David's question got me thinking a bit more about the development of May Day into Labour Day. May Day was traditionally a rural celebration when farm workers and 'commoners' celebrated their way of life. But, after the Enclosure Acts, a vast number of the rural population was forced off the land and obliged to migrate to the industrial areas where they provided the workforce for the Industrial Revolution. Here the traditional rural 'fertility' celebrations would have little resonance to people living in squalid urban slums and working in appalling conditions in mills, mines, steelworks and the like so, as the organised labour movement grew, what better way of giving the workers back their traditional holiday, but now with a more appropriate context that had a resonance to their current way of life – especially as May Day had been taken over by the middle classes as a quaint relic of folklore?

I doubt if you'll find much maypole dancing in Rotherham, Wath-on-Dearne of the old mining and steel town and villages of South Yorkshire. I reckon a few might be singing along To Ray Hearne, though (grapes of Wath is really appropriate!).