SOUTH LONDON MAYDAYS
Derived from notes taken at Neil Gordon-Orr’s Talk at the South
London Radical History Group. Apologies for the disjointed or confusing way
it reads…
MAYDAY IN THE MIDDLE AGES
In the Middle Ages the whole month of May was a month of festival, featuring
‘Church Ales’, community carnivals… The poor in these times
didn’t really have access to large indoor spaces for partying in the
winter, so when the time came when you could comfortably get down outside
they went for it. May also fell between periods of austerity and saving (Winter),
and the hard work of the harvest. So there was a bit of spare time and more
food, drink etc around…
One feature of May was ‘going Maying’: people especially the young
would go out into the fields and woods, have fun, and bring back greenery
and flowers to liven up their homes. Maying not only was great fun, there
were financial benefits to it: in 1492 Henry VI paid ‘maidens of Lambeth’
to go a-Maying. Given what people got up to when out Maying, I bet he did.
May Dew was supposedly good for the complexion (this was still being put about
in the 17th Century).
“Everywhere people "went a-Maying" by going into the woods
and bringing back leaf, bough, and blossom to decorate their persons, homes,
and loved ones with green garlands. Outside theater was performed with characters
like "Jack-in-the-Green" and the "Queen of the May." Trees
were planted. Maypoles were erected. Dances were danced. Music was played.
Drinks were drunk, and love was made. Winter was over, spring had sprung.”
(Peter Linebaugh)
May Poles were another notable feature of Mayday: large poles erected at central
locations in villages and towns, decorated, with long ribbons that people
held while dancing around the maypole. There are obviously phallic and fertility
issues going on HERE. The Maypole’s Pagan associations made them n obvious
target for Church repression, especially after the Reformation, when much
folk tradition tolerated or recuperated under Catholicism was quite rapidly
banned and wiped out.
Thus South London Maypoles at the New Causeway (Southwark), Horsleydown (Bermondsey),
were cut down – the latter in 1617 by the Vicar. Wandsworth Puritans
had already got rid of theirs as early as 1547.
May Kings used to be elected locally, probably at Whitsun, in a festival connected
to the Lord of Misrule. In some places they were replaced by May Queens, as
at Kingston. But it was mostly in the 17th Century that the may Queen became
more popular, under the influence of an increased romanticisation of rural
life by poets and minstrels, who played up the figure of the May Queen.
Another figure associated with May was Robin Hood. In Kingston, locals put
on Robin Hood plays in the early 16th Century, with all the usual figures,
of little John, Maid Marian etc. Kingston was also notable for early Morris
Dancing.
REPRESSION
“The farmers, workers, and child-bearers (laborers) of the Middle Ages
had hundreds of holy days which preserved the May Green, despite the attack
on peasants and witches. Despite the complexities, whether May Day was observed
by sacred or profane ritual, by pagan or Christian, by magic or not, by straights
or gays, by gentle or calloused hands, it 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.” (Linebaugh)
Mayday and the revels attached to it were shared by all levels of society
until the Protestant Reformation, when all forms of seasonal festivities began
to be repressed. Even under Catholic Queen Mary in the 1550s, ‘lewd
practices’ were banned. Many festivals and the costumes, holidays and
licence associated with them were banned through the 16th and 17th Centuries.
This was part of a wide repression of popular culture throughout Europe, an
imposing of ‘stricter standards of morality’ and a harsher work
discipline.
“To these work-ethicists the festival was obnoxious for paganism
and worldliness. Philip Stubs, for example, in Anatomy of Abuses (1585) wrote
of the Maypole, "and then fall they to banquet and feast, to leape and
daunce about it, as the Heathen people did at the dedication of their Idolles."”
(Linebaugh)
This intensified with the Puritan ascendancy leading up to and during the
English Civil War/Commonwealth. In 1640, the Walworth Maypole was dug up.
Old sports were frowned upon (many like street football had always been intermittently
banned, as they often led to riot and were sometimes used as a cover for people
to get together for collective action, eg destroying enclosure fences, attacking
unpopular officials or merchants). Under the Commonwealth many old religious
festivals were closed down, such as Xmas, when shops were ordered to remain
open etc. Ironically however, the early days of the English Revolution had
seen the Mayday 1640 festival lead to uprisings, with crowds attacking the
unpopular authorities such as the Bishops and the Palace. In 1644 the Puritans
in England abolished May Day altogether. “A parson wrote a piece
of work propaganda called Funebria Florae, Or the Downfall of the May Games.
He attacked, "ignorants, atheists, papists, drunkards, swearers, swashbucklers,
maid-marians, morrice-dancers, maskers, mummers, Maypole stealers, health-drinkers,
together with a rapscallion rout of fiddlers, fools fighters, gamesters, lewd-women,
light-women, contemmers of magistracy, affronters of ministry, disobedients
to parents, misspenders of time, and abusers of the creature, &c."”
(Linebaugh) That pretty much sums us all up I think!
The Restoration of the Monarchy brought back some of the old festivals, but
some royalist/Restoration authorities also had it in for Mayday and the old
carnival spirit. This reflected the fact that while there was a split in Ruling
Class attitudes to the nature of their rule and power relations in society,
most were united in their fear of the riot and rebellion that could arise
from festivals and gatherings. Mayday had traditionally been a day off for
apprentices, one of the main groups who would cause trouble, start riots,
fights etc… In the City of London apprentices often used Mayday to attack
populist targets, usually foreign merchants or craftsmen who were seen as
competing with English trade. (Most notoriously in the ‘Evil Mayday’
riots of 1517). This brought them into conflict with the authorities who sponsored
foreign traders or workers in their own interests, but clearly did serve to
keep craftsmen divided and at each others’ throats.
May festivities continued to decline into the 18th Century, under the influence
of urbanisation and an ongoing campaign to cut down on holidays and unruly
gatherings. Reducing the number of holidays and festival days was a crucial
element of the imposition of work discipline during the rise of capitalism.
But Mayday celebrations were kept alive by particular groups in certain areas…
Already by the 1660s in Westminster Mayday had become associated with Milkmaids,
who paraded through the streets, receiving tips from customers… This
led to the parody of the Milkmaids’ carnival, the “Bunters Mayday”
of “low thieving harlots’.
JACK IN THE GREEN
By the early 1800s Mayday was associated with chimney sweeps, and had become
combined with the Jack in the Green, a possibly originally separate celebration,
featuring a man in a costume made of a wicker frame in the shape of a sugar
loaf, with greenery woven in, accompanied by fiddlers, clowns, drummers and
in some places a Lord and Lady of the May.
South London villages and suburbs which had Jack in the Green parades included
the Borough, Clapham, Tooting, Deptford, Camberwell and Bermondsey.
Fraser in The Golden Bough associates the Jack in the Green with tree worship,
and the King and Queen of the may with pre-Christian sacred fertility rituals…
however this has been partly discredited since, in that Jack in the Green
is probably not an ancient pagan survival…
Roy Judge in his studies on the Jack in the Green believes the festivals arose
from the Milkmaids Maydays… but possibly there was an element of irony
in that ‘dirty’ sweeps were taking over rituals associated with
‘pure, clean’ maids.
The sweeps’ Jack In the Green declined through the 19th Century, (the
banning of child labour in chimney sweeping contributed to this!). It is last
described in 1923, in St Thomas Street in the Borough… although it has
been revived since the 1980s in Deptford and Greenwich.
Peter Linebaugh believes the chimney sweeps Mayday to be part of a resistance
to industrialisation and the work ethic: “Chimney sweeps and dairy
maids led the resistance. The sweeps dressed up as women on May Day, or put
on aristocratic perriwigs. They sang songs and collected money. When the Earl
of Bute in 1763 refused to pay, the opprobrium was so great that he was forced
to resign [as Prime Minister]. Milk maids used to go a-Maying by dressing
in floral garlands, dancing and getting the dairymen to distribute their milk-yield
freely. Soot and milk workers thus helped to retain the holyday right into
the industrial revolution.”
Horse workers were also associated with Mayday. Horses decorated and dressed
up took part in parades, and horse workers had Mayday off.
In the 19th Century workers in the Bricklayers Arms rail yards off Old Kent
Road had horse parades; as did workers at Whitbread’s bottle stores
in Lewisham.
THE VICTORIAN MAYDAY
Mayday celebrations underwent something of a revival and transformation in
Victorian Times. Local societies held Mayday pageants, but the pageants were
subtly different. They held a strong element of trying to recreate an idealised
‘good old days’. In South London, Mayday pageants with a May Queen
were held in Walworth from 1798 to the 1950s; but the heyday of these local
events was the 1920s. The nostalgic atmosphere can be seen in the recreation
of Brixton’s Vassall Road as an old English village!
Many of the Mayday pageants were run by the Settlement Movement.
MAYDAY AS WORKERS DAY
In parallel with the festive nature of Mayday, there was long radical tradition
associated with the First of May. This was a lot due to Mayday’s symbolic
image of rebirth and renewal. The Levellers’ Fourth Agreement of the
People, the radical program of the English Revolution, was adopted on May
1st… Later Utopian socialist Robert Owen predicted that a new egalitiarian
society would start on May 1st 1833.
The modern identification of May 1st as International Workers Day dates from
1886. After four workers died at the McCormack Harvester plant in Chicago,
attacked by police who were there defending scabs. A mass meeting held the
following day in the city's Haymarket Square was ambushed; a bomb killed one
policeman outright, six dying later. Police fired into the crowd killing one
man and injuring many more.
Marshall Law was decreed. Mass arrests took place over the bombing and eight
anarchists were finally selected for trial. Eight anarchists who had organized
and spoken at the Rally were sentenced to death. Four of the defendants -
Parsons, Engel, Spies and Fisher - died on the gallows on 11 November 1887.
Another was found dead in his cell.
The remainder had their sentences commuted to life.
In response to the judicial murder of the ‘Haymarket Martyrs’,
the International Socialist Congress, held in Paris in 1889, called for a
worldwide stoppage around the demand for an eight hour day, to be held on
1 May 1890.
The first May Day marches in London took place in 1890. In South London, workers
marched from North Camberwell Radical Club into the West End to meet marches
from other areas…
MAY DAY IN THE 20TH CENTURY
In
the early 20th Century, socialist Mayday events, like the ones held at Crystal
Palace, often combined Workers Day with elements of the traditional May fests
– Maypoles, sports, fireworks. Speeches drew on both traditions of Mayday.
Socialist artist and poet William Morris, had a strong influence on the socialist
and workers movement of the time, and his melding of looking partly forward
to a socialist future and backward to a lost medieval rural utopia was reflected
in the ideas and expressions of mayday celebrations. This can be seen in the
image of the ‘Workers Maypole’, designed by Walter Crane, a disciple
of Morris.
On Mayday 1920, 6 million workers went on strike… Workers at the Woolwich
Arsenal officially shut down the whole works. IN 1926, hundreds of thousands
of workers were on Mayday marches when the start of the General Strike in
support of the miners was announced…
Post World War Two, Mayday marches were banned in London… In 1949, an
attempt to gather at St George’s Circus, Borough, led to fighting with
the police. Bermondsey Trades Council had organised a demo, with a leaflet:
“Are You Fed Up?... is the worry of low wages and high prices getting
you down? Is the press dope about the Cold War giving you an empty feeling
when you see the meat ration? Don’t worry, the cure rests with you,
take the Wife and children down to St George’s Circus on Mayday.”
A meeting celebrating workers day, at which 100s were present, was held, followed
by a march down Waterloo Road, where police attacked demonstrators, leading
to a riot known locally as “the battle of Waterloo Road”.
The following year, with Mayday gatherings still banned, demonstrators caught
buses to Whitehall, for prompting more battles in the West End. 69 people
were arrested in the West End. Visit the Practical
History site for a report from the Times on the events.
By the 1960s, May Day had sunk to a sad decline… Just 200 people took
part in the 1967 London Mayday celebrations. Although in 1969 there was a
strong strike movement in the Docks…
In recent times of course, the mayday actions organised in London featured
the Picnic Against Privatisation and War at the Elephant and Castle roundabout
in 2002… Several hundred of us totally failing to occupy the roundabout
for any length of time, while the lack of any explanatory leaflet at all made
it a confusing spectacle for anyone passing by. But hey…
Here the notes kind of tail off… this by no means a comprehensive
account of Maydays in South London; we would welcome contributions…
Drop us a line…
Peter Linebaugh’s excellent account of Mayday through history can be
found at: www.midnightnotes.org/mayday/
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