Ducklington morris sources

“Traditional” is a treacherous word, defined differently by different people or by the same people in different contexts, but “longevity” is more concrete. How far back do our morris dances go?

The three main morris dance traditions done by the Binghamton Morris Men are Bampton, Chipping Campden,¹ and Ducklington. Bampton is a living tradition, with a continuous history almost certainly back into the eighteenth century and possibly earlier. We can guess it underwent many changes in that time, but some of the dances we do very likely go back two hundred years at least. Chipping Campden, on the other hand, is a living tradition too but the dances go back only to the 1890s, when they were put together by Dennis Hathaway, who based them in part on some information about dances done locally in the 1850s but mostly on his recollection of having seen the Longborough side when he was a child.

Then there is Ducklington. As far as I know it didn’t exist in the twentieth century morris revival until the 1960s when Roy Dommett produced a “reconstruction” of the tradition and started teaching it in England. But how much of it was taken from traditional sources and how much was made up by Dommett? Recent discussion at practice suggested that it was mostly a Dommett concoction.

I’ve done a little digging to find out. Bacon’s Handbook of Morris Dances mentions [Cecil] Sharp and [Clive] Carey MSS and “local informants”. I started by looking in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website.

Clive Carey

Carey’s manuscripts contain mainly just tunes, collected from the dancers Joseph Druce and Tom Wiggins, and some background information, nothing really about the dancing other than what can be inferred from the music. There is a brief note (here, page 10) with a tune list and a one sentence description of the traditional side, and four tunes: “Pipe Dance (Greensleeves)”, “Old Taylor (Trunkles)”, “The Lollipop Man” (not clearly a morris tune), and “Princess Royal” (here, pages 27–31).

Cecil Sharp

The VWML archive has two Sharp manuscripts about Ducklington (here and here). Sharp’s source was Joseph Druce, who mentioned “Jockie”, “Princess Royal” (jig), “Nutting Girl” (jig), “Old Woman” (set dance), and “Trunkles”. “Trunkles” was “Very much as ours [Headington?] but with more sets of capers.” “Balance the Straw” (jig) and “Shepherd’s Hey” are mentioned later, and “Starve the Lad a favourite jig”.

“Boys of the Bunch”

Sharp describes “Boys of the Bunch” as follows:

This was a single dance, with corners. The latter advanced and then changed places with “a galley and one caper”. Then they did the “foot up” again facing fiddler, and then a step or two and then all over again, corners getting back to places.

Set jigs

Sharp provides a sketch of the set jigs:

Did jigs altogether. Starts up in col. facing fiddler as in foot up. No. 1 & 2 danced first figure then fell back, while Nos. 3 & 4 did ditto. The latter fell back wile nos. 5 & 6 repeated it. Then we’d hey away. After that repeated it with capers & so on.

“Green Garters”

Sharp outlines “Green Garters”:

Green Garters and May pole thus

First foot up, with galley back, then face down, then go round pole half way and then back. Then hey away.

1/2 rounds 1st time side step
2’ " half capers
3’ " whole capers

Hey away in between half rounds & then ended up with hey with “kipper out”. (Evidently same as The Rose.)

“Old Taylor”

Sharp also wrote up the “Old Taylor” tune (here) with a note:

Practically the same as usual. The capers (i.e. corners) were done first time to side step, 2’ time to fore capers, and third time to uprights with slow time.

Roy Dommett

In Morris Matters vol. 4, no. 3, p. 11, Roy Dommett wrote:

We met the son of a dancer in the ‘60’s called Jervis or Jarvis (not Jerden) who said they used to have occasional jig dancing sessions in the pub. Joe Buckingham had a Ducklington tune from a Wiggins (Biggs mss.).

A 1982 article by Philip Heath-Coleman (Morris Matters vol. 5, no. 1), p. 10) says further that Dommett was shown the solo jig versions of “Jockie” and “Princess Royal” by a Mr. Jervis, who learned them from his father, who apparently learned them post WWI… somehow. Perhaps from Tom Wiggins, who lived until 1924. Apparently Jervis’s dancing differed from Druce’s in two aspects: First, Jervis didn’t use galley and caper but two half capers instead. Second, Jervis had “tap capers” which were, as Dommett says in his writeup, “neither slow nor capers”, done to un-augmented music, whereas Druce, as Sharp says in the “Old Taylor” note quoted above, had “uprights with slow time”.

Dommett’s writeup of his “reconstruction” follows Jervis in the use of half capers and fast “tap capers”. I’ve heard (from Peter Klosky, who cites conversations he had in 1978 with Dommett) that originally Dommett specified galleys but his team, the Bath City Morris Men, changed them to half capers; if this is true, the linked writeup must postdate that change. I assume it was at some point early on that the fast “tap capers” were switched to slow upright capers, the only way I’ve seen it done.

Heath-Coleman also speculates that the “lost” “Boys of the Bunch” tune could have been the same as the one noted by Sharp from North Leigh dancer Fred Gardner; North Leigh and Ducklington in their final years shared a musician named John Lanksbury. That tune is in Bacon for the Ascot dance, and is a variant of “Orange In Bloom”. But Dommett suggested using “The Lollipop Man”, and that’s the tune most sides now use.

What we know

So far as I have been able to find, these Carey and Sharp manuscripts and Dommett’s viewing of Jervis’s jigs constitute everything known about the nineteenth century Ducklington tradition. It’s not much. Rough outlines of the set jigs, “Green Garters”, and “Old Taylor” are in the manuscripts, but none of the details, and essentially nothing for “Boys Of the Bunch” but that it was a corner crossing dance. Dommett presumably got the basic stepping and hand motions from Jervis — except that, as indicated, they differed from Druce, and the slow capers we’ve ended up with are at best an inference. So indeed, it does seem most of what we call “Ducklington” is in fact Dommett — or, of course, post-Dommett mutations!

Notes

¹ by special permission of the Chipping Campden Morris Dancers.