The Cambridgeshire Feast Dances

My research of the Cambridgeshire Feast Dances was assisted by my friend, the late Russell Wortley, and much of my knowledge comes from my own family and other people who lived and danced in the village of Comberton. In 1960 we were able to make a tape recording of an interview with a former Comberton man, "Turk" Chapman by name. He was 90 years old at the time but was able to recall much of the dancing that went on in Comberton when he was a young man, mostly at two pubs, The White Horse and The Taylors Arms. Both of these no longer exist as public houses and are now private dwellings.

The dances, although simple in form, have a style of their own and seem worthy of a place in our dance history. They were danced in the village pub rooms around Cambridge at the end of the last century and for the first fifteen years of this. When a small fair or "feast" came to the village landlords hired musicians - fiddle, harp or concertina players - for the evening's dancing. This commenced around Easter each year and continued through the Summer until the end of Harvest, when the barns accommodated the Harvest Suppoers. Other villages must have had similar events and, as I have heard, my grandfather and other Comberton men would walk to Eversden and other nearby villages, for an evening's dancing.

The custom of dancing in the pubs seems to have died out during the First World War, but the dances themselves were still performed in the years that followed, often at the annual "Old Folks' Tea" up to about 1937. It was at these social occasions that I first came to learn something of the dances, as well as The Broom Dance, later described.

Unlike the "Molly Dances" of Plough Monday, which formed an all male tradition, these were social dances for mixed couples, although the movements were often similar to those used by the Molly Men. (Needham & Peck 1933, Palmer 1974, and Wortley 1978.)

In the Feast Dances, it was the custom for the two top couples to start, the others joining in as the leading couple progressed down the set until everyone was dancing. I think it right to assume from Mr Chapman's remarks that not many couples would be dancing at one time - maybe only three or four. A fee of tuppence a dance or one shilling for the evening was charged, the dancers paying the musician as they came to the end of the Longways Set nearest to him, or they would stop as they passed when dancing a Polka round the room.

The dance "Up the Middle and Down the Sides" was collected at Whaddon in 1974 when some of the elderly village people asked Russell Wortley and myself to help them to revive the dance which they had done in their young days in the school cloakroom when it was wet. Their memory of the dance and tune was vague, but my uncle, who was present, remembered it as a Comberton dance and helped with the figures. My aunt recalled that my grandfather would often tell the leading couple to "Cut Across the Corner" as they went round the bottom of the set in the second figure of the dance. This helped her to remember enough of the tune, to indicate to me that "Shave the Donkey" was the right tune to use, and I was able to reconstruct the dance, later notated.

In their original form these dances were slow, with movements repeated and some dancers standing inactive; in order to remedy this I have departed from true tradition, adding variants of my own in order to suit our present-day form of dance and make them more interesting to perform, while at the same time taking care to preserve the distinctive figures and character of the dances.

Lack of space may have been one reason for this leisurely way of dancing, while heavy boots worn by the men another, and, with the exception of Birds-a-building, the quality of the dances can be improved by using brisk and vigorous stepping.

There are seven dances, for which the notation has been collected mainly from the villages of Comberton and Girton.

On some occasions a solo step dance would be performed. Unfortunately, no surviving person seems to be able to be specific about the exact steps or nature of the dance. Billy Chapman remembered that a Comberton man called Huckle could "dance on a couple of bricks" - probably flagstones on the bar floor or courtyard. Mrs Chapman talked about a woman who also did solo dancing but was not considered a good dancer because she "just shuffled around", which suggests that possibly there was more lift and movement than in the type of dancing done by clog dancers from the northern counties.

The existence of a solo dance was confirmed by Mr Chris Taylor, whom Wendy Crouch and I met in October 1983. He remembered seeing solo dancing being performed in the clunch pit and barns of Isleham in his youth. He spoke of a dancer using a polka, or occasionally waltz step, according to the music as a more or less impromptu performance. We think, therefore, that the step dances were variations on the polka step performed by a single dancer.

Acknowledgements

This short account involved the help of many people but I can thank only a few, mainly the good folk of Comberton Village from whom I collected the dances, and the "Kings Penny Dancers" for their willingness to perform them to my instruction. I wish to express my gratitude to my friends whose encouragement and interest helped me to compile this book, and my special thanks to Norman Bett for his help with the music scores.

CYRIL PAPWORTH

Cambridge,
January 1984

References

Joseph Needham and Arthur Peck: "Molly Dancing of East Anglia". E.F.D.S.S. Journal 1933.

William Palmer: "Plough Monday 1933 at Little Downham". English Dance and Song, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 1974.

Russell Wortley: "Molly Dancing in South-West Cambridgeshire". English Dance and Song, Vol. 40, No. 2, Summer 1978.