The Manchester May Day tradition of molly dancing
Making History listener Stephen O'Loughlin went back to Victoria Square, Manchester, which he remembers from the 1950s, to work out the background of a 'trick or treat' custom which went under the name of molly dancing but which is thought not to be related to the relatively new East Anglian tradition of the same name. What Stephen remembered was, on one day a year, children dressing up in brightly coloured clothes - with an element of cross-dressing - and painting their faces. They then went out collecting from house to house soliciting money and treats, and calling themselves molly dancers, though there was no dancing. This continued when the family moved from the flat they lived in to a new council estate.
Making History consulted Dr Eddie Cass of the Folklore Society, who has studied Lancashire traditions. Dr Cass said that Stephen had been taking part in one of two or three May Day rituals which took place in the Manchester area. One tradition was for girls to don mainly white dresses, made from curtains or whatever, and carry around a broomstick representing a maypole. Another tradition was for boys to dress up in women's clothing and to colour their faces - they were called molly dancers, 'molly' being an old expression for an effeminate man. Dr Cass says they went round quoting a verse.
One such, from the Salford area, was:
I'm a collier from Pendlebury brew. Itch Koo
Pushing little wagons up a brew
I earn thirty bob a week
I've a wife and kids to keep
I'm a collier from Pendlebury brew
Dr Cass himself remembers both traditions. The girls would dance round the maypole and sing other songs, such as:
Buttercups and daisies
Oh what pretty flowers
Coming in spring time
To tell of sunny hours
We come to greet you on the first of May
We hope you will not send us away
For we dance and sing our merry song
On a maypole day
Where this came from is simply not known - it is not thought that it came from outside, but its origins are lost. Dr Cass says that though folklorists often want to know where things came from and why they moved from one area to another, the answer is that that we often just don't know. He says that the activity probably went out when the street was no longer the playground.
Further reading
Roger Elbourne, Music and Tradition in Early Industrial Lancashire, 1780-1840 (Folklore Society, 1995)
Richard Humphries, For a bit of sport: Molly Dancing and Plough Monday in East Anglia (R & K Humphries, 1986)
Elaine Bradtke, Truculent Rustics: Molly Dancing in East Anglia Before 1940 (The Folklore Society, 2000)
Websites
Lancashire Folk
Folklore Society
English Folk Dance & Song Society
Molly Dancing in East Anglia
Follow-up
A number of listeners contacted the programme with their memories and further information:
1) I used to go molly dancing on May Day in the late 1940s, early 1950s, when I lived in Cheetham, in Manchester. We got a broom or broom handle, decorated it with ribbons, and both girls and boys dressed up in the most garish dresses we could find, and daubed our faces with lipstick.
We would go knocking on doors, and when the householder answered, we would prance round the 'maypole', holding on to the ribbons and kicking our legs as high as possible, singing:
Molly dancers kicking up a row, kicking up a row, kicking up a row, Molly dancers kicking up a row, my fair lady.
Then we would wait, hoping for a few pennies or sweets.
2) As a child in North Manchester in the 1950s we dressed up in girlie clothes and paint on our face and sang to the tune of 'London Bridge is Falling Down':
Molly Dancers kicking up a row, kicking up a row, kicking up a row
Molly Dancers kicking up a row, My fair lady.
We received sweetmeats or small change.
3) My father grew up in Manchester, in the Heaton Park/Boggart Hole Clough area of Rochdale Road. On many occasions he sang the following to the tune of 'The British Grenadiers'.
Cheese and bread, the old cow's head,
Roasted in a lantern.
A bit for you, and a bit for me, and a bit for Molly dancers.
(Then a faster bit)
Cross-a-molly, cross-a-molly, cross-a-molly dancers.
My father died in 1993, aged 90, so this childhood memory was of 1910 or thereabouts.
4) My experience of Molly Dancing in the 1930s was in Salford, not far from Ancoats. We used to put on coats and jerseys back to front, black our faces with soot from the fireback and sing as loudly and raucously as possible:
Molly dancing, kicking up a round, kicking up a round, my fair lady.
And the neighbours would pay us to clear off. The girls used to dress up in their best frocks if they had them, and parade round with a maypole with ribbons. My wife, who was from Nelson, tells me she used to go round to neighbours' houses on January 1st with a brush to sweep the door surrounds and step while maintaining a humming sound. This was known as a 'humming' - the neighbours paid to have any bad luck swept away.
5) The origins of East Anglian Molly dancing are at least early 19th-century - and it was a 'trick or treat' idea, in its non-dancing form, known as Plough Witching. Sybil Marshall's book Fenland Chronicle refers to Molly dancing in the 1880s in Ramsey Heights, Cambridgeshire.
Website
Pig Dyke Molly
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