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 REVIVAL OF 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! (When?)
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. See www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7672/mayday1950.html
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/