tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81462665683846769352012-02-16T17:53:34.935ZExcerpts from "TRUE BRITS (The London 2012 Olympics Edition): A Tour of 21st Century Britain in all its Bog-Snorkelling, Shin-Kicking and Cheese-Rolling Glory," the travel and history book by JR DaeschnerJR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.comBlogger581100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-28678978770601782812012-01-25T02:29:00.002Z2012-01-25T02:29:49.815Z<div>Dover returned to England a very rich man, and Selkirk also did well for himself.<br /><br />According to one story, Dover took Selkirk to a tavern in Bristol and introduced him to a 60-year-old journalist by the name of Daniel Defoe.<br /><br />The penniless hack crafted Selkirk's story into his first novel, <em>The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.</em>(Defoe also tried to cash in with two sequels, <em>The Farther Adventures of…</em> and <em>The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe</em>; for his part, the real Robinson Crusoe tired of the high life, returned to the high seas, and died off Africa, probably of yellow fever.)<br /><br />Meanwhile, Dover's success stirred up speculation around the newly-formed South Sea Company.<br /><br />Ironically, the buccaneering doctor lost much of the money he stole in South America by gambling it in the subsequent South Sea Bubble. (Defoe also lost his shirt in the stock market debacle.)<br /><br />However, Dover made up his losses by penning a bestseller of his own, a controversial do-it-yourself guide called <em>The Ancient Physician's Legacy to His Country</em>.<br /><br />In the book, which ran to eight editions plus a French translation, the old buccaneer defended his use of mercury and gave readers the recipe for his famous Dover's Powders, a gout remedy that was still used as a painkiller in Europe well into the 20th century.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S58TD1wylug/TxzaMkQinoI/AAAAAAAAAcY/LJ6vEE9IVfo/s1600/Thomas+Dover+Dover%2527s+Powders.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" nfa="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S58TD1wylug/TxzaMkQinoI/AAAAAAAAAcY/LJ6vEE9IVfo/s400/Thomas+Dover+Dover%2527s+Powders.jpg" width="332" /></a></div><br />"In two or three hours, at farthest, the patient will be perfectly free from pain," the "Ancient Physician" promised.<br /><br />Which isn't that surprising, considering the key ingredient was large doses of opium.<br /><br />Men of the world like Dover and Defoe would have been familiar with "The Campden Wonder," a real-life tale of kidnap, murder and witchcraft that captivated their contemporaries and still fascinates true-crime buffs.<br /><br />The mystery centres on William Harrison, a trusted servant of Sir Baptist Hicks' family ever since the tycoon took over as Campden's lord around 1610.<br /><br />The family mansion had been destroyed during the Civil War, so Sir Baptist's daughter and heir, Lady Juliana Noel, had the stables converted into a comfortable home called Court House (still inhabited by her descendants).<br /><br />Harrison lived nearby, possibly in one of the mansion's old banqueting houses, known as the recently-restored east pavilion.<br /><br /></div><p><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-2867897877060178281?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-69102422483444137712012-01-25T02:13:00.000Z2012-01-25T02:13:02.458ZIronically, the pain didn't kick in until the ambulance ride. Every jolt and judder down the bumpy hill made the boys moan. <br /><br />At the hospital, X-rays confirmed just how serious Gareth's injuries were. <br /><br />Besides the gash on his scalp, which needed eight stitches, his thighbone—the longest and strongest bone in the human body—had snapped in half. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-smz45AsXrc0/Tx9gQ6R3XjI/AAAAAAAAAdQ/PsH_GSgDzRs/s1600/imagesCA5VYET4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" gda="true" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-smz45AsXrc0/Tx9gQ6R3XjI/AAAAAAAAAdQ/PsH_GSgDzRs/s320/imagesCA5VYET4.jpg" width="239" /></a></div><br />Instead of a long white column, the ghostly image showed two jagged stumps lying parallel to each other inside his thigh. <br /><br />Fortunately, the clean break had deadened the nerves. <br /><br />But Gareth's relatively pain-free experience was about to end. To realign the bone, the doctors had to stretch his leg until they could get the two parts to lock into place. It took three people to do it—one pulling on his foot, and two others pushing and shoving his thigh and knee while Gareth writhed in agony. <br /><br />That night, his legs twitched in his sleep, dislodging the bone, so the whole excruciating procedure had to be repeated. <br /><br />His operation the next day took five-and-a-half hours—the surgeon had to saw off the ragged ends where the femur had broken, and then run an 18-inch pin through it, fixing it with bolts at either end. <br /><br />Gareth spent two weeks in hospital, a cage-like contraption around his leg, and another four months on crutches. He was in physiotherapy for the rest of the year. <br /><br />The doctors warned him that if he broke his thigh again, the pin would bend rather than break, shattering his femur into fragments. <br /><br />A decade later, though, Gareth says that stark warning didn't scare him. The Smedleys have since moved away from Cooper's Hill to a home near the Welsh border. Sitting in the kitchen with his mother on a rainy afternoon, Gareth admits that he and a friend ran down the slope the following year, after the official race. <br /><br />True to form, he broke his collarbone. <br /><br />"You never told me that!" Barbara exclaims, shocked by her son's confession. "You told me you fell down on your way home!" <br /><br />"Well, I didn't, did I?" A mischievous grin. <br /><br />To this day, Gareth has an 18-inch scar running halfway down his leg, and if anyone squeezes his knee, he recoils in pain—the bolts holding the pin in place pinch the flesh in his thigh. <br /><br />His right leg is also shorter than the other, though you wouldn't know it when you see him walking. <br /><br />After all her family's mishaps, Barbara has become an opponent of cheese rolling. "I would like to see it banned." <br /><br />However, her son sees things differently. <br /><br />"I'd like to run it again," he ventures, eliciting the desired reaction from his mother. "Maybe I could finish the race this time." <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><strong>* * * </strong></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-6910242248344413771?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-39555367982134558452012-01-25T02:12:00.001Z2012-01-25T02:12:46.454ZAt least a dozen paramedics pounced on him. <br /><br />Despite his injuries and the blood streaking down his face, Gareth wasn't in agony; he was more concerned about his new jeans. <br /><br />"I started givin' 'em a bollockin', I said 'Don't cut me jeans!'" <br /><br />His friends huddled round, not so much out of sympathy but curiosity: they wanted a glimpse of the gore—as did the cameras. <br /><br />If it bleeds, it leads, and Jason's blood-streaked visage, with a fat bandage on his head and a brace around his neck, provided the opening shot for the local TV news. <br /><br />"Just 30 seconds earlier this teenager was in perfect health. Now he has a fractured hip"—the reporter paused for effect—"and head injuries. Another casualty of the annual Cooper's Hill cheese rolling races." <br /><br />Cut to the reporter interviewing the winner, a mate of Gareth's, as the paramedics swarmed over the prostrate body in the background. <br /><br />"That could've been me. You just don't know," the boy shrugged. <br /><br />"It doesn't bother you that this sort of thing happens." <br /><br />"Well, <em>yeah</em>," he conceded. "It's unfortunate for <em>him</em>. But you take that chance." <br /><br />The callousness of his friends—their car-crash curiosity—didn't upset Gareth. Truth is, he probably would have said the same if it had been one of them. <br /><br />As the medics lifted him into the ambulance, Gareth gave his mates two thumbs up, pumping his arms in the air. "I'm sound as a pound," he shouted. <br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sbmTKtY4K2s/Tx9k7-G-JSI/AAAAAAAAAd4/zIh1GDZtzXI/s1600/imagesCAY72KC2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" gda="true" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sbmTKtY4K2s/Tx9k7-G-JSI/AAAAAAAAAd4/zIh1GDZtzXI/s320/imagesCAY72KC2.jpg" width="226" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://inmagine.com/">inmagine.com</a></td></tr></tbody></table>Unfortunately, his mother didn't know that. <br /><br />Barbara had watched the debacle from a distance, through binoculars—she didn't think Gareth would run, but she didn't want to miss it if he did. <br /><br />To her horror, the boy in the black T-shirt flopping down the hillside looked a lot like her son. "I had a feeling it was him—call it mother's instinct." <br /><br />Mortified, she ran the uphill mile from her home to the racecourse in a matter of minutes. <br /><br />The medics assured her that Gareth was all right, and Craig Carter soon joined him in the ambulance, having injured both his ankles. <br /><br />Gloucester hospital had refused to accept cheese-rolling casualties—on the grounds that their wounds were self-inflicted—so the two teens were carted off to Cheltenham instead. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-3955536798213455845?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-33917661126802878432012-01-25T02:01:00.001Z2012-01-25T02:01:35.635ZThere wasn't any danger of lightning this time round, though. <br /><br />A drought had baked the slope rock hard beneath the deceptively green carpet covering the hill. <br /><br />Ideally, Gareth would have spent the afternoon limbering up like all the other cheese chasers did—by downing pints in the pub. <br /><br />But he had to work that afternoon, so he went straight from his job to the hilltop. <br /><br />A local TV reporter was interviewing runners at the starting line. <br /><br />One of Gareth's friends, Craig Carter, had finished fourth the previous year. "I think I'm gonna win it this year," he told the camera, brimming with confidence. <br /><br />Gareth, on the other hand, looked awkward, his wide-set eyes ducking and diving as the reporter asked him why he was taking part. <br /><br />"Summink to do," he shrugged, flashing his braces. "It's a good laugh, runnin' down there." <br /><br />"How are you going to avoid hurting yourself?" <br /><br />"I dunno—I'm not." <br /><br />Another grin: the recklessness of youth. <br /><br />Whereas old pros leaned back as they ran, Gareth bolted headlong down the incline, leading the pack at the start. <em>Hey! I'm still standin' up!</em> he thought. <em>I'll be alright here—I'm</em> miles <em>ahead!</em> <br /><br />But suddenly the hill flattened out, and he slipped, pitching him into a somersault that banged his head. <br /><br />Hurtling downhill, he did half a dozen side rolls, his right foot hitting the slope with every turn until his legs flopped beneath him like a messy pretzel. <br /><br />After a final back flip, he landed at the bottom, only yards from the finish line. <br /><br />Determined to win, he got on all fours and started crawling, but his right leg gave way. <br /><br /><em>My shoe's come off—I'll just keep goin'. </em><br /><br />He tried to get up again—so close!—but then he collapsed. He didn't feel any pain; it was just as if his leg wasn't there. <br /><br />"Then I could tell it was a bit more—a bit more than that," he laughs. "So I stayed there and thought I'd better not try to crawl any further." <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MKU8VIvNvM0/Tx9iZmOqhJI/AAAAAAAAAdo/8ozwIc6TJV0/s1600/imagesCAM3Q08O.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" gda="true" height="268" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MKU8VIvNvM0/Tx9iZmOqhJI/AAAAAAAAAdo/8ozwIc6TJV0/s320/imagesCAM3Q08O.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-3391766112680287843?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-30280627001931048292012-01-25T01:29:00.000Z2012-01-25T01:29:06.876ZAs crippling mishaps go, it would be hard to top Gareth Smedley's. <br /><br />When he was seven, his family went to watch the race on a hot Bank Holiday Monday in 1982. <br /><br />Rather than jostle with the crowds, they decided to watch from a field further down the slope. <br /><br />Just as the Cheese Roll began, though, a storm broke. The Smedleys and another family ran for cover under a tree. <br /><br />In hindsight, it was a stupid thing to do—but as his dad said, "It always happens to someone else, doesn't it?" <br /><br />There was no bang or flash when the lightning hit. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4vFKNwbPHv4/Tx9avWpJsdI/AAAAAAAAAdI/d0GiKvfiBmg/s1600/450px-Lightning_strike_jan_2007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" gda="true" height="266" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4vFKNwbPHv4/Tx9avWpJsdI/AAAAAAAAAdI/d0GiKvfiBmg/s400/450px-Lightning_strike_jan_2007.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Gareth's mother, Barbara, woke to find herself lying in the wet field, dazed and unable to move. <em>A bomb's exploded!</em> she thought. <br /><br />But then she looked up and saw the races continuing as normal. That's when she realised: both families had been blown several feet from the tree, forming a ring of bodies around the trunk. <br /><br />None of them could get up—the electricity had contracted their muscles so violently their limbs were useless. Her husband had a singed spot on his leg, and little Gareth had a hole burnt in his T-shirt where he had been leaning against the tree. <br /><br />Someone alerted the medics, and they were rushed off in an ambulance. All eight of them were released later that day, but it was a full week before they fully recovered. <br /><br />Barbara has been wary of Cooper's Hill ever since. "I felt that we were jinxed from the cheese rolling." <br /><br />If only Gareth would have listened. <br /><br />Every year he and his friends would watch the race, and every year he would tell his mother he was going to run in it. Somehow, though, his youthful bravado had never materialised into action. <br /><br />So when he told her at the age of 17 that he was going to do it, Barbara didn't believe him. Little did she know that he had secretly taken a test run the night before and made it to the bottom without a scratch. <br /><br />"I was gonna win all three cheeses, wasn't I?" he recalls, grinning. <br /><br />Despite his confidence, the timing of his debut didn't bode well—it happened to be the 10th anniversary of the Smedleys' first ill-fated experience on Cooper's Hill. <br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-3028062700193104829?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-18208451925125316082012-01-23T02:45:00.000Z2012-01-24T02:45:24.143Z<div>Dover's critics pointed out that the human body doesn't actually absorb liquid metal when it is swallowed.<br /><br />One told of a patient who downed <em>16 pounds</em> of mercury and recovered all but one and a half ounces of it… from his faeces:<br /><br />"It is doubtless the case of many, who thinking the remedy is working miracles in the blood, might find it in their breeches," he said, adding: <br /><br />"I have heard a pleasant story of a mercurial lady, who in Dancing at a Public Assembly, happened to let go some particles of the quicksilver she had taken in the morning; which, shining on the floor in the midst of so great an illumination like so many brilliants, there were several stooping down to take them up; but finding themselves deceived, it affected matter for much laughter among the gentlemen, and blushing amongst the ladies, especially she that was most concerned; for the cry went through the room, that some lady had scattered her diamonds."<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PKmzWCzqIs0/Tx4bJP23olI/AAAAAAAAAc4/A7ljMKBGlso/s1600/images.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" nfa="true" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PKmzWCzqIs0/Tx4bJP23olI/AAAAAAAAAc4/A7ljMKBGlso/s320/images.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Ridiculed by his peers—and possibly suffering an acute midlife crisis—Dover risked everything he had in his late forties to become a privateer: a legalised pirate on a mission to steal from the old enemy, Spain.<br /><br />In 1708, Dover and his colleagues backed an expedition to the South Seas--the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America. Not only did the doctor invest in the adventure, he also helped lead it, even though he had no nautical training.<br /><br />With "Captain" Dover leading the charge, the English sacked Ecuador's main port, Guayaquil. Between their looting and pillaging, the buccaneers slept in the local churches, disregarding the stench of the scores of plague victims recently buried beneath the floorboards.<br /><br />Wisely, Dover stopped his men from frisking the corpses for valuables.<br /><br />Even so, more than half the crew—180 men—fell ill in a catastrophic outbreak that threatened the expedition. Somehow, though, Dover's unconventional doctoring saved the venture: only eight men died.<br /><br />One survivor was a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk.<br /><br />Earlier that year, the expedition had stopped at a seemingly deserted island hundreds of miles off the coast for some much needed R&amp;R before attacking the mainland.<br /><br />Dover had volunteered to reconnoitre the island, and to his amazement, he found "a man clothed in goat skins, who seemed wilder than the original owners of his apparel".<br /><br />Selkirk had been marooned on the island for nearly four and a half years after quarrelling with the captain of another ship (which ship later sank off Peru, killing all but a few survivors who were then locked up by the Spanish in Lima).<br /><br />Dover's navigator happened to know Selkirk and vouched for his skills. With the Scotsman on board, the privateers raided ports and captured galleons from Ecuador to California, reaping a profit of £170,000—or nearly £12 million today.<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-1820845192512531608?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-21148798058574594052012-01-22T04:07:00.000Z2012-01-23T04:07:47.223Z<div>Before recounting my own sorry shin kicking experience, I can't resist a detour into Campden's little-known literary connections.<br /><br />The Cotswolds are mostly associated with Aga sagas and bonkbusters today, but Campden's writerly pedigree goes back much further, encompassing classic works of English literature and Nobel-calibre authors.<br /><br />Bizarrely, most guidebooks (and the tourist office) fail to capitalise on these artistic connections.<br /><br />If they mention them at all, they gloss over Campden's links to <em>The Canterbury Tales</em> (especially the X-rated film adaptation)… or the fact that Robert Dover's grandson rescued the real-life Robinson Crusoe… or that a Campden play put the Bs into the BBC… or that the area inspired TS Eliot to write a masterpiece of the 20th century (and indulge in a rare moment of passion)… or that Graham Greene kick-started his career in Campden (while lusting after American girls at a local pub)… or that Salman Rushdie supposedly took refuge in town, hiding out from the Ayatollah.<br /><br />In the absence of any alternative, I offer my own literary ramble, entitled "Murderers, Castaways and Copulating Flies"…<br /><br />Had it not been for the grandson of the Cotswold Olimpicks' founder, for instance, <em>Robinson Crusoe </em>may never have been written.<br /><br />Thomas Dover was a doctor-turned-buccaneer who makes modern adventurers—let alone celebrities—seem stupefyingly dull by comparison.<br /><br />Born around 1660 and based in Bristol, he became known as "The Quicksilver Doctor" after his favourite remedy.<br /><br />Mercury had been used as a medicine for centuries, and many physicians used to prescribe powders made from mercury salts.<br /><br />But "The Quicksilver Doctor" scandalised his peers by dishing out crude mercury, telling patients to <em>drink</em> massive amounts of it straight up, claiming that the liquid metal would cure everything from asthma to elephantiasis.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lBrS9D1TYJ0/Txzc2pLSDuI/AAAAAAAAAco/8VG_VmlSltU/s1600/imagesCA51BFMT.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" nfa="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lBrS9D1TYJ0/Txzc2pLSDuI/AAAAAAAAAco/8VG_VmlSltU/s400/imagesCA51BFMT.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />In cases of appendicitis, for instance, he prescribed downing a pound and a half of the slippery stuff.<br /><br />Thanks partly to him, mercury was as common in British households as tobacco—and probably just as healthy. Even with the relatively limited medical knowledge of the day, many doctors suspected that mercury could be toxic, arguing that Dover's cure-all benefited only nurses and gravediggers.<br /><br />In one notorious case, Dover used mercury to treat the top tragic actor of his day, Barton Booth. The doctor promised that it would not only prevent him from suffering a relapse of fever, "but would also effectually cure him of all his complaints".<br /><br />Sure enough, Booth died a week later. A post-mortem found his intestines and rectum blackened and lined with mercury.<br /><br />Another of Dover's patients died after treatment for syphilis.<br /><br />"At first he improved but later the patient had a violent dysentery which made an end to all his complaints, and his life also: To the great disappointment of all parties," one wit reported.</div><p><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-2114879805857459405?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-91903014336069769262012-01-18T02:53:00.000Z2012-01-22T22:55:28.656Z<div align="left">"They took it serious, y'see. Tough as hell—all of 'em were, in those days," an Old Campdonian tells me.<br /><br />Shin kicking had all but disappeared by the time Fred Coldicott was born in 1910, but he remembers playing just for fun as a boy: one of the kids in his gang, Wilfred "Guthram" Plested, was the nephew of the backswords champ who lost an eye and killed a man in the fatal bout held during the last years of Dover's Games.<br /><br />In their flat caps, pullovers, long shorts and socks, the kids would play games like leapfrog, noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe)… and shin kicking.<br /><br />"Very often, you'd get one who'd cry—the weak-hearted ones. I don't think I ever come under that category," laughs Fred, whose nickname was Tiger.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8gI189j5Q34/TxeFqq2L_FI/AAAAAAAAAbI/qIjoj8l0axw/s1600/little+rascals+boxing+and+shin+kicking.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="252" nfa="true" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8gI189j5Q34/TxeFqq2L_FI/AAAAAAAAAbI/qIjoj8l0axw/s320/little+rascals+boxing+and+shin+kicking.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />"We were some ignorant little b's in those days. We were little brutes. It was nothing to have a good stand-up fight. You never see that nowadays, do ya? You'd run home with a bloody nose to your father, and he'd say, 'Serves ya damn right, go back and give 'im another go, and give <em>'im</em> a nose bleed!' I got no sympathy from dad. It was a funny old world."<br /><br />Outsiders came away with much the same impression.<br /><br />"There is no imbecility nor barbarity that human beings will not practise and even exalt, so long as it be sanctified by custom," Massingham wrote of shin kicking on Dover's Hill.<br /><br />"Only a traditionalist or a good old Englander could regret the blessed silence and solitude that have come in the wake of the turbulent ways of men."</div><div align="center"><br /><strong>* * *</strong> </div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-9190301433606976926?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-21320065711142101762012-01-16T02:00:00.000Z2012-01-17T02:09:31.630Z<div>Back in the Cotswolds, shin kicking—and backswording—continued long after Dover's Games came to an end.<br /><br />One famous venue was Cooper's Hill Wake: when locals weren't chasing cheeses, they were kicking shins.<br /><br />As one critic recalled: "The wrestling was not a pleasant spectacle, despite its ardent admirers and votaries… I have seen stalwart fellows, with sinew and tendon of iron, struggle fiercely, not to say ferociously for the mastery. It was surprising how human limbs could be strained and kicked without the sinews cracking and the bones breaking."<br /><br />One old gamester and past champion of Cooper's Hill blamed his crippled leg on "The follies o' my youth. If I had my days to go over agen, I'd never stond up to ha' my legs kicked to pieces. I ha' learned this, thot our blessed Meeker nivver made our precious limbs to be kicked at vor other volks' amusement."<br /><br />Another old-timer with a thick West Country accent described similar injuries.<br /><br />"How thoy did maul one another. All of a zudden I yurd summut snop loike a stick. One on um fell down like a hos, ond thur waur a cry thot his leg waur bro-ock, ond a vot lot they cared about it".<br /><br />His own father had given up backsword fighting and become a Christian after a particularly vicious beating.<br /><br />"All those old wakes, develrus wonderments, ond Sayton's abominations be all done away wi," he concluded, "and in the main we ha to thank the Methodies for't."<br /><br />The hapless hero of <em><a href="http://www.shinkicking.com/2011/12/part-12-ye-olde-wet-t-shirt-contest.html" target="_blank">The Spiritual Quixote</a></em> would have been pleased.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G29EtfkpM_A/TtlZ2Vc19BI/AAAAAAAAAQU/rLxTED8Q1TA/s1600/Purring+cartoon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="256" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G29EtfkpM_A/TtlZ2Vc19BI/AAAAAAAAAQU/rLxTED8Q1TA/s400/Purring+cartoon.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shin Kicking T-shirt design by <a href="http://www.cafepress.com/just4yucks/2189945" target="_blank">Button Lore</a></td></tr></tbody></table>Shin kicking and backswording finally died out by the early 1900s.<br /><br />Travel writer H.J. Massingham collected some of the stories about the bad old days for his book, <em>Wold Without End</em>, in 1931.<br /><br />Locals told him about an old stonebreaker in the Vale of Evesham whose shins looked like corrugated iron from his wounds back when "Broddy fowt Kyanden" (Broadway fought Campden) and how the captain of the Campden team would "thrape" the soft parts of his shins with a coal hammer every night at The Eight Bells pub; other men used wooden planks to deaden the nerves in their legs or vinegar as an astringent to keep the skin from splitting.</div><p><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-2132006571114210176?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-48954722999336695592012-01-15T01:30:00.000Z2012-01-16T02:24:34.253Z<div>Rather than Australia, he might have been more at home in America.<br /><br />The most gruesome account of shin kicking comes from the US, where Welsh coalminers introduced "purring" to Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><em>The New York Sunday Mercury</em> described a "purr" outside Philadelphia between two fighters known as Grabby and McTevish in 1883.<br /><br />(And if you're at all squeamish, I suggest you look away now…):<br /><br />"At two o'clock the men appeared, wearing Lancashire shoes toed with copper, having submitted their feet for inspection to show that there were no protruding nails. Grabby advanced cautiously and…took hold with apparent unwillingness, and then began the most brutal and savage contest that two men could engage in.<br /><br />For fully five minutes they sparred with their feet in a manner that was simply wonderful. Blows were countered and returned with the same skill and rapidity as shown by men fighting with their fists. Not once in that time did either man more than touch his opponent's skin.<br /><br />Then McTevish, taking a firmer hold on his opponent's collar, lifted his left foot and, after keeping it poised for a moment, made a straight toe kick for his opponent's right knee. <br /><br />Grabby deftly avoided the blow by spraddling his legs far apart, and with almost inconceivable quickness brought his left foot around and caught McTevish on the outside of the right calf. <br /><br />The flesh was laid open almost to the bone, and the blood spurted out in streams.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TmxnfSAraOQ/TtlWu1hJE6I/AAAAAAAAAQE/kfBULLA0Log/s1600/McWilliams-Tavish.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="343" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TmxnfSAraOQ/TtlWu1hJE6I/AAAAAAAAAQE/kfBULLA0Log/s400/McWilliams-Tavish.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />McTevish never uttered a word. At the same instant that his own leg was cut he gave Grabby what is known as the sole scrape. Beginning at the instep and ending just below the knee pan, Grabby's left shin was scraped almost clear of skin.<br /><br />Both men were evidently in pain, and angry. They kicked and countered a dozen times again without doing any damage. Then Grabby, by some mishap, lost his hold… In attempting to grasp it again he lifted his eyes for a moment, and before he could recover himself the calves of both of his legs were laid open by a double-foot kick.<br /><br />In return for this he succeeded in delivering a terrific kick on McTevish's knee, causing him to drop to the ground like a log, pulling the other kicker on top of him.<br /><br />The seconds rushed forward and separated the men and took them to their corners to bind up their wounds. The first go or round occupied sixteen minutes.<br /><br />When the call of purr came again the purrers hobbled to the centre and took another hold. They were, indeed, a pitiable looking affair. McTevish's legs, although bound up in plaster, were bleeding freely, and the exposed places looked like beefsteak.<br /><br />His opponent's shins had both been scraped clean of the flesh, and the blood was oozing out from between the strips of plaster…"</div><p><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-4895472299933669559?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-81641777540175401792012-01-13T01:00:00.000Z2012-01-14T02:41:30.163Z<div>Even so, shin kicking lived on in gory incarnations throughout the West Country <em>and</em> the rest of the country—as well as America.<br /><br />Hobnailed boots and metal toecaps weren't enough for some fighting Welshmen; they wore thick shoes with nails sticking out the sides.<br /><br />Shin kicking was so popular it made it into one of the first Welsh dictionaries in 1793 as 'crimmogiaw' ('crimog' meaning 'shin').<br /><br />Eventually, though, the Welsh adopted the incongruously gentle term used by their coalmining counterparts in the northwest of England: "purring" (possibly related to "pare" in English or the Scots Gaelic <em>piorr</em>, meaning "to scrape or stab").<br /><br />In Lancashire, the locals enjoyed clog dancing—a forerunner of American tap-dancing—as well as clog fighting. Only they didn't use the quaint, carved <em>klompen</em> worn by the Dutch; their shoes and boots had horseshoe-like irons hammered to their wooden soles to make them hardwearing.<br /><br />The leather uppers were fastened with brass nails, and metal toecaps were often added for dancing and fighting.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hxcYOFKzHh8/TtlVsPDoBqI/AAAAAAAAAP0/53xu1b3jNOU/s1600/lancashire+clogs.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="251" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hxcYOFKzHh8/TtlVsPDoBqI/AAAAAAAAAP0/53xu1b3jNOU/s320/lancashire+clogs.bmp" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />So "clog toe pie" wasn't a regional delicacy, and "a leather 'n' timber kiss" wasn't a sign of affection; they both meant that you were about to receive a good kicking.<br /><br />What's more, miners would grapple against each other stark naked, wearing only their clunky, metal-trimmed clogs.<br /><br />This may have been in imitation of the Greeks, or it simply may have seemed like a good idea at the time.<br /><br />Whatever the reason, naked shin kicking was common throughout Greater Manchester, when "hot and rebellious liquors were indulged in to excess, and the Sabbath was desecrated and made hideous by drunken orgies".<br /><br />Miners from Oldham, Bacup and Ashton would pit themselves against quarrymen from Whitworth.<br /><br />The Oldham "rough heads" were renowned for being as slippery as "snigs," or eels, but their winning streak ended after they were caught cheating by rubbing soap all over their bodies.<br /><br />Another report tells of a clog fight near Manchester in 1843 between two young men named Ashworth and Clegg—"(both in a state of nudity with the exception of each having on a pair of strong boots)".<br /><br />They kicked each other for 45 minutes… all for one pound. Both wound up severely injured.<br /><br />In another fight, Ashworth went on to kill another opponent and emigrate Down Under (aptly enough)—though it's unclear whether this was his choice or Her Majesty's Pleasure.</div><p><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-8164177754017540179?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-77821821848697171602012-01-05T01:00:00.000Z2012-01-06T00:25:59.759Z<div>What with all the kicking, injuries were inevitable.<br /><br />"After the wrestling match is over… the wrestlers ought to have room for themselves… to dress one another's legs," he recommended.<br /><br />But some wounds were beyond doctoring. In an accompanying poem, he recalled seeing a particularly vicious bout as a boy: "One man got kick'd so in four rounds,/That in very few days died of his wounds."<br /><br />In the West Country, the only place that frowned on shin kicking was Cornwall, home of what may be England's oldest wrestling style.<br /><br />Originally, Cornish combatants were allowed to use their feet and legs, but only to trip their opponents or hit them with their heels and insteps.<br /><br />Frontal toe-to-tibia attacks were forbidden, not least because wrestlers usually fought barelegged from the knees down.<br /><br />Trust their archrivals from the next county over to twist the rules to their advantage.<br /><br />By the early 1800s, wrestlers in Devon had made two vicious innovations: not only did they trip their opponents, they also whacked them in the shins.<br /><br />What's more, the devious Devonians took to wearing heavy shoes and hobnail boots—sometimes even baking the soles to make them extra hard.<br /><br />"By the abuse of this latitude of rules (for it cannot be otherwise regarded than as an abuse) the shoes had been allowed to develop into a hideous weapon armed with a thick sharp-edged sole," a Victorian wrestling expert wrote.<br /><br />In their defence, Devon's bruisers claimed that kicking had a long pedigree in wrestling: the Greeks had allowed it in their ancient Olympics; unlike Devon's wrestlers, though, the Greeks had fought in the nude.<br /><br />If Cornish wrestling was brutal, the Devon style could be lethal.<br /><br />In 1840, a Devon wrestler threw his rival "with so much violence to the ground, that his neck was dislocated and his back dreadfully injured, so that his life for some time despaired of, and he now lies in a precarious state," a newspaper reported.<br /><br />On another occasion, a 22-year-old died from his wounds.<br /><br /> <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7lC26ggBKzE/TtlQeOKyEoI/AAAAAAAAAPk/lq5_GbqiZ_s/s1600/Women+fighting+in+Devonshire+c1898.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7lC26ggBKzE/TtlQeOKyEoI/AAAAAAAAAPk/lq5_GbqiZ_s/s320/Women+fighting+in+Devonshire+c1898.jpg" width="315" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Women wrestling in Devonshire, circa 1898</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Not surprisingly, Cornish wrestlers were somewhat… <em>reluctant</em> to fight the Devonians.<br /><br />But they couldn't walk away from a challenge—especially not from those scoundrels across the River Tamar.<br /><br />One of the earliest known showdowns between the two styles took place in 1826 in Devonport, on the county line.<br /><br />Devon champ Abraham Cann fought Cornwall's James Polkinghorne, a pub landlord.<br /><br />Whereas the barefoot Cornishman reputedly had a neck like a bull, Cann's boots were soaked in bull's blood.<br /><br />The match ended in a draw, but Cornwall won out in the long run: although Cornish wrestling has survived to this day, its Devonian pretender eventually died out. </div><p><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-7782182184869717160?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-8450066913467426822012-01-05T00:39:00.000Z2012-01-06T00:03:39.372Z<div align="left">As outrageous as those lyrics seem now, the reality wasn't so black and white in Foster's day.<br /><br />The famous African American abolitionist (and former slave), Frederick Douglass, cited songs like "Uncle Ned" and "My Old Kentucky Home" as "allies" in the fight against slavery: "They awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root and flourish."<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CqxXjs0HbZ8/TwY5pc1qe5I/AAAAAAAAAas/x_kbfGRmwjE/s1600/Darkie+by+Dante+Gabriel+Rossetti.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="353" rea="true" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CqxXjs0HbZ8/TwY5pc1qe5I/AAAAAAAAAas/x_kbfGRmwjE/s400/Darkie+by+Dante+Gabriel+Rossetti.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />In Britain, "Uncle Ned" was a standard in school songbooks well into the 20th century. <br /><br />One Padstonian told me that the Darkie Day songs were taught at the local primary school in the Seventies, and possibly even as late as the Eighties, including a tune called "Little Nigger."<br /><br />Seeing that I wasn't familiar with the song, he recited the words, penned by an anonymous author:<br /><br />I 'ad a little nigger<br />He wouldn't grow no bigger<br />So I put 'im in the wilebeest show.<br /><br /><em>What?</em> Surely I'd misheard him. "Wilebeest? Like 'wild beast'?"<br /><br />"Yeah," he shrugged. "Of course, there's all different verses. We don't sing the whole song. 'Cause ya know we 'ad problems. So wherever we've got the word 'nigger' we now change it to 'mummer'." He grinned. "So then we're politically correct."<br /><br />"So what do you make of that?"<br /><br />"Welllll… when you're drunk, who can tell what you're singing?" </div><div align="center"><br /><strong>* * *</strong><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-845006691346742682?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-21809590146555283162012-01-01T02:30:00.000Z2012-01-01T02:30:00.457ZIn the interim, though, good old sports like shin kicking and backswording also faced growing opposition. <br /><br />A small print tucked away in Campden's town hall commemorates a famous backsword match held at Dover's Games, possibly the same year they were shut down. <br /><br />The local champion, Ebenezer "Nezzy" Plested, and a man called Spiers are locked in combat, wearing breeches and blousy shirts, with one hand bound to their thighs. <br /><br />The bout lasted a long time—maybe up to an hour and a half. In the end, Plested won the match but lost an eye, while Spiers was "incapacitated for further work" and died two weeks later. <br /><br />Fatal encounters like that triggered calls to ban the sports. <br /><br />Thomas Hughes defended backswording but drew the line at shin kicking: "I suppose there are more unsettled points in wrestling, or it is harder to see whether the men are playing fair," he wrote after watching a bout in his home village in 1857. <br /><br />"Besides, the kicking, which is allowed at elbow and collar wrestling, makes it look brutal very often." <br /><br />Nevertheless, shin kicking was a crowd-puller. <br /><br />In the wrestling style that Hughes refers to, competitors gripped their opponents' jackets by the collar and elbow while kicking and throwing each other. Collar and Elbow wrestling--still the national style in Ireland--was even exported to America. <br /><br />As a teenager, George Washington had been a champion Collar and Elbow wrestler (and at least two other presidents followed his example). <br /><br />During the War of Independence, Washington supposedly took time out to wrestle seven of his soldiers, throwing them one after the other; not bad for a man of 47. <br /><br />It's unclear whether America's Founding Father stooped to shin kicking, but Collar and Elbow wrestling did allow tibial attacks in Britain. <br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-r53FiykUi4s/TtlNM37ZF0I/AAAAAAAAAPU/xbZhti43vaQ/s1600/george_washington_zombiehunter.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="236" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-r53FiykUi4s/TtlNM37ZF0I/AAAAAAAAAPU/xbZhti43vaQ/s400/george_washington_zombiehunter.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">George Washington: Shin Kicker and... Zombie Hunter</td></tr></tbody></table><br />While Hughes frowned on kicking in the West Country, on the east coast of England, "Collars and Elbow men" would batter each other in a now-extinct style known as Norfolk wrestling. <br /><br />(Incidentally, Norfolk was the birthplace of Cotswold Olimpicks founder Robert Dover.) <br /><br />A veteran gamester wrote a pamphlet on "The Whole Art of Norfolk Wrestling" in the 1830s. <br /><br />In it, Charles Layton, nicknamed "The Celebrated Game Chicken" (roosters attack with their claws in cockfights), described the wrestlers' footwear as long socks and genie-style shoes with curled-up toes to help them hook each other's ankles. <br /><br />Officials would check combatants' legs and feet beforehand to prevent cheats from using shin pads or shoes with nails in them. <br /><br />"It requires a good temper and a great deal of caution" to avoid "getting desperately kicked," Layton wrote. "Kick sharp or faint, kick high, kick low, to kick certain is the main thing." <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-2180959014655528316?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-2044090211747349452012-01-01T02:00:00.000Z2012-01-01T02:00:07.034Z<div>In hindsight, it's clear that all minstrelsy played on and perpetuated outdated and even repugnant stereotypes about blacks.<br /><br />As in the early days of the genre, though, I think that Darkie Day in Padstow was literally a way of adding some colour to people's plain-vanilla lives.<br /><br />The burnt cork on their faces acted as a mask that freed them from their daily routine, allowing them to sing, dance and cavort during the holidays without any malice intended toward blacks.<br /><br />And before rushing to judge Darkie Day or indeed blackface performers of the past, it's worth keeping in mind that future generations may look back on our era and view white stars ranging from Elvis and the Beatles to "blue-eyed soul" singers, white rappers and any number of boy bands as little more than minstrels without the makeup: singers and songwriters who have copied black American slang, diction, dress and singing styles to produce the most commercial music of our time.<br /><br />Eminem boasted as much in his #1 single, "Without Me" (from <em>The Eminem Show</em>, 2002), bragging that he and Elvis had enriched themselves by exploiting black music.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0AMr6fdYSkI/Tv-RAey1lDI/AAAAAAAAAag/p7YrKEJ1eh4/s1600/Eminem+Rap+Boy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" rea="true" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0AMr6fdYSkI/Tv-RAey1lDI/AAAAAAAAAag/p7YrKEJ1eh4/s400/Eminem+Rap+Boy.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">But if a black man also profits from the exploitation, that's ok, right?<br />Right?</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Although modern pop may not mock blacks in the same way as the old minstrel shows, the deeper issue of exploitation remains.<br /><br />In its own unique way, Darkie Day represents a variety of traditions come full circle: Old World customs were exported to the New World and mixed with plantation-style music to create blackface minstrelsy, which was then exported to Britain at the same time as blacks developed white-face counterparts in the British West Indies.<br /><br />A similar phenomenon occurred in South Africa, where to this day "Coloureds" imitate old-time American minstrel performers during their annual New Year's celebrations in Cape Town.<br /><br />The mixed-race revellers, many wearing black-and-white minstrel makeup, have stubbornly resisted attempts to rebrand their hootenanny as the Cape Minstrels Carnival. Instead, they call it by its old-fashioned name—the Coon Carnival.<br /><br />Likewise, Darkie Day clings to its controversial roots. The soundtrack for the day kicks off with the lyrics "Oh, I just come out before you / To sing you a Darkie song", then samples snippets of half a dozen ditties, such as "Polly Wolly Doodle".<br /><br />One of the most contentious verses comes from an international hit by Stephen Foster, "Uncle Ned":<br /><br />On a cold and frosty morning my Uncle Neddy died,<br />And he died many years ago.<br />He had no woolly on the toppy of his head<br />In the place where the woolly ought to go.<br />Up with the shovel and a ee-aye-oh<br />And down with the shovel and the hoe.<br />There's no more work for the poor old man<br />He's gone where the good niggerrrs go, aye oh<br />He's gone where the good niggerrrs go. <br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><object width="320" height="266" class="BLOGGER-youtube-video" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" data-thumbnail-src="http://3.gvt0.com/vi/jvZdP55FSQs/0.jpg"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/jvZdP55FSQs&fs=1&source=uds" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><embed width="320" height="266" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/jvZdP55FSQs&fs=1&source=uds" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></object></div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-204409021174734945?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-18748031541773681432011-12-31T03:00:00.000Z2011-12-31T20:29:34.653Z<div>After Jim Crow's transatlantic success, minstrelsy quickly became commercialised.<br /><br />Stephen Foster made his name writing minstrel songs and became the first composer to receive royalties for hits like "Oh! Susanna" and "Camptown Races".<br /><br />One-man blackface performances turned into blockbuster Minstrel Shows, arguably the first bona fide "show business"—and a major influence on American vaudeville and British music hall traditions.<br /><br />Like the manufactured pop bands of today, managers and agents put together troupes of performers to tour internationally, rebranding them as "Minstrels" to make them more respectable (akin to the highbrow European acts that were touring the States at the time, such as The German Minstrels).<br /><br />The Virginia Minstrels, formed in 1843, advertised their shows as "concerts" and promised that they would be "entirely exempt from the vulgarities and other objectionable features, which have hitherto characterized negro extravaganzas".<br /><br />Whereas the original minstrels hoofed and hollered on the same stages as blacks in mixed ghettoes, their imitators headlined at uptown theatres where blacks were barred. America's showbiz minstrels tended to reinforce black stereotypes by depicting them as stupid, violent and oversexed.<br /><br />"Nigger minstrel" troupes also made the rounds in Britain, overlapping in some areas with homegrown customs like mumming: a group called The Gowongo Minstrels performed in Padstow just after Boxing Day in 1899, and the first known photo of Padstow's Darkies dates from around the same time.<br /><br />Nine men and boys pose in front of a stone cottage with accordions, tambourines and drums, dressed like dandified Negroes, sporting tall top hats, frilly collars, oversized buttons and crazy-colour formalwear—and, of course, tar-black faces. At least one man in the picture is a forebear of a current Darkie.<br /><br />Professional minstrel shows had all but died out in America by the time Al Jolson bawled for his "Mammy" in the 1930 film of the same name (which also featured the song "Yes, We Have No Bananas").<br /><br />In Britain, however, minstrels remained incredibly popular right up until only a few decades ago.<br /><br />Unbelievably, <em>The Black and White Minstrel Show</em> ran on TV for more than two decades. In its prime, the variety show won the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux and pulled in 16 to 18 million viewers—roughly one out of every four Britons.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-X6yaqqIjdds/Tv9wZfVm6wI/AAAAAAAAAaI/Ne3MUYdn7hA/s1600/Black+and+White+Minstrel+show.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" rea="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-X6yaqqIjdds/Tv9wZfVm6wI/AAAAAAAAAaI/Ne3MUYdn7hA/s320/Black+and+White+Minstrel+show.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />In 1969, the stage version of the show at London's Victoria Palace Theatre broke box office records. To put that into perspective, that same year in the West End, the hippie musical Hair was still shocking audiences with its famous nude scene and songs about peace, love and racial harmony.<br /><br /><em>The Black and White Minstrel Show</em> didn't cakewalk off the air until 1978, and it had millions of fans right to the bitter end.<br /><br />Even now, a quick search on the Web pulls up all kinds of nostalgic recollections about the programme and protestations that it wasn't really racist at all, and many performers still have the show on their CVs.<br /><br />For instance, though he'd probably rather forget it now, Lenny Henry—St. Lenny of Red Nose, CBE—toured with the Black and White Minstrels during the Seventies. In between jokes, he would wipe the sweat from his face and say it tasted like chocolate.<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-1874803154177368143?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-62680245997565555142011-12-31T02:00:00.000Z2011-12-31T20:27:36.155Z<div>In fact, just as England's first Olimpicks and other festivals were being shut down, a replacement of sorts was beginning barely 60 miles away, in the Shropshire village of Much Wenlock.<br /><br />These new games, started in 1850, were similar in spirit to Dover's early competition and went on to inspire the Frenchman who founded the modern Olympics.<br /><br />The Wenlock Olympian Games included ancient contests like racing and modern events such as football.<br /><br />Their founder, Dr. William Penny Brookes, had read about Dover's Olimpicks in one of his favourite books, which he gave as a prize at the Wenlock event.<br /> <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I15iRInBNU8/TtlJ9oeDrnI/AAAAAAAAAPA/L2rU0_7L3LY/s1600/Penney+Brookes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" dda="true" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I15iRInBNU8/TtlJ9oeDrnI/AAAAAAAAAPA/L2rU0_7L3LY/s1600/Penney+Brookes.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dr. William Penny Brookes</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Just as Dover had defended his "harmelesse honest sports" against the Puritans 200 years earlier, Penny Brookes hailed the "harmless recreation" of "Merrie England" and talked of the need to train "a noble, manly race" to build the Empire and prevent the "physical degeneracy" seen in France and America. <br />However, Penny Brookes had his own puritanical leanings.<br /><br />As an archetypal Victorian reformer, he believed in temperance.<br /><br />What's more, it wasn't enough that the games were fun; they had to serve a Higher Moral Purpose.<br /><br />"As Christians we should, on moral grounds, endeavour to direct the amusement of the working classes—as patriots we should recognise and promote them."<br /><br />Despite some powerful opponents, the doctor's crusade quickly grew from its village roots to become the National Olympian Association.<br /><br />Penny Brookes was working on the most ambitious phase—an international event in Athens—when he came across a young Frenchman who had the same goal, as well as the connections to make it happen.<br /><br />Baron Pierre de Coubertin was that rarest of things: a Frenchman who admired Britain.<br /><br />The future founder of the Olympics had read <em>Tom Brown's Schooldays</em> and come to believe in its ethos of "muscular Christianity".<br /><br />"Since ancient Greece has passed away, the Anglo-Saxon race is the only one that fully appreciates the moral influence of physical culture," he wrote.<br /><br />The 27-year-old made a pilgrimage to Much Wenlock in 1890.<br /><br />Unfortunately, Penny Brookes died four months before De Coubertin staged the first modern Olympics in 1896.<br /><br />However, he is still regarded as "the father of the English Olympics", and Wenlock continues to host its games every July.<br /><br />Meanwhile, Robert Dover's contribution was all but forgotten. Britain's oldest Olimpicks were killed off in 1852 after Rev. Bourne succeeded in enclosing Dover's Hill.<br /><br />The organisers stayed defiant to the end.<br /><br />As the vicar won his legal victory in Parliament, they looked to the future: "The celebrated and renowned Olimpic (sic) Games… are esteemed by all brave, true and free-spirited Britons," their posters declared. "The good old times will be revived."</div><div align="center"><br /><strong>* * *</strong><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-6268024599756555514?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-76104340487579367702011-12-30T02:30:00.000Z2011-12-30T16:42:01.589Z<div>For opponents like Rev. Bourne, the best way to stop Dover's Games was to kick them off their turf.<br /><br />Back in their founder's day, the hilltop had covered 500 acres of open land.<br /><br />But even then, enclosure had been a threat.<br /><br />Vast tracts of common land were parcelled up and sold, ostensibly to farm them more efficiently and produce more food for the country's growing population.<br /><br />The Campden part of Dover's Hill had been enclosed in 1799, so the Olimpicks had moved to the other side, in the parish of Weston Subedge, where Bourne was vicar-for-life.<br /><br />The young crusader soon launched a campaign to enclose the rest of the hill.<br /><br />At the same time, officials across the country were trying to shut down other local festivities.<br /><br />As in the Cotswolds, participants saw their traditions as high-spirited, old-fashioned fun, whereas opponents—often outsiders like Bourne—saw them as lawless, bacchanalian orgies of vice.<br /><br />West Country native Thomas Hughes, a fair-minded man of the law, wrote nostalgically about shin kicking and backswording in his bestseller,<em> Tom Brown's Schooldays</em>, in 1857.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-g7C2VJgIfpQ/TtlIiBLryHI/AAAAAAAAAOw/aRwlW8lmZ2g/s1600/Tom+Brown%2527s+Schooldays.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-g7C2VJgIfpQ/TtlIiBLryHI/AAAAAAAAAOw/aRwlW8lmZ2g/s320/Tom+Brown%2527s+Schooldays.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />"Wrestling, as practised in the western counties, was, next to backswording, the way to fame for the youth of the Vale; and all the boys knew the rules of it, and were more or less expert," he recalled.<br /><br />However, he also acknowledged that rural feasts had deteriorated since his day because of longer working hours and a lack of support by the gentry.<br /><br />In the end, he reckoned the change was good "if it be that the time for the old 'veast' (feast) has gone by; that it is no longer the healthy, sound expression of English country holidaymaking; that, in fact, we as a nation, have got beyond it, and are in a transition state, feeling for and soon likely to find some better substitute".<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-7610434048757936770?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-69967021601592057262011-12-30T02:00:00.000Z2011-12-30T16:29:05.981ZInevitably, European and African customs intermingled on the plantations of the British West Indies and the American South. <br /><br />Slaves were allowed time off over Christmas, and they celebrated with processions centred on the towering figure of "John Canoe" or "Jonkonnu"—a man in a tall mask and outlandish clothes.<br /><br />"John Canoe" may have been a corruption of an African word for "witch doctor", but many celebrations also featured quotes from Shakespeare or characters from European mumming plays.<br /><br />Sometimes John Canoe and his followers would dress in rags and animal skins; other times, they would poke fun at their masters by wearing fancy European dress—and white makeup with pink Caucasian features.<br /><br />Jonkonnu extravaganzas still take place in Jamaica and the Bahamas around Christmas and New Year's, though they died out in America after the Civil War.<br /><br />Meanwhile, Kwanzaa, the US holiday invented during the Black Power movement of the 1960s, runs from December 26th until January 1st, supposedly taking its inspiration from "first-fruits celebrations in ancient Africa".<br /><br />Ironically, though, it coincides precisely with the beginning and end of Padstow's Darkie Days.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jZ7aDegsf1E/Tv3mhsHKxEI/AAAAAAAAAYc/z9QQosUMpB8/s1600/Kwanzaa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" rea="true" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jZ7aDegsf1E/Tv3mhsHKxEI/AAAAAAAAAYc/z9QQosUMpB8/s400/Kwanzaa.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />In our era, minstrel singers from Jim Crow to Al Jolson tend to be tarred with the same "racist" brush, but connoisseurs increasingly divide minstrelsy into two eras. <br /><br />As with many creative genres, they distinguish between the movement's pioneers—who often bucked society's norms—and the opportunists who followed, cashing in on the craze by pandering to people's expectations. <br /><br />Whereas the upper classes viewed Jim Crow and Zip Coon essentially as "niggers" good for a laugh, working-class folks seemed to think they weren't that different from themselves. <br /><br />The low-rent neighbourhoods of New York and other Northern cities were surprisingly integrated, with whites and blacks singing "Jim Crow" and "Zip Coon" as part of their shared street culture (not unlike rap and hip hop today, which are also notorious for their use of the "n-word"). <br /><br />Paradoxically, both Rice and Dixon spoke out against slavery as their alter egos. After returning to America from his first trip to Britain, which had abolished slavery a few years earlier, Rice added a new verse to "Jim Crow": <br /><br />De country for me <br />Is de country whar de people <br />Hab make poor nigga free. <br /><br />Given this stance, it's more than a little ironic that the term "Jim Crow" is now most commonly associated with racial segregation laws in the American South. <br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-6996702160159205726?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-11244891930101134152011-12-29T03:00:00.000Z2011-12-29T17:41:20.896Z<div>However, it wasn't until Rice took his impersonation of a "Kentucky cornfield negro" to New York in 1832 that Jim Crow really began to take flight.<br /><br />The boys of the Bowery Theater—a venue so rough the patrons often ended up onstage with the actors—demanded Rice do his Jim Crow shtick 20 times a night.<br /><br />And after conquering the US, Jim Crow jumped the pond in 1836 to begin a yearlong tour of the British Isles, plus a stint in Paris.<br /><br />Middlebrow critics denounced Rice's "buffo negro songs" as no-class "balderdash": "America has sent us a filthy abortion of a song, with neither talent nor humour," sniffed <em>The London Satirist</em>.<br /><br />However, Rice found a much wider audience in Britain than America, where his fans were mainly working-class.<br /><br />"In London, Jim Crow is even more popular than in New York," wrote one US correspondent. "It is heard in every circle, from the soirees of the nobility to the hovels of the street sweepers."<br /><br />Even a hardened satirist like Thackeray, author of <em>Vanity Fair</em>, confessed that minstrel music "moistened (his) spectacles in a most unexpected manner".<br /><br />Rice made a fortune, married the daughter of a London theatre owner and returned for two more tours of the UK. (To this day, the British Library has one of the most extensive collections of Jim Crow plays in the world.)<br /><br />"English audiences were in a special position to appreciate minstrelsy: in many ways, it simply brought images, symbols and forms back home," writes American musicologist Dale Cockrell in <em>Demons of Disorder</em>, his study of early blackface performers.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MHRxzPGCPYI/TtWnM6rSXrI/AAAAAAAAAMg/O4xavAMyo4w/s1600/Zip_Coon_sheet_music.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MHRxzPGCPYI/TtWnM6rSXrI/AAAAAAAAAMg/O4xavAMyo4w/s400/Zip_Coon_sheet_music.jpg" width="295" /></a></div><br />New World minstrels combined the music, masking and drama of traditions like "guising" and mumming that had been imported from the Old World.<br /><br />Between Christmas and New Year's, folks around Britain—including Cornwall—would "disguise" themselves by blacking their faces and singing, dancing and performing for food or money during the holidays.<br /><br />An English mummers' play from 1771 even features a black-faced character called Sambo.<br /><br />Meanwhile, in New England, bands of "callithumpian" rabble-rousers would parade through the streets on New Year's with chimney soot on their faces, banging pots and drums and naming and shaming anyone they didn't like.<br /><br />In the Old World, this ritual of social commentary was known as charivari, combining abuse and good humour. In fact, <em>Punch</em>, the famous satirical magazine, was originally subtitled <em>The London Charivari.</em></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-1124489193010113415?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-53445728677012651962011-12-29T02:00:00.000Z2011-12-29T17:42:25.474Z<div>In real life, though, the reformers eventually won the tug-o'-war over Dover's Games.<br /><br />After a clean-up, they briefly became fashionable once again in the early 1800s, portrayed as the training ground for the kind of "muscular Christianity" that had built a global superpower.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D4dNyLPqATY/TtlG8wE3QvI/AAAAAAAAAOg/Te_77irCX6M/s1600/Muscular+Christianity.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="284" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D4dNyLPqATY/TtlG8wE3QvI/AAAAAAAAAOg/Te_77irCX6M/s320/Muscular+Christianity.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From Wikipedia: In this illustration for the novel <i>Hepsey Burke</i>, an Episcopal rector&nbsp;gets little pay because of interference from the rich man at the right, so he&nbsp;shovels stone to support himself and his wife. Here the rector confronts the rich man.&nbsp;</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Within two decades, though, they had degenerated into a marathon orgy of booze, sex and crime.<br /><br />The Victorian gentry quickly deserted the games (preferring to indulge in those sins privately), giving the lower orders run of the hill for an entire week around the Olimpicks.<br /><br />Men from the mean streets of Birmingham preyed on country hospitality, ale booths sold alcohol round-the-clock, railroad workers started punch-ups, and "cardsharpers", pickpockets and thieves prowled the hill.<br /><br />At least, that's the way critics portrayed it.<br /><br />In 1846, a 25-year-old vicar fresh out of Oxford took over the parish.<br /><br />George Drinkwater Bourne—surely a teetotaller—was shocked by the pandemonium. He estimated that 30,000 people descended on the area during Dover's Games, or roughly 83 outsiders per local.<br /><br />A historian who interviewed Bourne wrote that "the games, instead of being as they originally were intended to be decorously conducted, became the trysting place of all the lowest scum of the population which lived in the districts lying between Birmingham and Oxford".<br /><br />It's tempting to depict the Olimpicks as one of those quaint old festivals that fell victim to puritanical Victorians.<br /><br />But based on descriptions of the games—from <em>Hobbinol</em>'s slapstick brawls and "warm spouting gore" in the 1700s to the rampant crime and "trysting scum" of the mid-1800s—it's clear that they didn't conform to modern ideas of fun days out for the whole family.<br /><br />In fact, there's nothing like them in Britain today: imagine Xtreme Fighting matches headlining Notting Hill Carnival with a contingent of Hell's Angels thrown in, and you might get some idea of the roughneck Olimpicks.<br /><br />Oh—and instead of hundreds of police, picture a handful of bobbies trying to control the crowd.<br /><br />Amid this mayhem, shin kicking and backswording were probably some of the tamer displays of violence on Dover's Hill; at least they had rules and referees.<br /><br />The most balanced portrayal of the event comes from a man whose mother profited from the chaos—all the while fearing for her life.<br /><br />Mrs. Stratton was the landlady of a pub in Evesham who sold alcohol and food at Dover's Games every year. She never left her serving tent and always kept a couple of loaded revolvers under the table. Her son explained why:<br /><br />"No one was safe from the lawlessness… During the daytime the turmoil was terrible, but all night long it was a perfect pandemonium. Cries of murder were often heard, and disorder and rapine held full sway. If the shadow of a person showed through the sheeting of the tent at night, he would almost sure to be struck with a heavy bludgeon from without, and the miscreant would crawl underneath and rob his victim."</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-5344572867701265196?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-13804144016852629552011-12-17T02:30:00.000Z2011-12-17T22:58:45.230Z<div>A best-selling satire on Methodism in 1773 used the Cotswold Olimpicks as the setting for a confrontation between a would-be firebrand and a bemused mob.<br /><br />In <em>The Spiritual Quixote</em>, written by local Anglican vicar Richard Graves, a Methodist squire named Geoffry Wildgoose sets out to change the world (on a wild goose chase—geddit?), accompanied by a Sancho Panza sidekick.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KaUHMkwbs8o/TtlE5X9i-kI/AAAAAAAAAOQ/kqNiQHZJj14/s1600/Spiritual+Quixote.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KaUHMkwbs8o/TtlE5X9i-kI/AAAAAAAAAOQ/kqNiQHZJj14/s640/Spiritual+Quixote.png" width="494" /></a></div><br />Dover's Hill is the site of "Mr. Wildgoose's first Harangue". He views the Olimpicks as "a heathenish assembly… where so many souls are devoted to destruction, by drinking, swearing, and all kinds of debauchery".<br /><br />As priggish as he is quixotic, he's shocked to see young women shucking their outer garments ahead of a race and "exhibit(ing) themselves before the whole assembly in a dress hardly reconcilable to the rules of decency".<br /><br />And there's no doubt the races were racy, the closest the 18th century got to a wet T-shirt contest.<br /><br />In <em>Hobbinol</em>, Somerville worked himself into a lather describing one woman's "amiable figure": "Her heaving breast, through the thin cov'ring view'd,/Fix'd each beholder's eye..."<br /><br />And the prize—a virtually see-through linen shift—didn't leave much to the imagination, either.<br /><br />"They may <em>make</em> a poor SHIFT, like the fig-leaves of Eve, to cover the nakedness of your bodies," Wildgoose splutters, jumping up on a basket. "If you have any regard to the <em>health</em> of your souls, shun, as you would the <em>plague</em>, these anti-Christian recreations..."<br /><br />At first, the crowd mistakes the Methodist for a quack doctor; all they can hear are words like "health" and "plague".<br /><br />But then they catch what he's really saying: "Instead of bruising the head of that old serpent, the Devil; you are breaking one another's heads with cudgels and quarter-staffs; instead of wrestling against flesh and blood, you are wrestling with one another."<br /><br />Realising all this God talk might be bad for business, a pub owner starts heckling the Methodist, inciting the crowd to pelt him with dirt, dung and orange peels until they drive him Dover's Hill.<br /><br />"Thus unsuccessfully ended Wildgoose's first effort towards reforming the world."</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-1380414401685262955?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-11746824650088965842011-12-17T02:00:00.000Z2011-12-17T22:59:16.847Z<div>In trying to explain Darkie Day, I don't know which is stranger: the locals' story about dancing slaves, or the fact that many journalists—including defenders like Darcus Howe—swallowed the fishy tale hook, line and sinker.<br /><br />To my mind, commemorating slaves' suffering by blacking up and singing about "niggers" would seem like more of a sick joke than an honest <em>hommage</em>. And so far as the historical record shows, slave ships never docked at Padstow—and even if they had stopped, it's unlikely the captive men, women and children on board would have been in any condition to sing and dance.<br /><br />In 1806, a slave ship wrecked just outside Padstow as it was returning to Liverpool, having already sold its cargo of 193 slaves in Barbados. Seven Africans had died in transit from the Cape Coast, most from fever and dysentery.<br /><br />The true roots of Darkie Day lie in the 19th century "nigger minstrel" craze that swept both sides of the Atlantic—and still echoes through pop music today.<br /><br />Americans and Europeans—particularly the British—share the blame for mimicking and ridiculing blacks onstage.<br /><br />In 1799, a German immigrant named Gottlieb Graupner (now regarded as the father of orchestral music in America) entertained Boston as the banjo-strumming <em>Gay Negro Boy</em>.<br /><br />And two decades later, a famous English actor, Charles Mathews, staged a one-man show in blackface called <em>A Trip to America</em>, lampooning a black production of <em>Hamlet</em> he'd seen in the States. In the middle of the Dane's famous soliloquy, after the line "And by opposing, end them", the black audience would burst into a slave song, "Opossum Up a Gum Tree."<br /><br />However, the undisputed founding fathers of the minstrel show were a couple of Yankees.<br /><br />Thomas Dartmouth Rice and George Washington Dixon developed the two black stereotypes that dominated the stage for more than a century: the sympathetic Southern plantation slave (Rice's "Jim Crow" character), and the uppity Northern dandy (Dixon's "Zip Coon")—which also inspired the golliwog, another transatlantic creation.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NomB8CVDDcM/TtWh9AgCnnI/AAAAAAAAAMI/QMHQZKMr_qg/s1600/Jump+Jim+Crow.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NomB8CVDDcM/TtWh9AgCnnI/AAAAAAAAAMI/QMHQZKMr_qg/s400/Jump+Jim+Crow.bmp" width="280" /></a></div><br />Rice, a New Yorker of Anglo-American extraction, was a struggling performer touring the US when he heard Dixon sing his hit song, "Coal Black Rose" around 1830.<br /><br />In Kentucky, he also happened to see an old black stablehand singing and dancing disjointedly (possibly because he was crippled); Rice supposedly borrowed the man's moves and music to create "Jim Crow", the archetypal novelty hit, complete with its own silly dance and catchy chorus:<br /><br />"<a href="http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/remembering/bitter.html" target="_blank">Wheel about and turn about, / And jump Jim Crow</a>."</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-1174682465008896584?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-57350559660408780842011-12-16T03:00:00.000Z2011-12-16T18:23:56.439Z<div>As promised, Somerville delivered all of the above, courtesy of his antihero, Hobbinol, a farmer from the Vale who fights a burly shin-kicking champ from the Wold called Pastorel on Dover's Hill.<br /><br />The rivals trade vicious blows until:<br /><br />"The sweat distils, and from their batter'd shins<br />The clotted gore distains the beaten ground."<br /><br />At the end, Pastorel nails his challenger's ankle with "a furious stroke", bringing Hobbinol to his knees.<br /><br />As the champ prepares to celebrate, though, Hobbinol clambers to his feet and throws him out of the ring. The losers from the Wold start a brawl, and:<br /><br />"Like bombs the bottles fly<br />Hissing in the air, their sharp-edged fragments drench'd<br />In the warm spouting gore."<br /><br />A justice of the peace (not unlike Somerville) stops the carnage—just in time for more "warm spouting gore" to begin.<br /><br />No one wants to fight the reigning backswords champ—a slaughterman with a smashed nose and missing eye—so Hobbinol takes up the challenge.<br /><br />Although he's smaller than Gorgonius, he's quicker on his feet… <em>and</em> he fights dirtier.<br /><br />Instead of aiming for the giant's head, he attacks his shins with his cudgel.<br /><br />The low blows infuriate the Cotswold Cyclops so much that he drops his guard.<br /><br />Hobbinol then cracks him over the skull, sending him crashing out of the ring.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cHmIxhj-sMI/TtlAtwlMZwI/AAAAAAAAAOA/CRTwO0D3uNY/s1600/Gordons+Gin+Lane.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="640" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cHmIxhj-sMI/TtlAtwlMZwI/AAAAAAAAAOA/CRTwO0D3uNY/s640/Gordons+Gin+Lane.jpg" width="426" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Somerville was a fan of Hogarth's; this is a spoof of the latter's "Gin Lane"</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Although the Puritans had long since fallen from power, Somerville's moralising shows that their reforming zeal was still a force.<br /><br />Around the same time, a minister at nearby Stow-on-the-Wold singled out "Dover's Meetings" as examples of "profanations of the Lord's Day by the bodily exercise of wrestling and cudgel-playing".<br /><br />Other reformers shared his views, particularly the spiritual heirs of the Puritans mocked as "Methodists".</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-5735055966040878084?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-62952147969072071792011-12-16T02:30:00.000Z2011-12-16T18:23:04.435Z<div>"I'd <em>never</em> thought of Darkie Day as being offensive—just because it was part of something that had always gone on in Padstow," says former mayor Keltie Seaber.<br /><br />"If it would've gone on in <em>London</em>, we would've said, 'Ooh, isn't that terrible?'"<br /><br />And she would have been among the first to protest: after all, Keltie had the kind of credentials that wannabe liberals only dreamed about.<br /><br />Her parents had been Communists throughout the Cold War, when there were possibly fewer "Reds" than blacks in Cornwall. The locals gossiped that her family spent Christmas in Russia, and the neighbourhood kids would bang on their door and shout "Commies!" through the letterbox.<br /><br />Whereas most Cornish Communists tried to keep their politics secret, Keltie's mother was very open about her radical tendencies. She used to order two copies of <em>The Daily Worker</em> from the newsagents, so that one could be kept on display.<br /><br />"But they said, no, it had to be under the counter, with the dirty magazines—dirty Communist <em>rag</em>," Keltie chuckles.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ytel4f0Ir-g/TtWgaBwEWrI/AAAAAAAAAMA/2soNlCQoh2w/s1600/Daily+Worker.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ytel4f0Ir-g/TtWgaBwEWrI/AAAAAAAAAMA/2soNlCQoh2w/s400/Daily+Worker.jpg" width="271" /></a></div><br />Her family's B&amp;B, as advertised in <em>The Daily Worker</em>, served as a dacha-by-the-sea for party members, trade unionists and various urban lefties, including some black families.<br /><br />However, the locals never gave them any trouble for having blacks in the house. "They always thought we were rather eccentric, I think."<br /><br />Keltie was never a Communist in the strict sense of the term, but when she moved to London to become a teacher, she threw herself into the protests of Seventies, such as the Free Mandela marches in the capital (she still has the badge she used to wear).<br /><br />"I was <em>dead</em> <em>keen</em> to help anybody who was a slight underdog. I wanted to get out and change the world."<br /><br />Even so, it wasn't until outsiders objected to Darkie Day that her eyes were opened.<br /><br />"I had this discussion with mum, when we both decided that—'God how thick were <em>we</em>,'" she laughs. "There we were, liberal, educated people, we thought, politically very correct—not a racist bone in our bodies. And I said to mum, <em>'Why</em> didn't it occur to us that wandering around, y'know blacking your faces up and dressing as negresses, <em>why</em> didn't it even cross our consciousness that it might be considered racist?'"<br /><br />Keltie reckoned it was because Darkie Day had always been there.<br /><br />Although she'd never taken part in it, she knew most of the people who did. And none of them ever went out with the idea of "Oh, I hope I'll see a black person, because it'll really insult them." And knowing Padstow people, they were very… <em>non-racist</em> somehow. They were very inclusive towards people who were down on their luck.<br /><br />"Down here, race isn't really an issue because we don't have black families," she emphasises. "If you had a <em>black</em> area in the town, with 20 black families, and went round their streets singing these songs, I think it would have dawned on me that yes, it could be construed as perhaps insensitive and intolerant and <em>racist</em>. But they were singing these Darkie Day songs—when there was no race issue in Padstow. It wasn't done to wind anybody up, because there was nobody to wind up. Darkie Day has never <em>ever</em> been malicious, or had any motive, apart from the fact of just going out and having a sing. They do it because they do it." </div><div align="center"><br /><strong>* * *</strong> </div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-6295214796907207179?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-85868256998439339902011-12-15T15:30:00.000Z2011-12-15T21:21:01.765ZThe Ood's other casualty is a brawny outdoor fitness instructor whose curly reddish hair and pink cheeks make him look like a cherub on steroids. <br /><br />"I weigh 17 stone (240 pounds), and it didn't protect me," laughs Brian Briggs, wincing from the pain. <br /><br />"I got crushed. Everyone went over, and I 'ad about three people layin' on top of my chest, and just crushin' my lower ribs so I couldn't breathe. I don't reckon they're broken, but they are very, very painful—I 'eard them crack when I was landed on." <br /><br />A similar thing happened two years ago, when Brian broke his collarbone. <br /><br />"This year it's just as well we fell on the field, 'cause it's a soft landing. Nice an' muddy, you don't get 'urt. When you fall on the road, that's when it really does 'urt." <br /><br />This from the guy who just cracked his ribs on the field. <br /><br />"One lad last year got three of 'is fingers dislocated from landin' down near the pub. So he got 'is fingers dislocated and"—he cracks his knuckles for effect—"he puts 'em all back in place and carries on!" <br /><br />What with all the drinking and scope for injury, you'd expect the paramedics to frown on the Hood. <br /><br />However, the moustachioed man from St. John's Ambulance takes the casualties in stride. <br /><br />"Mainly just sprains and strains, the odd bit of crushing, like. When you come against something like a solid object, like a wall, or a car, it's not gonna give. So you may get a couple crush injuries, but—y'know"—he shrugs—"I think it's brilliant. I think it's absolutely fantastic. It's Old England, isn't it? It's Old England. It's something that's been goin' on for years—something we should never get rid of." <br /><br />Over the next few hours, the swaying, hundred-footed drunk, the bedraggled knot of humanity, stumbles through Haxey in the dark, steaming and heaving and careening off walls, windows and even a car. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eAKh7cjFqd4/Tuk9tqH0O4I/AAAAAAAAAWA/iwG9CSh2-VE/s1600/Haxey+Hood+commuter+crush.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" oda="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eAKh7cjFqd4/Tuk9tqH0O4I/AAAAAAAAAWA/iwG9CSh2-VE/s400/Haxey+Hood+commuter+crush.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Halfway through, an old-timer shouts to the boggins to rescue him from the mob. Despite his wife's warnings, after downing two gallons of beer, he couldn't resist the pull of the Sway. <br /><br />"I shouldn'ta been in it, lad" he gasps. "Aye, I'd an 'eart attack three months ago." <br /><br />By the time the Hood reaches the King's Arms on the other side of the village, I'm feeling revitalised by the mad rush I get whenever I go to these events. <br /><br />Mud, blood and booze in Old England; maybe I'm not so crazy after all. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><strong>* * *</strong><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-8586825699843933990?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-37074279089214419252011-12-15T15:00:00.000Z2011-12-15T21:18:58.176ZSpectators can get as close to the action as they dare—there are no sidelines, or boundaries, for that matter.<br /><br />The wide-open field makes the spectacle look all the more surreal, like an urban commuter crush transplanted to the countryside, only there's no obvious reason for the rough-and-tumble. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-di-XpMhH8b8/Tuk8waw6AWI/AAAAAAAAAV4/Gkaa_oZIiZs/s1600/The+Hood.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" oda="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-di-XpMhH8b8/Tuk8waw6AWI/AAAAAAAAAV4/Gkaa_oZIiZs/s400/The+Hood.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The men are surrounded by acres of empty space; if they wanted to, they could just stop and quietly disperse, without any need for crushing against each other. <br /><br />At one point, the players have to negotiate a muddy ledge onto a lower section of the field. <br /><br />The drop's only eight inches, but it might as well be 80 feet. There's no way the Sway is going down it without falling over; the men would stand a better chance of landing on their feet if they jumped off a cliff. <br /><br />The mud around the ledge is unbelievably sticky, a mix of earth, clay and superglue, so that their legs get locked into the claggy soil while people are still pushing from the outside in both directions and inevitably—MAN DOON! MAN DOON!—the Sway collapses over the dividing line, bodies sprawled on both sides. <br /><br />After much negotiation, the boggins break the stalemate by hoisting the Hood—or rather, the men attached to the Hood—past the breaking point. <br /><br />Then it falls over again. <br /><br />A little guy is ripped out of the body pile and hauled off, his legs dragging in the mud. <br /><br />From the way the boggins are handling him, it looks like he's a troublemaker about to get a taste of rough justice: Don't you ever (thump!) come here (thwack!) again! <br /><br />Instead, the boggins drop his limp body on the field. <br /><br />He's passed out, coated in mud except where his shirt's been pulled up, exposing the white, fish-belly skin of his stomach. <br /><br />A St. John's Ambulance official huddles over him, cocking his head to get some air into his lungs. <br /><br />Eventually, the guy's eyelids flutter to life, and he staggers to his feet like a discombobulated wino straight from the gutter. <br /><br />His hair is spiked and matted around his skull, his clothes are rumpled helter-skelter and his eyeballs are red and rolling in different directions. <br /><br />The right one even has a blotch of blood next to the pupil. He's been squeezed until his eyes popped! <br /><br />Rather than going home or to the hospital, though, he hangs around the sidelines, waiting for another chance to jump in the Sway. <br /><br />For Stephen Mitchell (initials: S&amp;M), getting knocked down and out is all part of the fun. <br /><br />"Oh, I got trampled on, yeah," he tells me. "Oh, without a doubt. Me 'ips aren't feelin' too clever at the minute… I'm bound to get a bollocking off me family because they know I need a hip replacement." <br /><br />"What?" <br /><br />"The bones are crumblin'." <br /><br />At 34, he has chronic arthritis in both hips. <br /><br />"So why on earth do you do this?" <br /><br />He pauses, then grins wildly. "It's the 'Ood—ya can't explain it. It's the 'Ood!"<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-3707427908921441925?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-23143842244768251322011-12-15T02:16:00.000Z2011-12-15T21:18:36.194ZIn fairness to Haxey, though, I was profoundly depressed at the time. <br /><br />For more years than I cared to count, I'd been sneaking away on weekends and spending precious holiday time in the backwaters of Britain, living a double life as a weekday wage-slave and a weekend shin kicker. <br /><br />Only my family and a few friends knew my terrible secret. <br /><br />It wasn't the kind of thing you talked about in polite company; not in professional North London, at least. <br /><br />It would be like confessing to a Marmite-related fetish. People would stop inviting us to dinner. They wouldn't let our daughter play with their children. They would cross the street for fear that my madness was contagious. <br /><br />Anyway, once I had enough material, I quit the day job, remortgaged the flat and took a year off to finish my book. <br /><br />"That's a brave move," an ex-colleague said, "especially for someone with a child." <br /><br />The subtext was clear—by "brave" he meant "stupid" and possibly "irresponsible". <br /><br />More than a year later, I was facing disaster, desperately trying to sell a book about gurning and Pope burning to publishers—mostly middle-class Londoners—who couldn't care less about hicks in the sticks and their strange an-tics. <br /><br />In my mind, I had wandered into shin kicking and stumbled onto <em>The Big Book of Britain</em>. <br /><br />In reality, it looked like my work was going to end up buried among other misfiled titles at the library, somewhere between <em>The Wacky World of Welding</em> and <em>Great Bison I Have Known</em>. <br /><br />And that was if I was lucky! I was facing disgrace!—Financial ruin!—Public ridicule! "See that guy?" people would jeer, "He bet his house on bog snorkelling!" <br /><br />No matter how many tales of rejection-to-victory I heard, they weren't enough to lift the depression, not even the one about the publisher who told JK Rowling, "You'll never make any money out of children's books, Jo." <br /><br />No doubt she cackled like Voldemort now as she threw another fifty-pound note on the fire. <br /><br />Things had worked out for her… <em>but what about me? </em><br /><br />All that was the mental distortion, the hissing white noise warping my perceptions, when I first saw Haxey and the Hood. <br /><br />On the rare occasions that it is mentioned by the media, they typically hype Haxey Hood as being ultraviolent. <br /><br />But it isn't so much violent as… <em>ultrasurreal</em>—gloriously, profoundly absurd: a bizarre crush with no apparent reason for being; a seemingly meaningless struggle. <br /><br />Dozens of men risk hypothermia to push and shove each other, arging and barging, hurling and burling, hubbing and bubbing in the mud and manure, emitting primal noises as they try to herd the slow-moving stampede, the hundred-footed elephant, across the field. <br /><br />The thing is, you can't even see the Hood, the object of all the grunting and shunting. <br /><br />In rugby and football, at least the ball is regularly passed and kicked. <br /><br />Not so the Hood. A leather cylinder, it quickly disappears in the crush only to resurface again at the end. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-INleQCZSOVE/Tuk8csuHF8I/AAAAAAAAAVw/9od94HA_jSU/s1600/Hood+disappearing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="186" oda="true" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-INleQCZSOVE/Tuk8csuHF8I/AAAAAAAAAVw/9od94HA_jSU/s320/Hood+disappearing.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />In fact, some years it has disappeared altogether—in the chaos of the Sway, the men didn't realise until some time afterwards that the Hood had been stolen. <br /><br />Rather than a piece of leather, it looks like the men are tussling over a boiling cauldron or a block of dry ice, judging from the clouds of steam billowing up from the centre, their combined body heat vapourising in the freezing cold. <br /><br />It takes nearly two hours for the writhing mass of humanity to cover 200 yards, mainly because it keeps keeling over in the mud. <br /><br />And when the Sway collapses, it can take a while for the officials to untangle the limbs and unpick the carnage. <br /><br />You'd get a similar effect if you shoved the men into a dumpster, lifted them 50 feet into the air, and then tipped them onto the ground.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-2314384224476825132?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-43396993706110779102011-12-15T02:00:00.001Z2011-12-15T21:16:13.153Z<div>Padstow's merrymakers were also wary of me, but that was only natural—I was a stranger with a videocam.<br /><br />"Have ya paid for them photos?" an ersatz Aunt Jemima asked me.<br /><br />Once I put some money in the collection box, though, no one seemed to mind me tagging along.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2dLQzpsqOmQ/TtWepUrsNZI/AAAAAAAAALw/vNfWVpRcFA0/s1600/Darkie1+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="276" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2dLQzpsqOmQ/TtWepUrsNZI/AAAAAAAAALw/vNfWVpRcFA0/s320/Darkie1+%25282%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />I decided to return during the summer, when people might be more forthcoming. Even so, I felt self-conscious asking about the event. I tended to mumble the offensive words or bury them under my breath, so that Darkie Day became <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Darkie)</span> Day.<br /><br />However, the locals had no such hang-ups, rattling off the lyrics about "niggers" as if they were just any old words, as innocuous and nonsensical as "polly wolly doodle". <br /><br />You could view this openness as proof that they don't mean to cause offence; on the other hand, you could argue that they're such hard-tack crackers, they don't care who they offend.<br /><br />Time and again, Padstonians protest their innocence: "How can we be racialist (sic) if we don't have any blacks around to be racialist against?"<br /><br />This is the racial equivalent of the chicken-and-egg conundrum—which came first: blacks or bigots?<br /><br />Race-baiters cut their teeth on this question, tearing into it like lions mauling an easy kill.<br /><br />"This is almost the same as saying that racism only exists where there are significant numbers of black people present, i.e., before 'they' came, 'we' didn't have a problem," wrote the head of the Devon and Exeter Racial Equality Council during the Darkie Day uproar.<br /><br />"Racism is usually (not always) about white people's attitudes, and that is essentially the problem."<br /><br />This emphasis on whites' attitudes takes the debate into the realm of Orwellian wrongthink; if you're reckless enough to speak your mind, you might as well stick your face in a cage full of rats.<br /><br />Of course, it is possible for people living in an all-white society to be racist; but just because they live in an all-white society doesn't make them inherently racist.<br /><br />To my mind, the true test of whether someone is racist is how he or she treats people of other races when meeting them face-to-face. </div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-4339699370611077910?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-77344274427456651512011-12-15T02:00:00.000Z2011-12-15T21:14:48.466Z<div>Straddling both the Wold and the Vale, Dover's Hill provided neutral territory for bloody prizefights, and for over two centuries, the main attractions at Britain's homegrown Olimpicks were also the bloodiest.<br /><br />In theory, backswording, or cudgel "play", was less brutal than shin kicking (which was known simply as wrestling throughout much of the West Country).<br /><br />Opponents whacked each other with sticks until one wound up with a "broken head," verified by a trickle of blood at least an inch long on the scalp (an extension of the "first blood" rule in duelling).<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-n-lCk_GDbrc/Ttk-a9yrI5I/AAAAAAAAANw/rWgE7uno5_Q/s1600/Backswording.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-n-lCk_GDbrc/Ttk-a9yrI5I/AAAAAAAAANw/rWgE7uno5_Q/s320/Backswording.bmp" width="320" /></a></div><br />A deft gamester could graze a scalp with surgical precision. But in practice, both backswording and shin kicking frequently degenerated into bloody spectacles, with participants often maiming—and occasionally even killing—each other.<br /><br />Incredibly, some hard nuts competed in both sports on the same day.<br /><br />Not surprisingly, many women disapproved of the sports. Accounts from the 1700s and 1800s (written by men, naturally) depict wives and girlfriends trying to stop their lovers from joining the fun.<br /><br />Apart from the possibility that women are indeed smarter than men, shrieking <em>Blood! Blood!</em> with the crowd wasn't very ladylike.<br /><br />What's more, women had to cope with the consequences of such wilful stupidity, nursing the broken heads and bloodied shins.<br /><br />For their part, the men fought for love rather than money. Not the love of their womenfolk, you understand; simply because they loved to fight.<br /><br />Of course, there were prizes to be won—a gold ring, laced hat or half a dozen belts or gloves—but neither shin kicking nor backswording would make you rich.<br /><br />A typical country backsword contest in 1778 promised "Half a Guinea… to each Man breaking a Head, and Half a Crown to each Man having his Head broken."<br /><br />In modern money, that's barely £80 for bashers and £20 for bashees.<br /><br />The first graphic account of shin kicking and backswording on Dover's Hill comes from William Somerville, a local justice of the peace who emulated Hogarth.<br /><br />While the famous painter satirised the excesses of <em>Gin Lane</em> London, the country squire targeted "the luxury, the pride, the wantonness, and quarrelsome temper of the middling sort of people" responsible for the poverty and "bare-faced knavery" in the world (though tragically, he didn't end up much better than his subjects, dying a penniless alcoholic).<br /><br />For Somerville, Dover's Games were proof that England was going to pot.<br /><br />"A country-wake is too sad an image of the infirmities of our own people," he wrote in the introduction to his satiric poem, <em>Hobbinol</em>, in 1740. "We see nothing but broken heads, bottles flying about, tables overturned, outrageous drunkenness, and eternal squabble."</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-7734427442745665151?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-31066009678023691712011-12-14T15:00:00.000Z2011-12-15T21:18:25.318ZHaxey itself didn't seem to have any real beginning or end; it was a long, thin row of redbrick buildings strung out along a high street, without any obvious centre or reason for being. <br /><br />It looked like it had been designed by a Soviet planning committee as Northern People's Collective #3268, typified by the plain lettering on a drab building halfway down the high street: MEMORIAL HALL. <br /><br />They might as well have labelled the rest of the town accordingly: CHURCH, CHAPEL, SHOP #1, SHOP #2, PUB #1, PUB #2, and so forth. <br /><br />Why use names when labels would suffice? Titles were the bourgeois affectations of soft southerners. <br /><br />John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, hailed from Epworth, the next town over. No wonder the locals had looked to heaven; there sure wasn't much for 'em down here on earth. <br /><br />The land around Haxey—at least what you could see through the mist—was brutally flat; reclaimed marshland from the days when the area was an island, the Isle of Axholme. <br /><br />The Hood took place on what the locals called a hill, but Haxey Field sure looked flat to me. <br /><br />And the weather didn't help, either. Apart from the mist and patches of snow, the sky was an industrial, boiler-room grey. <br /><br />A half hour before the match, just as everyone was coming out of the pub for the Fool's Speech, a freezing drizzle completed the setting. <br /><br />The flat wasteland… the all-conquering mist and cold… the seemingly pointless strife: this was Sartre and Beckett territory, relocated to the North of England. <br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-djMnZzQaYHw/Tuk5MpOBAnI/AAAAAAAAAVo/ALwI9AlhG2M/s1600/Haxey+grim.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="327" oda="true" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-djMnZzQaYHw/Tuk5MpOBAnI/AAAAAAAAAVo/ALwI9AlhG2M/s400/Haxey+grim.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Lord of the Hood and his Boggins</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>A book on the Port of Goole was called <em>50 Miles from Spurn</em>—a fitting title for Haxey as well, or some kooky existentialist sketch: <br /><br />A: (<em>gloomily</em>) "Where are we?" <br />B: "I don't know." <br />A: (<em>joyously</em>) "You don't know?" <br />B: "You know Spurn?" <br />A: (<em>aghast</em>) "Oh no. Not Spurn!" <br />B: "No, no—not Spurn. (<em>Pause</em>.) Fifty miles from it."<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-3106600967802369171?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-77040929027272730212011-12-14T03:30:00.000Z2011-12-15T21:18:06.459ZJames Bland happened to be the first person I bumped into in Haxey. <br /><br />We were crushed up against the bar in last year's pre-match pub-crawl—the pre-Sway Sway, so to speak. <br /><br />I didn't know it at the time, but I was standing next to a living legend, one of the hard nuts—or were they just nuts?—who stayed in the middle all day, their hands clamped to the Hood as they fought off rivals. <br /><br />'Blandie' immediately stood out. <br /><br />Not because of his ginger mullet—short on top and wispy down the back—or his hooped earrings, but because of his goatee. <br /><br />A half-goatee, actually, one side of his face bare and the other carpeted with red whiskers. <br /><br />Was he an eccentric who re-enacted historical battles? <br /><br />Or maybe a self-loathing Englishman who got kilted up like a Highland Scot on weekends? <br /><br />For all I knew, he got his kicks dressing as a two-faced man-woman, with a bride on one side and a groom on the other. <br /><br />I had no idea. And it's not particularly polite—or wise—to ask a stranger in a strange pub about his strange facial hair. <br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XjBb8IIeV4A/TugKuXXecUI/AAAAAAAAAVY/6Tx68Pjg5Gs/s1600/James+Haxey+Hood.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" oda="true" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XjBb8IIeV4A/TugKuXXecUI/AAAAAAAAAVY/6Tx68Pjg5Gs/s320/James+Haxey+Hood.png" width="201" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Blandie has since upgraded <br />to a half-beard and dreadlocks</td></tr></tbody></table><br />I finally had a chance to ask him when he shouted to a friend across the room, a heavyset guy with a big H shaved into the top of his head. <br /><br />So that was it—they were groomed especially for the occasion. <br /><br />And they weren't the only ones. The two main officials, the Lord of the Hood and the Chief Boggin, wore black ties and red hunting jackets, as well as fetchingly floral top hats with tall pheasant feathers sticking out—for that crucial touch of fauna. <br /><br />The "Fool" had a blackened face with smears of colour on it, plus a bowler hat and a suit of rags, while the ten other boggins were dressed in scarlet sweatshirts with their jeans tucked into their socks in preparation for the mother of all matches. <br /><br />For the time being, though, the only projectiles in their hands were pints, and they were belting out drinking songs in boozers so crowded it was almost impossible to get to the bar. <br /><br />"Just poosh on through, luv!" two pint-sized grannies told me. "That's what we do!" <br /><br />Truth be told, I hadn't been very impressed with Haxey at first. <br /><br />Tucked in a mist-covered corner of North Lincolnshire next to Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, it was surrounded by towns and villages with names so miserable they must have been inflicted on purpose: <em>Scun</em>thorpe… <em>Scroo</em>by… <em>Grim</em>sby… <em>Goole</em>. <br /><br />Maybe the Saxons thought that if they gave them ugly names, the Vikings wouldn't bother pillaging them. <br /><br />Unfortunately, it didn't work then, and now it succeeds only in scaring off tourists—anyone fancy a romantic getaway to <em>Goole?</em> <br /><br />A promotional poster on the Tube in London declared: "Doncaster—A City in All But Name." <br /><br />And what a difference a name makes. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-7704092902727273021?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-60317091791563383712011-12-14T02:30:00.001Z2011-12-14T20:59:55.004Z<div>As it stands, <em>Annalia Dubrensia</em> is the ultimate in vanity publishing, compiled at a time when every self-styled Renaissance man imagined himself a poet.<br /><br />One typically overblown effort compares "Cotswold Hill" to Mount Olympus and Dover to Hercules; whereas the latter took five years to organise the ancient games, though, the English showman had pulled off his Herculean feat in just one year.<br /><br />When Dover's admirers weren't praising him, they were scoring points off the Puritans.<br /><br />Jonson's 10-line epigram—some of the last verse he wrote—ends with a veiled swipe at religious "<em>hipocrites</em>, who are the worst… Let such envie, till they burst."<br /><br />Ironically, the same year that was published, a puritanical vicar took over at Campden. And eight years later, the Civil War stopped Dover's Games.<br /><br />Puritans and Royalists began fighting with weapons rather than words, and bloody skirmishes replaced ritualised combat on Dover's Hill.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rcwbdjUNkfA/Ttk9FO0sopI/AAAAAAAAANY/vFgX7LonYAw/s1600/Queen+hunting+Puritans.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="266" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rcwbdjUNkfA/Ttk9FO0sopI/AAAAAAAAANY/vFgX7LonYAw/s320/Queen+hunting+Puritans.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />The "Cotswold Genius" passed away in 1652, aged 70, his beloved games seemingly consigned to history.<br /><br />In the battle over sports, it appeared the Puritans had finally won.<br /><br />After the restoration of the monarchy, though, Dover's Games quickly bounced back.<br /><br />Instead of his high-minded Olimpicks, though, they reverted to their hard-knock origins. Out went Dover's classical pretensions; in came knockdown, drag-out fights—between combatants <em>and</em> spectators.<br /><br />Local alehouses began sponsoring the event (just as beer companies sponsor boxing today), and Dover's Olimpick spirit quickly drowned in Olympian amounts of spirits.<br /><br />Once hailed as England's very own Mount Olympus, Dover's Hill was eventually condemned as "the trysting place of the lowest scum".<br /><br />Young bucks from the Wold—the hills around Campden—would spar against their rivals from the Vale of Evesham, reflecting a medieval rivalry that continues to this day.<br /><br />Market towns like Campden have long looked down on farmers in the valley.<br /><br />"The Wold got their origins as sheep and market towns for the wool industry in the Middle Ages. The Vale people are agriculturists, they grow—well, their prized growth is <em>asparagus</em>," laughs Olimpick historian Francis Burns.<br /><br />"You talk to the locals in Chipping Campden about Broadway, and they talk about them as if they were a different race down there. And it's what—five miles? And they talk about those funny folk down there."</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-6031709179156338371?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-13383452461099893122011-12-14T02:30:00.000Z2011-12-15T00:29:37.939Z<div>Despite all the hype about "multicultural Britain", modern Albion remains as overwhelmingly white as the Latin roots of its name suggest.<br /><br />Living in London or any sizeable city, it's easy to forget just how racially homogenous England is, not to mention Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.<br /><br />Although roughly one out of every four people in Greater London is black or Asian, for the UK as a whole—including the capital—that ratio plunges to 8%, most of whom are Asians. Afro-Caribbeans number just one million out of the country's total population of 59 million—around 2%.<br /> <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yT6tSEGbqO0/TtWcf4iGkMI/AAAAAAAAALg/Vxr71pWAjSA/s1600/BBC+born+outside+UK+map.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="338" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yT6tSEGbqO0/TtWcf4iGkMI/AAAAAAAAALg/Vxr71pWAjSA/s400/BBC+born+outside+UK+map.gif" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong>BBC map of people born outside the UK</strong><br /><div class="ba_caption">Map on right shows country as if areas with roughly equal populations were the same size. So, densely populated London takes up much more space than sparsely populated Scottish Highlands.</div></td></tr></tbody></table> Meanwhile, in north Cornwall, minorities make up just 1% of the inhabitants, though barely one person in 1,000 is of African descent—just 0.1% of all locals.<br /><br />I first visited Padstow with my ex-wife and our first daughter a few days before New Year's. At first, I'd had my doubts about taking them to see Darkie Day. She is Latin and often mistaken for being Asian, while our daughter is decidedly mixed, a cross between a German-Swedish-American and a Spanish-Italian-Inca.<br /><br />However, I happened to know a couple of people (like Anita and Ian) who had seen Darkie Day, and they assured me there wouldn't be a problem.<br /><br />We'd also visited Padstow the previous summer, and the locals couldn't have been more welcoming.<br /><br />Small towns are often portrayed as bigoted backwaters, but in my experience, that ain't necessarily so.<br /><br />Having lived in Smalltown USA as well as half a dozen world capitals, I've found that city-dwellers can be just as bigoted as villagers, if not more so. It wasn't until I moved to New York that I was called "cracker"—a drive-by insult from a carload of strangers—and I don't remember ever hearing anyone talk about "coloured" people until I came to London—from a freshly-minted Oxford graduate who called himself a liberal (and later worked in Asia).<br /><br />As for the term "darkie", well, it's like something out of the 19th century. You never hear it nowadays—unless you go to Padstow. Then, boy do you hear it: like stage pirates, the Cornish give r's their full value and then some, so when they say "darrrkie", "colourrred" or "niggerrr", it's all the more <em>jarrrring</em>.<br /><br />For many Padstonians, "coloured" is still an accepted synonym for "black", while "Negro" also occasionally pops into conversation; "nigger" is only ever used in the context of the Darkie Day songs (at least that I've heard). The first time I witnessed the tradition—not long after the media storm—I managed to interview only one local.<br /><br />"Because of this—this word, niggerrr, I'm sensitive even talkin' to you about it," he said. "You're arriving at a time when any stranger who asks questions will be viewed with a little bit of suspicion. For all they know, you're writing for <em>The Black Power Journal</em>, and next year, there'll be a hundred heavy guys down here. That's what everyone feared… people waving banners." </div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-1338345246109989312?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-719993547159923822011-12-14T02:07:00.001Z2011-12-15T21:17:48.539Z"Savour the pain, boys! Savour the pain!" <br /><br />That's easy for him to say. <br /><br />Blandie's lying near the top of the heap, and I'm down at the bottom, squashed by a dozen or more bodies, a thousand pounds of pressure concentrated within six feet. <br /><br /><em>Don't squeal like a pig.</em> <br /><br />I can't move, and I'm vaguely aware of the groans emanating from the bald heads and buzz cuts around me.<br /><br />My torso feels like one of those giblet bags crammed up the backside of a butchered turkey. <br /><br />The coroner will open me up and find nothing but a creamy pâté inside, human foie gras in a skin-and-bones bag. <br /><br />At least I'm still conscious—not like that kid they pulled out of the crush a couple of collapses ago. <br /><br />The Lord of the Hood—distinguished by his flowery top hat—jumped in to stop the ruckus, brandishing his wicker wand of office and bellowing: "MAN DOON! MAN DOON!" <br /><br />The teenager was ripped out of the tangle of bodies and laid flat on the field, unconscious, his eyes fluttering and head and hands twitching. Either he was knocked out or fainted from the lack of oxygen. <br /><br />"I hate it when that happens," an official frowned, without any irony. <br /><br />But that kind of thing is bound to happen in the Haxey Hood, an organised riot that takes place every year on January 6th, supposedly since at least the 1200s. <br /><br />Take as many as 300 men, get them liquored up, stick them on a claggy field in the freezing cold and throw a leather tube known as a Hood into the middle of the mob. <br /><br />This being England, and The North in particular, the goal of the game is a no-brainer: to get back to the pub for more drinking. <br /><br />The problem is, there are four locals within a one-mile radius—three in Haxey and one in the rival village of Westwoodside, on the other side of the field. And if they finish the game too soon, it would spoil the fun. <br /><br />So, instead of heading straight for the nearest boozer, the competitors end up pushing in opposite directions, creating a slowly rotating human hurricane capable of trampling anyone or anything in its path—occasionally demolishing walls, tearing down hedges and bursting through people's front doors. <br /><br />This asphyxiating crush of humanity, this juggernaut of flesh and bone, has an absurdly genteel name: the Sway. <br /><br />Although it looks like the world's biggest scrum—in fact, it is an ancestor of rugby and football—there are crucial differences. <br /><br />"It's not a scroom because you're standin' up," Blandie had explained in the pub. "If you were bent over, you'd snap your neck." <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w-8ajbTCab8/Tuk22KON3NI/AAAAAAAAAVg/po4XR8ZYSB0/s1600/random7_3_1+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" oda="true" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w-8ajbTCab8/Tuk22KON3NI/AAAAAAAAAVg/po4XR8ZYSB0/s640/random7_3_1+%25282%2529.jpg" width="427" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><strong>* * *</strong><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-71999354715992382?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-66933826758855677702011-12-13T23:25:00.000Z2011-12-15T00:29:37.947Z<div>Bordering the North and the South, Kentucky used to be a slave state, though its sons fought on both sides of the Civil War. <br /><br />One of Kentucky's most famous adopted sons was Stephen Foster, America's first great songwriter, who made his name writing minstrel songs. Two of them ended up becoming the official anthems of Southern states: "Swanee River" for Florida (which he never visited) and "My Old Kentucky Home" (which he did). <br /><br />As in Padstow, both songs had to be modified because they contained the word "darkies". Kentucky changed the offending word to "people" in 1986… after a group of Japanese students serenaded the General Assembly with "My Old Kentucky Home". <br /><br />For most of my youth, I had a black best friend—later my best man—who hailed from the deepest backwoods of <em>Kin</em>tuckee: Hazard, to be precise. (TV's <em>Dukes of Hazzard</em> wasn't actually set there, but it could've been.) <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1rdZyuRtNVo/TtWLVqWFG8I/AAAAAAAAALQ/pwEErihGYmg/s1600/the_dukes_of_hazzard_large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="396" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1rdZyuRtNVo/TtWLVqWFG8I/AAAAAAAAALQ/pwEErihGYmg/s400/the_dukes_of_hazzard_large.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Through him and other friends, I learned what it was like to be a member of a minority, albeit in a very limited sense. <br /><br />Blondish and blue-eyed, I was often the only white in black churches, talent shows and neighbourhoods. My girlfriend and I were the only mixed couple at the prom, and I reciprocated at her predominantly black school. <br /><br />I left Kentucky to study international relations at a university in Washington, D.C. (aka "Chocolate City" among blacks), and during summer breaks, I worked for a newspaper in Indianapolis, where I covered migrant farm workers and the Miss Black America Pageant (the same event where Mike Tyson later earned his rape conviction). <br /><br />After university, I lived in Peru at the height of a terrorist insurgency, travelling to shantytowns and villages where I was at least a head taller than the locals; an easy target for any would-be <em>yanqui</em>-killers. Instead, I met my ex-wife (<em>insert your own joke here</em>.) <br /><br />As for my second wife, well, she actually is African, having gone to school with Nelson Mandela's kids and protested against apartheid as a mixed-race citizen of South Africa. <br /><br />I mention all this knowing that veteran race-baiters will dismiss it as just a longwinded version of the old <em>cri de coeur</em> of a closet racist: "Some of my best friends are black!" <br /><br />All I can say is: judge for yourself. <br /><br />In my experience, race relations are never black and white: just when you think you've worked out people's differences, along comes an exception to contradict everything you've ever thought. <br /><br />So it's with real trepidation that I write about race in the UK… </div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-6693382675885567770?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-29141542710289894612011-12-13T02:00:00.000Z2011-12-14T20:59:11.424Z<div>To win royal backing for his May games, Dover could count on two powerful allies who just happened to have country homes in the area.<br /><br />The new lord of Campden, Sir Baptist Hicks, was one of the richest Britons ever—a multibillionaire by today's standards—who made his fortune selling fine cloth to James I and then lending him the money to buy it (plus interest).<br /><br />Dover's other courtly connection was Endymion Porter, a kinsman and native of the area who was a trusted adviser to both the king and his son.<br /><br />After James died in 1625, Porter persuaded Charles I to donate some of his father's cast-offs—a plumed hat and ruff—to Dover.<br /><br />Despite James' notoriously questionable hygiene, the showman wore them with pride at the games.<br /><br />In fact, the only known portrait of Dover shows him as Master of Ceremonies, kitted out in the dead king's hand-me-downs (possibly cut from cloth supplied by Sir Baptist).<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UKnqF9GW4RQ/Ttk6xZKVToI/AAAAAAAAANI/jMA7gbTJvjs/s1600/Scan-12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UKnqF9GW4RQ/Ttk6xZKVToI/AAAAAAAAANI/jMA7gbTJvjs/s320/Scan-12.jpg" width="267" /></a></div><br />Mounted on a white steed, he would ride through the crowd bestowing yellow silk ribbons on men and women; some gallants supposedly wore the yellow favours all year-round.<br /><br />Dover broadened the games' appeal by combining newly fashionable sports like horseracing with plebeian pastimes: throwing the hammer, spurning the bar and, of course, shin kicking.<br /><br />Food and drink abounded alongside scandalous pleasures like mixed-sex dancing, while the centrepiece of the celebrations was a wooden castle, complete with a flag and real cannons (supposedly donated by King Charles) that were fired at the start of each event, echoing a similar tradition in London's theatres.<br /><br />With their royal cachet, the games quickly became the biggest spectacle of their kind at the time.<br /><br />Jaded trendsetters from London travelled to see them as an alternative to Bath and the Spring Gardens in Hyde Park.<br /><br />Suddenly, England's country games were no longer rusticke; Dover had made them Olimpick, in keeping with the Renaissance vogue for antiquity.<br /><br />And just in case anyone missed the connection, he had a musician dress up like Homer and walk around plucking a harp (the <em>Iliad</em> contains the earliest reference to the Olympian Games).<br /><br />The first poet to dub England's Games "Olimpick" was Michael Drayton, a contemporary of Shakespeare's who helped compile a flowery tribute to Dover called <em>Annalia Dubrensia</em>.<br /><br />Published in 1636, the book's frontispiece shows Dover as a stout middle-aged gent and also provides one of the earliest illustrations of shin kicking: two men in breeches grip each other's arms and hack at each other's tibias.<br /><br />Although most of the 33 contributors were Dover's friends and relatives, the project did attract some well-known writers, including Ben Jonson.<br /><br />Unfortunately, Shakespeare died long before he could be pressed into singing Dover's praises. But that hasn't stopped Campden's boosters from searching for the Holy Grail of the heritage industry: any link between the Bard and their town.<br /><br />Some point to a remark in <em>The Merry Wives of Windsor</em> as a reference to the Cotswold Olimpicks ("How does your fallow greyhound, sir? I heard he was outrun on Cotsall").<br /><br />But that's probably much ado about nothing: greyhound racing was common in the Cotswolds.<br /><br />Still, Shakespeare probably would have known about the games simply because they were too big to be missed; what's more, Stratford is only 10 miles from Campden, and the Bard retired to his hometown the same year that Dover started his Olimpicks.<br /><br />The two men had friends and relatives in common—and compatible personalities—but whether Bill ever met Bob is anybody's guess.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-2914154271028989461?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-21088682894713304882011-12-12T03:00:00.000Z2011-12-15T00:29:37.944Z<div>When I first read about Darkie Day, I was astounded. <br /><br /><em>What kinda local yokels would black up and sing racist songs in this day and age—and why in Britain, of all places?! </em>Not even the most country-fried, Confederate-flag-loving hillbillies in the Deep South would do something like that! <br /><br />Then again, who was I to throw stones? My grandfather was a member of the KKK. <br /><br />As far as I can tell, though—and as absurd as it sounds—he wasn't a cross-burner or even a racist. <br /><br />His father, a German immigrant to the Midwest in the 1850s, had joined the Republicans at a time when they were the upstart anti-slavery party led by Abe Lincoln. At just 17, my great-grandfather volunteered for the Civil War, sneaking off in the middle of the night to fight for the Union. <br /><br />It seems unlikely that a man who had voluntarily risked his life to fight slavery would then indoctrinate his children with racist teachings. <br /><br />Although it's possible that his son rebelled by joining the redneck group founded by Confederates at the end of the war, from what I can gather, my grandfather wasn't the type: he was a gentle soul, more henpecked than hellraiser. He certainly wasn't overtly racist, and he taught his children to treat blacks as equals. <br /><br />Without trying to defend the indefensible, I reckon he joined the KKK for one simple reason: everybody else was doing it. <br /><br />In its heyday, the Klan was very much a mainstream organisation in America (which arguably made it more sinister than its current incarnation on the lunatic fringe). <br /><br />Although its rhetoric was undoubtedly bigoted, its rank-and-file members didn't hide behind hoods, and they didn't go around burning crosses or lynching people—at least not in Kansas. <br /><br />The secret history of the KKK seems to be that outside the South, it functioned like any "respectable" social club of the time, hosting picnics, baseball games and fundraisers. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m1cEyK2QtMY/TtWIu7otVsI/AAAAAAAAALA/b82p0nlMsCo/s1600/kkk-baseball-team.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m1cEyK2QtMY/TtWIu7otVsI/AAAAAAAAALA/b82p0nlMsCo/s400/kkk-baseball-team.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />For what it's worth, I was brought up to view people of all races as equals. Not that there were many minorities in the middle of Kansas: no blacks, only one family of Mexicans/Catholics, and just one Asian—my Vietnamese foster brother. <br /><br />When I entered my teens, we moved to Lexington, Kentucky, a city that prides itself on being part of the Progressive South. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it's true: they don't lynch people anymore; capital punishment is strictly by electrocution. </div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-2108868289471330488?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-87733045770993373342011-12-12T02:00:00.000Z2011-12-12T18:44:23.370Z<div>Scoff if you will, but Campden's homespun Olimpicks provide a truer reflection of the ancient Olympian spirit than their more famous international counterparts.<br /><br />Some events may not have the glamour and suspense of say, competitive walking or synchronised swimming, but what they lack in grandeur, they more than make up for in pedigree.<br /><br />Founded in 1612, the Cotswold Olimpicks represented the first successful attempt to revive the spirit of the Greek Olympian Games, predating their modern pretenders by nearly 300 years: for better or worse, the English were the main guardians of the Olympic flame between antiquity and the modern age—a fact cited by the British Olympic Association in its winning pitch to host the London 2012 Olympics.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--CPPE1_p5M8/Ttk4RUsFmNI/AAAAAAAAAMw/WnGMwmcbpDw/s1600/London+2012+Olympics.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--CPPE1_p5M8/Ttk4RUsFmNI/AAAAAAAAAMw/WnGMwmcbpDw/s200/London+2012+Olympics.bmp" width="180" /></a></div><br />Campden owes its Olimpick link to an outsider who transformed the area's rural pastimes into a fashionable spectacle sanctioned by the Crown.<br /><br />A country boy from Norfolk, Robert Dover studied law in London during the years when Shakespeare was writing <em>King Lear, Macbeth</em> and <em>The Tempest</em>—with high-calibre competition from the likes of Ben Jonson.<br /><br />So when Dover returned to the country, settling in the Cotswolds as a newly qualified barrister, his head was full of Renaissance ideals. And, like any good Royalist (and closet Catholic), he hated Puritans.<br /><br />Decades before they actually started killing each other, the Royalists and the Puritans fought a war of words over a seemingly unlikely subject—sports.<br /><br />The Puritans, gaining ground around Campden, believed the English were sports mad (even back then) and condemned the drunkenness and violence at country festivals.<br /><br />However, Royalists argued that games were "harmlesse mirth and jollitie," as Dover put it. So when the opportunity came to organise a sports extravaganza near his new home, he quickly took up the challenge.<br /><br />Not only would it be fun, it would peeve the Puritans. </div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-8773304577099337334?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-13872519741074380862011-12-11T17:58:00.000Z2011-12-11T23:16:41.045ZStill, some of the injuries are just as bad as they look. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-F5f_rS5z5dg/TuU5va173BI/AAAAAAAAAUM/BejJ4VXdq-g/s1600/injury+cheese+rolling.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="318" mda="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-F5f_rS5z5dg/TuU5va173BI/AAAAAAAAAUM/BejJ4VXdq-g/s320/injury+cheese+rolling.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />And cheese chasers aren't the only ones at risk; bystanders have also been hurt—by out-of-control runners… and bouncing cheeses. <br /><br />Rob Seex does his best to make sure the VIPs who roll the eight-pound Double Gloucesters aim for a midpoint at the bottom of the hill, which, whether by coincidence or not, lies right next to the media's bullpen. <br /><br />"This year there was a camera stand there, so I said aim for that," the emcee smiles. <br /><br />"But if the cheese hits a bump in the wrong place, it can take off and it can go well up in the sky." <br /><br />Iris remembers dodging the cheeses as a child. <br /><br />"Nowadays everybody gets a bit paranoid about the cheese. But in the old days, you didn't seem to worry about it—perhaps it was just that we were a bit thick; we didn't realise then that it would hurt!" <br /><br /><em>And then some.</em> <br /><br />By the time they hit the bottom, the cheese wheels are spiralling unpredictably at up to 70 miles an hour. <br /><br />"That's gotta be a bit of a whack," says Jason, whose mother was hit in the leg by a hurtling cheese. "She had a humongous bruise and couldn't walk for a couple of weeks." <br /><br />More recently, a spectator banged his head and fell 100 feet down the slope after trying to dodge a wayward cheese. <br /><br />Fortunately, he didn't suffer the same fate as a fabled bystander from long ago. <br /><br />His epitaph read: <br /><br />Here lies Billy, if you please <br />Hit in the stomach with a cheese <br />Cheese is wholesome fayre, they say <br />IT TURNED POOR BILLY INTO CLAY <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-1387251974107438086?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-87749206064604779422011-12-11T17:53:00.000Z2011-12-11T22:59:54.153ZIn recent decades, the injuries have increased along with the speed. <br /><br />"They didn't go so fast in the old days," Iris maintains, recalling a couple of champions from the 1940s and 1950s who never fell down. <br /><br />"It was much nicer to watch because there was more of an art to it. They just throw themselves like lemmings now, don't they." <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-b2uQXreCGn8/TuU1yl9rczI/AAAAAAAAAT8/Sah0FDnvWFA/s1600/Lemmings.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" mda="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-b2uQXreCGn8/TuU1yl9rczI/AAAAAAAAAT8/Sah0FDnvWFA/s400/Lemmings.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Morbid observers reckon that a serious mishap is only a matter of time. After all, on Cooper's Hill, a "breakneck pace" could mean just that. <br /><br />The committee behind the Darwin Awards, which honour "those who improved our gene pool by removing themselves from it in really stupid ways", has already granted cheese rolling an honourable mention. <br /><br />"We fondly anticipate a cheese-chasing Darwin Award nominee in the near future," the committee said. <br /><br />To prevent that from happening, the cheese roll has the cave rescuers and the St. John Ambulance on hand. <br /><br />In any given year, they can expect at least a dozen casualties and sometimes more than twice that number, with injuries ranging from grazed knees to suspected spinal trauma. <br /><br />Then there are the photogenic wounds like head cuts, which bleed a lot and make the hill look like a battle scene, yielding headlines such as CARNAGE ON COOPER'S HILL. <br /><br />The casualties tend to increase during dry years, when the sun bakes the slope rock hard. <br /><br />In 1978, a runner was knocked unconscious for an hour, and a winner sprained his ankle and lost a front tooth: "it snapped off clean," the newspaper reported, alongside of him posing with a gap-toothed grin, the very picture of a local yokel. <br /><br />To date, though, the worst wounds have been fractures. <br /><br />"You get broken legs, broken arms, broken ribs, broken collarbones—collarbones are fairly common," the emcees says matter-of-factly, "but a lot of injuries look worse than what they are." <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-8774920606460477942?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-90578457522737613692011-12-11T17:50:00.000Z2011-12-11T22:52:47.831ZTo conquer their fear, most cheese chasers fall back on Dutch courage. <br /><br />Like wine and cheese, drinking and cheese rolling have gone together for as long as anyone can remember. <br /><br />"I don't think they get pissed up just for the sake of it," one rescuer says. "You <em>need</em> to have a few drinks to get yourself into a state where you'd actually throw yourself off the top." <br /><br />For many runners, the anaesthetic of choice is locally made farmhouse scrumpy, although connoisseurs frown on chasing under the influence. <br /><br />"I always feel that if they've had too much to drink, they'd never win a cheese," Iris says. "They might get to the bottom eventually, but they've got to have a certain amount of clarity in the mind to win one." <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p4J1RGUC14Q/TuU0GQlKBsI/AAAAAAAAATs/t_k_M7lUO6Q/s1600/adge-cutler-and-the-wurzels-pill-pill-columbia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" mda="true" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p4J1RGUC14Q/TuU0GQlKBsI/AAAAAAAAATs/t_k_M7lUO6Q/s400/adge-cutler-and-the-wurzels-pill-pill-columbia.jpg" width="397" /></a></div><br />That said, drinking may help them stay in one piece. <br /><br />"It does help if you're totally legless—you relax when you fall," another local says. <br /><br />Apart from an apocryphal story about a runner dropping dead centuries ago, cheese rolling has yet to produce a serious casualty, defined as a paralysing injury or, God forbid, a fatality. <br /><br />For the organisers, injuries are a sore point, so to speak. They accuse the media—particularly the local papers—of sensationalising the event by focusing on casualties. <br /><br />"That's the only reason why they report on this event because they like to get as many as they can," grumbles Tony Peasley, Iris' husband. "They're so unremittingly negative about the cheese rolling." <br /><br />In years when the body count is particularly high—more than a dozen or so—the papers print close-ups of bloodstained competitors lying prostrate on the hill. <br /><br />For hardened veterans, though, gashed heads and broken bones are inevitable. <br /><br />"That's the whole essence of the cheese rolling," argues Tony. "People know that there is an element of risk—there has to be. Otherwise… why roll cheeses down the hill and chase after them?" <br /><br /><em>Why indeed?</em> For injuries, like alcohol, have always been a part of cheese rolling. <br /><br />The first photos of the event capture an Edwardian casualty in progress: "The leading competitor has pitched right over, and can be seen halfway down standing on his head," the caption explains. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-9057845752273761369?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-38820393084998083842011-12-11T14:30:00.000Z2011-12-11T22:44:13.399ZBut Iris Peasley's view may be closer to the truth. <br /><br />"We're a bit chicken, I think," she chuckles. "We know the hill, and we know the sort of dangers and whatnot." <br /><br />As a girl, she had wanted to chase a cheese, but her father warned her she'd break her neck. <br /><br />By the time she was old enough to make up her own mind, she decided not to tempt fate. <br /><br />Like the others on the hill, she leaves cheese chasing to youngsters from surrounding villages who have something to prove. <br /><br />Every year, Jason Kotwica and his friends trudge up from Brockworth to run in the race. "If you live locally, this is like the main event in the whole year, innit, really. We love it, because it is like, our Christmas day." <br /><br />Despite his Polish surname—his grandfather came over during the War—the 22-year-old is Brockworth born and bred. <br /><br />A fence builder by trade, he sports a shaven head, a goatee and gold hoops in both ears. <br /><br />Like his fellow buccaneers, he's been chasing cheeses since he was in his mid-teens. He reckons it makes so-called extreme sports look tame. <br /><br />"Oh, I've done bungee jumping," he says dismissively. "That's not <em>anything</em> compared to cheese rolling. Because when you do bungee jumping, you know it's all organised and it's all safe. But when you run this, you could break your neck." <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KYtwhdC0juY/TuUyHYISSLI/AAAAAAAAATc/rKvd715CDXk/s1600/broken+neck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" mda="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KYtwhdC0juY/TuUyHYISSLI/AAAAAAAAATc/rKvd715CDXk/s400/broken+neck.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />A few years back, a daredevil came all the way from Australia—or was it New Zealand?—to add cheese chasing to his list of accomplishments. <br /><br />"And he came here, and everybody was like, 'Ooh, there's that mad guy who does everything around the world!' And he had elbow pads on, kneepads, helmet—everything." But it still wasn't enough. "He looked down there and said, 'No, I ain't doin' it.'" <br /><br />The memory still makes Jason laugh: "'<em>Noo</em>, I ain't doin' it.'" <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-3882039308499808384?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-89898915799523613252011-12-11T04:00:00.000Z2011-12-11T22:19:26.060ZWhen you look down, though, the ground suddenly disappears. <br /><br />Rather than a gradual incline, the hill drops away at a near 70-degree angle, then quickly shifts to 50 degrees, then plunges again, then levels out, then falls one last time before abruptly flattening out—leaving runners only a few yards to stop before crashing into a cottage fence at the bottom. <br /><br />The 250-yard racecourse is a short, sharp drop full of dips, bulges, and any number of perils, seen or unseen: long, ankle-twisting grass… patches of slick, decomposing leaves… gravel outcrops lurking under the turf… tufted islands jutting up unexpectedly… eroded foot-traps masked by grass… not to mention big fat Roman snails and the odd duck's nest. <br /><br />In short, the hill is a natural obstacle course containing just about every impediment Mother Nature could come up with, making it difficult to <em>walk</em> down, let alone run down. <br /><br />"It's nearly a grass cliff," says Rob Seex, the current master of ceremonies. "It's not quite vertical, but it <em>is</em> steep." <br /><br />So steep, in fact, that the runners don't dare start the race standing; instead, they sit at the starting line before flinging themselves off the ledge. <br /><br />There are three men's races and one for women each year. No one ever catches the cheese—the winner is simply the first runner to hit the bottom of the hill. <br /><br />"The trick is to try and stay on your feet," advises reigning champ Steve Brain. <br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NpTuN33xHPM/TuUsD2RFWoI/AAAAAAAAATM/oqQ7Xxrj08g/s1600/GPA+Photo.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" mda="true" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NpTuN33xHPM/TuUsD2RFWoI/AAAAAAAAATM/oqQ7Xxrj08g/s400/GPA+Photo.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Steve Brain in the lead, followed by another runner and Jason Kotwica in orange<br />GPA Images</td></tr></tbody></table><br />But very few runners manage that feat. "People literally fly through the air," Seex says. "It just looks <em>insane</em>. You will be amazed that people aren't more seriously hurt than they are." <br /><br />To clear the casualties, paramedics rely on special rescue equipment, abseiling down the hillside to reach the fallen runners, then strapping them into stretchers and lowering them to the bottom. <br /><br />For several years, the only group that would perform this service was a team of potholing fanatics—people who crawl into dark crevices for fun. Surprisingly, though, not even these hardcore cavers have ever chased the cheese. <br /><br />What's more, not even the organisers do it. <br /><br />Only a few inhabitants of Cooper's Hill (population: 39) have ever braved the event. <br /><br />Most of the organisers say they're too busy running things to actually run in the race. The emcee claims his height and a back injury prevented him from competing. <br /><br />"I'm six-foot-two, much too tall. You've got to be nice and short and five foot wide." <br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br />©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-8989891579952361325?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-81080419535824031882011-12-10T21:37:00.001Z2011-12-11T21:13:26.532ZFor sheer lunacy and danger, few events can rival cheese rolling. <br /><br />If you've never seen it, the ancient Gloucestershire tradition doesn't sound that daunting: a cheese is flung down a hill, and dozens of men chase it. <br /><br />Initially, I envisaged a wheel of cheese trundling down a long, grassy slope at a leisurely pace. Of course, some runners might take a tumble—that would explain the injuries every year—but they were probably reckless or just plain clumsy. <br /><br />In my naïveté, I even imagined that I might join in the fun. <br /><br />But then I saw Cooper's Hill. From the bottom, the racecourse doesn't seem that dangerous; from the top, it looks suicidal. <br /><br />No matter how much you've heard about it, no matter how many times you've seen pictures of it, nothing can prepare you for the full jaw-dropping impact of seeing the slope in person. <br /> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5Opon9xkUoM/TuUcktxyBaI/AAAAAAAAASs/dZuEaeeSWU8/s1600/no+idea+of+the+excessive+steepness+of+the+hill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" mda="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5Opon9xkUoM/TuUcktxyBaI/AAAAAAAAASs/dZuEaeeSWU8/s400/no+idea+of+the+excessive+steepness+of+the+hill.jpg" width="381" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/05/coopers_hill_cheeserolling.html" target="_blank">Matt Cardy/Getty Images on Boston.com</a></td></tr></tbody></table> The first known photograph of the event, back in 1911, assured readers: "This gives no idea of the excessive steepness of the hill." <br /><br />And even if you've seen this "excessive steepness" once, the fearsome plunge still comes as a shock when you visit again. <br /><br />Cooper's Hill marks the midpoint between Gloucestershire's three contrasting regions: the Vale of Severn, the Forest of Dean and the Cotswolds. <br /><br />Like its hilly counterparts, it's more of a mound than a mountain, not even 900 feet above sea level. <br /><br />As you're driving on the motorway—or the Roman-built Ermin Way—Cooper's Hill stands out as the one with the maypole on top and a grass ramp shaved through the trees. <br /><br />A narrow lane leads you up the side of the hill to the cluster of cottages at the foot of the racecourse, while walkers on the Cotswold Way will stumble across it about halfway through their 100-mile trek. <br /><br />Standing on the summit, you can see for miles across the uneasy mix of town, country and motorway that makes up the Severn Vale: industrial Brockworth crowding the foot of the hill, the spires of Gloucester Cathedral a few miles away, Cheltenham huddled in the distance, the jagged Malverns to the northwest, and the Black Mountains looming just over the border in Wales. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-8108041953582403188?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-71165915462884779202011-12-09T21:32:00.000Z2011-12-11T22:29:08.353Z<div style="text-align: center;"><strong>Chapter Two&nbsp;from <em>True Brits</em></strong></div><div style="text-align: center;"><strong>FEAR, FREEDOM AND THE FROMAGE FRAY: CHEESE ROLLING ON COOPER'S HILL </strong></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><strong>PART ONE: THE UNLIKELIEST REBELS </strong></div><br />For Iris Peasley and the other guardians of the event, there was never any question of cancelling it altogether. <br /><br />No one said as much; it was more of an unspoken conviction: <em>Who are we to stop it?</em> <br /><br />For that matter, who were the county council—or the media—or any other critics to stop a centuries-old tradition that was bigger than all of them put together? <br /><br />Iris had lived on Cooper's Hill for all but three of her 74 years—so long, in fact, that she could remember all the emcees from the past century. <br /><br />Even the cottage she and her husband lived in had links to the tradition, having been the home of Bill Brookes, master of ceremonies for more than 50 years starting in the late 1800s. <br /><br />For Brookes, the event was so important he chose to be buried in his top hat; another emcee had his ashes spread on the hilltop. Iris' uncle had also served in the post, and her father had been chairman of the organising committee for many years. <br /><br />So many of her friends and family members had worked so hard to carry on the tradition that she would have felt deeply responsible—guilty, even—for letting them down. <br /><br />And in the past year, the organisers had lost not one but two members, including Iris' own sister. Feeling duty-bound and bloody-minded, the committee resolved, at the same meeting where they cancelled the public spectacle, to hold a clandestine race on the usual date—only this event would take place just after dawn, while their critics were sleeping. <br /><br />So at six a.m. on that chilly Bank Holiday Monday in May 1998, Iris, her husband, and a group of unlikely rebels trudged out to the hill to defy the handwritten, black-and-white sign planted in the middle of the slope: <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><strong>CHEESE ROLLING CANCELLED.&nbsp;</strong>&nbsp;</div> <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OkjDynkawKQ/TuPmq-ifafI/AAAAAAAAASU/z72-3SfGc8Y/s1600/Cheese+rolling+cancelled--cropped.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="189" mda="true" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OkjDynkawKQ/TuPmq-ifafI/AAAAAAAAASU/z72-3SfGc8Y/s200/Cheese+rolling+cancelled--cropped.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Jean Jefferies, <br />from her book, <em><a href="http://www.cheese-rolling.co.uk/cheese_rolling_in_gloucestershire_the_book.htm" target="_blank">Cheese Rolling in Gloucestershire</a></em></td></tr></tbody></table> <br /><div style="text-align: center;"><strong>* * *</strong></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-7116591546288477920?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-55140377606840239212011-11-21T23:26:00.000Z2011-12-10T20:28:37.265Z<div align="left">Once they've left, though, Campden reverts to its carefully preserved beauty.<br /><br />In the late afternoon, the high street seems to glow in the setting sun, and if you try hard enough, you can just about imagine what the medieval market town must have looked like centuries ago.<br /><br />Failing that, you can always rent an X-rated video.<br /><br />The tourist office doesn't like to brag about it (I can't imagine why), but Campden served as a film location for an adult version of <em>The Canterbury Tales</em>, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1971.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sQxVB8JTGWE/Tssaqf9uMkI/AAAAAAAAAKw/27mxMY5wX0Y/s1600/Pasolini%2527s+Canterbury+Tales.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" hda="true" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sQxVB8JTGWE/Tssaqf9uMkI/AAAAAAAAAKw/27mxMY5wX0Y/s320/Pasolini%2527s+Canterbury+Tales.jpg" width="235" /></a></div><br />The choice of Campden was a neat coincidence. The oldest house on the high street was built by William Grevel, a wool merchant roughly the same age as Geoffrey Chaucer. Indeed, the two men probably knew each other from their dealings in London.<br /><br />Both were important players in the wool trade (albeit on opposite sides of the law), with Chaucer the customs official in charge of Wools, Skins and Hides, while Grevel was a wheeler-dealer and moneylender to Richard II, a factor that no doubt helped him win a pardon "for all unjust and excessive weighings and purchases of wool".<br /><br />In <em>The Canterbury Tales</em>, Chaucer satirised Grevel's type as the archetypal Merchant, a spiv who brags about profits even though he's secretly in debt.<br /><br /><em>How times change…</em><br /><br />Nearly six centuries later, Pasolini axed all of Chaucer's religious stories to focus on the bawdy ones in what is best described as <em>Saucy Chaucer: The Canterbury Tails</em>, a tacky spaghetti-sex flick featuring a mostly English cast dubbed in Italian.<br /><br />In other words, you can read the actors' lips (along with the subtitles), but what you hear is Italian.<br /><br />"Pasolini wasn't too bothered about the acting," a bit player recalled. "When one actor forgot his lines, he was told to just count to ten and it would be dubbed into Italian later."<br /><br />The X-rated film's "stars", such as they were, included Oscar-winner Hugh Griffith (best supporting actor in <em>Ben-Hur</em>) and Charlie Chaplin's daughter, Josephine, in "The Merchant's Tale" episode; sex farce stalwart Robin Askwith as a hooligan who urinates on a crowd before being killed (something that never happened in the <em>Confessions</em> series, unfortunately); Tom Baker and his, um, sonic screwdriver three years before he took over as Dr. Who; and finally, Pasolini as Chaucer, four years before his murder at the hands of a rent-boy.<br /><br />At the risk of making it sound more interesting than it actually is, the movie features bare bottoms and bodily functions galore; full male and female nudity; assorted straight, gay and three-in-a-bed sex; adultery and prostitution; fellatio, sodomy, masturbation, voyeurism, flagellation and torture; as well as surreal shots of a friar in bed with a watermelon and some chickens, horned demons buggering humans in Hell, and close-up shots of Satan's anus as he defecates sinful monks in a bout of friar-rhoea.<br /><br />The whole shebang ends with a fart and a hymn.<br /><br />For the scenes in Campden, the crew transformed it into a medieval market town, complete with dirt and straw covering the high street, serfs and geese gambolling around, and an apothecary selling his potions in the market hall.<br /><br />Hay bales acted as fig leaves for the indecencies of 20th century development.<br /><br />Even so, eagle-eyed viewers claim you can spot rogue TV antennas in Campden's high street.<br /><br />What with all the naked flesh on display during the rest of the film, though, these nitpickers were clearly missing the bigger picture.</div><div align="center"><br /><br /><strong>* * *</strong></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-5514037760684023921?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-87112479399470120542011-11-21T23:14:00.000Z2011-12-10T20:28:54.386ZTwo weeks after its "scoop", <em>The Sunday Independent</em> reported that the National Front was planning to fight an election in Cornwall for the first time in 19 years under the banner of "Keep Cornwall White".<br /><br />"NF supporters believe they can pull in a large slice of the votes—especially following the Darkie Day race row," it said, quoting an NF spokesman as saying: "We fully support the rights of white people in Padstow to celebrate Darkie Day. As for Bernie Grant and his ilk, they would be far from these shores, back in the Caribbean and Africa, under the National Front's humane repatriation and resettlement programme and no longer able to interfere in our country's internal affairs."<br /><br />Padstow's Darkies were horrified.<br /><br />"Whatever the National Front are saying is not what the people of Padstow believe. They are not welcome," one declared.<br /><br />Nevertheless, many observers predicted that Padstow's Darkie Day would soon come to an end. "And we can only hope it's not a violent one," lamented <em>The Western Morning News</em>.<br /><br />The only other Cornish village known to have a similar tradition quickly whitewashed its Darkies to avoid a similar controversy.<br /><br />Calstock, an hour from Padstow, had revived its "ancient" blackface tradition in 1983. Locals claimed that singing Cornish Christmas carols and collecting money had nothing to do with blacks or slavery; its roots were in the medieval traditions of "guising" and mumming, when people would darken their faces and entertain the crowds for food and money.<br /><br />In a canny move, the Calstock Darkies officially rebranded themselves the Calstock Guisers (pronounced "geezers") and painted white crosses over their black faces, forming the Cornish flag of St. Piran.<br /> <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IGxFLvTOgVo/TssWdSDGTXI/AAAAAAAAAKg/6gI-t9z26qg/s1600/St+Piran+flag+face.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" hda="true" height="239" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IGxFLvTOgVo/TssWdSDGTXI/AAAAAAAAAKg/6gI-t9z26qg/s320/St+Piran+flag+face.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An artsy take on St. Piran's flag, courtesy of <a href="http://artcornwall.org/">ArtCornwall.org</a></td></tr></tbody></table>Padstow's Darkies also agreed to some alterations after meeting with the police and the local branch of the Commission for Racial Equality in the run-up to Christmas.<br /><br />"But we refused, point-blank, not to go out," one local said. "The police didn't want us to dark our faces up or anything—I mean, that would've made a mockery of it."<br /><br />So they compromised.<br /><br />The Padstow Darkies became the Padstow Mummers, with black faces but no minstrel-style white make-up around their eyes or mouths. Most importantly, they agreed to substitute "mummers" for the word "niggers" in their songs.<br /><br />Even so, a national broadsheet revived the controversy the following year with an article threatening that the National Front might march in Padstow.<br /><br />Throughout the furore, though, few (if any) of the journalists, politicians or other outsiders who commented on Darkie Day ever actually saw it.<br /><br />After all, who in their right mind would want to spend Christmas or New Year's with a bunch of "racist rednecks" in Cornwall?<br /><br /><div align="center"><br /><strong>* * *</strong></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-8711247939947012054?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-85046225882923201412011-11-06T23:16:00.001Z2011-12-10T20:29:27.871Z<div>In any event, Cobbett has had plenty of company, past and present, in critiquing the Cotswolds.<br /><br />A cleric visiting in 1836 declared Campden "a dull, clean, disused market town".<br /><br />More recently, Joanna Trollope, the <em>grande dame</em> of cottage-in-the-country fiction, dissed her native Gloucestershire in terms that made the Cotswolds sound like the Third World.<br /><br />"Children in these honey-coloured villages go to school with no underclothes," she claimed. "Teachers in the beautiful Cotswolds find pupils scavenging through rubbish bins."<br /><br />Fellow Cotswold resident Jilly Cooper gamely agreed: "The county has got jolly rough areas… Where I live is ravishingly pretty. There's a gorgeous village school. I have no idea if the children in it are wearing knickers or not. But there are problems in some areas with poverty."<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k9cpBMYX41c/TsnTvt-H_UI/AAAAAAAAAKI/b2mxiFxfZyQ/s1600/Jilly+Cooper+Riders.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" hda="true" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k9cpBMYX41c/TsnTvt-H_UI/AAAAAAAAAKI/b2mxiFxfZyQ/s200/Jilly+Cooper+Riders.jpg" width="131" /></a></div><br />A famous Trollope's remarks about knickers were bound to have outsiders in stitches—"Rural Idyll Caught With Its Pants Down," sniggered <em>The Guardian</em>.<br /><br />But the residents of Britain's biggest "Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty" were not amused. After all, talk like that can drive down property prices.<br /><br />"We just hope people do not take her comments too seriously," a tourist official said. "I have never seen anyone knickerless in the Cotswolds."<br /><br /><em>Well, that's a relief.<br /></em>Knickers firmly intact, Campden manages to attract plenty of well-to-do outsiders, including retirees, weekenders and "merchant bankers (who) buy mansions with their bonuses," to quote Trollope.<br /><br />For moneyed newcomers, Campden represents the best of both worlds: a typically English setting, complemented by the finer (foreign) things in life.<br /><br />It's the kind of place where you could easily hear a transplanted Londoner say: "Dinner at the <em>taverna</em> sounds fine, dear. I'm going to nip to the shop for some marmalade and <em>Le Monde</em>."<br /><br />In short, the town is the epitome of England's "in Europe, but not of Europe" stance—the equivalent of having your cake… and eating it.<br /><br />Inevitably, Campden is also a magnet for whistle-stop tourists looking to "do" the Cotswolds in as little as 24 hours.<br /><br />In 1931, a travel writer walked 20 miles around the area without seeing a single car; nowadays, you'd be doing well to walk a mile without seeing 20 cars.<br /><br />"Too… many… visitors," complains Ben Hopkins when I ask him about the changes he's seen in the newly styled "Capital of the North Cotswolds".<br /><br />"Tisn't the traffic so much—it's the coaches, stop in the middle of town, spew out about 50,000 foreigners a year. I don't think they do the town any good. They walk up and down, and then they get in and go. Half an hour, hour, and gone."</div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-8504622588292320141?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-84264696961787207932011-11-06T23:10:00.000Z2011-12-10T20:29:47.789Z<div>Strolling through Campden today, it's hard to imagine that this affluent, honey-gold town in the Cotswold Hills was once a virtual Mount Olympus of shin kicking.<br /><br />With its artists' studios, antiques shops, and upmarket hotels and restaurants, Chipping Campden seems too well-heeled to have ever hosted a blood sport like shin kicking (the "chipping" prefix is a reference to its former status as a market town, rather than the damage inflicted by footfighting).<br /><br />For many visitors—Brits and foreigners alike—the Cotswolds in general and Campden in particular represent their dream of the English countryside made reality.<br /><br />Green fields and hedges surround the town, and its gently curved high street seems to have been hewn from a single block of grey-gold Cotswold stone.<br /><br />G.M. Trevelyan, a popular historian of the 1940s, called it "the most beautiful village street now left in the island", which naturally made it "the most beautiful in Europe".<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rDWZJpHfP2s/TsnLWZh4U2I/AAAAAAAAAJg/kk_twbd9XFE/s1600/Chipping+Campden+watercolor+by+John+Davis.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" hda="true" height="275" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rDWZJpHfP2s/TsnLWZh4U2I/AAAAAAAAAJg/kk_twbd9XFE/s400/Chipping+Campden+watercolor+by+John+Davis.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chipping Campden Market Hall by John Davis</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Much of this beauty dates from the era of the Golden Fleece, when England's wealth came off the back of Cotswold sheep.<br /><br />Campden's oldest mansion, built by a wool merchant in the 14th century, features a sundial, gargoyles, and a novel form of ventilation for the time (chimneys rather than holes punched in the roof).<br /><br />Further down stands a timber market hall, the Jacobean focal point amid the rows of Georgian and Regency-era houses, wood-beamed tearooms and pubs and coaching inns with arched carriageways leading off into courtyards.<br /><br />At the end of the mile-long high street, the large church towers over what little is left of Campden's 17th-century manor house, the exotic fantasy of Sir Baptist Hicks, one of the richest Britons of all time.<br /><br />Still, not everyone has been bowled over by Campden and the Cotswolds.<br /><br />William Cobbett slated the area in his <em>Rural Rides</em> in 1826. In the first place, he wrote, the name was all wrong: "Cotswold Hills" was a tautology, since wold means hill. Worse, he thought the region was "an ugly country" with "less to please the eye than any other I have ever seen".<br /><br />Maybe that was because back then, the buildings were whitewashed, covering up their golden stone. </div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-8426469696178720793?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-91052988275199689572011-11-06T22:55:00.000Z2011-12-10T20:30:02.133Z<div>However, their biggest stunt was yet to come.<br /><br />"We dug our own graves on Dover's Hill," Ben says.<br /><br />While a marching band distracted the crowd, Ben and Joe, wearing neckerchiefs and old-fashioned shepherd's smocks, slipped into their shallow graves covered by coffin boards and turf.<br /><br />After the band finished, two men disguised as poachers came walking up the hill carrying a jug of cider.<br /><br />"I got a rabbit down 'ere!" one of them shouted and started digging frantically.<br />To the crowd's surprise, the poachers soon discovered the graves and lifted the shin kickers onto the ground.<br /><br />"They lay us down, give us a drink of cider, and we started shin kickin'."<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q9gkFITQOsM/TsnG4KDpLHI/AAAAAAAAAJA/O0ZUbeA4QqU/s1600/Festival+of+Britain+poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" hda="true" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q9gkFITQOsM/TsnG4KDpLHI/AAAAAAAAAJA/O0ZUbeA4QqU/s1600/Festival+of+Britain+poster.jpg" /></a></div><br />The BBC was on hand to record the event in a black-and-white newsreel that opens with pastoral music and scenic shots of Campden and its Olimpicks.<br /><br />"Among the villages of the Cotswolds was found renewed proof last week that the Festival is Britain's," intones a tea-and-crumpets voice. "At Chipping Campden, it was marked by seven days of celebrations, including a revival of the Cotswold Games."<br /><br />Cut to Ben and Joe locked in combat, swiping at each other's legs. When one of them swings, the other jumps back.<br /><br />"A favourite item then was always a shin-kicking contest, brought to life again this day by two local young men. They have volunteered to resurrect this duel and show how shins were broken years ago."<br /><br />Ben and Joe kicked and feinted until they got tired, having decided beforehand who would lose.<br /><br />"I lost the toss," Ben says. "It was <em>really</em> good, I thought. And that was the beginning of all that."</div><div align="center"><br /><strong>* * *</strong></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-9105298827519968957?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-67039542913925091492011-11-06T22:54:00.001Z2011-12-10T20:30:13.185Z<div>In the spirit of revival, the organisers decided to resurrect the sadistic sport, if only for show.<br /><br />Ben was roped in when his best friend, Joe Chamberlain, volunteered. "I didn't mind, I thought it was a bit of fun," he chuckles. "We were young and silly."<br /><br />Both married and in their thirties, Ben and Joe could have been siblings, what with their hooded eyes and jutting jaws.<br /><br />In a photo from the time, they're standing side by side laughing, brothers in arms, one in a pinstriped jacket and paisley tie, the other in a flat cap and overalls.<br /><br />Although Joe worked in town at the chemist's and Ben was a farmer, they lived next door to each other in Campden; the couples would nip into each other's houses for tea and conversation—"very sociable, like".<br /><br />And shin kicking—even the pretend kind—was best done among friends.<br /><br />One over-enthusiastic swing would be enough to infuriate anyone and turn a good-natured display into a grudge match. Ben and Joe tried to check their blows, kicking hard enough to make it look realistic but pulling back just before impact. They also had padding sewn inside their trousers.<br /><br />"Not <em>real</em> padding," Ben says. "It was just a double thickness on our trousers."<br /><br />"They Call It Sport, But We Say It's Plain Crazy!" a newspaper exclaimed, with a photo of Ben kicking wildly at Joe's bare shins (but missing by a country mile).<br /><br />Shin kickers of yore supposedly prepared by deadening their legs with hammers. So Ben pretended to do the same for reporters:<br /><br />"Tom Barnes, a 79-year-old local blacksmith, skilfully swung his seven-pound hammer to fall with a thump on the shinbone of 34-year-old farmer Ben Hopkins. And Ben, he winced a little, then—'A little harder if you please, Tom,'—he said.<br /><br />Tom obliged."<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Sb9_07N0gws/Tsm8iG8vigI/AAAAAAAAAIg/zze5euvWYaQ/s1600/blacksmith+hammer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" hda="true" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Sb9_07N0gws/Tsm8iG8vigI/AAAAAAAAAIg/zze5euvWYaQ/s320/blacksmith+hammer.jpg" width="320" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-6703954291392509149?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-59848028831663937022011-11-06T22:51:00.001Z2011-12-10T20:30:25.434Z<div>Not many men live to dig their own grave, let alone climb out of it. But Ben Hopkins was planning to do just that in the summer of 1951.<br /><br />The Festival of Britain had revitalised the nation, boosting morale at a time when there were still shortages of food and housing six years after World War Two.<br /><br />In London, the organisers of the five-month extravaganza strained to look to the future, commissioning fantastical attractions called Skylon, the Dome of Discovery and the Outer Space Pavilion.<br /><br />However, in the old Cotswold town of Chipping Campden, the locals planned to celebrate their Britishness by doing what came naturally: reliving the past.<br /><br />The festival's timing happened to mark nearly a century since the abolition of a little-known event that linked England with the ancient Olympian Games and the modern Olympics.<br /><br />England's very own "Cotswold Olimpicks" had been held since at least 1612 on Dover's Hill outside Campden and survived until 1852, when rowdiness gave the authorities an excuse to shut it down.<br /><br />Ninety-nine years later, the people of Chipping Campden decided to revive their old-fashioned Olimpicks as their contribution to Britain's Festival.<br /><br />Instead of standard track-and-field events, these Olimpicks would feature tug-o'-war, sack races, morris dancing, greasy-pole climbing and "throwing the sheaf"—hurling a hay bale with a pitchfork.<br /><br />But it fell to Ben and a friend to re-enact the most infamous sport of them all: shin kicking, a brutal form of wrestling once common in England, Wales, and parts of America.<br /><br />Contestants would square off, lock arms and hack at each other's shins until one of them was thrown to the ground.<br /> <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2U9v31NUshs/Tsm2CyUSnlI/AAAAAAAAAIA/Pt0L1c9TfJs/s1600/Shin+Kicking+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" hda="true" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2U9v31NUshs/Tsm2CyUSnlI/AAAAAAAAAIA/Pt0L1c9TfJs/s1600/Shin+Kicking+pic.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.emmawoodphotos.co.uk/blog/?p=91" target="_blank">Photo by Emma Wood</a></td></tr></tbody></table>In the old days, shin kickers wore metal toecaps on their boots, leaving losers—and winners—with permanently dented shinbones. Some were crippled for life, and a few even died from their injuries. As a result, the pastime itself died out by the early 1900s. </div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-5984802883166393702?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-4915827244999846472011-11-05T23:04:00.001Z2011-12-10T20:30:43.216Z<div>The debate soon turned into a Town vs. Country clash with a Cornish twist, pitting critics from 'up-country' against the salt-of-the-earth 'Westcountry'… "politically correct zealots in the big cities" vs. "two or three dozen Padstow people"… and the "London media" vs. local papers that were "Flying the Flag for Cornwall" (the motto of <em>The Sunday Independent</em>). <br /><br />Most importantly, the uproar seemed to reflect the ancient conflict between the English, the offspring of Anglo-Saxon invaders, and the Cornish, who regarded themselves as the country's true natives. <br /><br />Whereas callers to a radio chat show in London loudly condemned Darkie Day, most letters to newspapers in Cornwall supported the tradition. For natives, Darkie Day became a symbol of their dying culture. <br /><br />"Some people will always try to put us Cornish people down," wrote a man from St. Columb. "If there are people out there not liking 'Darkie Days', they can always cross the Tamar Bridge and leave us Cornish people in peace." <br /><br />What's more, the controversy came at a time when many traditional aspects of British life were being denounced as "politically incorrect". <br /><br />A couple of years earlier, Granada TV reportedly imposed a "blackout" on the Britannia Coconutters of Bacup, Lancashire, because they darkened their faces with boot polish as part of their Easter dance routine. <br /><br />The "Nutters" argued that it had nothing to do with race—in fact, the blackface routine may have been imported in the 19th century by Cornish miners who were mocking morris dancers (though one theory holds that the word "morris" comes from "Moorish", which may explain why morris teams such as the Flag Crackers of Yorkshire still wear black makeup). <br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--SexTFHv7SA/TsnSUOGOeYI/AAAAAAAAAJ4/mLY08cHhvZ8/s1600/Bacup+Coconutters.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" hda="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--SexTFHv7SA/TsnSUOGOeYI/AAAAAAAAAJ4/mLY08cHhvZ8/s1600/Bacup+Coconutters.bmp" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Bacup Coconutters</td></tr></tbody></table>In their defence of Darkie Day, the Cornish kept coming out with statements of shock and dismay that were just too innocent to be believed—at least from an urban perspective. <br /><br />"It is an old Cornish custom, and they are not taking the mickey out of coloured people," a woman from Plymouth said. <br /><br />"They just go round singing and dancing dressed up with their faces darkened," shrugged Padstow's mayor. <br /><br />"Although the word nigger in several songs could be seen as inflammatory nowadays, it is not meant in that way," another Padstonian explained. <br /><br />One local admitted that as a girl, she didn't know the day after Christmas was called Boxing Day; she knew it only as "Darkie Day". <br /><br /><em>The Western Morning News</em> blamed the uproar on "an increasingly censorious urban attitude": "To brand the people of a small Westcountry fishing port redneck racists who deserve to have their town turned into a minefield is a disgraceful slur and entirely counterproductive to genuine racial harmony." <br /><br />By the end of the article, the paper turned things around, somehow arguing that the condemnation had been "so offensive and bigoted" that it was effectively a "racist attack" in its own right—against the Cornish! <br /><br />Against this "racist attack", Padstow found an unlikely defender in a big-city black journalist. "You can make yourself see racism anywhere, if you look hard enough—even in a Cornish town on the day they celebrate the abolition of slavery," wrote Darcus Howe in <em>The New Statesman</em>. <br /><br />The pundit and broadcaster had first visited Cornwall back in the 1960s and returned many times since. Chiding Grant, who was the MP for Tottenham—"not exactly a Cornish constituency"—he added: "May I offer a little local history lesson for our metropolitan radicals?" <br /><br />Then Howe regurgitated an unlikely tale about the event's origins: "Slave ships used to anchor in Padstow to avoid storms. The slaves would disembark and entertain themselves and the local people in a song and dance routine," he said. <br /><br />Citing a "local expert", Howe concluded that Darkie Day was really an anti-slavery celebration: "The critics maintain that Darkie Day is some time-warped throwback to the bad old days of <em>The Black and White Minstrel Show</em>. The reality is the opposite; but the politically correct brigade never stopped for long enough to find that out." </div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-491582724499984647?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-82474023407813422092011-11-05T22:55:00.001Z2011-12-10T20:30:56.460Z<div>WOULD <strong><em>YOU</em></strong> BAN IT? shrieked the front page of <em>The Sunday Independent</em> a couple of weeks later.<br /><br />The Plymouth tabloid—no relation to its highbrow national namesake—specialised in shouty headlines, announcing everything in bold-faced capitals that made even the most innocuous news look alarming: ASSEMBLY 'YES' the paper would cry, or SCHEME WILL DO A LOAD OF GOOD.<br /><br />But for Padstonians, nothing good could come from the paper's "exclusive" about Darkie Day, with its front-page photo of local men, women and children in blackface.<br /><br />Posing with their drums and accordions, the whole dark-faced gang was cheesing for the camera, blissfully unaware of the national controversy about to be set in motion.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-co1Ob_8PADU/TsnIcpKD0sI/AAAAAAAAAJQ/FzelYnb9k_w/s1600/Darkie+Day--Copy+for+Background+image+credit+Sunday+Independent+%25283%2529+-+Copy-1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" hda="true" height="232" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-co1Ob_8PADU/TsnIcpKD0sI/AAAAAAAAAJQ/FzelYnb9k_w/s400/Darkie+Day--Copy+for+Background+image+credit+Sunday+Independent+%25283%2529+-+Copy-1.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br />"To a West Country community it's a bit of harmless fun," the article began. "But to race watchdogs it's evil—and they want it banned NOW."<br /><br />"I'm not black and it offends me," huffed Eileen Bortey, the 'chairperson' of Cornwall's new Race Equality Council.<br /><br />"Padstow is a beautiful place. It's a great pity it is being defiled in this way. If we need to kick up a stink, we will. It has to be condemned."<br /><br />Compared with the offended white woman, Britain's best-known black politico, who sometimes wore African robes to Parliament (even though he was Caribbean), was initially a model of restraint.<br /><br />"I thought the days when white people dressed up as black people were well behind us," London MP Bernie Grant was quoted as saying.<br /><br />After a token defence from "Ziggy", Padstow's lone black resident—he called Darkie Day "great fun" (but then, he <em>would</em> say that, wouldn't he?)—the report ended with locals vowing to continue the tradition, while the police warned that it could be banned if it stirred up trouble.<br /><br /><em>"What do YOU think?"</em> the paper enquired, sensing it was on to a sure thing. <em>"Write to Race Row, Sunday Independent…"<br /></em>And so, in just 16 paragraphs, a local tabloid took an obscure tradition—so back-of-beyond, in fact, that hardly anyone in Cornwall had ever heard of it—and transformed it into a national scandal.<br /><br />Within days, follow-ups appeared in national papers ranging from <em>The Guardian</em> and <em>The Daily Mail</em>. "A dark day for tradition as the race police sail into port," rued the <em>Mail</em>, alongside a photo of Ziggy posing on the pier.<br /><br />On national radio, a shock jock branded Padstonians "racist rednecks" and urged listeners to boycott the town. Rumours circulated that previously obscure groups like the Cornwall Race Equality Council were threatening to bus black protesters into Padstow with 'lighted up' faces.<br /><br />And soon enough, Bernie Grant cranked up the rhetoric with a veiled warning to Padstonians: "If they want their nice idyllic little town to turn into a minefield, that's up to them." </div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-8247402340781342209?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-30004294118095953252011-11-05T22:44:00.001Z2011-12-10T20:31:11.788Z<div>As Anita was mulling this over, and wondering whether she should buy a card—or anything at all—she couldn't help but overhear the attendant chattering on the phone.<br /><br />"Are you coming down tomorrow?" the nice lady asked her friend on the other end of the line. "Yeah, of course, it's Darkie Day, isn't it?"<br /><br />"And <em>immediately</em>, it was like someone had <em>jerked</em> my head on a string," Anita recalls. "I <em>snapped</em> my head to look at her, and it was so <em>fast</em>, I—I almost cricked my neck."<br /><br />Red-faced, the woman spluttered into the phone, "Oh, uh, okay, Jean, I'll call ya back, I'll call ya back."<br /><br />But Anita was already gone. As she stormed outside to take the sea air, she kept asking herself: <em>What the hell is Darkie Day?</em><br /><br />Unfortunately, she was bound to find out: they had reservations at Rick Stein's on New Year's Day. The celebrity fish freak owned four eateries in town, as well as a hotel and a Seafood School. Foodies travelled from around the country to eat at his flagship restaurant in "Padstein". So they couldn't just cancel their reservations.<br /><br />In the car on the way back to their cottage, Anita began to worry. "Oh my God, did you hear what she said?" she asked her future in-laws.<br /><br />"Oh, what was that, dear?"<br /><br />They had never heard of Darkie Day—and they'd been visiting Cornwall for 30 years.<br /><br />They were educated, <em>highly</em> progressive people; in fact, they were so colourblind—in the well-meaning sense of the word—that they didn't seem to understand why she might be concerned.<br /><br />"It's probably nothing," they said.<br /><br />But that didn't make her feel better.<br /><br />Usually, when she went to Cornwall, she was the only dark face around—you didn't see many Asians, and <em>certainly</em> in the winter, you didn't see <em>any</em> outsiders. When you walked into the locals' pub—<em>their</em> pub—everyone would stop, and they'd register you; you were a curiosity. And God only <em>knew</em> what the Cornish did when everyone went away and they were left to their own devices. Who knew what happens in the <em>depths</em> of Britain? <em>Darkie Day</em> didn't sound exactly positive for black people, did it? It was like "Coon Day" or "Racial Slur Day" or something.<br /><br />From the woman's reaction, Anita couldn't tell if it was something innocuous or sinister. It was like some sort of secret <em>ritual</em> they were planning, that outsiders weren't meant to know about. Was it some sort of local Ku Klux Klan?<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-p0ywCc4kQ8E/TsnECvQ891I/AAAAAAAAAIw/S2CzEDdQHYs/s1600/KKK+irony.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" hda="true" height="262" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-p0ywCc4kQ8E/TsnECvQ891I/AAAAAAAAAIw/S2CzEDdQHYs/s320/KKK+irony.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Irony: It strikes at the best of times"</td></tr></tbody></table><br />At the very least, it was probably going to be very uncomfortable and embarrassing; at the very most—well, who knew? Possibly a white-sheet job. If she got a sniff that it was even remotely Ku Klux Klanny, she would be out of there like a bat out of hell.<br /><br />By the time they returned on Darkie Day—that was the other weird thing, they didn't call it "New Year's Day"—Anita had just about rationalised away her fears. <em>Maybe it's just an expression… maybe it's nothing… maybe I'm overreacting. </em></div><br />Even so, she couldn't help but feel apprehensive.<br /><div><br />Just before lunch, it started pouring down rain, so they took shelter in a pub next to the harbour. And when Anita walked in, all the regulars stopped to look. Maybe it was because they didn't expect someone with a dark face—or <em>maybe</em> it was because they knew what was coming.<br /><br />Suddenly, the doors were flung open, and there was a flurry of noise and music. Two-dozen people rushed in, all blacked up, dressed in rags, with big white circles drawn around their eyes and rouge lips to make them look big and fat, and these <em>dreadful</em> Negro wigs on. And they were singing in thick Cornish accents, <em>bursting</em> into laughter, cheering and stomping—it was obviously the big event of the day.<br /><br />The cavalcade continued around the pub, and… everyone thought it was completely normal.<br /><br />But for Anita, it was <em>really</em> horrific.<br /><br />There she was, on New Year's Day, hoping to have a quiet drink, and suddenly there was this assault on her senses—and sensibilities. It wasn't threatening; it was shocking.<br /><br /><em>This is modern, multicultural Britain—and people are running around dressed up like 'niggers'!</em> </div><div align="center"><br /><strong>* * *</strong></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-3000429411809595325?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-61243782694229724062011-11-05T22:37:00.000Z2011-12-10T20:31:28.561Z<div><em>What the hell is Darkie Day?!?</em><br /><br />"Anita" had no idea what she was in for. Her parents were Indian, but Britain was her home, and she'd been to Cornwall several times with her boyfriend, who hailed from the West Country (albeit genteel Somerset).<br /><br />She and Ian liked the Duchy so much they decided to spend New Year's there, relishing the chance to see one of Britain's top tourist destinations in the raw, without too many daytrippers around to spoil the atmosphere.<br /><br />Off-season, Padstow felt like a close-knit fishing community; by comparison, St. Ives seemed positively cosmopolitan.<br /><br />Although Cornwall one of the whitest counties in England (which is saying something), Anita and Ian never had any problems there—unlike parts of south London, where you risked assault simply for passing through the neighbourhood on the train.<br /><br />Occasionally the Cornish would stare, but more out of curiosity than anything else: mixed-race couples were a rarity, and Anita's dark skin and black hair contrasted sharply with Ian's very English lack of pigment.<br /><br />The day before New Year's, the two of them visited Padstow with Ian's parents, strolling along the small harbour and dipping into the shops in the Old Town, which was little more than a knot of streets next to the waterfront.<br /><br />While browsing among the watercolours, Cornishware and alabaster tiles decorated with crabs, Anita happened to notice something else in the corner—a small collection of golliwogs.<br /><br /><em>Let it go,</em> she thought.<br /><br />One time she and her sister had been shopping in York, and they'd spotted some of the googly-eyed ragdolls on display.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UdvzBCqENIw/Tsm5SSbNFZI/AAAAAAAAAIQ/QpF01slLXLo/s1600/golliwog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" hda="true" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UdvzBCqENIw/Tsm5SSbNFZI/AAAAAAAAAIQ/QpF01slLXLo/s320/golliwog.jpg" width="283" /></a></div><br />"Excuse me," her sister told the attendant, "some people would find these offensive—black people, for example."<br /><br />"Well, black people don't have to buy them, do they?" snapped the Yorkshirewoman behind the counter.<br /><br />And it turned into a massive row.<br /><br />As a journalist and self-professed member of north London's chattering classes, Anita's natural instinct would have been to jump on her high horse and get all <em>Guardianish</em> about it: "This is outrageous!"<br /><br />But she wasn't the kind to make a scene, especially not in front of her future in-laws. <em>I'm with Ian's parents, let's not start a massive row. </em>And anyway, people in Cornwall would have no idea what she was talking about, and they wouldn't really <em>care</em>. You could moan all you liked, and they would think, 'Well, you're the first dark face that I've seen in God knows how long, so if I'm selling golliwogs, and they're selling like hotcakes, then to hell with political niceties." </div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-6124378269422972406?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8146266568384676935.post-66836869766604215272011-11-05T19:18:00.002Z2011-12-10T20:32:00.488Z<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YaPh0lyjBY4/TsmTszs9_rI/AAAAAAAAAHE/QHILZtfuBlo/s1600/Darkie3.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 300px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 231px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5677231203279568562" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YaPh0lyjBY4/TsmTszs9_rI/AAAAAAAAAHE/QHILZtfuBlo/s400/Darkie3.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><div align="left">Now, don't get the wrong idea—most people in Padstow will tell you they're <em>not</em> racist, at least no more than anyone else in this once-great country.<br /><br />"Coloureds" are welcome to stroll along the harbour or dine in Rick Stein's restaurant or stay in the Metropole overlooking the Caribbean-blue waters and golden beaches where the rich and royal come to play. The Cornish wouldn't treat them any differently to any other outsiders.<br /><br />And anyway, how can you be racist if there aren't any blacks around to be racist against?<br /><br />Except for one, of course—good ole Ziggy, a West Indian who's lived here for years (or did he move away?).<br /><br />At any rate, it never bothered him. And the former mayor, why, she used to march in London to Free Mandela, and she never thought twice about the pot calling the kettle black, so to speak.<br /><br />All of which goes to show why on Boxing Day and New Year's Day—when there aren't too many emmets about—Old Padstonians see nothing wrong in dressing up like blackface minstrels, parading through town and belting out songs about "niggers".<br /><br />At first, they seem to come out of nowhere, like the tradition itself. The drums, accordions and voices pulse through "Padsta" like a heartbeat, permeating the air as they make their way down the hill from the social club.<br /><br />The rough music—an infectious noise—resonates through the winding lanes, but it's hard to tell where it's coming from. Just when you think you're close to the source, it seems to fade away.<br /><br />Then you turn the corner, and—there they are! Two dozen men, women and children done up as surreal stereotypes: Cornish approximations of Aunt Jemimas, Jim Crows, Uncle Toms, Sambos, Mammies, Pickaninnies and Rastafarians, all with burnt cork or greasepaint smudged onto their ruddy white faces.<br /><br />The men sport bow ties and sequined vests, plus top hats and bowlers festooned with tinsel and flowers.<br /><br />A couple of jokers wear black crazy-curl wigs, the kind you see at football matches, while an elderly woman is sporting sunglasses and a Rasta Novelty Tam, her fake dreadlocks decorated with blue and gold Christmas balls.<br /><br />The rest of the women favour the Mammy chimneysweep look, as typified by a little girl with a smudged face, headscarf, gaudy earrings, long skirt and red apron hanging down to her knees.<br /><br />No fewer than eight accordions lead the group, followed by a handful of drums, rattling collection boxes, bone castanets and a couple of "lagerphones"—long staffs studded with bottlecaps, so that when they beat the ground, they ching-ching in time to the music.<br /><br />The movable hootenanny struts through town singing snatches of "Polly Wolly Doodle", "Oh Susanna" and "Uncle Ned", shocking outsiders and serenading friends and relatives before getting down to the serious business of drinking.<br /><br />At each of Padstow's half a dozen pubs, the merrymakers burst in singing and hollering, fill their boxes for charity, and then stop for a pint (or three).<br /><br />Whenever a pale-faced local walks in unawares, the women will kiss him and smear burnt cork all over his face. More laughter and singing, and then it's off to another pub along the crescent-shaped quay.<br /><br />As they roll out into the blinding winter sunshine, chatting and singing, the music swells to a climax. One drummer, his double chin as pink as his face is black, throws back his head to belt out the end of "Uncle Ned", the bit where Al Jolson would have dropped to one knee and brayed:<br /><br />There's no more work for the poor old <em>maaaaaaaan</em>—<br />Heeeeeee's gone where the good niggerrrs go, aye oh<br />He's gone where the good niggerrrs go.<br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>* * *</strong></div></div><div style="text-align: center;">©J.R. Daeschner </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Like what you've read? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://true-brits.blogspot.com/p/how-to-buy-true-brits.html" target="_blank">You can buy <em><strong>True Brits</strong></em> here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8146266568384676935-6683686976660421527?l=true-brits.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>JR Daeschnernoreply@blogger.com0