Beth Neill passed on the message to me that Roy Dommett died on 2 November 2015. There was a brief item in yesterday's 'The Times'; hopefully his passing will merit a deeper appreciation by one of the quality dailies soon, English Dance & Song and Folk Music Journal.

Roy was THE inspiration for many of us in the post-'Morris On' wave of dancers and musicians in the 1970s. He was on demand for the endless series of Morris tutorials he was prepared to give, and is always referenced as the brains behind Lionel Bacon's 'bible' A Handbook of Morris Dancing.

He would often appear at festivals with Tony 'Tubby' Reynolds, dressed in his gargantuan Andy Pandy outfit: Tubby playing his rustic 'country' fiddle to Roy's knowledgeable instruction, interspersed by talks on 'how it was' and broadening peoples' horizons with newer ideas and research he himself had undertaken.

On a few personal notes, he drove over from his home in Fleet in Hampshire to act as tutor in the early years of Fleur de Lys Morris from Godalming, to whom he taught stave dances from Dorset which he'd researched from friendly society logbooks, along with a few dances from Ilmington and Hinton-in-the-Hedges and the Shropshire Bedlams/Martha Rhoden's repertoire which were in vogue in the late 1970s (and still are!!)

The world of technology will recall him as a scientist in rocket engineering at the former Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, and never one to suffer fools gladly (morris fools excepted!) His critics in the world of Morris will chide that he had created and taught 'new morris' where none existed before. We won't know the truth behind that assertion, but it certainly enriched a jaded world taken over by corpulent tankard-bearing bearded school teachers, bank clerks and the like convinced they were emulating a dance form researched diligently by Cecil Sharp and co in the first quarter of last century.

There must be dozens if not hundreds of teams in the UK and America who have not benefited from his tuition in one way or another.

My thoughts go out to Margueritte and her family.

By his example and enthusiasm, the baton has now been passed on, but he leaves a (physically) immense hole in the lives of those who met and knew him.