May Day 2024

From The Guardian in 2011:

May Day is a conflation of three traditions. An ancient Celtic and Germanic one in which peasants who had managed to survive the winter celebrated the beginning of better weather; the Christianisation of those pagan rites, which retained the emphasis on fertility but suggested that the Virgin Mary was a more seemly object of veneration than a maypole; and the modern idea of a festival of organised labour that has come to be known as International Workers’ Day.

It is, of course, to the third of those that Conservatives who want to eliminate the May Day holiday object. The bank holiday was introduced by the Labour government in 1978 – surprisingly late given that the notion of a workers’ festival on 1 May was already almost a century old – and somehow survived Mrs Thatcher.

May Day in the UK is a strangely confusing mix — of particular resonance to me and my artwork — of folklore and left-wing politics. The article above is over a decade old, but the Tories still rankle about us having a May Day holiday (officially “Early May Bank Holiday” set on the first Monday of May), nearly as much as Oliver Cromwell did during the Commonwealth of England from 1649 to 1660, albeit for very different reasons (Cromwell’s objections were from a Puritan perspective about the folk festivals - International Workers’ Day wasn’t born until 1889).

Five years ago today — May 1^st, 2018 — I got up very early in the morning and headed up to Chanctonbury Ring to watch the Chanctonbury Ring Morris Men for the annual Welcoming the May, followed by a pre-release performance of Chanctonbury Rings by Justin Hopper and Sharron Kraus.

Justin had asked me if I wanted to contribute any of my artwork, but paper isn’t a good medium to display outside, so I offered to document the proceedings on my video camera instead. You can find my film and my blog post about it here: Welcoming The May, Chanctonbury Ring, 2018.

One year ago — May 1^st 2023, which coincided that year with the official Early May Bank Holiday since the month started on a Monday — I headed over to Hasting for the fortieth anniversary of the revival of the Jack in the Green festival. I didn’t film anything this time, but I did take a few photos that you can find in my blog post Hastings Jack in the Green 2023.