Mary Neal Day Feb 7th 2009

Subject: RE: Mary Neal Day Feb 7th
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 17 Jan 12 - 10:07 PM

See also the thread on the Mary Neal letters and archives, now available online.

~ Becky in Tucson

Subject: RE: Mary Neal Day Feb 7th
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 17 Jan 12 - 10:06 PM

Poverty knock

The traditionally male pastime of morris dancing has a secret history involving a suffragette and the slum girls of Victorian London. Lucy Neal investigates

Lucy Neal
The Guardian, Friday 6 February 2009

They say morris dancing is on its last legs, with no new blood to keep its ancient heart beating. A few years ago I wouldn't really have cared, but I've changed my mind. Now I think the traditions of morris dance are part of a wider inheritance, and have a political history that needs to be understood, even celebrated and renewed. This turnabout is thanks to time spent with the papers of my great-great-aunt, Mary Neal: a suffragette, social reformer and morris dance revivalist who has been almost written out of history.

When I began to research her story, I was unprepared for the ride through English cultural history that awaited me - hidden stories, unresolved controversies - which changed my sense of my own Englishness. There was also an ancestral conundrum, now solved and resolved with the first public celebration today of Neal's life and work in Camden, north London, at the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

Neal was born in 1860, the daughter of a Birmingham button manufacturer. Finding her life "a pageant of snobbery", she joined the West London Mission in 1888 to serve the poor as a Sister of Mercy. Her unpublished autobiography narrates her life - taking the first minutes of the Women's Social and Political Union in London; and becoming not only the first female magistrate on a county bench, but a pioneer of seaside holidays for the working classes and a force behind the folk song and dance revival. Her vision for social justice found expression in the Espérance Club, set up for sewing girls in the slum of Somerstown, around King's Cross. She wished to free working-class women from servitude, and believed in the joyous effect of song and dance on the lives of the young and poor. The club, open four nights a week for almost 20 years from 1895, became renowned for its public displays of English song and dance.

As a result, the girls were invited to teach in villages, schools and factories across England. One girl danced and taught her way around Wales, Devonshire, Derbyshire and Kent. Another, Blanche Payling, was sent to Thaxted to teach children from the town's sweet factory to dance. That summer, a group of 60 children danced at the Thaxted flower show (the town has a "side" of morris dancers today, though it doesn't include women and children). Neal was proud of the changes these responsibilities brought about in the girls' lives. "It is no small thing," she wrote in 1910 "for a little London dressmaker to stay in the house, as an honoured guest of a country squire, and ride in his motorcar and write letters home at his study table, and feel at the same time that she too has something to give".

A Holborn librarian helped me locate where Neal had lived with her best friend, the suffragette Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence: a three-room tenement block in Duke's Road, WC1. They used to invite in old ladies turfed out of the nearby workhouse, and give them tea in front of the fire. They also poured tea for a bohemian mix of politicians (Keir Hardie) and poets (WB Yeats), suffragettes (the Pankhursts) and the Espérance girls themselves, whom Neal would take up to the sixth floor of the building to rehearse for public performances.

According to the social reformer Charles Booth, who used to tramp London's streets by night with local policemen, and colour-code areas according to their degrees of vice and misery, the area around Cumberland Market that the Espérance girls came from had poor sewerage and badly ventilated rooms that housed four or five at least, "mixed up with stables". It was tinted on his map with the dark colours that warned of "vicious semi-criminal" inhabitants.

It was the energy and interest generated by these slum girls that instigated the first folk revival of English song and dance, a movement that blazed across the countryside. Witnesses to Espérance Club parties were struck by the contrast between the songs of a "sweet and simple England", and singers from "this grimy latter-day London": "'Blow away the morning dew,' they sang," according to Lucas, "with vigour and happiness . . . while one knew that some of them had never seen a dewdrop."

Yet the contribution of Neal and the Espérance girls has been almost forgotten, with most credit going to the song collector Cecil Sharp (Neal had gone to him in 1905 to ask for songs for her girls). When her papers came into my hands there came with them a request not to place them in the most appropriate national archive: the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House. I learned about a controversy, a century old, over different approaches to ways in which traditional dance could be inherited and passed on. And the more I learned, the more I felt a sense of injustice at the treatment she had received at Sharp's hands. Although Sharp and Neal were reconciled during their lifetimes, history had continued to play out a century-old feud.

I've heard Sharp referred to as "God", and morris dancers drink toasts in silence to his "immortal memory". Given that adulation, Neal's papers form a counter-narrative, but it has been difficult to resolve the tension between honouring her history and challenging the Sharp orthodoxy.

Malcolm Taylor at the Vaughan Williams library bravely hung a picture of Neal in the corner of the entrance hall at Cecil Sharp House. She has been written about by the folklorist Roy Judge, and a play by Sue Swift, The Forgotten Mary Neal, has been performed by the New Espérance Morris (a women's morris group founded in 1973). People have spoken of her conspiratorially as if a Sharp taskforce were ready to jump out with jingling bells whenever her name were mentioned.

What happened? An initially happy and fruitful collaboration between Neal and Sharp ended with a blizzard of hostile letters and articles in national newspapers. Sharp accused Neal's girls of "hoydenish dancing"; Neal complained of Sharp's "pedantry". When she sailed to the US on a lecture tour, a friend of Sharp's wrote to her hosts saying she had been "thrown over" by the education authorities. The quarrel concerned class and gender divisions, questions of national identity, tradition and modernity, "accuracy" and "spirit" - and whether morris dancing involves a bent or straight knee.

Sharp prioritised a strict canon for traditional dances and songs; Neal followed individual dancers' desires. While he captured the dances at a particular moment in time, she argued that "no two sides of dancers did a particular dance in precisely the same way. No two men in the side did the step the same . . . and no one danced it the same way on two separate occasions." While Neal "got people dancing", it was Sharp who commandeered the records. "This tiny drama," Neal said, "went to the very foundation of life." While it seems clear that Sharp began the conflict, Neal, later in life, was philosophical about it. "It is almost impossible to state what the exact quarrel was about. Perhaps, just briefly, it was that Mr Sharp wanted to make an exact canon for dancing and I wanted it to follow the traditional freedom of the old dancers." With the first world war, she said, "the world changed", and the club closed.

Neal was not simply a folk revivalist who lost out to Sharp, but a woman who recognised the radical potential of the arts to transform lives - particularly those of the young and poor. Perhaps the historians of the folk-song and dance revival have been asking the wrong questions: not were the Espérance girls dancing the tradition correctly, and should women dance morris at all, but how did London's hard-up sewing girls manage to produce a dynamic team of teachers and dancers in the first place? Payling, Bertha Maas, Kate Leahy, Daisy Jackson and the hundreds of other Espérance girls have left few traces. We know that Florrie Warren travelled to the US with Neal in 1910, stayed and married an American. I tracked down her youngest daughter, Vida Olinick Brown, aged 87, and learnt she had been a dancer herself and ballet mistress to George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet.

If Sharp has stood over the years for exclusivity and control, and Neal for inclusivity and participation, only one action could reconcile their stories. I decided to place her papers where they'll be found by the people who care about them: they're going to Cecil Sharp House. Today, on Mary Neal day, we end the feud, recognise the pioneering cultural innovations achieved by women in English folk song and dance and pay homage to the resilience of a continuing tradition.

Pursuing Mary Neal, I lost my prejudices; 25 years as director of the London international festival of theatre had given me a far better acquaintance with global traditions than with English ones. Like many of my generation, I was culturally programmed to ignore them. But when I saw the Bampton morris dancers at Whitsun and the midsummer celebrations of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dancers in north Essex, I began to be lured in. I met the legends of folk England: Shirley Collins in the south; Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson in the north. The songs and music were beautiful.

I couldn't believe I'd lived in England all my life and never looked for this music. The stories of songs such as "Poverty Knock", about women mill-workers, trace an English history of struggle, love and loss. I met a newer generation of folk practitioners, robustly recreating what Paul Sartin from the band Bellowhead calls the "vernacular music of England". I met Laurel Swift, a morris dancer reinventing morris dancing; contemporary dancers with a love of morris such as Jonathan Burrows and Rosemary Lee; and a young choreographer, Freddie Opoku-Addaie, encountering morris for the first time and being struck by its relation to other dances around the world. I'm beginning to doubt whether those prophecies of the end of morris dancing can possibly come true.

~ Becky in Tucson

Subject: RE: Mary Neal Day Feb 7th
From: Richard Mellish
Date: 08 Feb 09 - 02:00 PM

I was planning to go but decided not to risk what the weather might be doing by late Saturday night. Can someone who did go tell us all about it, please?

Richard

Subject: RE: Mary Neal Day Feb 7th
From: peregrina
Date: 08 Feb 09 - 01:15 PM

Full Notes on Poverty Knocks and Tommy Daniel here at The Yorkshire Garland Site:

Poverty Knocks, words, notes & sound file at Yorkshire Garland

Subject: RE: Mary Neal Day Feb 7th
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 08 Feb 09 - 01:10 PM

Lucy Neal doesn't say it is trad.

Pete Coe (who I am just, coincidentally, off to see) said once that it came from a Yorkshire weaver called Tom Daniel who'd cleaned it up considerably from what he'd heard in the mills in the early years of the last century.

Subject: RE: Mary Neal Day Feb 7th
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 08 Feb 09 - 12:51 PM

Thanks for the link, Sylvia. Poverty Knock wasn't a trad song though.....?

Kitty

Subject: RE: Mary Neal Day Feb 7th
From: SylviaN
Date: 08 Feb 09 - 12:29 PM

See this article from Saturday's Guardian.

Article in the Guardian - 7/2/09

Cheers

Sylvia

Subject: RE: Mary Neal Day Feb 7th
From: Leadfingers
Date: 05 Feb 09 - 09:48 AM

The slant was that Our Cecil was a bit of a HideBound Traditionalist ! It WAS interesting though .

Subject: RE: Mary Neal Day Feb 7th
From: GUEST,Mr Red
Date: 05 Feb 09 - 09:29 AM

And as for William Kimber teaching women Morris dancing. Well........

Morris Ring must be rushing to hush that one up. Headington Morris was the first that C# saw.

Subject: RE: Mary Neal Day Feb 7th
From: GUEST,Mr Red
Date: 05 Feb 09 - 09:27 AM

Heard the progeramme.

What with pieces on ceilidh bands and regular female Folk musicians on the show - WH has arguably as much Folk content as Radio2.

Subject: RE: Mary Neal Day Feb 7th
From: Folkiedave
Date: 05 Feb 09 - 05:06 AM

On today's Woman's Hour - and it is Mary Neal of course and not Mary "Deal".

Looks like they are setting up a controversy - trailer says "Peace breaks out at the EFDSS".

Subject: Mary Neal Day Feb 7th
From: Folkiedave
Date: 04 Feb 09 - 11:31 AM

Can't make it myself unfortunately - but:

The Mary Deal Day is featured in this weeks Time Out and will be on Women's Hour with Jenny Murray, tomorrow Feb 5th 10-11am on Radio 4 as well as in the Guardian on Saturday and Lyn Gardner's blog on the Guardian online.

Should be well worth listening to.

More information about the day from here.

Appearances by:

Appearances by: Shirley Collins MBE, Alistair Anderson, Laurel Swift, Benji Kirkpatrick, Miranda Rutter, Freddie Opoku-Addaie, Robin Deacon, Project Phakama, Master Baker Lee Parvin, children from Edith Neville and Bentley Primary Schools and English Ceilidh Band, The Gloworms, Jim Moray, New Espérance Morris, Abingdon Morris, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, Vida Olinick-Brown, Jonathan Burrows, Ron Smedley, Doc Rowe and Malcolm Taylor OBE.