2013 sees the 60th anniversary of the first performance of the Westminster Morris Men – we first danced out in public on the Queen’s Coronation Day, and we thought that if Her Majesty is allowed to celebrate her impressive milestone then perhaps we should also.
Our budget didn’t stretch to a floating carnival on the Thames – however we recently held our annual Day of Dance, celebrating 60 years of dancing in London. We were very happy to be joined by guest teams from around England, who danced with us in Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, and all around Westminster in the sunshine for the enjoyment of locals and visitors alike.
This year we have a busy & varied programme – featuring tours of the “historical buildings” of old favourite London areas such as Belgravia, Baker Street and Clerkenwell, and introducing a few trips out to places we haven’t explored so much, like Clapham and Richmond. Further afield, we’ve visited our friends in Thaxted, danced at the Oxford Folk Weekend. Later in the year we’ll be in Gloucestershire & Chichester and in July we’re off on our annual pilgrimage to The Cotswolds.
In the autumn, to mark the 60th year of the team we’re holding a dinner for friends, our families, and members past & present.
If anybody has any photos, stories, or memories of Westminster that you’d like to share with us, please get in touch!
Morris Dancing is a traditional English dance, with different varieties across the country. Westminster Morris perform dances from the Cotswolds region, which crosses Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, and a few other areas. Once performed by the men in the villages, the dances were specific to a particular town. As such, the dance traditions are named for the village they come from, for example Longborough, Adderbury, Brackley, Bampton, Headington Quarry, Sherborne, and soforth. Each tradition has distinctive movements and figures, although the overall structure and shape of dances are very similar.
If you’ve ever seen Westminster Morris dancing you’ll no doubt have spotted our Unicorn which accompanies the team wherever we go. The Westminster Unicorn, which along with the portcullis on our yellow and black costume makes part of the City of Westminster coat of arms, is the last surviving unicorn in captivity. He survives purely by eating money which he gladly munches from any crowd member who is kind enough to keep him alive.
Westminster Morris first began practising in September 1952 during a boom in the foundation of new morris teams following the two world wars. The team first danced out in 1953, with our earliest notable public appearance being on Coronation Day. The team were very quickly accepted into the Morris Ring of England – the premier association for male morris dancing teams – and we “danced in” to the Ring on 6th of June 1953 at our first Ring Meeting in the beautiful town of Thaxted in Essex. The team has danced at every annual Thaxted Ring Meeting since then.
