May Day, Great Rollright, 1907
Spring festivals – from Beltane to Empire Day
In shepherd Richard Widdows’ lifetime, May Day was a day for high-spirited, rural celebrations after a long winter. The photograph above, taken in 1907, towards the end of his life, depicts a gaggle of village children in Great Rollright, celebrating the beginning of May. Despite their formal dress – the girls are in large Edwardian hats and the boys in flat caps and suits – the children are lively and untamed. The girl holding the garland to the left looks at us with a surly sideways glance and the boy to the right has a stern posture beyond his years. In the background, a small boy holding a flag looks as if he could be about to swing from the railings.
Taking its origins from Beltane, the spring pagan festival, in medieval times the first of May became an important day for feasting and dancing in towns and villages across the country. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Puritans attempted to repress these ‘heathenish’ festivities. From Banbury, Vicar Thomas Bracebridge advocated for an edict to be issued by Banbury’s constable in 1589 to ‘take down all maypoles within his district and to repress and put down all Whitsun ales, May games and morris dances’. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, maypoles were raised across the country to symbolise and celebrate the end of Puritan prohibition.
The May Queen and Empire Day
During the early 20th century, May Day became imbued with a patriotic nostalgia for ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ as the country shifted from an agricultural nation into an urban, industrial and imperial one. The focus moved away from a day of unbridled, and frequently drunken, festivities for agricultural workers towards celebrations that sentimentalised a young May Queen, often with an accompanying court of May queens, wearing white to symbolise ‘purity and the promise of spring’.
This transformation is evident in the 1915 photographs of May Day festivities in Oxfordshire villages, taken by Frank Packer for the Oxford Journal Illustrated (Great Rollright is top right). The girls in all four villages are wearing white, decorated with flowers.
In the 1900s, Empire Day was also introduced in May – on the late Queen Victoria’s birthday on 24th May. This day of overt patriotism in which children across the British Empire sang the national anthem and ‘Jerusalem’ and were taught to become good citizens, frequently incorporated maypole dancing. This meant that the iconography of celebrations often merged. For instance, in the newspaper photo above, the children of Heythrop are waving Union Jacks. In 1913, a description of a May pageant in Great Rollright in the Oxfordshire Weekly News describes ‘a nigger being introduced’ (a blacked-up child) into the festivities – a highly dubious addition – no doubt influenced by the Empire Movement.
Although Empire Day declined after the Second World War, May Day continued to be an important focus for celebrations in Great Rollright. An organised festivity for children, however, it lacked the verve and unruly joy that is captured in the 1907 photograph.
