Our Fete : Introduction

Introduction

by Niamh Thompson

Every year a procession of yellow RAF wheelbarrows weave their way through the streets of the English village of Thriplow, in South Cambridgeshire, a Shetland pony named Honey is decorated with yellow ribbon, demonstrations of how to rescue someone from sinking mud take place using mannequins cut in half, and a single, and singular, daffodil has a picket fence built around it bearing the label ‘The oldest daffodil in Thriplow’. Welcome to our village fete.

By ‘village fete’ I mean the festival or celebration held annually in each of the small towns and villages of England. With its roots in Britain’s agrarian past, the village fete marks the passing of the seasons, its rituals linked to the patterns of sowing and harvest. In this respect, the fact that Britain is no longer economically dependent on its agriculture might have meant the demise of the fete, its tombstone bearing the damning epithet ‘quaint’.

This characterisation suggests that the fete represents an antiquated social system, its stalls with their jars of preserves – jam and honey – also representing a wider sense of preserving – in this case, as addressed in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 2000 ‘Village Fete’ event, notions of ‘English heritage’ 1. Yet the fete survives, challenging every herald of doom which has prophesied its impending end – its adversaries, the internet, television, radio, universal literacy and the Industrial Revolution, have failed to destroy the inevitable and continual human return to ritual – instead, they have sustained it…

The mechanisation of society politicised the fete as a tool for both industrial action and those opposing it. Although increasing literacy might have

separated ‘folklore’ from ‘the image of folklore’ 2, as mythologist Martin Shaw suggests, it nevertheless increased its circulation among a wider community of ‘folk’. Meanwhile, the emergence of a post-digital society has produced a new wave of ‘virtual Romantics’ - not wholly dissimilar to the Romantic poets who, in their rejection of the Industrial Revolution, longed for a lost Arcadian idyll.

The interest, therefore, lies in the degree of change that effervesces within these contexts of annual repetition. We see cross-fertilisation in the adoption of the American ‘trick or treat’ Hallowe’en ritual. Certain specific locations have reclaimed ‘their’ customs, staking their claim to ‘authenticity’ and declaring all other manifestations to be mere imitations. Some of the festivals that have emerged are not as old as they might seem. In this way the village fete synthesises, reflects, contradicts and curates history into a continuous lived, and living, archive.

Although they can be seen ultimately as reactionary events, village fetes continue to provide anchors within a changing world. Society and history are inextricably woven into this tiny world of horse skulls engaging in rap battles, and oak branches scaling church spires, whether these scenes are representations of wider ideology, symbols which ideology has come to manipulate, or even a confused translational space somewhere between thought and action.

1 Bracewell, Michael. (2000) 2 Hopkins, Rob. (2012)

The mechanisation of man.

An old skill in crafts replaced by a new skill in machines.

Aggression overseas...

The first official Empire Day, a celebration intended to remind the children of Britain ‘what it meant to be sons and daughters of such a glorious Empire’.

1916

and at home

makes way to years of Depression, disaster and despair.

Intervention

and unrest.

So the people flee.

They escape to the country.

1960

TEMPLE NORMANTON

One of many villages dependent on coal mining, Temple Normanton’s appears here uncharacteristically white under a fresh fall of snow, it’s future beginning to fade away.

Where, with former economic and social structures in ruins...

we trigger a retu

urn to the land,

to work upo

on the land.

A people...

controlled by the seasons.

Once every twenty years the people of Corby barricade every road leading into the village, and anyone who passes through is expected to pay a toll. The exact date of this image is unknown, but the usual ‘Welcome to our village’ banner has been replaced by ‘Success to our coal industries’.

CORBY

Welcome to our village.