Darkie Day (Part 6): From Darkie Day to Mummers' Day

Two weeks after its "scoop", The Sunday Independent 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".

"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."

Padstow's Darkies were horrified.

"Whatever the National Front are saying is not what the people of Padstow believe. They are not welcome," one declared.

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 The Western Morning News.

The only other Cornish village known to have a similar tradition quickly whitewashed its Darkies to avoid a similar controversy.

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.

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.


An artsy take on St. Piran's flag, courtesy of ArtCornwall.org

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.

"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."

So they compromised.

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.

Even so, a national broadsheet revived the controversy the following year with an article threatening that the National Front might march in Padstow.

Throughout the furore, though, few (if any) of the journalists, politicians or other outsiders who commented on Darkie Day ever actually saw it.

After all, who in their right mind would want to spend Christmas or New Year's with a bunch of "racist rednecks" in Cornwall?

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©J.R. Daeschner

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