Morris Dancing?

There are times when it feels as though ‘native British culture’ – by which I mean that which is familiar to me and my ilk – is in danger of being displaced by the process of globalisation, the dominant influence in which is American. Having returned recently from New Orleans, however, I feel reassured that not all the uniqueness of Britain has been subsumed for, since landing on home ground, certain quintessentially native phenomena have come to my attention.

It was Saturday 30^th of March, the day after we were supposed to have left the European Union, and I was walking across town hoping against the odds that the whole Brexit movement would founder on the rocks of intractability, when the unmistakable sounds of Morris dancing came to my attention. An all-girl troupe was performing at the entrance to Tesco Metro on Market Street, a spot more usually occupied by buskers, beggars and on-the-hoof street-vendors. I stopped to watch for a while – I like the daftness of Morris dancing – and considered it brave of them to risk ridicule: after all, the natural habitat for these dancers is the village green and the George & Dragon Inn and the eccentric costumes and rural heritage of their performance might feel alien to an urban audience. I need not have worried, for there was safety in their number: by the time I had crossed town I had encountered six more troupes, some in action, some in transit and others spilling out of city pubs. It was National Morris Dance Day, it transpired. The tradition is alive and kicking at the doors of city-folk, though I doubt it will make it across the Atlantic.

On the way home I overheard this snippet of phone conversation: “…well, I did ask the bus conductor…”. Now, bus conductors disappeared back in the seventies, I think, yet here was someone to whom they were an unforgettably intrinsic part of the public transport system. Perhaps he hopes that they will be reinstated when the buses are brought back into public ownership. There is a place – the Working-Class Movement Library – where this aspiration lives on. It is a thirty-minute walk from home and I have been intending to go there for some time but made it, eventually, for a talk by historian Katherine Connelly on her biography, Sylvia Pankhurst, Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire. (If you should ever be inclined to make yourself feel inadequate, read this account of one person’s selfless, heroic and indefatigable efforts in the cause of human emancipation.)

The WCML is founded on the collection of two individuals, Ruth and Eddie Frow, and its continued survival is to be applauded, especially given that capitalism, with its rampant, aggressive and triumphalist progress, condemns it to the status of a marginalised curiosity. It is funded by charitable and voluntary donations, though it really merits national support and recognition because of the significance of its collection to the history of our socio-political development. The event I attended was hosted by volunteers, all of whom were doddery old ladies offering a warm welcome, cherished memories, tea and biscuits. Where were the bright-eyed young acolytes of the socialist movement? I shall return in hope of encountering one or two.

Socialism is a British – nay, European – tradition that meets with strong resistance in America because of the supremacy accorded to private property rights, therefore little progress has been made to redress the balance of their exported neo-liberalism. They are, however, more open to the subtle charms of cool culture – as pioneered by the Beatles, for example. And the film that I just saw, Out of Blue – which, though set in New Orleans (been there!), was made by Mancunian Carol Morley, features the actor Toby Jones and is based on a novel by Martin Amis – could be part of the fight-back: or, at least, an indication that culture is trickling in the other direction.