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THE BEGINNINGS OF CEILI DANCING: LONDON IN THE 1890s Nicholas Carolan, Archive

Text of a paper delivered at a Folk Music Society of seminar ‘Traditional Dancing in Ireland’ , 15 Henrietta Street, 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 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’ ’ 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 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 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 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 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 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. Among those taught by Reidy and still known today are eight-hand and four-hand reels, long dances, ‘The Siege of Ennis’, ‘The Walls of Limerick’, ‘St Patrick’s Day’ (a jig dance) and ‘The High Caul Cap’ (a reel dance).

The core of the dancing group – Mac Coluim, Seamus O’Keeffe, Eileen Drury (later, as Eibhlín, Bean Mhic Choisdealbha, editor of the famous Galway-Mayo song collection Amhráin Mhuighe Seola ), Art O’Brien, a London-born engineer of Clare ancestry, and others – sought out more of these group dances to enlarge the repertory. After a visit to the first Ballyvourney in 1899, they visited Kerry, and in Glenbeigh they found another dancing master, Sheáin Ó Súilleabháin. From him they learned a long dance, sixteen-, twelve-, eight- and four-hand reels and an eight- and a four-hand jig. In Killorglin they got an eight-hand reel and an eight-hand jig from a John O’Reilly.

The new dances were not only successful in London, but, along with the new institution of the League ceili, they spread to other British branches such as Liverpool and eventually, at the very end of the century, back to Ireland. There was a good deal of contact at feiseanna such as Ballyvourney and at the between the London League members and those based in Ireland, and the latter were very eager to pick up the dances. The London members were constantly called on to give demonstrations and classes. At the Oireachtas of 1901, for instance, the Londoners danced in the Mansion House an exhibition four-hand reel and with the aid of members of the Dublin Craobh an Chéitinnigh, an eight-hand reel.

The dances quickly spread throughout Ireland, but not without opposition. There were those who were opposed to them because they had never seen them before, and those who considered them as modifications of quadrilles and of lancers and therefore as un-Irish. There were bitter rows at the Oireachtas and at feiseanna about the new figure dances, with Kerry people in particular supporting them. Things got to such a pitch there was a proposal that all dancing competitions be dropped from the Oireachtas programme. The main dispute was about the admissibility of the four-hand and the eight-hand reels; there was little difficulty seemingly with the jig-figure dances. The steps involved in these reel-figure dances were not, it was considered, traditional reel steps.

Cartoon by Charles E. Kelly of Dublin Opinion from 1939, the year of publication of Ár Rinncidhe Fóirne (Capuchin Annual , Dublin, 1940) The Oireachtas Committee set up a sub-committee to examine the matter in 1901. This Sub-Committee was not prepared to exclude the reel-figure dances, but recommended that a commission be set up to examine the matter further. The recommendation was followed and the Commission met in May 1903. The members included Professor Patrick Reidy from London, and witnesses were heard from Tipperary, Kerry, Offaly, Galway, Down and Mayo. The final decision of the Commission was that the four-hand and eight-hand reel be excluded from Oireachtas competitions from 1904 on. However, a later decline in the number of dancers entering the Oireachtas competitions led to a complete revision of the dancing rules in 1912, and in 1913 the four-hand and eight-hand reel were re-admitted to competition.

The number of competitors began to incerase again henceforward firmly established in the competitions. Away from the competitions, of course, in the branches, the figure dances were by then long firmly established and universally danced and the rest is history in which we have all participated.

The London branch had one final contribution to make. In 1902, Seamus O’Keeffe and Art O’Brien of the Branch produced A Handbook of Irish Dances . This valuable little book encapsulates the researches of the London group. It deals with many aspects of and preserves descriptions of twenty-six figure dances, most of them taken from the teaching of Patrick D. Reidy and Tadhg Sheáin Ó Súilleabháin. As a historical document and as a source book for later publications it retains its importance and has remained in print until recent times.

A final point: what were the first origins of these rincí fóirne or rincí Gaelacha as they were variously called, which we now call ‘ceili’ dances? It is difficult to say at this juncture, but I think it clear that some of them were early nineteenth-century creations, modelled by the Kerry dancing masters on the pattern of the quadrille. This was Reidy’s explanation and he attributed their creation to an instruction given to the dancing masters by the Knight of Glin at the end of the Napoleonic Wars to produce group dances on the quadrille model. Some, like the various long dances for instance, are older, and there are some now existing which are twentieth-century creations.

Kerry does seem to be the area where they were strongest – they weren’t known in Cork, we are told – but even some printed in O’Keeffe and O’Brien were from Donegal and Wexford sources, and in the 1930s ‘The Sweets of May’ and ‘The Three Tunes’ were recovered from tradition in . It seems reasonable to suppose that there were group dances of various sorts earlier than the quadrille type performed throughout the country in the eighteenth century and before, and that these exercised an influence on the later dances that we now know. ‘Sweets of May’ at a 1950s ceili, courtesy

Whenever the precise forms of the dances as we have them now were created, many of the elements that make them up are very old and widespread throughout Europe, to go no further. I think that we have in them a snapshot of a particular strand of the Irish dancing tradition, the group-dancing strand, at a particular time in history and that, like our other oral traditions of song and instrumental music, it is a strand of tradition constantly changing and evolving, at the same both old and contemporary.

This paper was published as an article in Céim: Iris Oifigiúil an Choimisiúin le Rincí Gaelacha (no 69, Sept. 1990) and in Rince Céilí. Céilí Dancing 2004 , edited by Eilís Ní Mhearraí for Cairde Rince Céili na hÉireann (Dublin, 2004). For further details, see John Cullinane, Aspects of the History of Irish Céilí Dancing 1891–1997 (Cullinane, Cork, 1998).