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| Hathern Band taking part in the Whit march, May 2015 |
Something in some of the recent issues of the local newspaper, ‘The Loughborough Echo’, caught my eye: the editor had set a challenge, and not one for ignoring such things, I set about researching and finding an answer to the question. What a journey that’s been!! From Loughborough to Nottingham, back to Hathern and off to Clifton in Nottingham, and then up to the North West of England – all on a Whit weekend!
In the Nottingham
Evening Post of 3 June 1936, a contributor to the newspaper wrote about the
Whitsuntide holiday, and the staging of what was often the main event of the
year in villages – the ‘walk’. The contributor suggests that the tradition of
walking at Whitsuntide is associated with the ‘benefit clubs’ and friendly societies
that existed in the nineteenth century, some, as he says, going back even as
far as around 1790 in Nottinghamshire. The role of the friendly society (1) was
to provide aid (financial, medical and social) to its members, long before the inception
of the NHS and social services of today. There is also a suggestion that these
Whit walks were born out of processions of Sunday school children who were
celebrating the coronation of George IV in 1821.
The Whit
walks were full of pomp and ceremony and helped to unite the gentry and
landowners with the rest of the village population, and all members would join
the procession. Of course, the better the event, the more new subscribers were
enrolled and therefore the more help could be distributed. During the
procession, the walkers would stop perhaps stop off for a blessing at the local
church (let’s not forget that Whitsun is the Christian festival of Pentecost, a
time which commemorates the holy spirit descending upon Jesus’s disciples), and
then at various of the big houses, where sometimes they were provided with
refreshments, before probably ending up at a large banquet for everyone.
The
walks, the banquet and the evening dancing were usually accompanied by the
village band, something which most villages had. From the report of the event
that appeared in the Nottingham Daily Express of 29 May 1860, it appears that,
as ever, the British weather was not at all conducive to the enjoyment of such
an outdoor event as the Whit walk, although, thankfully some people did attend.
There appears to have been no sport, no boating on the river Trent, which
apparently was very choppy, and no music, singing or dancing. It was the wind
that was really the problem, making the day feel chilly. People had been
expected to picnic at Clifton Grove (2), to dance at the arboretum, and fish
and take boating trips on the Trent. What did take place, however, were the
friendly society dinners which included groups such as the Independent Lodge of
Oddfellows, and the Ancient Order of Foresters.
So, bands
were normally a big part of the Whit walks. Our nearest local band is Hathern
Band, an amalgamation of two bands in the village, one which formed around 1856
and one later in the nineteenth century. The history of the band is on their
website, and it was the entry for the 1860 Whit Week that sent me on this
journey.
More recently
(2010 and 2015 that I know about) Hathern Band have taken part in Whit marches around
Manchester: there are two, one based around Saddleworth, the other around
Tameside, and it was the latter which Hathern took part in. For the bands
taking part, the marches are actually a banding contest, which is supported by
thousands of spectators. Luckily, some of the band's performances have been recorded and saved for posterity! Have a listen to performance 1, performance 2, performance 3 and performance 4! And see some pics from the event:
It is
but a short journey from Hathern to Loughborough, and so back to the challenge I mentioned
at the beginning of this post, which was to discover who was ‘Heywood’, a
writer who contributed articles to the Loughborough Echo back in the 1930s. You
might guess from reading this post, that I believe Heywood to be Heywood
Chilton, the person who contributed to the Nottingham Evening Post in the
1930s, although so far, this is all I know about the person!
Notes
(1) I haven’t written much about our local friendly
and fraternal societies on the blog – there’s something on the post about UnityHouse, and the Sparrow Hill Theatre – but there’s a bit more about them in ‘Secret
Loughborough’.
You are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follow:
Dyer, Lynne (2020). Whitsun holiday. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2020/05/whitsun-holiday.html [Accessed 24 May 2020]
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Lynne
