There’s nowt so queer as folk, as they say on the Lancashire plains.
The British have a mummer’s side to them: a propensity to take farce to new and strange ends. A love of the absurd which spears folklore and waves it around to its advantage.
When my husband and I were living in Cornwall, we laughed uneasily at a Cornish custom we came across, at the fashionable Camel estuary port of Padstow. It involved two entities named ‘osses.
In the days when everyone was very much concerned with fertility because no-one had much to eat and people would keep on dying, the people on that side of the Camel Estuary came up with a rite which welcomed in May.
Everyone who lived in Padstow dressed up in white. And then they cultivated ancient family allegiances: some would support the red ‘oss (horse) and some the blue ‘oss.
They danced to deeply unsettling folk music with a fetching young woman named a ‘teaser’, up and down the lanes of Cornwall, until the day was done, well after ten at night.
The practice continues every May.
Never has the word weird seemed quite so apt: except perhaps when Edward Woodward stumbled upon a Scottish community with some sinister practices, out on a Scottish island sometime in 1973.
‘The Wicker Man’: who has not felt the creeping unease on the fictional island of Summerisle, where children are taught about the sinister importance of the maypole at school; who put toads in the mouth to cure whooping-cough; and who do not use christian burial sites.
A young woman from the island has disappeared and the islanders claim never to have known her. Sergeant Neil Howie of the West Highland Police is the incomer lured to the island for purposes older and more evil than the hills.
The film captures what it is to come into a community with its own idiosyncratic values and customs.
Who knows what those Cornish ‘osses are really trying to say. Are they just a relic from the days tiny isolated communities had to make their own entertainment?
Maybe, occasionally, these carnival-like occasions have something to say.
Like the custom that grew up in a tiny little hamlet nestling in among fields which have long since disappeared, between Wandsworth and Tooting.
Democracy was a stranger to working men in England, back then. The only people who got the vote were the nobility, with a smattering of middle classes. Representation of Joseph Public’s hopes, fears and aspirations in parliament was just a pipe dream.
So when someone tried to encroach on the common land which gave them grazing rights -Wandsworth Common – they got together and elected a representative.
The weight of the commoners triumphed and their rights to the land remained intact. And somewhere along the way it became fixed that their elected representative should become a mock-Mayor, his term to last until the end of the current parliament. He was called the Mayor of Garratt.
Mr.Public needed a good laugh: and because these mayors had no powers as such, one could elect anyone one liked without fear they might end up in charge.
They took on false names. The first elections, fuelled by local hostelry The Leathern Bottle, featured the local water man and a nearby publican, and they called themselves respectively Squire Blowmedown and Squire Gubbins.
They each gave out handbills inflating their own abilities and decrying those of their opponent, and all with a wit which captured the hearts of thousands. That was in 1747.
By 1761 there were a further nine candidates: Sir John Crambo, a waterman called Kit Noisy , Lord Lapstone the shoemaker, Lord Paxford, Lord Twankum (a cobbler), Lord Wedge and Beau Silvester.
And not a peer among them.
There were a few specifications for this oddest of occupations. One must look odd, that was for sure; and spend a good proportion of each day inebriated. But above all, a rapier-sharp wit would get the Garratt Mayor elected.
If you tell the right joke, they will come: and they did, 80,000 – and claims of 100,000 -at one election.
The candidates would process in boats on wheels with the most solemn of mock-pomp from Southwark, and then parade in Wandsworth. As the event’s popularity grew, crowds packed the route and street sellers would set up their stalls. It was a time of political lampoonery, inebriation, japes and bawdy innuendo.
During one such election someone threw a dead cat at the hustings. Someone bawled out that it ‘stank worse than a fox.’ One of the ‘Mayors’, Sir John Harper, rejoined: “That is no wonder: for it is a poll-cat!”
You get the picture.
What put an end to an event which entertained tens of thousands? Some say the propensity of commoners to riot and oust the ruling classes, as evidenced by the Gordon riots and the French Revolution, made those in power reluctant to allow such bawdy gatherings fuelled by fire water.
But the middle class and its morals were making such vulgarity unfashionable. Hard work and sobriety were closing in. By the end of the eighteenth century the post of Mayor was no longer upheld.
If these festivals have managed to survive, people seem to have forgotten why. Garratt’s Mayor has not even survived the rigours of history.
But they do add colour to life.
Even if it comes in the strangest shades.
Read more about the elections here. It’s fascinating reading!
Kate Shrewsday 
The mock Mayor of Garratt
Bumbled tying his cravat
One night before dinner
He felt like a winner
He’d managed a Windsor knot
The Wicker Man sounds scary, Kate. You’re so right . . . There’s nowt so queer as folks.
Ah, maybe a couple of hundred years ago you could could have stood for mayor with that wit, Nancy….mind you, you’d have to look odd and drink a lot, so on the other hand, perhaps not 🙂
Well . . . I certainly DRINK enough. 😀
BTW: My Scottish aunt (great aunt), born in 1892, often used that expression:
There’s nowt so queer as folks.
When they have all done with the teaser
Does someone eventually please her?
Or come with a knife
To cut off her life
The same as with Julius Caesar?
Rickman has it right, though. Wales is the spookiest place, I would say!
Oh, I bet you fit right in on your sallied into British life, Col 😀 Your comic verse is always a forte….and yes, Wales is very spooky. My husband was haunted in the toilet there, but that’s another story.
Fascinating – the dark side of my Cornish forebears.
Ah, your ancestors hail from Cornwall? The ‘osses are just the tip of the iceberg! very wild and very beautiful there though…
well, well, we seem able to have similar events here, today. We’re a young country as far as democracy goes, and with only a percentage of the population employed (and employable) we have many with ‘nowt but time’ on their hands (and often the ability to brew up some funny drinks). I wonder if a few inspired ‘evangelists’ could give us spectacles to draw the world’s curious to watch and wonder (and maybe disappear)
Once the ruling party has a rubber stamp, it igniores everyone on the ground as it goes its merry way appointing buddies to lucrative positions and ignoring the common folk until they want the next rubber stamp, so these mock-elecions could provide that feeling of power and control for ‘us on the ground’.
I suspect we lack some of the wierd British sense of humour, although some of the darker deeds have reflections here. deeds dark, hidden and evil (‘muti’ murders) for the sake of harvesting body parts obtained with maximum fear and pain for use by the not-so-nice side of the traditional sangoma (healer/.witch)
The majority of the sangomas are actually healers of the physical and mental side, but the others hardly bear thinking about.
Ok now I have depressed myself, I’ll stop.
It always lurks the in the shadows, the darker side, doesn’t it? And sometimes comes out into broad daylight. Democracy raises such hopes but humanity usually manages to get in the way of justice.
I dunno, Kate. It sounds a lot like present day elections here!
😀 I’d love to be in America one day to watch one, Penny…
Bawdy gatherings fuelled by fire water? Quite a regular occurrence here, come over anytime…
😀 Happens here too, but without the excuse of the mayor…
Nothing much has changed in politics, Kate, except the entertainment value, which is at rock bottom in this country at the moment
I wonder if satire is what happens when we are completely blocked, BB? I keep remembering the wave of rapier-share wit during the Thatcher years…Spitting image and so forth. If life gets depressing, a good sardonic guffaw is sometimes all that’s left.
They certainly seem like a lot of odd bods don’t they? Almost as if they became ‘civilised’ by accident? Or is it just a veneer?
oh, excellent question, Adeeyoyo. I’d say it was a veneer…scratch an English man and before long you’ll come up against farce. I and some friends once had a sweepstake as to how long it took before one of our men mentioned bottoms. it took three minutes.
What fun…false names, inflated egos and a ugly mug. Tis our fate today except for they must now be handsome since the invention of the television…that is why one female candidate has made it so far (did I just say that?!), cheers ~
I’m sure I heard (or wished really hard) that Spitting Image was coming back… Timely?
well, the Tories are back, Speccy…
Actually, we say ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk’. We Lancashire folk are particular about where we use our esses. 🙂
If I tell the right joke, do you promise I’ll get 80,000 hits?
No ‘s’. Got it, Tilly 🙂
I make no promises: but you’re on no.84, and they’re coming, aren’t they?
😀
‘Osses–sounds like Ngaio Marsh’s Death of a Fool.
Also sounds like recent US politicking. Consider what those candidates for mayor could have got up to if they’d had cell phones, cameras, Twitter…I would like very much to be tucked into a little village in Cornwall for the upcoming election year.
While I’d like to be there for just one of those all-singing, all-dancing elections of yours, Kathy…