THE BEGINNINGS of CEILI DANCING: LONDON in the 1890S Nicholas Carolan, Irish Traditional Music Archive

THE BEGINNINGS OF CEILI DANCING: LONDON IN THE 1890s Nicholas Carolan, Irish Traditional Music Archive Text of a paper delivered at a Folk Music Society of Ireland seminar ‘Traditional Dancing in Ireland’ , 15 Henrietta Street, Dublin 1, Saturday 19 May 1990 Ceili dancing and ceili dances have been eclipsed in the last ten or more years by the spectacular rise in the popularity of set dancing. There are set-dance classes and set dances now every night of the week in Dublin and throughout the country, and I’ve even heard of a set-dance group in Hawaii which periodically flies a teacher out from San Francisco. This degree of set-dance popularity obscures the fact that ceili dancing is still going on, sometimes mixed in with set-dancing, and it makes it difficult to remember how popular ceili dancing once was, how ceili dancing venues like the Irish Club in Dublin’s Parnell Square used to be packed out night after night, how people would travel long distances to dance to their favourite ceili band, how many ceili bands there were, and how integral ceili dancing was to the operation of organisations like the Gaelic League and the Summer Colleges. By ceili dancing, of course, I mean those group figure dances of various types which range in complexity from the simple ‘Siege of Ennis’ or ‘Walls of Limerick’ through the ‘Hay - makers’ Jig’ to the complicated ‘Sixteen-Hand Reel’ or ‘High Caul Cap’. They can be per - formed by hundreds of people at a time, and the different types cater for different numbers of people in the unit. Scout Boys’ Ceili at Arcadia, Cork, 1935, courtesy Irish Examiner The term ‘ceili’ is a northern Irish and a Scottish Gaelic word meaning a ‘social gathering’. In its northern usage the ceili may include dancing, but the word did not originally mean a dance as it now generally does. It began to take on this meaning in Gaelic League circles early in this century, as the dance element of the League socials began to overshadow singing and instrumental music. Before this, the word had been used in League circles in its older sense. In the Donegal Town branch in 1898, for example, it was defined as ‘a concert, tea, and a ball’. In the same year the Belfast Gaelic League were advertising a ceili which would be followed by a dance. The London branch organised the first Gaelic League ceili on the 30 October 1897 in the Bloomsbury Hall beside the British Museum in London. They took as a model the céilithe held by the Scottish Gaelic Society of London, a body which had been founded in 1777 and which provided a successful and respectable pattern for the fledgling League. The surviving programme shows the entertainment to have been conceived of basically as a concert with uilleann piping and other instrumental music, songs, exhibition step dances, and speeches. Scottish and Welsh singers and dancers were part of the programme. The concert was followed by social dancing, but confusingly the dances at this first ceili were not what we call ‘ceili’ dances, but quadrilles, waltzes, polkas, schottisches, and two-steps, all however performed to Irish airs. Ceili dancing has been in decline since the 1960s. It reached its peak of popularity, I would think, at the end of the 1950s, and for a combination of social and economic reasons it has since come down to comparative obscurity. It is a form of dancing that rose to prominence only in this century, and I propose in this short paper to look at its beginnings, at the period before it became popular, which is a story which belongs to the decade of the 1890s already referred to, and what may be surprising, to the city of London. My sources of information have been chiefly Gaelic League periodicals of the turn of the century and the papers of the late Fionán Mac Coluim. Mac Coluim was a Kerryman, from near Killarney, who was a member of the British Civil Service in London and the first Hon. Secretary of the Gaelic League there. He later became a timire for the Gaelic League in Ireland. His papers are held in the Department of Irish Folklore [now, 2012, the National Folklore Collection], University College Dublin and Undated newspaper illustration I am obliged to the Department for access to them. London in the 1890s was a city with a large Irish population. Leaving aside those who were the descendants of poverty-stricken emigration in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and who had been largely assimilated into the general London population, there were those who had come there, mostly from country areas, as a result of the Great Famine of the 1840s and of the forced emigration of the following decades. In addition, there were those from a whole range of backgrounds who had come to London from all parts of Ireland, seeing it as a place of opportunity. Since the passing of the Act of Union in 1800, London, rather than Dublin, had been the focus of ambition for many Irish people of education and professional training: doctors, engineers, lawyers, journalists, men of letters. London was also the heart of an empire at the summit of its power, and the large administrative machine required to drive it included many Irish civil servants, appointed as a result of competitive examination. Some of these educated emigrants were people from traditional backgrounds – some had Irish – and they included those with literary and historical Irish interests. The Southwark Irish Literary Society founded in 1883 with the Galway poet, songwriter and civil servant Francis A. Fahy as president and with W .B. Yeats among its members, occasionally sponsored lectures in Irish. The Irish Texts Society was founded in London in the 1890s and somewhat later the Irish Folk Song Society. However, the organisation which concerns us here is the Gaelic League, founded in Dublin in 1893. The London branch was set up in October 1896 with Francis A. Fahy as President and with Fionán Mac Coluim as Hon. Secretary. As in all branches of the League, song and dance were essential elements to sweeten the pill of language learning and to help in the creation of a social atmosphere. At first the dancing practised in the London Gaelic League was mostly step-dancing: jig, reel and hornpipe. Their three chief exhibition dancers were Seamus O’Keeffe from Kanturk, Kathleen O’Brien from Limerick, and Liam O’Looney from Clare. For group dancing they relied on quadrille sets which the members had from home. In addition they had a concocted group dance based on double-jig stepping in which men and women formed two facing lines and danced across exchanging places with their partners. To improve the step-dancing of the general membership, Fionán Mac Coluim, then a clerk in the War Office, hired a room for a dance class in Madame Gerées Ballet Dance Parlours in Leicester Square, and a group of Leaguers, mostly young office workers, met once a week there after work to improve their step-dancing under the direction of Seamus O’Keeffe and Kathleen O’Brien. Mac Coluim then got sanction from the Branch to engage a professional teacher and take larger premises for the class in the Bijou Theatre off the Strand in central London. He found living in Hackney in north-east London a Patrick Reidy, or Professor Reidy as he styled himself, who had been a dancing master in Ireland. Reidy was from Castleisland in north Co Kerry. He was the son of a professional dancing master who had been a pupil of Tomás Ó Céirín, reputedly the greatest Kerry dancing master of the early 1800s. The dancing traditions Reidy inherited therefore stretched well back into pre-Famine Ireland. Before he left Ireland, his dancing circuit was through north Kerry and west Limerick up to the Feale and to the Shannon and he would be on circuit from six to twelve weeks at a time. He is reported as being an active and well-known dancer and teacher in Kerry in the 1860s and as being ‘past the meridian of life’ when he came into contact with the Gaelic League in London. Reidy was just what the new London branch needed and he soon became a central figure in its activities. He was an excellent step dancer of course but he also knew a number of group dances, later to be called ‘ceili’ dances, which were eagerly taken up by his pupils. These new dances were much easier for the average League member than step-dancing was and were more fun. For the particularly interested League members the new dances introduced by Reidy came as proof of something they had always believed: that group social dances other than dances of the quadrille type had once been part of the Irish tradition. They had been led to this belief through their contacts with Scottish Highlanders in London. Knowing of the shared culture of Gaelic Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, they concluded that the figure dances Mac From Francis O'Neill, Irish Minstrels and Musicians (Lyon & Healy, Chicago, 1913) Coluim for one had seen and danced at the Scottish Gaelic Society of London in 1896 had once had their Irish equivalents. Reidy’s dances seemed to show that they were right. These dances became an established part of different League activities: the weekly night classes, the summer seilgí or outdoor excursions to such places as Epping Forest, and the winter socials or céilithe . They were performed by large numbers of people (the London Gaelic League membership reached 1,000 in the early 1900s, organised into about eighteen schools), and they were obviously suitable dances for a mass movement.

Load more