest, the May Day
Fete, attracted great crowds to the usually quite Kentish village of St Mary
Cray. The May Queen, attended by her maids of honour, had her throne of a triumphal
car, drawn by four Sussex bullocks, with drivers in Old English costume. The
procession was led by Druids, with flowing beards and flowing robes (one very
much like Father Christmas, out of season), followed by Friendly Societies with
their banners, and tilters on horseback, by maskers, clowns, and sweeps, Jack-in-the-Green,
living chess characters, milkmaids leading a decorated cow, children representing
wild flowers, maids with garlands, and a living pack of cards... The dance around
the Maypole... attracted great notice'.
May Day in St Mary Cray, (The Graphic, 10 May 1890)
The following year 10,000 spectators turned out in the pouring rain. 'The
costumes... were entirely designed by Mr Joynson, of the paper mills, and were
carried out at the mill under his personal superintendence... it betokened a
very pleasant state of feeling between the employer and the employed that the
latter should have entered so heartily into the spirit and enjoyment of the
performance' (Graphic 9 May 1891).
But this kind of paternalist May Day from above was already being challenged
by a new kind of May Day event. The same issue of the Graphic reported May Day
demonstrations, and in some cases riots, in various countries. It seemed that
a new spectre was haunting Europe: 'Nothing in its way could be more impressive
than the fact that essentially the same ideas have captivated the imagination
of the labouring population of every civilised country... in all the great centres
of industrial life they are evidently of the opinion that it is possible for
them to have shorter hours of work and higher pay, and that it is just and necessary
that the possibility should be transformed into a reality' (Graphic 9 May
1891).
6. THE WORKERS' MAY DAY: ORIGINS TO 1930s
Origins
In the late nineteenth century a new layer of meaning was added to May Day,
as the first of May became associated with the international workers movement.
As we shall see, elements from traditional May Day celebrations came to be incorporated
into socialist demonstrations - but was it just, as Hutton (1996) suggests,
'a wholly fortuitous coincidence' that 'the strike which became
the symbol of the American Labor Movement began upon 1 May'?. To answer
this we have to examine the origins of the 'Workers' May Day' in the struggle
for an 8 hour day in the United States and elsewhere.
For the early workers movement internationally a key demand was for a reduction
in the length of the working day. The 1884 Chicago congress of the Federation
of Organized and Labor Unions (which later become the American Federation of
Labor) declared that from May 1st 1886, it would impose an eighthour working
day in the United States by industrial action. Unlike most strikes which respond
to particular events, this date was set several years in advance.
It is unlikely to have been a purely arbitrary date - but why the first of May?
Dave Roediger (1997) has noted that in parts of the United States May 1st was
known as Moving Day, the date when leases expired and when new terms and conditions
of work were set for building tradesmen and others who worked outdoors. This
would make it an obvious date for setting new hours of work. Of course the notion
of May 1st as effectively the start of a new year might itself be related to
older seasonal traditions. It is also quite possible that for some within the
workers' movement at the time the date had a symbolic value as a time of renewal,
related to these traditions. Immigrants to the USA brought with them various
May Day customs from their home countries. For instance a Maypole was famously
set up at Merrymount in New England by Thomas Morton in the 1620s.
There does also seem to have been a precedent for radical movements to regard
May 1st as significant. We have already seen that the Levellers' 'Agreement
of the People' was published on 1 May 1650. The proposed French Revolutionary
Calendar renamed the month Floreal, with the opening day envisaged as a celebration
of love and nature. The utopian socialist Robert Owen announced in 1833 that
the New Moral World should begin on 1 May 1834 - Owenite ideas certainly had
their influence in the US so this may have been a factor. On May Day 1820 the
Cato Street conspirators, who had plotted to assassinate the British cabinet,
were hanged in London.
It was also on 1 May 1776 that Adam Weishaupt founded the 'Order of Perfectibilists',
later known as the llluminati, at the University of Ingolstadt. Apparently dedicated
to the enlightenment ideas and critical of the absolute rule of kings and priests,
this Masonic society was seen by reactionaries as the hidden hand behind every
radical and republican stirring in 19th century Europe. As a case in point,
the notorious anti-semite Nora Webster (1924) saw May Day as a plot of 'the
great German-Jewish company that hopes to rule the world' led by 'illuminized
freemasons' in the guise of socialists. She asked 'Was it again a mere
coincidence that in July 1889 an International Socialist Congress in Paris decided
that May 1, which was the day on which Weishaupt founded the Illuminati, should
be chosen for an annual International Labour demonstration?'. Well yes
in all probability it was a coincidence.
Whatever the factors involved in choosing the date, the events of Saturday 1
May 1886 and the succeeding days are well documented. The eight hour day strike
went ahead in parts of the USA, and by May 3 1886 perhaps 750,000 workers had
struck or demonstrated (Roediger). In Chicago police killed two people when
they opened fire on Monday 3 May during clashes outside the McCormack Reaper
Works, where workers had been on strike since February. The following day a
policeman was killed by a bomb thrown at a protest meeting in Haymarket square
in the city. Eight anarchists who had been in the forefront of the 8-hour-day
agitation in Chicago were convicted of murder, of whom seven were sentenced
to death.
There was an international outcry against the trial and the sentences. In London
those who spoke out included William Morris, Annie Besant (who had lived in
Colby Road, Upper Norwood), George Bernard Shaw, Peter Kropotkin (then living
at 6 Crescent Road, Bromley), Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Ford Madox Brown,
Walter Crane, E. Nesbit (then living in Lewisham), Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling
(who later lived in Sydenham). A meeting on the case was held at the Peckham
Reform Club (Freedom, November 1897).
Nevertheless, four of the accused were hanged. The deaths in Chicago had a powerful
impact across the world, not least on Jim Connell who was inspired to write
'The Red Flag' anthem in 1889 on a train to New Cross - he was living at
22a Stondon Park in Honor Oak at the time (Gordon-Orr, 2004).
The movement for a shorter working day did not die with those who became known
as the Chicago Martyrs. In December 1888 the American Federation of Labour called
for a national day of demonstrations and strikes on 1 May 1890, and this call
was echoed in July 1889 by the international socialist conference in Paris.
So it was that from 1890 May Day became an annual international festival of
working class solidarity.
The 1890s
In London, May Day 1890 was marked by a huge demonstration in Hyde Park, a venue
that was to become the focus for May Day protests for many years to come. May
1st 1890 actually fell on a Thursday, and saw London anarchists holding a meeting
at Clerkenwell Green. The main demonstration took place on the following Sunday
- May 4th - and saw contingents heading towards Hyde Park from all over London.
A description from the South London Press of the attendance of the
North Camberwell Radical Club and Institute' provides an insight into how local
groups organised themselves for the march:
'A goodly contingent went from this club to take part in the monster eight-hours
demonstration. The procession was headed by the club's excellent band, which
discoursed some well-chosen music on the way. A large banner followed, bearing
the device in front, 'The Proletariat Unite', and on the reverse side the legend,
'Eight hours' work, eight hours' pay; Eight hours' rest, eight bob a day'. Mr
Oodshorn devised and executed the banner, which was very effective. Mr J. Harrison
(chairman of the club) headed those who marched in front, and Mr. H.J. Begg
accompanied the contingent until it took its place in the general ranks. Two
breaks followed the pedestrians - one full of ladies, and one containing those
of the sterner sex who were not equal to a four-hours march on a warm day. Messrs.
Benstroke and J.Sage (chairman of the Political Council) acted as marshalls.
The breaks, which added greatly to the effectiveness of the procession, were
under the charge of Mr A. Boreham (chairman of the Entertainment Sub-Committee).
The contingent arrived in the park in time to hear some good speaking from No.7
Platform, and afterwards Mrs Besant's stirring speech from the Socialists' platform.
The whole affair was excellently managed, and good humour and good order prevailed
throughout' (South London Press, 10 May 1890).
The next few years saw this route being repeated. In 1891, the North Camberwell
Radical Club was again said to have been busy in preparing for the 8 hours demonstration
in Hyde Park (SLP 25 April1891). The Club was based in Albany Road.
In 1892 a crowd estimated between 300 and 500,000 marched from Westminster Bridge
to Hyde Park, with 350 banners and 110 bands. An observer reported that 'The
great staple industries of London, the dockers, the stevedores, the coal-porters,
the gas-workers... railway workers, and so on, came first: and then a whole
host of miscellaneous trades, led by little Jew cigar and cigarette-makers from
the East End... The Workgirls... were in great force. The chocolate-makers had
a smart little wagonettte all to themselves, from which they dispensed 'Union
Chocolate' in penny packets' matchgirls'. Those present included Bernard Shaw,
Tom Mann and Louise Michel (all of whom spoke), Eleanor Marx and the elderly
Frederick Engels. The crowd was so large that 'the South London contingent,
led by John Burns, never got in at all, and it
turned sadly back without a chance of attending the meeting. In a word, London
has never seen such a gigantic turn-out of the forces which create her wealth'
(Penny Illustrated Paper, 7 May 1892)
In 1897 the Demonstration from Embankment to Hyde Park on Saturday 1 May included
contingents from Camberwell and Battersea (Times 3 May 1897); in 1898
there was a large 'International May Day Demonstration' from Embankment to Hyde
Park in the pouring rain (Times 2 May 1898).
Crystal
Palace and Walter Crane
The turn of the new century saw the main May Day event moving to South London
at the Crystal Palace. The Palace had been hosting May Day celebrations for
many years. In the 1850s, William Husk of the Sacred Harmonic Society had helped
recreate a Tudor-style May game there (Hutton, 1996). On May Day 1866 'a
great concert of five thousand voices was given by children and others connected
with the metropolitan schools... Ethardo [a circus performer] also reappeared,
his lofty pole being converted into a gigantic maypole. On the following day
Mr Charles Dickens kindly undertook to give a reading of Little Dombey' (PIP
5 May 1866). In 1898 a 'Crystal Palace May Day Festival' had included 'May-Day
Sports and Maypole dance' with a programme featuring 'the Clan Johnson,
Scottish Dancers and Champion Pipers and an Old English Maypole Dance'
as well as a 'Grand May-Day Concert' featuring 'madrigals by the Crystal
Palace Choir' (advert in the Times, 1 May 1899).
May Day 1900 was different in tone. The Times reported that 12,000 took part,
including 'about 150 associations connected with the Social Democratic Federation
and London Trades Council'. Six platforms were set up and the resolutions
carried included one asserting 'their determination to overthrow wagedom
and capitalism, and to establish by united efforts that international cooperative
commonwealth in which all the instruments of industry will be owned and controlled
by the organized communities and equal opportunity be given to all to lead healthy,
happy human lives' (Times, 2 May 1900).
The event did though include more traditional May Day elements alongside the
socialist speeches: 'There was a procession at half past two, and meetings
at 3 o'clock. There were also cycling and athletic sports, a Maypole dance and
other attractions. The programme concluded with a display of fireworks by C.T.
Brock & Co., including a special set Labour piece by Walter Crane'
(South London Press, 5 May 1900). Other attractions of the 'International
Labour Festival' included a variety show and a performance of Bernard Shaw's
'Widowers' Houses' (advert in Times, 1 May 1900).
The artist Walter Crane recalled: 'Labour's May Day, which has become an
international festival in the Socialist movement, was this year celebrated at
the Crystal Palace, which certainly afforded plenty of space for the gathering,
as well as entertainment and refreshment in the intervals of the functions.
A vast meeting was held under the dome, and this was addressed by many of the
leaders, such as Mr. H. M. Hyndman, Mr. G. N. Barnes, Secretary of the Amalgamated
Engineers (and now in Parliament), Mr. Pete Curran, Mr. Ben Tillet, and many
others. I made a design for a set piece for the firework display which was carried
out on a gigantic scale and with remarkable success by Messrs. Brock. It was
a group of four figures, typifying the workers of the world, joining hands,
a winged central figure with the cap of Liberty, encircled by the globe, uniting
them, and a scroll with the words 'The Unity of Labour is the Hope of the World'.
It was the first time a design of mine had been associated with pyrotechnics.
I was rewarded by the hearty cheers of a vast multitude.' (Crane, 1907
- Crane dates this event to 1899 while The Times reports it as being
in 1900, though it is possible it was repeated in both years).
Crane was a key figure in the creation of a May Day iconography that combined
socialist values with the familiar 'Merrie England' imagery of may queens, garlands
and angels. Crane's earliest May Day work was a series of illustrations for
a fairy tale by John Wise, The First of May, a Fairy Masque (1881).
His drawings depicted animals dancing round a maypole and fairy scenes. Soon
he was to add a political dimension to such imagery. While for some conservative
Victorians, the recreation of May Day festivities harked back to a traditional
social order where everybody knew their place, socialists like Crane and William
Morris mobilised visions of medieval pageantry and a lost rural idyll in the
service of a critique of what they saw as the squalor of industrial capitalism.
The contrast between May Day festivities and the world of work had been drawn
before. In May Day songs from the 1860s, WC Bennett had written: 'Your fathers
met the May, With laughter, dance, and tabor; Come, be as wise as they: Come
steal today from labour... Talk not of want of leisure; Believe me, life was
made, For laughter, mirth and pleasure, Far more than toil and trade' (PIP
7 May 1864); and 'Out from cities haste away, This is earth's great holiday:
Who can labour while the hours, In with songs are bringing May' (PIP
5 May 1866).
But for most workers skipping into the fields on a work day was not an option
- it was only the reduction of working hours and the extension of weekends and
holidays that could create the free time for festive celebrations.
As the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1998) has argued, the act of demonstrating,
and in some cases striking, on May Day made this connection directly: 'It
was thus both a gesture of class assertion and class struggle and a holiday:
a sort of trailer for the good life to come after the emancipation of labour...
Seen in this light May Day carried with it a rich cargo of emotion and hope'.
Crane's images gave a strong visual identity to this 'emotion and hope'
and were precisely adverts 'for the good life to come', in which carefree,
healthy proletarians dance in the open air. After May Day became the focus of
an annual socialist demonstration, Crane produced a May Day cartoon every year.
These were mostly published in Justice, paper of the Social Democratic Federation,
but they were also printed for sale separately. Examples included 'The Triumph
of Labour' (1891) 'The Workers May Pole' (1894) 'A Garland for May Day' (1895)
'John Ball's Creditors' (1900), 'The Goal' (1904) 'Socialism and the Imperialistic
Will O' the Wisp' (1907), 'A Posy for May Day and a Poser for Britannia' (1910)
and 'The Triumph Car for May Day' (1911).
Socialism
and the Seasons
In addition to the main London demonstration, May Day was often marked by local
events. In 1905, for instance, there was a 'tremendous gathering' in
Woolwich's Beresford Square for a May Day demonstration sponsored by Woolwich
Independent Labour Party and Woolwich and District Trades and Labour Council.
Speeches at this event show how in England at least, many saw a clear continuity
between the workers' May Day and the more traditional festivities. Mr. H.S.
Wishart, the Chairman, declared: 'long ago the workers were wont to assemble
on May Day to enjoy themselves. Today the workers were nominally free, but their
real condition was worse than in days gone by. Today the workers were really
slaves owned by the masters, slaves to wages, and to the men who controlled
the money power of the world'. Councillor Grinling elaborated: 'May
Day was the birthday of summer, and they were assembled on that occasion in
spirit with the men and women all over the universe who on May Day saw the sun
rise on a new summer and a new season. The lives of all were dependent upon
the four seasons, yet livers in towns were so unfamiliar with the beauties of
the earth and sky that they forgot the changing seasons'. He went on to
herald the summer of the Labour Movement, with the 'people rising to take...
a fuller and juster share in all that comes from Mother Earth' (Woolwich
Pioneer, 28 April 1905, 5 May 1905).
Similar sentiments were voiced in Bermondsey Labour Magazine in the 1920s: 'All
over the world the organised Labour movement has set aside May 1st as a special
holiday or festival. From pagan and mediaeval times the period of the year marked
by the beginning of the month of May has been held as a time of rejoicing at
the return of sunshine and warmth after the greyness and frost of winter. In
the young trees the sap is rising. Flowers and buds and blossoms are lifting
up their faces to the sun. Shall not humanity do likewise and rejoice with them?
May Day for our ancestors, therefore, symbolised the Dawn of Hope - hope of
harvest, hope of fruit, hope of plenty, hope of the glad time to come after
the bleak discomfort of the past months. For Labour and the toiling masses everywhere,
May Day signifies the new hope of the better days that are to be. It proclaims
the bursting of the fetters of convention; it declares deliverance from the
bondage of wage slavery; it tells of the times when the disinherited shall share
in the beauty, the joy, the dignity of life. And, as the men of the past proclaimed
their faith in the future by song and dance and merrymaking, by procession and
pageant and revel, so the Labour and Socialist Movement over Europe demands
that May 1st shall be a day of demonstration, of carnival, of freedom from work.
The celebration of May Day is Labour's proclamation to the tyrants of Land and
Capital that the mighty are to put down from their seats and that the people
of low degree are at long last to enter into their inheritance... May Day is
Labour's International Holy-day' (The Meaning of May Day, Bermondsey
Labour Magazine, May 1924).
The following year's May edition of the magazine included 'The Workers' Song
of the Springtide' which bemoaned: 'They sing of the merry springtide, Which
is sweet to them indeed, These wealthy whom we are clothing, Whose little ones
we feed; But to us is the sun a furnace, The spring but a burning cauldron,
And life but a prison cell'. Still, the author proclaimed 'the time will come
when the
beauties of earth shall be for all... When the spring shall come laden with
gladness, And pleasure instead of pain' (BLM, May 1925).
The Nineteen Twenties
The official labour movement in Britain generally timed the main May Day demonstrations
so that they did not fall on a working day. 1920 was an exception - May Day
fell on a Saturday, still a normal working day for most, and 6 million workers
took a holiday. At the Woolwich Arsenal, the Shop Stewards wrote to the management
informing them that the workers there had 'decided to celebrate the First
of May as a Labour Holiday' (WP 30.4.1920). On the day 'there were
so many absentees from work that some of the departments had to shut down' (WP
7 May 1920).
Many of them joined a demonstration on Dartford Heath that included contingents
who had marched from Woolwich, Welling, Erith, Bexley Heath, Dartford and Crayford.
It featured the Woolwich Labour Protection League drum and fife band and songs
from the Woolwich Socialist Sunday School. There was also a children's wedding
procession with girls in home made paper dresses (KM 7 May 1920). The
resolution passed at the mass meeting declared:
'This meeting of workers assembled on Dartford Heath, May Day, 1920, sends
fraternal greetings to the Proletariat of the World, and heartily rejoices at
the continued success of the Russian Revolution. Recognising that the everincreasing
burdens placed upon us are entirely due to Capitalist Domination, we urge the
International Solidarity of our Class to bring about its emancipation from this
system. Furthermore, we condemn the action of the British Government, in regard
to its Militarist oppression of Ireland, Egypt and India' (WP
7 May 1920).
As well as the Dartford demonstration, The South London Press reported
a 'gigantic muster in Hyde Park' at the end of the May Day demonstration
from Thames Embankment (SLP 7 May 1920).
In 1926, May Day marked the effective start of the General Strike. On Saturday
May 1st, one million miners were locked out for refusing to accept a pay cut
and longer hours. The same day workers at the Daily Mail walked out
on strike refusing to print the paper's lead article 'For King and Country'.
This marked the point of no return and from Monday May 3rd millions of workers
went on strike in support of the miners. After nine days they were ordered back
to work by the Trades Union Congress.
On Saturday May 1st itself at least 100,000 people marched from the Embankment
to Hyde Park, including many from South London. 'The Bermondsey contingent
in the London May Day procession was the finest and most impressive that had
been organised. At 11 am we lined up outside the Bermondsey Town Hall with our
band, banners and brakes. Almost every section of organised workers in the Borough
was represented'. The Bermondsey contingent met up with marchers from Deptford
and Camberwell by St George's Circus (BLM June 1926). Later there was
a May Day Festival and Dance at Bermondsey Town Hall featuring 'Bert Healey's
Famous Dance Band' and 'Limelight colour effects and novelties' (BLM,
April 1926).
May Day messages in the Bermondsey Labour Magazine reflected the turbulent
times. New Cross (No.1 Branch) of the National Union of Railwaymen declared
'Greetings to the workers in "All Labour Bermondsey". International
Labour Day, 1926, will go down in history as the turning point in the inevitable
all conquering march towards emancipation... Let us honour the memory of our
valiant pioneers, by striving for Unity - at home and in all the lands, irrespective
of race, colour or creed'. Bermondsey NUR sounded a more seasonal note:
'Let us therefore strengthen our own organisations, industrial and political,
and continue every day this May Day Spirit of Brotherhood and Comradeship to
meet the present Capitalist offensive. We read how in London before the ugly
factories were built children danced the Maypole and men and women joined in
their games on the people's commons. Spring had come, birds were beginning to
sing, flowers to bloom, and nature putting on her best. It is because of this,
we workers think of the laws that are unjust and bind us. We long to repeal
them and make Liberty and Freedom for all to enjoy' (BLM, May
1926).
The history of the General Strike in South London is beyond the scope of this
pamphlet, but it was strongly supported in most areas. There were clashes between
strikers and police at the Elephant and Castle (Past Tense, 2005) and at the
New Cross Tram Depot in New Cross Road (Gordon-Orr, 2004).
The Nineteen Thirties
In 1930, May 1st marked the end of a National Unemployed Workers Movement hunger
march. Starting on 30 March 1930, twelve contingents of unemployed workers set
off from areas including Scotland, Yorkshire, South Wales and Kent. Unemployed
'hunger marchers from Kent' joined with contingents from Bermondsey, Deptford
and Lewisham at Bermondsey Town Hall in Spa Road to march via St George's Circus
to the Embankment and on to Hyde Park. 'Bermondsey workers gathered in large
numbers... under the banners of the local branch of the Electrical Trades Union,
Bermondsey Shop Stewards Committee and the Bermondsey Branch of the National
Unemployed Workers Committee Movement'. The marchers were headed by a drum
and fife band (SLP 2 May 1930)
On 1st May the march finished with a mass demonstration of at least 50,000 in
Hyde Park. Over the next few days there were various clashes with the authorities
as marchers took control of Fulham workhouse to provide accommodation, occupied
the boardroom at the Ministry of Health and attempted to storm the House of
Commons (Hannington 1936). On May 2nd there was also a strike on the docks in
Bermondsey, with a thousand 'Tooley Street Stevedores and Dock Labourers' walking
out claiming that not enough workers had been allocated to unload a ship (SLP
6 May 1930)
In the same year, Bermondsey Council - led by the Labour Party's Alfred Salter
- agreed to grant employees a May Day holiday. In the evening there was a May
Dance at Bermondsey Town Hall, followed on the Sunday after by a May Day demonstration
from Bermondsey Town Hall to Southwark Park. The attendance was apparently not
as large as in previous years, and the Labour Party's platform in the park had
to contend with the presence of 'a rival communist orator and his following'
(BLM, May 1930).
An account of May Day in Bermondsey in the late 1930s is given in Jessica Mitford's
memoir of the period, Hons and Rebels (1960). In 1937, she moved to
41 Rotherhithe Street with her husband Esmond Romilly, back from supporting
the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. They became involved in left-wing
politics in the area and took part in the 1937 May Day march:
'On May Day the entire community turned out, men, women and children, home-made
banners proclaiming slogans of the 'United Front against Fascism' waving alongside
the official ones. The long march to Hyde Park started early in the morning,
contingents of the Labour Party, the Co-ops, the Communist Party, Independent
Labour Party marching through the long day to join other thousands from all
parts of London in the traditional May Day labour festival... Everyone took
lunch in a paper bag, and there was much good-natured jostling and shouting
of orders, and last-minute rounding up of children who had darted away in the
crowd. Philip [Toynbee] and Roger taught us some new songs to sing on the way
- parodies on Communist songs: 'Class conscious we are, and class conscious
we'll be, And we'll tread on the neck of the bourgeoisie'. 'Oh 'tis my delight
on a Saturday night to bomb the bourgeoisie!', and a sarcastic version of the
'The People's Flag: 'The People's Flag is palest pink, It's not as red as you
might think'. We had been warned that the Blackshirts might try to disrupt the
parade, and sure enough there were groups of them lying in wait at several points
along the way. Armed with rubber truncheons and knuckledusters, they leaped
out form behind buildings; there were several brief battles in which the Blackshirts
were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the Bermondsey men'.
7. THE
WORKERS' MAY DAY AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR
1940s and 1950s
In the aftermath of the Second World War, May Day marches resumed but were marked
by a split as the Labour Party endeavoured to keep its members away from Communist
Party influence. In 1946, the former held a rally at Covent Garden Opera House
on the same day as the London Trades Council's May Day demonstration to Hyde
Park: 'Marching to the band of Camberwell British Legion, about 1,000 workers
from SE London moved off from St Georges Circus... every trades council in SE
London, with the exception of Southwark and Wandsworth, was present. Local Communist
parties were well represented, and among the trade union banners were those
of Southwark TGWU, Brixton AEU and S. London AEU' (SLO, 10 May
1946). In 1947, a May Day rally in Lewisham Town Hall was addressed by Labour
Minister Herbert Morrison, whose criticism of strikes was met with silence,
and saw 800 people singing 'The Red Flag' (SLO, 9 May 1947).
The following year, the Labour Party organised a May Day procession through
Lambeth, culminating in a rally in Brockwell Park (SLO, 7 May 1948).
The May Day demonstration was banned in 1949, prompting defiance and arrests
in South London. The South London Press (May 1949) reported: 'Waterloo
marchers broken up by police: The Battle of Waterloo Road was South London's
biggest share in the May Day clashes between thousands of people in procession
and the police. Some were injured after the police called for reinforcements
to try and stop thousands who swelled a crowd of about 600 leaving St George's
Circus, Southwark, where a South London demonstration had been organised by
Southwark Trades Council and supported by Bermondsey and Camberwell Trades Councils.
After the meeting ended and the crowd began to move along Waterloo Road, a procession
was soon deemed contrary to the ban imposed by Mr Chuter Ede. More police, on
foot and mounted, arrived and there were several clashes as they tried to break
up the march. At the southern end of Waterloo Bridge there was a police cordon,
but the crowd seeped through to find another line of police at the northern
end of the bridge. Some of the marchers were diverted down to the Embankment,
but most of them continued. Mr A.E. Scriven, secretary of the Southwark Trades
Council, told the South London Press: 'Our meeting passed off peacefully under
the chairmanship of Mr Len Smith, chairman of our Trades Council. We made no
attempt to organise a procession afterwards. It was extraordinary how the crowds
suddenly increased as the people drifted away from our meeting. I think the
police used unnecessary violence in dealing with the crowd in Waterloo Road.
I know they have a difficult job to do, but they could have been more tactful'.
London Trades Council speakers at the Southwark meeting included Mr Mark Bass
of the Fire Brigade Union and Mr I.W. Hall, Sheet Metal Workers Union, a member
of the London Trades Council executive'.
The following year, May Day demonstrators again sought to defy the Home Secretary's
ban on political processions. 69 people were arrested as mounted police broke
up a crowd of thousands of people in and around Trafalgar Square (Times
8 May 1950). A number of South Londoners were among those arrested, including
James McCabe, 31, an engineer from Carter Street, Albert Lodge, a Walworth Lorry
Driver, and Agnes Mennell, an East Dulwich typist (SLO, 12 May 1950).
1960s and 1970s
May Day demonstrations continued in London through the 1950s and early 1960s,
usually from the Victoria Embankment to Hyde Park on the first Sunday after
May 1st. By the mid-1960s these seemed to be dwindling away, with numbers getting
smaller each year. Some saw them as archaic and harking back to the interwar
period. At the 1958 London Labour Conference a Deptford delegate complained
that marching behind brass bands belonged 'to the times of mass unemployment
and empty bellies', while in 1966 a black Labour councillor in Camberwell
told Tribune that the now traditional May Day demonstration 'meant
little to him, as he had not participated in any of the struggles it honoured.
He called for the celebrations to be made more relevant, not just for the sake
of immigrants but also for native-born youngsters' (Fielding 2004). Subsequently
the Labour Party withdrew from the demonstrations and held a rally in Festival
Hall instead from 1969 to 1971, though the agenda of speeches, classical music
and performances from the Royal Shakespeare Company were not particularly popular
with the party's rank and file (Fielding 2004). Others were determined to take
May Day back to its radical roots, prompting the formation in 1967 of the London
May Day Committee to try and reinvigorate the tradition of demonstrating on
May Day itself, not on the nearest weekend. A key driving force in this was
John Lawrence (1915-2002), who lived at 29 Love Walk in Camberwell in this period.
Their first march in 1967, from Blackfriars to Farringdon, only attracted around
250 people, but by 1968 this had increased to a more respectable 2500 marching
from Tower Hill to Transport House (McIlroy 2003). Unfortunately the 1968 May
Day march was overshadowed by another demonstration of workers that day: dockers
and workers from Smithfield and Billingsgate markets walked out in support of
the racist MP Enoch Powell and marched on Westminster. Outside the House of
Commons they clashed with marchers from the May Day demonstration (Times 2 May
1968). On the following Sunday there was a Labour Party May Day rally in Trafalgar
Square, where Government ministers were heckled from the crowd (Times
6 May 1968).
1969 saw one of the biggest May Day events for years when thousands of people
went on strike against the Labour Government's proposed trade union legislation.
The strike was unofficial but despite the lack of support of trade union leaders
the government estimated that 90,000 walked out, including printers, car workers
and dockers (other estimates put the number closer to 200,000). The Port of
London was at a standstill and no daily papers were printed in London.
The 1969 London May Day demonstration was split due to political differences.Writing
in the anarchist paper Freedom, Lawrence had proclaimed that 'May
Day is May 1st or it is nothing... This May Day is going to be different. Not
a dreary slog through the City and the West End but a short march and then off
to an open space, Victoria Park in the East End, to enjoy ourselves with bands,
groups (pop not political), dancing, sports and anything else that the members
want to do ... it will be free day in every sense of the word, free from work
and free to do what you like.... As one worker at our May Day Committee said:
"My guv'nor will be choked if I take the day off and he'll be double choked
if he knows that I'm enjoying myself as well."'
However the Communist Party-led Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions
refused to support the London May Day Committee and instead organised its own
demonstration, to start from the same location half an hour before. At least
15,000 took part in the CP/LCTDU demonstration from Tower Hill to Lincoln's
Inn Fields (Times 2 May 1969), while another 500 headed off to Victoria
Park.
The following year, the May Day demonstration (Sunday May 3rd) seemed to have
returned to a relatively low key event, with the Times reporting that only 1000
marched to a rally at Festival Hall on the South Bank. As they went by Trafalgar
Square they passed a rival May Day rally organised by the right-wing Conservative
Party group The Monday Club with a strong National Front presence of at least
500. On the same day Pakistani workers marched from Hyde Park to Downing Street
to protest against racist attacks (Times 4 May 1970). The 1971 march
was uneventful, with 'about a thousand people, including Labour Party members,
old age pensioners and Vietnam war protestors, marched from Charing Cross to
Hyde Park' (Times 3 May 1971).
In 1973 the TUC called for a national day of action on May 1st against the Conservative
government's clampdown on wages. The pay freeze had already led to disputes
in South London. For instance, in January '73, 90 electricians employed by Southwark
firm Phoenix on the St Thomas's Hospital building site walked out and were still
on strike on March 19th when there were clashes with police on the picket line
(SLP 8 May 1973).
On May Day, by the government's own estimates 1,600,000 workers went on strike,
while the TUC estimated 'several millions' stayed away from work. In any event
it was the biggest single stoppage of work since the 1926 General Strike with
railways, factories, and newspapers all affected (Times, 2 May 1973).
All 30,000 staff employed by the Labour-led Greater London Council were given
the day off including the many employed at County Hall on the South Bank (SLP
8 May 1973).
An unusual call for support for the May Day strike came from the National Union
of School Students branch at Dulwich College, one of the capital's most exclusive
private schools. The NUSS there claimed 47 members, including Simon Keys, a
member of the national executive of the union. As well as calling for a walk
out on May 1st, the Dulwich College NUSS newsletter denounced the class-segregated
education system: 'Most school students are middle to upper class and will
go on to become part of the ruling class whereas the students at Kingsdale (a
local comprehensive school) are predominantly working class, are educated to
a much lower level, live in a worse environment and leave school to be wage
slaves' (SLP 1 May 1973).
By the end of the 1970s, May Day had been declared a public holiday. In 1970,
the Trades Union Congress passed a resolution calling for two new public holidays
a year: May Day and New Year's Day (Times 12 September 1970). In 1975,
the Labour Government declared that from 1978, May Day (or the Monday after
it) would be a bank holiday.
The trade union May Day march has continued in Central London ever since, generally
a fairly routine demonstration rarely exceeding a few thousand marchers. From
time to time there have been other large scale trade unionorganised events.
In 1981 for instance, the May Day bank holiday (Monday 4th) was marked with
a celebration of the Peasant's Revolt 600th Anniversary on Blackheath, with
music including Leon Rosselson and Squeeze.
8. THE
COUNTER-CULTURE AND THE FOLK REVIVAL
Free Games for May
On May 12 1967 Pink Floyd presented "Games for May" at the Queen Elizabeth
Hall on the South Bank promising 'space-age relaxation for the climax of
spring, with electronic compositions, colour and image projections, girls and
the Pink Floyd'. There was recorded bird song, millions of bubbles and
free daffodils. Counter-cultural events like this were signs of a renewed interest
in the pastoral dream of evergreen Albion. The earlier 1960s folk revival had
also led to a resurgence of Morris and other forms of English folk dancing.
From these overlapping strands the seasonal elements of May Day once again came
to the fore.
In South London, students at Goldsmiths College formed the Blackheath Foot'n'Death
Men in 1969, described in the International Times as a 'Long haired
Morris dancing crew' (IT 11-25 February 1971). They danced at
'underground' happenings alongside bands like Hawkwind and The Pink Fairies.
Over time they morphed into Blackheath Morris Men and are still going today,
40 years later. It was members of the Blackheath Morris Men who revived the
Fowlers Troop Jack in the Green in the early 1980s, inspired by one of Thankful
Sturdee's photographs of the original troop from the turn of the twentieth century.
The Fowlers Troop have been going out on May Day ever since, processing through
the streets with music, dance and fancy dress (clown costumes, a bear, Edwardian
style clothes), all accompanying a very impressive Jack - a pyramid of greenery
on a frame carried by a hardy volunteer concealed. The location varies - sometimes
Greenwich, sometimes the Borough/Bankside area of Southwark (e.g. in 2007-2009
and 2011). In 2006, a larger scale event in Deptford with Rediscovered Urban
Rituals included a recreation of Sturdee's 1902 photograph.
Sacred Marriages and Green Men: neo-pagan Beltane
The flowering of the counter-culture also saw a revived interest in mysticism,
the occult and various spiritual paths. In this context May Day came to acquire
another layer of meaning, with its reinvention as the neo-Pagan Beltane festival.
In her influential 'The Witch Cult in Western Europe' (1921) Margaret
Murray (1862-1963) identified May Day as one of the four Sabbats of an underground
witch religion that had survived from pre-Christian times until at least the
seventeenth century. Similarly in 'The Golden Bough' (1922), James
Frazier paid a lot of attention to May customs. He considered the Jack-in-the-Greens
in a chapter on 'Relics of tree worship in Modern Europe' as 'representatives
of the beneficent spirit of vegetation', while the crowning of the King
and Queen of May represented a kind of sacred marriage, 'magical rites intended
to ensure the revival of nature in spring... our rude forefathers personified
the powers of vegetation as male and female, and attempted, on the principle
of homeopathic or imitative magic, to quicken the growth of trees and plants
by representing the marriage of the sylvan deities in the persons of a King
or Queen of May'.
Current day folklorists and historians are generally dismissive of the suggestion
of folk customs being diluted survivals from pre-history. In any event, the
notion of the sacred marriage of the King and Queen does not fit with most descriptions
of early modern May Day, where, as we have seen, May Kings seems to have been
a lot more numerous than Queens. There is no evidence of the Jack in the Green
before the 1780s, even if the image of what has more recently been labelled
as the Green Man is familiar from the foliate heads on old churches.
Ronald Hutton and others have undermined the claims of modern day witches and
neo-pagans to be inheritors to an ancient nature religion practiced continuously
since the Neolithic, and indeed poured scorn on Margaret Murray's earlier claim
that such a religion was still being practiced as recently as the seventeenth
century.
Modern witchcraft, or Wicca, seems to have been codified by Gerald Gardner (1884-1964)
and others in the 1940s and 1950s, drawing on various literary, occult, and
folklore sources. In the process they effectively reinvented a pagan May day
- which may, or may not, have been recognisable to the pre-Christian revellers
of the British Isles. Gardner included a ritual for May Day into his 'Book
of Shadows', influenced by Kipling's 'Puck's Song'. This was one
of eight seasonal festivals, including solstices and equinoxes, occurring at
regular intervals in the course of the 'Wheel of the Year'.
All of these festivals may have been marked at one time or other by different
groups of our ancestors, but there is no evidence that this particular calendar
in its entirety was celebrated in any one period. Its origin seems to lie with
Ross Nichols, an important figure in modern Druidry, who devised the Wheel based
on his reading of Medieval literature in the 1940s (Orr, 2000).
The various neo-Druid groups originating in the 18th century celebrated the
equinoxes and summer solstice, but not Beltane. The order Nichols belonged to
rejected his calendar, and it was not until he established The Order of Bards,
Ovates and Druids (OBOD) in 1964 that modern Druids in Britain began May Day
rituals. In the mean time, Nichols' 'Wheel of the Year' had been incorporated
in another reinvented pagan tradition - that of Wicca - by his friend Gerald
Gardner.
One of the earliest of Gardner's covens was developed in South London from the
late 1950s, where Rae Bone was high priestess. Her coven was in Tooting Bec
and then Streatham, while its daughter coven, Madge Worthington's Whitecroft,
met in Chiswick, Chislehurst and then Beckenham (Hutton 1999). Whatever the
origins of their ritual, it is indisputable that by the 1960s various school
of modern paganism were celebrating Beltane or a similar festival on May Day
in the London area.
9. ANTI-CAPITALIST
MAY DAYS
In the aftermath of the 1988 'Acid House' explosion, a new generation tasted
the delights of partying in the great outdoors and some of the old 'hippy' ideals
of love, peace and communing with nature were excavated once again. In conflict
with the authorities, parts of this scene also became increasingly politicised.
The scene was set for the latest twist in the London May Day story.
Within the rave scene, May Day was sometimes marked with parties if only because
it was a bank holiday weekend. For instance Telepathic Fish were pioneers of
ambient parties, where the emphasis was as much on chilling out as on dancing.
One of their first big parties in 1993 was a May Day tea party in a squat in
Tunstall Road, Brixton. Fliers were given out on teabags and DJs including Mixmaster
Morris and Richard "Aphex Twin" James. One of the organisers recalled
'It was from Sunday tea on May bank holiday and people just turned up in
dribs and drabs all through the night. We got Vegetable Vision in to do the
lights. We ran around and got mattresses from on the street round Brixton and
we had some of my friends doing the tea. We made lots of jelly and there was
plenty of acid about. That went on for about fourteen, fifteen hours, with people
lying around. That was the first proper Telepathic Fish, May 1st, '93'
(Toop, 1995).
On Clapham Common, Wandsworth Trades Council started putting on big May Day
free festivals in the 1990s, and by featuring bands who were also popular on
the electronic dance music and festival circuits attracted thousands of people
who might not otherwise have come into direct contact with the socialist May
Day tradition.
On 1st May 1994 featured bands included Dub Warriors and Fun Da Mental, as well
as the Bhundu Boys, The following year, sponsored by the GMB Union, acts included
Tribal Drift and Skunk Anansie. The Government had just passed its Criminal
Justice Act, with its notorious 'anti-rave' powers targeting parties where the
music was characterised by 'repetitive beats'. On Sunday April 30th 1995, 3,000
marched from the Embankment to oppose the CJA, ending up at the May Day festival
on Clapham Common. Neither the police nor the festival stewards were keen to
allow the United Systems sound system on to the Common, so the lorry pulled
up alongside the park, where people danced on the grass next to it.
The movement of opposition to new roads and other developments came to a head
in the mid-1990s with the protest camp against the Newbury bypass and the occupation
of abandoned houses on the proposed route of the M11 at Claremont Road in Leytonstone.
Seasonal parties became part of the social life of these camps, and on May Day
1998 a Beltane party was held in the protest camp at Crystal Palace, set up
in the previous month to oppose plans to build a multiplex cinema in the park.
The protest continued until March 1999 when hundreds of police evicted the camp
- though it took them a further three weeks to remove two protestors who had
barricaded themselves in an underground bunker (Anon 1999).
In 1999, two separate May Day protests ended up on Clapham Common. The International
Cannabis Coalition organised a 'May day is J day' Cannabis Carnival 1999, with
people marching from Brixton to Clapham behind Luton's Exodus Collective sound
system on a flat bad lorry. More than 10,000 people gathered on the Common,
with bands and sound systems playing despite a last minute objection by the
police to the event getting a licence (SchQuall 2000). On the same day, several
hundred people held a May Day party on the London Underground. Boarding a Circle
Line train at Liverpool Street station, they decorated the train, released balloons,
played music and gave away food. Leaflets were given out against tube privatisation
and demanding a free transport system. After a couple of hours, the police stopped
the train and those on board were put on another train to Clapham Common, where
they joined the legalise cannabis campaigners in the sunshine.
Among those organising the Party Line tube party was Reclaim the Streets (RTS),
established amidst the road protests of the early 1990s with a focus on reclaiming
public space from the car through street parties. On May Day 2000 they called
for an anti-capitalist protest in Parliament Square, eexplicitly bringing together
the different strands of May Day: "Mayday is RED for international
workers' day; GREEN for Beltane, the ancient fire and fertility festival that
signals transformation and rebirth; and BLACK for the anarchists executed for
their part in trying to bring about a shorter working day... Mayday is a time
when RED, GREEN and BLACK converge - a catalyst for hope and possibility"
(RTS flyer, 2000).
This echoed the sentiments of the US radical historian Peter Linebaugh (1999):
'To the history of May Day there is a Green side and there is a Red side.
Green is a relationship to the Earth and what grows thereof. Red is a relationship
to other people and the blood spilt there among... Green dreams of the world
that is to come; Red resists the world as it is. Green is nurturing; Red is
struggle. May Day is both'.
Several thousand people made their way to central London on May 1st 2000, with
banners displayed proclaiming 'the earth is a common treasury for all',
and a Maypole raised next to Parliament. An attempt was made to transform the
Parliament Square green into a 'guerrilla garden' with the planting of flowers
and plants. Most famously the statue of Winston Churchill was given a turf mohican.
After a long stand off with the police, hundreds of people headed South with
a Samba band over the river to Kennington Park where 'someone had the bright
idea of starting a football match... and a hundred a-side game ensured. Eventually,
the crowd dispersed' (Anon 2000).
The following year there was an intensive police operation to prevent a recurrence
of the May Day protests. A month before May Day, up to 200 police raided the
Button Factory, a squatted building in Wanless Road, Herne Hill that had been
used for gigs, parties and meetings. The police portrayed it a training centre
where 'Anarchists from across Europe were due to gather in the disused factory
this weekend for riot training and planning' (Daily Telegraph,
31 March 2001). On May Day itself, the South London May Day Collective called
for people to gather at Elephant and Castle for an 'anti-privatisation picnic'
as one of a series of 'anti-capitalist actions across London'.
Several hundred people met up there before heading into central London where
the day ended with demonstrators being held in a police cordon by Oxford Circus.
The 2002 May Day events saw several hundred cyclists take part in the South
London Critical Mass mobile protest, starting off from Camberwell and heading
off via Elephant and Castle into the City of London and the West End. There
they joined up with the main protest in Mayfair, which the flyer pointed put
was so-named as 'the traditional place of Mayday celebrations... Mayday
in Mayfair will be a fluid, spontaneous and exciting return to the Mayfayre'.
Many other events were held across London during that week as part of the Mayday
Festival of Alternatives, including a New Cross and Deptford Radical History
Walk.
10. 21ST
CENTURY MAY DAY
In the first decade of the twenty-first century May Day continued to be marked
in South London in many different ways. The children's May Queen festivities
initiated by the Victorians continued, particular on the outer fringes of South
London. It is true that some of the longer established traditions seemed to
struggle to survive. In 2002, the May Queen Society in Mitcham agreed to discontinue
its event that had started in 1949: 'The crowning of Mitcham May Queen,
one of the borough's best-loved traditions, could be consigned to history after
more than 50 years because organisers cannot drum up enough support to keep
the event running' (Wimbledon Guardian, 1 May 2002). In Croydon
too, the future of the May Queen was in doubt: 'The little girls of the
historic Croydon May Queen group, who have delighted generations with their
jigs round the maypole, may have had their last dance' (Croydon Guardian,
16 May 1998).
Elsewhere though the Wallington May Queen made it through to its centenary in
2003, and the Beckenham May Queen was crowned in Croydon Road Recreation Ground
in 2010. In the same year, the Caterham and Warlingham May Queens both had floats
in Caterham Carnival on Westway Common. And on Hayes Common in the London Borough
of Bromley, 26 May Queens from around south-east London and Kent took part in
the London May Queen event - where similar events have been held for a hundred
years or more. Maypole dancing in schools was much rarer than fifty years before,
but not entirely extinct. At Redriff Primary School (SE16), a May Day event
with maypole dancing was held in 2008, with the English Folk Dance and Song
Society on hand to teach the children dances. The school was chosen because
in the 1960s it had hosted a festival of singing games and playground chants.
The pagan Beltane was celebrated in various places: Children of Artemis held
Beltane events at Croydon Fairfield Hall in 2002 and 2007. At Green Angels in
Trundle Street (SE1), Avalon in London and the Dragon Environmental Network
held an eco-pagan Beltane in 2004.
In the Roman Catholic Church, May 1st was designated as the Feast of St Joseph
the Worker in 1955. With the influx of migrant workers into London from traditionally
Catholic countries (e.g. Latin American people settling around Elephant and
Castle or Portuguese around South Lambeth), the day gained a new resonance.
South London churches took part in an annual Mass for Migrant Workers at Westminster
Cathedral held from 2006 at the beginning of May, accompanied by a rally calling
for better wages and an amnesty for undocumented migrants. In 2011, it was scheduled
to take place at St George's Cathedral in Southwark.
While the annual socialist May Day demonstration continued in central London,
the more direct action oriented anti-capitalist protests came to end for the
time being in 2004, when the London May Day Collective decided not to organise
an event other than a picnic in St James Park. But there were a variety of local
radical May Day events. In 2007 a procession made its way from the Camberwell
Squat Centre in Warham Street SE5 to Kennington Park behind banners reading
'Workers of the World Relax' and 'Kennington Park - A common place
for all', referring to the park's pre-enclosure history as a common, where
the Chartists gathered in 1848. 50 or so people gathered in the park for a picnic
where they danced around a maypole, featuring an imitation surveillance camera
on top. Fowlers Troop Jack in the Green were out every May Day with their costumes,
folk music and dancing, and there were occasional larger scale festive events.
In Battersea Park there was a 2007 'May Day Festival and Procession' featuring
a Maypole, Morris dancing and the burning of a giant Jack in the Green sculpture.
11. CONCLUSION
For hundreds, and in all probability thousands of years, people have been celebrating
at the height of Spring in many different ways. When people celebrate today
they are not simply acting out a script surviving from ancient times, but nor
are they simply reinventing festivals spontaneously from scratch.
We can think of May Day as a kind of dressing up box, full of customs, images,
songs and stories. Different people at different times have dipped into this
box and selected the bits that fitted with their current hopes and concerns.
Some things have been lost or forgotten, but new elements have been added. As
Roy Judge (2000) has put it: 'May Day should be thought of as producing
a diversity of activity, which changed its associations and relationships in
kaleidoscopic fashion. There was not a set, immutable pattern, but rather a
fluid, moving process, which combined different elements at different times'.
For as long as people have been writing about May Day they have been looking
back to some golden age when the festival was supposedly bigger and better.
When John Stowe wrote 400 years ago of London May Day customs he did so under
the heading 'Sports and Pastimes of Old Time'. A common complaint in
the 19th century was that 'The May-day morris dancers have degenerated into
Jack-in-the-green and his attendants, and they are not what they used to be;
the dance of milk-maids is no more; the May-pole is unhonoured; all the old
customs are dying out' (The Graphic 4 March 1870).
If the best of May Day was always already in the past, it has evidently had
a very long after life in South London and many other places. Paradoxically
this nostalgia has sustained May Day and helped give it life: 'We love it
for what it has been - for what it reminds us of; for undying memories and evergreen
associations, for the fragrance of flowers that still lingers about it, and
the echoes of unsurpassed music that it still brings home to our hearts'
(PIP 2 May 1863).
But May Day is not simply backward looking - there is an inherent optimism in
celebrating the perpetual return of brighter days, and indeed of looking to
children as the bearers of the future. May Day in all its guises is 'an
amorphous event within which the central themes of revival and new life have
been expressed in a number of different ways' (Judge, 1999). But more than
that the idealized form of May Day festivities has offered a glimpse of a different
way of life - an affirmation of the joy of living, of free time spent in the
company of others in the open air, of pleasure exalted over drudgery of labour.
Or as described on the ribbons of Walter Crane's Workers Maypole, a celebration
of 'Socialization, Solidarity, Humanity' and 'Leisure for All'.
12. BIBLIOGRAPHY
The overall understanding of May Day customs in this text is particularly indebted
to Ronald Hutton and Roy Judge, whose work is an essential starting point for
the study of seasonal festivities and May Day in particular.
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• Bermondsey Labour Magazine (BLM)
• Bromley Record
• The Graphic
• International Times
• Kentish Mercury (KM)
• Penny Illustrated Paper (PIP)
• South London Observer (SLO)
• South London Press (SLP)
• Woolwich Pioneer (WP)