The May Pole dance, May Day 1974, Midsummer Common, Cambridge...
It’s May Day today and it prompts me to share these old Kodak Instamatic pictures from May Day 1974.
It was my first year at university and everything was new. Although I had come from a village, I had never been involved in any kind of Maypole dance. I didn’t get involved this time, either, but stayed in the background, observing and taking amateur snaps.
According to Wikipedia the modern Maypole dates only from the 19th century, in a twee “Merry England” way. The addition of intertwining ribbons seems to have been influenced by a combination of 19th century theatrical fashion and visionary individuals such as John Ruskin.
“Pairs of boys and girls (or men and women) stand alternately around the base of the pole, each holding the end of a ribbon. They weave in and around each other, boys going one way and girls going the other and the ribbons are woven together around the pole until the merry-makers meet at the base.”
May Day 1974 on Midsummer Common, Cambridge - students prepare the Maypole dance
The same sort of thing was going on in some of these images. There was a Conga dance with a dragon costume, a man with a horse’s head and another with a sun mask. These are all maybe fertility symbols associated with the return of the warm weather of summer (in the northern hemisphere). The Maypole itself is certainly phallic (or a tree symbol).
May Day 1974 on Midsummer Common, Cambridge - on the left is a man with a horse's head...
May Day 1974 - a dragon dance winds its way across the common...
May Day has long been a feast day – it’s the old Beltane or Walpurgis Night. It’s a pagan celebration and is one of the few of these not to be overlaid by Christian feast days. In the UK the first Monday in May is a Bank Holiday (public holiday) and it’s also International Workers’ Day. I always thought it was America’s Labor Day, but I see now that is September 1.
To me these pictures from 1974 are made more memorable by the colour of the sky – we had a thunderstorm and you can see the deep purple of the clouds at one stage. I have also known it to snow on May Day. So much for summer.
May Day 1973 with leaden skies before a thunderstorm - these two bike riders were jousting with parsnips, I seem to remember...
I don’t know any of the people pictured. I wonder where they are now…
May Day 1974 after the storm...
Ah nostalgia! I travelled across Misummer Common every day for two years by bike when I lived in a street near Milton Road Corner, also frequented the Fort St George pub.
Nostalgia indeed – I haven’t been back to Cambridge for so very long. I think if I went back now I would cry my eyes out for my long-lost youth!
All the best 🙂