I've been reading this through with various dire feelings, and not intending to communicate with either Chantry School or here. I've taken time out to write to the BBC History magazine which, in the July issue, has published a dodgy letter about it being better for the far right to co-opt Anglo-Saxon tradition than for bleeding-heart liberals to concel our real English past for eternity. And then I've returned.
Until this thread I was not really aware about the border versus Cotswold morris situation. I may well have seen border at Rochester. I think I did, and I think I noticed black people watching without concern. But it wasn't something I thought about as an issue to be investigated from a school point of view. And that's me as a person who will go out of her way to watch morris. My mental image, founded in Folkestone in the fifties, and reinforced by the morris sides which have visited our school in Dartford, is of whites, and baldrics. I can easily imagine a head, who has a great deal of other stuff going on at the moment, not having the time to investigate something that she did not know needed to be investigated, but thinking it would be great to have a morris side along to compare and contrast with the Sikh folk dance. (I distinctly remember bells, and sticks, and two lines of dancers - and definitely not white costumes.) If the booking were done over the phone, on the strength of their being local, the obvious photograph would be missed. We don't know how the contact was made. Not sll local sides have web sites - searching might have been time consuming.
Chantry has been, in the past, the base for the English as a second language teaching in the area, and may still be. It is a school where ethnicity and associated issues will be something that cannot be ignored. I think it is unfair to criticise the head for the whole of the situation. I did see a report that the leaving off the blackface was discussed with the side, and no agreement could be reached.
The situation doesn't seem to have helped anyone, but I think that too much criticism with too little information will have done more harm to both the school and any morris side in the vicinity than leaving it alone whould have done.
No-one seems to have explained just how the story hit the press. Someone told them, and for some reason. Someone who knew about it. Who benefits from it, and are we helping them?