Russell Wortley Archive

The Russell Wortley Collection of Traditional Dance, Music and Custom Archive List and Indexes Archives of Cultural Tradition University of Sheffield January 1999 Contents Introduction Page Biographical History 3 Content and Character 4 Arrangement 5 Conditions of Access and Use 6 Collection List Printed, Manuscript, Photographic and Sound Recording Items 7 Newspaper Cuttings 138 Sound Recordings 139 Photographs 179 Index (Tune/Song Title) 195 Index (Subject, Personal/Corporate Name, Place Name) 202 2 ACT/97-022 The Russell Wortley Collection of Traditional Dance, 1870-1979 Music and Custom Biographical History1 As a scholar, collector, dancer and musician, Russell Wortley (1912-1980) had a keen interest in traditional English customs, folk song, music, dance and drama. After going to Haileybury School in Hertfordshire, he went in 1930 to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read both parts of the Natural Sciences Tripos. During this time he became an enthusiastic dancer with both the Cambridge Morris Men and the Cambridge branch of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. After taking his degree he stayed on in Cambridge to undertake research in plant physiology at the School of Agriculture. He obtained his doctorate in 1938 and then took up a post with the Potato Virus Research Institute where he remained for the rest of his working life. His continued residence in Cambridge was especially valuable to the Cambridge Morris Men in helping give a stability and continuity to a club whose membership, like that of any university-based club, changes frequently and may often lack dancers of long experience. He was a faithful attendee at the club practices, giving their first morris instruction to many beginners, playing the pipe and tabor, and often bringing new light and fresh interpretation to familiar dances. Russell Wortley was Squire of the Cambridge Morris Men in 1934, and again in 1936 and 1966, and was Bagman from 1945 to 1952 when he played a major part in re-establishing the tours of the Travelling Morrice after the interval of the war. It was in those early post-war years that he developed a strong interest in the dances of the Welsh Borders and the Forest of Dean, beginning the work of collecting dances and tunes. This was to become one of his life-long interests. He collected dance material from Peter Ward of Ruardean, Gloucestershire, and tunes from Stephen Baldwin of Upton Bishop, Herefordshire, who also taught the Bromsberrow Heath dance to the 1947 tour of the Travelling Morrice which Russell Wortley was leading. Later, in 1955, he tape-recorded over thirty tunes from Stephen Baldwin. His interest in folk customs led him to investigations in East Anglia, and he was instrumental in reviving the New Year Plough Monday custom at Balsham, Cambridgeshire, where the traditional plough was stored, although unused for many years. In 1952 he inspired the Balsham ploughmen to go out again, supported by the Cambridge Morris Men. Although there have been some breaks since then, the custom is now well established and has been an annual event since 1972. Russell Wortley found that in many Cambridgeshire villages the Plough Monday festivities had been accompanied by molly dancers, and he worked out a revival of this form of dance with the Cambridge Morris Men, who, since 1978, have performed it in its traditional settings on Plough Monday. Russell Wortley had a deep love of music. He played the cello and was a skilled morris musician on the pipe and tabor. He was taught to play the hammered dulcimer by Billy Cooper of Hingham, Norfolk; and assisted in making the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s film of Billy Bennington playing this instrument. From 1950 to 1959 Russell Wortley was the third Bagman of the Morris Ring. This was a period when the Ring was expanding rapidly, with large increases throughout the country in the numbers of morris and sword dance clubs, and the task of Bagman was an onerous one to which he gave unstinted time and effort. He served as the editor of the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s Folk Music Journal from 1961 to 1971, and after relinquishing the editorship he continued as a member of the 1 The biographical notes included in this section are based to a large extent on those written by Walter Abson in his introduction to Russell Wortley, a booklet published by the Cambridge Morris Men in 1980 and reprinted with notes and errata in 1983. 3 Editorial Board. He was also a member of the Society’s Library Committee for many years, and of the Collection and Research Committee from the time of its inception. A further editorial task was that of the morris workshop in the Society’s magazine English Dance and Song. In addition to this work Russell Wortley wrote a number of articles about ceremonial dance, folk song and music. His article entitled ‘The XYZ of Morris’, not only gives an account of the morris dance tradition, its origins and diversities, but was also an expression of his own feelings for the dance. He had started a book on the ritual dances of England but died prematurely on January 7th 1980. Content and Character The collection was given to the Archives of Cultural Tradition by Russell Wortley’s wife, Diana, and was delivered in four consignments between July 1981 and the summer of 1982. In 2009, it was transferred to the University of Sheffield Library’s Special Collections Department. It comprises: · Russell Wortley’s library of approximately 500 books, journals and pamphlets on traditional customs, folk music, dance, song and drama; · Four boxes of newspaper cuttings relating to English folklore; · Sound recordings (31 open reels, copied onto 37 audiocassettes), recorded primarily in East Anglia 1955-1977; · 11 boxes of printed, manuscript and photographic items, including correspondence, notebooks, published and unpublished articles, pamphlets and musical notations. The original open-reel fieldwork tape-recordings in this collection were made largely in East Anglia and Gloucestershire, and comprise interviews with individuals in their homes on subjects including morris dance traditions, Plough Monday and molly dancing, May Day customs, local history, mumming (drama) traditions, song, pipe and hammered dulcimer playing. The tapes also include informants singing and playing musical instruments, and giving explanations of musical technique. Some of the recordings were made whilst Russell Wortley was touring the country with the Travelling Morrice dance team. Accompanying these recordings are fourteen small notebooks, covering the period 1936- 1979 and containing Russell Wortley’s handwritten fieldwork notes and observations made during and after interviews with informants (97-022/1/9). In addition, there are a number of tape copies of BBC Radio broadcasts and LP records. Although the date range for the photographic prints contained in the collection is quite large, the majority of the photographs were taken in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s during the Cambridge Morris Men’s Travelling Morrice tours in the West Country and Derbyshire, and at Morris Ring dance weekend meetings. There are thus a substantial number of photographs of morris dance sides, individual dancers and musicians, as well as informants Russell Wortley interviewed whilst on tour. He also collected photographs of other forms of dance, including long sword and rapper sword dance sides, and calendar events with a morris and/or dance element (e.g. the Mayor of Ock Street ceremony, the horn dance at Abbots Bromley and the hobby horses of Padstow and Minehead). The photographs were not all taken by Russell Wortley, and he amassed copies of prints given/loaned to him by other photographers (his friend Bill Cassie made a number of these copies for him, using the photographic department at the University of Newcastle). Russell Wortley also purchased copy prints of events covered by local newspapers. The majority of the prints are black and white and unmounted. Many of them were affixed to A4 sheets of paper (using corner mounts) by Diana Wortley, following her husband’s death. The handwritten information recorded by Russell Wortley on the reverse of many of the prints was copied by 4 Diana Wortley onto these sheets. These were then inserted into files arranged by subject and geographical area, along with related manuscript and printed items. Arrangement The books in the collection are shelved alphabetically by author. The newspaper cuttings have been roughly sorted by subject and put into four storage boxes. The sound recordings exist roughly in the chronological order that they were createdand are shelved with the collection. The contents of the eleven manuscript boxes, covering the date range ca.1870-1979 and representing a substantial part of the collection, were originally arranged in A4 wallet folders according to subject and geographical areas. This work, and the listing and numbering of each item within the folders, was undertaken by a friend of the Wortleys, Amanda McCaig, during the twelve months following Russell Wortley’s death. At the same time, Diana Wortley produced typed transcripts (with indexes) of her husband’s field notebooks, and typed contents lists for the tape recordings. The manuscript and printed items were re-stored in archive boxes in 1996, and while the original order has been maintained each item has been allocated a new reference code. The folders, originally labelled ‘A-W’ and ‘AA-DD’, are divided into the following series and sub- series: 97-022/1 Morris Dance /1 Gloucestershire /2

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