Darkie Day (Part 15): The First Bona Fide Show Business

After Jim Crow's transatlantic success, minstrelsy quickly became commercialised.

Stephen Foster made his name writing minstrel songs and became the first composer to receive royalties for hits like "Oh! Susanna" and "Camptown Races".

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.

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).

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".

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.

"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.

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.

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").

In Britain, however, minstrels remained incredibly popular right up until only a few decades ago.

Unbelievably, The Black and White Minstrel Show 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.

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.

The Black and White Minstrel Show didn't cakewalk off the air until 1978, and it had millions of fans right to the bitter end.

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.

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.

©J.R. Daeschner

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Shin Kicking (Part 15): The Inspiration for the Modern Olympics

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.

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.

The Wenlock Olympian Games included ancient contests like racing and modern events such as football.

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.


Dr. William Penny Brookes

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.
However, Penny Brookes had his own puritanical leanings.

As an archetypal Victorian reformer, he believed in temperance.

What's more, it wasn't enough that the games were fun; they had to serve a Higher Moral Purpose.

"As Christians we should, on moral grounds, endeavour to direct the amusement of the working classes—as patriots we should recognise and promote them."

Despite some powerful opponents, the doctor's crusade quickly grew from its village roots to become the National Olympian Association.

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.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin was that rarest of things: a Frenchman who admired Britain.

The future founder of the Olympics had read Tom Brown's Schooldays and come to believe in its ethos of "muscular Christianity".

"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.

The 27-year-old made a pilgrimage to Much Wenlock in 1890.

Unfortunately, Penny Brookes died four months before De Coubertin staged the first modern Olympics in 1896.

However, he is still regarded as "the father of the English Olympics", and Wenlock continues to host its games every July.

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.

The organisers stayed defiant to the end.

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."

* * *

©J.R. Daeschner

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Shin Kicking (Part 14): No Longer Healthy?

For opponents like Rev. Bourne, the best way to stop Dover's Games was to kick them off their turf.

Back in their founder's day, the hilltop had covered 500 acres of open land.

But even then, enclosure had been a threat.

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.

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.

The young crusader soon launched a campaign to enclose the rest of the hill.

At the same time, officials across the country were trying to shut down other local festivities.

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.

West Country native Thomas Hughes, a fair-minded man of the law, wrote nostalgically about shin kicking and backswording in his bestseller, Tom Brown's Schooldays, in 1857.

"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.

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.

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".

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Darkie Day (Part 14): The Kwanzaa Connection

Inevitably, European and African customs intermingled on the plantations of the British West Indies and the American South.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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".

Ironically, though, it coincides precisely with the beginning and end of Padstow's Darkie Days.

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.

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.

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.

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").

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":

De country for me
Is de country whar de people
Hab make poor nigga free.

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.

©J.R. Daeschner

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Darkie Day (Part 13): "A Filthy Abortion of a Song"

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.

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.

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.

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 The London Satirist.

However, Rice found a much wider audience in Britain than America, where his fans were mainly working-class.

"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."

Even a hardened satirist like Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, confessed that minstrel music "moistened (his) spectacles in a most unexpected manner".

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.)

"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 Demons of Disorder, his study of early blackface performers.

New World minstrels combined the music, masking and drama of traditions like "guising" and mumming that had been imported from the Old World.

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.

An English mummers' play from 1771 even features a black-faced character called Sambo.

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.

In the Old World, this ritual of social commentary was known as charivari, combining abuse and good humour. In fact, Punch, the famous satirical magazine, was originally subtitled The London Charivari.

Shin Kicking (Part 13): An Orgy of Booze, Sex and Crime

In real life, though, the reformers eventually won the tug-o'-war over Dover's Games.

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.

From Wikipedia: In this illustration for the novel Hepsey Burke, an Episcopal rector gets little pay because of interference from the rich man at the right, so he shovels stone to support himself and his wife. Here the rector confronts the rich man. 

Within two decades, though, they had degenerated into a marathon orgy of booze, sex and crime.

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.

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.

At least, that's the way critics portrayed it.

In 1846, a 25-year-old vicar fresh out of Oxford took over the parish.

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.

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".

It's tempting to depict the Olimpicks as one of those quaint old festivals that fell victim to puritanical Victorians.

But based on descriptions of the games—from Hobbinol'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.

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.

Oh—and instead of hundreds of police, picture a handful of bobbies trying to control the crowd.

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.

The most balanced portrayal of the event comes from a man whose mother profited from the chaos—all the while fearing for her life.

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:

"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."

Shin Kicking (Part 12): Ye Olde Wet T-Shirt Contest

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.

In The Spiritual Quixote, 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.

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".

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".

And there's no doubt the races were racy, the closest the 18th century got to a wet T-shirt contest.

In Hobbinol, 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..."

And the prize—a virtually see-through linen shift—didn't leave much to the imagination, either.

"They may make 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 health of your souls, shun, as you would the plague, these anti-Christian recreations..."

At first, the crowd mistakes the Methodist for a quack doctor; all they can hear are words like "health" and "plague".

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."

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.

"Thus unsuccessfully ended Wildgoose's first effort towards reforming the world."

Darkie Day (Part 12): A Fishy Tale

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.

To my mind, commemorating slaves' suffering by blacking up and singing about "niggers" would seem like more of a sick joke than an honest hommage. 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.

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.

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.

Americans and Europeans—particularly the British—share the blame for mimicking and ridiculing blacks onstage.

In 1799, a German immigrant named Gottlieb Graupner (now regarded as the father of orchestral music in America) entertained Boston as the banjo-strumming Gay Negro Boy.

And two decades later, a famous English actor, Charles Mathews, staged a one-man show in blackface called A Trip to America, lampooning a black production of Hamlet 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."

However, the undisputed founding fathers of the minstrel show were a couple of Yankees.

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.

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.

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:

"Wheel about and turn about, / And jump Jim Crow."

Shin Kicking (Part 11): Warm Spouting Gore

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.

The rivals trade vicious blows until:

"The sweat distils, and from their batter'd shins
The clotted gore distains the beaten ground."

At the end, Pastorel nails his challenger's ankle with "a furious stroke", bringing Hobbinol to his knees.

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:

"Like bombs the bottles fly
Hissing in the air, their sharp-edged fragments drench'd
In the warm spouting gore."

A justice of the peace (not unlike Somerville) stops the carnage—just in time for more "warm spouting gore" to begin.

No one wants to fight the reigning backswords champ—a slaughterman with a smashed nose and missing eye—so Hobbinol takes up the challenge.

Although he's smaller than Gorgonius, he's quicker on his feet… and he fights dirtier.

Instead of aiming for the giant's head, he attacks his shins with his cudgel.

The low blows infuriate the Cotswold Cyclops so much that he drops his guard.

Hobbinol then cracks him over the skull, sending him crashing out of the ring.

Somerville was a fan of Hogarth's; this is a spoof of the latter's "Gin Lane"

Although the Puritans had long since fallen from power, Somerville's moralising shows that their reforming zeal was still a force.

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".

Other reformers shared his views, particularly the spiritual heirs of the Puritans mocked as "Methodists".

Darkie Day (Part 11): Why Didn't It Occur to Us?

"I'd never 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.

"If it would've gone on in London, we would've said, 'Ooh, isn't that terrible?'"

And she would have been among the first to protest: after all, Keltie had the kind of credentials that wannabe liberals only dreamed about.

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.

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 The Daily Worker from the newsagents, so that one could be kept on display.

"But they said, no, it had to be under the counter, with the dirty magazines—dirty Communist rag," Keltie chuckles.

Her family's B&B, as advertised in The Daily Worker, served as a dacha-by-the-sea for party members, trade unionists and various urban lefties, including some black families.

However, the locals never gave them any trouble for having blacks in the house. "They always thought we were rather eccentric, I think."

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).

"I was dead keen to help anybody who was a slight underdog. I wanted to get out and change the world."

Even so, it wasn't until outsiders objected to Darkie Day that her eyes were opened.

"I had this discussion with mum, when we both decided that—'God how thick were we,'" 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, 'Why didn't it occur to us that wandering around, y'know blacking your faces up and dressing as negresses, why didn't it even cross our consciousness that it might be considered racist?'"

Keltie reckoned it was because Darkie Day had always been there.

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… non-racist somehow. They were very inclusive towards people who were down on their luck.

"Down here, race isn't really an issue because we don't have black families," she emphasises. "If you had a black 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 racist. 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 ever 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."

* * *

Haxey Hood (Part 6): Mud, Blood and Booze

The 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.

"I weigh 17 stone (240 pounds), and it didn't protect me," laughs Brian Briggs, wincing from the pain.

"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."

A similar thing happened two years ago, when Brian broke his collarbone.

"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."

This from the guy who just cracked his ribs on the field.

"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!"

What with all the drinking and scope for injury, you'd expect the paramedics to frown on the Hood.

However, the moustachioed man from St. John's Ambulance takes the casualties in stride.

"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."

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.

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.

"I shouldn'ta been in it, lad" he gasps. "Aye, I'd an 'eart attack three months ago."

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.

Mud, blood and booze in Old England; maybe I'm not so crazy after all.

* * *

©J.R. Daeschner

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Haxey Hood (Part 5): Me Hips Aren't Feelin' Too Clever

Spectators can get as close to the action as they dare—there are no sidelines, or boundaries, for that matter.

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.

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.

At one point, the players have to negotiate a muddy ledge onto a lower section of the field.

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.

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.

After much negotiation, the boggins break the stalemate by hoisting the Hood—or rather, the men attached to the Hood—past the breaking point.

Then it falls over again.

A little guy is ripped out of the body pile and hauled off, his legs dragging in the mud.

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!

Instead, the boggins drop his limp body on the field.

He's passed out, coated in mud except where his shirt's been pulled up, exposing the white, fish-belly skin of his stomach.

A St. John's Ambulance official huddles over him, cocking his head to get some air into his lungs.

Eventually, the guy's eyelids flutter to life, and he staggers to his feet like a discombobulated wino straight from the gutter.

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.

The right one even has a blotch of blood next to the pupil. He's been squeezed until his eyes popped!

Rather than going home or to the hospital, though, he hangs around the sidelines, waiting for another chance to jump in the Sway.

For Stephen Mitchell (initials: S&M), getting knocked down and out is all part of the fun.

"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."

"What?"

"The bones are crumblin'."

At 34, he has chronic arthritis in both hips.

"So why on earth do you do this?"

He pauses, then grins wildly. "It's the 'Ood—ya can't explain it. It's the 'Ood!"

©J.R. Daeschner

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Haxey Hood (Part 4): He Bet His House on Bog Snorkelling

In fairness to Haxey, though, I was profoundly depressed at the time.

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.

Only my family and a few friends knew my terrible secret.

It wasn't the kind of thing you talked about in polite company; not in professional North London, at least.

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.

Anyway, once I had enough material, I quit the day job, remortgaged the flat and took a year off to finish my book.

"That's a brave move," an ex-colleague said, "especially for someone with a child."

The subtext was clear—by "brave" he meant "stupid" and possibly "irresponsible".

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.

In my mind, I had wandered into shin kicking and stumbled onto The Big Book of Britain.

In reality, it looked like my work was going to end up buried among other misfiled titles at the library, somewhere between The Wacky World of Welding and Great Bison I Have Known.

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!"

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."

No doubt she cackled like Voldemort now as she threw another fifty-pound note on the fire.

Things had worked out for her… but what about me?

All that was the mental distortion, the hissing white noise warping my perceptions, when I first saw Haxey and the Hood.

On the rare occasions that it is mentioned by the media, they typically hype Haxey Hood as being ultraviolent.

But it isn't so much violent as… ultrasurreal—gloriously, profoundly absurd: a bizarre crush with no apparent reason for being; a seemingly meaningless struggle.

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.

The thing is, you can't even see the Hood, the object of all the grunting and shunting.

In rugby and football, at least the ball is regularly passed and kicked.

Not so the Hood. A leather cylinder, it quickly disappears in the crush only to resurface again at the end.

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.

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.

It takes nearly two hours for the writhing mass of humanity to cover 200 yards, mainly because it keeps keeling over in the mud.

And when the Sway collapses, it can take a while for the officials to untangle the limbs and unpick the carnage.

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.

©J.R. Daeschner

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Darkie Day (Part 10): Which Came First: Blacks or Bigots?

Padstow's merrymakers were also wary of me, but that was only natural—I was a stranger with a videocam.

"Have ya paid for them photos?" an ersatz Aunt Jemima asked me.

Once I put some money in the collection box, though, no one seemed to mind me tagging along.

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 (Darkie) Day.

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".

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.

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?"

This is the racial equivalent of the chicken-and-egg conundrum—which came first: blacks or bigots?

Race-baiters cut their teeth on this question, tearing into it like lions mauling an easy kill.

"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.

"Racism is usually (not always) about white people's attitudes, and that is essentially the problem."

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.

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.

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.

Shin Kicking (Part 10): First Blood and the Infirmities of Our People

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.

In theory, backswording, or cudgel "play", was less brutal than shin kicking (which was known simply as wrestling throughout much of the West Country).

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).

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.

Incredibly, some hard nuts competed in both sports on the same day.

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.

Apart from the possibility that women are indeed smarter than men, shrieking Blood! Blood! with the crowd wasn't very ladylike.

What's more, women had to cope with the consequences of such wilful stupidity, nursing the broken heads and bloodied shins.

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.

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.

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."

In modern money, that's barely £80 for bashers and £20 for bashees.

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.

While the famous painter satirised the excesses of Gin Lane 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).

For Somerville, Dover's Games were proof that England was going to pot.

"A country-wake is too sad an image of the infirmities of our own people," he wrote in the introduction to his satiric poem, Hobbinol, in 1740. "We see nothing but broken heads, bottles flying about, tables overturned, outrageous drunkenness, and eternal squabble."

Haxey Hood (Part 3): Fifty Miles From Spurn

Haxey 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.

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.

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.

Why use names when labels would suffice? Titles were the bourgeois affectations of soft southerners.

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.

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.

The Hood took place on what the locals called a hill, but Haxey Field sure looked flat to me.

And the weather didn't help, either. Apart from the mist and patches of snow, the sky was an industrial, boiler-room grey.

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.

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.

The Lord of the Hood and his Boggins

A book on the Port of Goole was called 50 Miles from Spurn—a fitting title for Haxey as well, or some kooky existentialist sketch:

A: (gloomily) "Where are we?"
B: "I don't know."
A: (joyously) "You don't know?"
B: "You know Spurn?"
A: (aghast) "Oh no. Not Spurn!"
B: "No, no—not Spurn. (Pause.) Fifty miles from it."

©J.R. Daeschner

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Haxey Hood (Part 2): The Guy With the Half-Goatee

James Bland happened to be the first person I bumped into in Haxey.

We were crushed up against the bar in last year's pre-match pub-crawl—the pre-Sway Sway, so to speak.

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.

'Blandie' immediately stood out.

Not because of his ginger mullet—short on top and wispy down the back—or his hooped earrings, but because of his goatee.

A half-goatee, actually, one side of his face bare and the other carpeted with red whiskers.

Was he an eccentric who re-enacted historical battles?

Or maybe a self-loathing Englishman who got kilted up like a Highland Scot on weekends?

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.

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.

Blandie has since upgraded
to a half-beard and dreadlocks

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.

So that was it—they were groomed especially for the occasion.

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.

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.

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.

"Just poosh on through, luv!" two pint-sized grannies told me. "That's what we do!"

Truth be told, I hadn't been very impressed with Haxey at first.

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: Scunthorpe… Scrooby… Grimsby… Goole.

Maybe the Saxons thought that if they gave them ugly names, the Vikings wouldn't bother pillaging them.

Unfortunately, it didn't work then, and now it succeeds only in scaring off tourists—anyone fancy a romantic getaway to Goole?

A promotional poster on the Tube in London declared: "Doncaster—A City in All But Name."

And what a difference a name makes.

©J.R. Daeschner

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Shin Kicking (Part 9): The Trysting Place of the Lowest Scum

As it stands, Annalia Dubrensia is the ultimate in vanity publishing, compiled at a time when every self-styled Renaissance man imagined himself a poet.

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.

When Dover's admirers weren't praising him, they were scoring points off the Puritans.

Jonson's 10-line epigram—some of the last verse he wrote—ends with a veiled swipe at religious "hipocrites, who are the worst… Let such envie, till they burst."

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.

Puritans and Royalists began fighting with weapons rather than words, and bloody skirmishes replaced ritualised combat on Dover's Hill.

The "Cotswold Genius" passed away in 1652, aged 70, his beloved games seemingly consigned to history.

In the battle over sports, it appeared the Puritans had finally won.

After the restoration of the monarchy, though, Dover's Games quickly bounced back.

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 and spectators.

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.

Once hailed as England's very own Mount Olympus, Dover's Hill was eventually condemned as "the trysting place of the lowest scum".

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.

Market towns like Campden have long looked down on farmers in the valley.

"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 asparagus," laughs Olimpick historian Francis Burns.

"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."

Darkie Day (Part 9): Bigoted Backwaters?

Despite all the hype about "multicultural Britain", modern Albion remains as overwhelmingly white as the Latin roots of its name suggest.

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.

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%.


BBC map of people born outside the UK

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.

 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.

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.

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.

We'd also visited Padstow the previous summer, and the locals couldn't have been more welcoming.

Small towns are often portrayed as bigoted backwaters, but in my experience, that ain't necessarily so.

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).

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 jarrrring.

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.

"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 The Black Power Journal, and next year, there'll be a hundred heavy guys down here. That's what everyone feared… people waving banners."

Haxey Hood (Part 1): The Mother of All Football Matches: Swaying the Hood in Haxey

"Savour the pain, boys! Savour the pain!"

That's easy for him to say.

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.

Don't squeal like a pig.

I can't move, and I'm vaguely aware of the groans emanating from the bald heads and buzz cuts around me.

My torso feels like one of those giblet bags crammed up the backside of a butchered turkey.

The coroner will open me up and find nothing but a creamy pâté inside, human foie gras in a skin-and-bones bag.

At least I'm still conscious—not like that kid they pulled out of the crush a couple of collapses ago.

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!"

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.

"I hate it when that happens," an official frowned, without any irony.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This asphyxiating crush of humanity, this juggernaut of flesh and bone, has an absurdly genteel name: the Sway.

Although it looks like the world's biggest scrum—in fact, it is an ancestor of rugby and football—there are crucial differences.

"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."

* * *

©J.R. Daeschner

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Darkie Day (Part 8): Judge for Yourself

Bordering the North and the South, Kentucky used to be a slave state, though its sons fought on both sides of the Civil War.

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).

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".

For most of my youth, I had a black best friend—later my best man—who hailed from the deepest backwoods of Kintuckee: Hazard, to be precise. (TV's Dukes of Hazzard wasn't actually set there, but it could've been.)

Through him and other friends, I learned what it was like to be a member of a minority, albeit in a very limited sense.

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.

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).

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 yanqui-killers. Instead, I met my ex-wife (insert your own joke here.)

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.

I mention all this knowing that veteran race-baiters will dismiss it as just a longwinded version of the old cri de coeur of a closet racist: "Some of my best friends are black!"

All I can say is: judge for yourself.

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.

So it's with real trepidation that I write about race in the UK…

Shin Kicking (Part 8): Shakespeare and the English Olimpicks

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.

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).

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.

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.

Despite James' notoriously questionable hygiene, the showman wore them with pride at the games.

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).

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.

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.

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.

With their royal cachet, the games quickly became the biggest spectacle of their kind at the time.

Jaded trendsetters from London travelled to see them as an alternative to Bath and the Spring Gardens in Hyde Park.

Suddenly, England's country games were no longer rusticke; Dover had made them Olimpick, in keeping with the Renaissance vogue for antiquity.

And just in case anyone missed the connection, he had a musician dress up like Homer and walk around plucking a harp (the Iliad contains the earliest reference to the Olympian Games).

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 Annalia Dubrensia.

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.

Although most of the 33 contributors were Dover's friends and relatives, the project did attract some well-known writers, including Ben Jonson.

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.

Some point to a remark in The Merry Wives of Windsor as a reference to the Cotswold Olimpicks ("How does your fallow greyhound, sir? I heard he was outrun on Cotsall").

But that's probably much ado about nothing: greyhound racing was common in the Cotswolds.

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.

The two men had friends and relatives in common—and compatible personalities—but whether Bill ever met Bob is anybody's guess.

Darkie Day (Part 7): The Secret History of the KKK

When I first read about Darkie Day, I was astounded.

What kinda local yokels would black up and sing racist songs in this day and age—and why in Britain, of all places?! Not even the most country-fried, Confederate-flag-loving hillbillies in the Deep South would do something like that!

Then again, who was I to throw stones? My grandfather was a member of the KKK.

As far as I can tell, though—and as absurd as it sounds—he wasn't a cross-burner or even a racist.

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.

It seems unlikely that a man who had voluntarily risked his life to fight slavery would then indoctrinate his children with racist teachings.

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.

Without trying to defend the indefensible, I reckon he joined the KKK for one simple reason: everybody else was doing it.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Shin Kicking (Part 7): Peeving the Puritans

Scoff if you will, but Campden's homespun Olimpicks provide a truer reflection of the ancient Olympian spirit than their more famous international counterparts.

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.

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.

Campden owes its Olimpick link to an outsider who transformed the area's rural pastimes into a fashionable spectacle sanctioned by the Crown.

A country boy from Norfolk, Robert Dover studied law in London during the years when Shakespeare was writing King Lear, Macbeth and The Tempest—with high-calibre competition from the likes of Ben Jonson.

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.

Decades before they actually started killing each other, the Royalists and the Puritans fought a war of words over a seemingly unlikely subject—sports.

The Puritans, gaining ground around Campden, believed the English were sports mad (even back then) and condemned the drunkenness and violence at country festivals.

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.

Not only would it be fun, it would peeve the Puritans.

Cheese Rolling (Part 7): Perhaps We Were a Bit Thick

Still, some of the injuries are just as bad as they look.

And cheese chasers aren't the only ones at risk; bystanders have also been hurt—by out-of-control runners… and bouncing cheeses.

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.

"This year there was a camera stand there, so I said aim for that," the emcee smiles.

"But if the cheese hits a bump in the wrong place, it can take off and it can go well up in the sky."

Iris remembers dodging the cheeses as a child.

"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!"

And then some.

By the time they hit the bottom, the cheese wheels are spiralling unpredictably at up to 70 miles an hour.

"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."

More recently, a spectator banged his head and fell 100 feet down the slope after trying to dodge a wayward cheese.

Fortunately, he didn't suffer the same fate as a fabled bystander from long ago.

His epitaph read:

Here lies Billy, if you please
Hit in the stomach with a cheese
Cheese is wholesome fayre, they say
IT TURNED POOR BILLY INTO CLAY

* * *

©J.R. Daeschner

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Cheese Rolling (Part 6): Just Like Lemmings

In recent decades, the injuries have increased along with the speed.

"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.

"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."

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.

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.

"We fondly anticipate a cheese-chasing Darwin Award nominee in the near future," the committee said.

To prevent that from happening, the cheese roll has the cave rescuers and the St. John Ambulance on hand.

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.

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.

The casualties tend to increase during dry years, when the sun bakes the slope rock hard.

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.

To date, though, the worst wounds have been fractures.

"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."

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Cheese Rolling (Part 5): You Need to Have a Few Drinks

To conquer their fear, most cheese chasers fall back on Dutch courage.

Like wine and cheese, drinking and cheese rolling have gone together for as long as anyone can remember.

"I don't think they get pissed up just for the sake of it," one rescuer says. "You need to have a few drinks to get yourself into a state where you'd actually throw yourself off the top."

For many runners, the anaesthetic of choice is locally made farmhouse scrumpy, although connoisseurs frown on chasing under the influence.

"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."

That said, drinking may help them stay in one piece.

"It does help if you're totally legless—you relax when you fall," another local says.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

For hardened veterans, though, gashed heads and broken bones are inevitable.

"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?"

Why indeed? For injuries, like alcohol, have always been a part of cheese rolling.

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.

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Cheese Rolling (Part 4): You Could Break Your Neck

But Iris Peasley's view may be closer to the truth.

"We're a bit chicken, I think," she chuckles. "We know the hill, and we know the sort of dangers and whatnot."

As a girl, she had wanted to chase a cheese, but her father warned her she'd break her neck.

By the time she was old enough to make up her own mind, she decided not to tempt fate.

Like the others on the hill, she leaves cheese chasing to youngsters from surrounding villages who have something to prove.

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."

Despite his Polish surname—his grandfather came over during the War—the 22-year-old is Brockworth born and bred.

A fence builder by trade, he sports a shaven head, a goatee and gold hoops in both ears.

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.

"Oh, I've done bungee jumping," he says dismissively. "That's not anything 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."

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.

"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.'"

The memory still makes Jason laugh: "'Noo, I ain't doin' it.'"

©J.R. Daeschner

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