Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005

Subject: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: alanww
Date: 21 Dec 04 - 05:21 AM

Who's going to this year's Strawbear on Fri 7 to Sun 9 January? All the usual crowd and a few first-timers, I hope!
Let's hope it won't be as cold as it was in 2003!
"Dancing and singing, bell ringing...!"
Alan

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: IanC
Date: 21 Dec 04 - 05:24 AM

I'll be there as always, with Stevenage Sword.

:-)

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: Mrs_Annie
Date: 21 Dec 04 - 07:59 AM

Yes, cold and frosty is better than rain. And it adds a bit of excitement wondering if the dancers are going to slip over.

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: LesB
Date: 21 Dec 04 - 01:17 PM

I'll be there with Southport Swords
Our first time last year, we enjoyed it so much we're coming again.
Cheers
Les

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 22 Dec 04 - 01:56 AM

I suppose Manitas will be there with East Saxon Sword, but I won't, I'm due for surgery the next Monday so don't want to catch any nasty morris type bugs..... If it's a nice day though, try going up the church tower to watch it... it's incredible!

LTS

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: GUEST,gadaffi
Date: 22 Dec 04 - 05:20 AM

Anyone there know where a decent music session may be found during Saturday? Hosting venues and participants always seem to change, the best in recent years being the Bee three years ago IMO. Anyone know whether the Morton's Fork and/or Old Crown are in use this year?

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: Fidjit
Date: 22 Dec 04 - 05:46 AM

hey the fidjits will be there. check us out at http:/chasclark.net It's great. More melodeons than you shake a stick at.

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: Zany Mouse
Date: 22 Dec 04 - 06:14 AM

I love this festival - small and friendly. Sadly, the cold winds in the Fens are Syberian-type. Wear your thermals if you go!

It's good craic.

Rhiannon

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: Mrs_Annie
Date: 22 Dec 04 - 09:02 AM



They're not included in the dance venues, see map

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: alanww
Date: 29 Dec 04 - 06:28 AM

gadaffi: Yes, the song and music sessions on Saturday seem to change venues! And very confusing it is!
Over the last few years I recall good sessions at different times at: The Bee, The Boat, The George, The Bricklayers & The New Crown.
Its pot luck, I think.
See you there - somewhere!
"... they sold the Church Bible to buy a new bear!"
Alan

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: John C.
Date: 29 Dec 04 - 08:49 AM

Although I originally come from Peterborough I don't manage to get to the Straw Bear too often. The last time I went, a couple of years ago, it was amazing! I think that everyone involved is to be commended.
There was only one sour note, though, I attended a number of evening sessions in the local pubs and as a singer got the distinct impression that 'singers are not welcome here' (could have been my singing, of course!).

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: alanww
Date: 31 Dec 04 - 08:16 AM

Yes, it can be like that, John C.
As an unaccompanied singer myself (but a concertina player too!), I have found that as the beer flows the boxes often become hyper and take it over at places like The Bricklayers.
But in the last couple of years there has been a singaround at The Boat on the Saturday night. Derek & Mary Droscher (Mudcat name: Merek&Dairy, I think!), who run the Banbury FC & FF, set it up. We will both be sheltering our campervans in The Boat car park again this year.
So, if it happens again this year, perhaps we will see you there?
"My bonnie lies over the ocean ...!"
Alan

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: John C.
Date: 31 Dec 04 - 10:30 AM

Thanks alanww - I'll try and make it - if I can face the journey again. For family reasons I've been back and forth between my home in the NW and P'boro so many times in 2004 I suspect that my car could probably get there by itself!
May I wish you a Happy New Year if I'm not able to face the trek again.

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: phil h
Date: 31 Dec 04 - 12:54 PM

Main afternoon Irish session is in the Falcon, some of the locals were chuffed when Mally turned up last year. He'll probably be there this year too as Persephone are dancing. Evening Irish is a bit hit and miss, may be at the Hero of Alliwall.
I really miss the sessions but I'm dancing with the Witchmen in the day and off to the ceilidh Saturday evening.
I live in Peterborough & there will be 17 people staying at my house Saturday night (admitedly 4 of them in a camper van on the drive).
Straw bear is the best thing in my yule/xmas/newyear etc period, even beats new years eve in the tap and spile Whitby.
Phil

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: LesB
Date: 31 Dec 04 - 01:09 PM

Last year I had to play for the Southport Swords instead of dancing, (3rd reserve musician)! & I had to play for them to dance 'Elgin' in the Falcon, to which we use Foxhunters Jig, & I can't play it very well. So Mally & all the sessioneers came to the rescue & drowned me out, it was magic playing with a band like that behind you. (Thankfully i'll just be dancing this year).
Les

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: LesB
Date: 06 Jan 05 - 01:35 PM

I have just found out that we (Southport Swords) will be spending lunchtime on Sat with lots of rapper & sword sides at 'The Ram'. Anyone know where it is? I downloaded a list of pubs from the Whittlesea Community web site, but no 'Ram'. Roll on Friday night.
Cheers
Les

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: treewind
Date: 06 Jan 05 - 01:39 PM

We're aiming for the New Crown for an English tunes session, which is what we did last year. But as mentioned above, you never know where the session is going to be.

There'll be some sort of rowdy and boozy singaround at the Bricklayers, of course; there always is

Anahata

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: Emma B
Date: 06 Jan 05 - 02:29 PM

Guess I'll be a rowdy boozer then! (as usual)

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 06 Jan 05 - 05:39 PM

No East Saxon Swords, their kit is a summer one.... we're working on a winter design, but it means everyone gets to be a Betty!

I'm staying in bed for the day I think!

LTS

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: IanC
Date: 26 Jan 05 - 11:45 AM

I wouldn't normally copy large articles here, but I'm including this because it doesn't seem available on the web. A bit odd in places, but well-written and entertaining as well as being in a mainstream newspaper.

From The Times January 14, 2005
Let's cry God for hairies, England and straw bears
Caitlin Moran

With its Morris dancing and wobbly folk music the Straw Bear Festival is the essence of Englishness - eccentric, scary and very cold.

WHITTLESEY is a Godforsaken village in the middle of frozen Cambridgeshire fenland, ten miles from Peterborough. To judge by the simple yet heartfelt graffiti on the benches ("I love cheese"; "I love carrots"), very little occurs for most of the year. On the first Monday after Epiphany, however, the Straw Bear Festival comes to town — a ritual of which no body knows the provenance and which fills the pavement outside Somerfield with Morris dancers, Molly dancers, pagans, real-ale devotees, freaks and a 9ft straw bear.

You see the special sights of a group of Molly dancers standing furtively around outside a pizza shop, sharing a resoundingly unpagan American Hot; or Morris dancers trying to have a quiet wee behind a church, forgetting that the bells round their ankles work as a deadly accurate aural tracking device at all times. Indeed, if you're very lucky, you will see the man I chanced on this year, who had not only dressed himself and his wife in the Morris mode, but also his two children, three grandchildren, and a big fat golden Labrador — who, if my ears weren't deceiving me, was actually called Morris.

On paper, I wouldn't put money on this being of much interest. Indeed, before I went the first time I wasn't intending to. "But Molly dancers are the evil Morris dancers," a Straw Bear-going friend said, by way of encouragement.

But surely Morris dancers are already the evil Morris dancers? I couldn't really see a way you could possibly up the malevolence quotient of Morris dancers any further. Unless they had clown make-up, perhaps. And danced to one of Tom Waits's more demented New Orleans funeral marches.

Interestingly, when you arrive at Straw Bear, you realise that this is exactly what one of the troupes — the Pig Dyke Molly from Yaxley, Cambridgeshire — have done. With their faces painted to look like Edward Scissorhands, dressed in black and white Op-Art fabrics, and accompanied by a large tuba, the Pig Dyke Molly look like Dress Down Friday at the Robert Smith Academy for Troubled Youths.

At 11am on a cold, sunny day they make a slightly alarming sight, like a giant Goth gang that missed the last bus home last night and are now so out of their minds with longing for White Lightning that they're dancing for pennies.

Still, it's not as if the Pig Dyke Goth Hoedown are alone in looking incongruous. At the first Straw Bear I attended, in 2001, we got off the train just as the main procession reached the village square. A plough decorated with flowers was being pulled along, surrounded by dancing women in long dresses with ivy in their hair. Alongside them were Old Glory — Molly dancing transvestites in woollen frocks with blacked-up faces — and the Pig Dyke Sisters of Mercy Knees-Up.

Milling about at the edge of the procession were the Witchmen, the Hell's Angels of Morris dancers, dressed in black and amber, spiked with pheasant's feathers and wielding big sticks.

And in the middle, of course, was the Straw Bear — a villager bound up in 9ft of straw and looking like an agrarian, medieval, extremely flammable Darth Vader. Completely blinded by his straw head, the Bear was being led on a chain by another villager and executing an odd, rhythmic, stumbling dance, in which a key move seemed to be sporadically realising how top-heavy he was and nearly pitching into the audience.

I can't tell you how surprised I was when, on taking this all in, I immediately burst into tears.

Obviously I had risen before 7am on a Saturday to stand outside a Somerfield in the fens — and at an event, it was sadly clear, that had absolutely no jerk chicken stalls — but it wasn't all down to that.

I think it was a sudden realisation that this is what, until very recently, being English had all been about. My conception of Englishness had been built on P. G. Wodehouse and Amnesty International and Radio 4 and Dan Cruickshank but, in fact, they were preceded by hundreds of years of this: peasants in the middle of winter, without antibiotics or telegraphs or thermals, pretending to be witches and warlocks and Straw Bears until the spring finally came.

Whatever modern Englishness is, it was either a reaction to or stemmed from what I was watching: wild drunken joy, fear, cheap, deep magic and cross-dressing. I felt like Estelle in the recent single 1980 when she raps: "I touched Africa and came back darker/ Knowing myself, feeling my roots a little harder."

That cold, sunny January day in 2001, I suppose I touched Cambridgeshire and came back whiter — save around the nose, which went an interesting cherry colour as a result of the unbelievably potent fenland winds.

Because if there's one reason why the Whittlesea (as the organisers insist on spelling it) Straw Bear Festival continues to be a small-scale affair — I would estimate no more than 300 people line the route, or wander off to watch the dancing displays held in front of pubs across the village — is that it's unbeoffthescalelievably cold.

This isn't Glastonbury, with the odd spot of rain in an otherwise idyllic setting in the middle of June. This is the fens in January. You know how, when you see a winter-blooming flower in a normal part of the country, you think: "Oh dear, that looks very vulnerable to the cold"? In Whittlesey I thought that about a potato dropped in the road. When a pie from the chip shop proved not to have been heated right through to the middle, it precipitated an almost calamitous loss of heart in our group as it was the family's only heat source.

Indeed, all mystery as to why the Straw Bear Festival had originally come about — it was first mentioned in newspapers in the 1890s, and nobody knew why it occurred even then — are quickly resolved when one reflects on the insulating properties of straw. My reading of the festival is that the Straw Bear is the only warm man in the fens and he is flaunting his warmth at a collection of villagers who are trying to keep warm by dancing.

The music the bands play — stomping, hearty folk, a great deal of it very fast — is designed so that the musicians lose as few fingers as possible to frostbite. And the dancing — stomping, hearty, ramshackle — is basically a slightly more organised version of people hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm.

And I suppose this, above all other reasons, is why the Straw Bear remains a very special event in the British calendar. For, while all other festivals — Harvest, Glastonbury, Christmas, Easter, Solstice at Stonehenge and the Cheese Rolling Festival (May 30, Cooper's Hill, Brockworth, Gloucester) — are products of surplus time, abundance and celebration, Straw Bear is conceived of necessity. It's culture as a survival tactic. It's art as central heating.

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: alanww
Date: 26 Jan 05 - 01:20 PM

Thanks for that, IanC.
Yes, for me its about being eccentrically English.
"Some talk of Alexander ...!"
Alan

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: John C.
Date: 26 Jan 05 - 02:57 PM

Oh thank you, IanC for sharing that wonderful piece from the Times with us! And thank you Caitlin Moran, wherever you are, you're a genius!
Yes, Whittlesey is an odd place - I know it well - and, yes, it is very cold in January. I don't know how to express this but having grown up in nearby Peterborough I've always thought that the Fenland has a curious sort of charged atmosphere - boring most of the time (probably due to the extreme flatness!) but with a feeling that something interesting is bound to happen soon. Well, of course, every Plough Monday it does - anarchy breaks out in Whittlesey, of all places. One of my teachers used to use the name 'Whittlesy' as a sort of synonym for 'boring' and 'prosaic' - little did he know!!

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: My guru always said
Date: 27 Jan 05 - 02:37 PM

Oh what a fabulous description, thanks for posting that Ian!!

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 27 Jan 05 - 02:53 PM

I think I know who the carrot lover is......

LTS

Subject: RE: Whittlesey Straw Bear 2005
From: My guru always said
Date: 06 Feb 05 - 07:55 AM

There are some fabulous pictures at the following pages:

here
and here
and here too
and finally here (these are musical!!)