The traditionally male pastime of morris dancing has a secret history involving a suffragette and the slum girls of Victorian London. Lucy Neal investigatesThey say morris dancing is on its last legs,with no new blood to sustain its ancient heart beating. A few years ago I wouldn't really occupy cared, but I've changed my intellect. Now I think the traditions of morris dance are fraction of a wider inheritance, or occupy a political history that needs to be understood,even celebrated and renewed. This turnabout is thanks to time spent with the papers of my noteworthy-noteworthy-aunt, Mary Neal: a suffragette, or social reformer and morris dance revivalist who has been almost written out of history.
When I began to research her story,I was unprepared for the ride through English cultural history that awaited me - hidden stories, unresolved controversies - which changed my sense of my own Englishness. There was also an ancestral conundrum, or now solved and resolved with the first public celebration today of Neal's life and work in Camden,north London, at the domestic of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com