The giants of Rossendale

Roy Kerridge

On Easter morning in Rochdale the bells rang out from the parish church of St Chad on the hilltop, echoing over the neat rows of terraced houses where children played hopscotch and skipping games in front of their well-scrubbed doorsteps. All these children were of Asian origin, for here the white working class has abdicated, made self conscious by all those Northern novels and plays, and fled to Wimpey and council estates. The Asians made a perfect substitute, good householders, hard workers and family men, and their children to my eyes seemed fragile, fairy-like and quite enchanting, All spoke in a Lancashire dialect and played Lancashire games, and a troop of them returning from the mosque reminded me of Sunday School and chapel children of long ago. Enoch Powell's dire predictions seemed nonsense here. Any future conflict will be between these children and their parents, and rightly so, as it seems obvious to me that the children ought to be Christians. In fact I attempted to tell a group of them, girls in scarlet or yellow pyjamas, boys in English dress, about Easter. Their father warned me off, and, my missionary ardour quelled for the moment, I took a bus out to Bacup in Rossendale to see the Easter celebrations.

Rossendale resembled a more spacious, less grim, Rhondda Valley, with workedout granite quarries instead of coal mines, and the chimneys of demolished cotton mills standing on their own like obelisks.

Next morning, on Easter Saturday, I stood with a small crowd outside the 'Travellers' Rest' a mile out of town, waiting for the Britannia Coconut Dancers. Half the crowd were parents with children, the other half earnest folklorists with tape recorders. Policemen prepared to direct traffic around the dancers. Before long, the Nutters, as they are called, emerged from the pub in all their finery. They are middle-aged men, all locals, and their eyes blinked with pink lids in heavily blackened faces. Even the back of their necks and ears were black, though not their hands, which wore inverted knuckle dusters of maple discs, known as the 'coconuts'. Perhaps real coconut shells had been used in the past, but these discs, also fastened on the knees and about the waist, produced the same clippety-clopping effect. Eleven men in all, the dancers wore red and white turbans with blue feathers in, and dressed in the same patriotic colours, although their name, Britannia, derives from the name of the district and perhaps from the Royal Britannia Mill (now a garage) where some of their ancestors worked.

Every year the Nutters spend the whole day dancing from pub to pub in their bells and gaiters, skirts and knee breeches and clogs, followed by enthusiastic local supporters and 20 or 30 folklorists who try hard not to influence events and to leave the dancers unspoiled. It would take a lot to spoil these cheerful giants of Rossendale, whose good humour seemed as boundless as their thirst.

'Nice variation, lads!' the band manager commented, as a brisk dance tune started the day, and the Nutters began their founds. Each dancer held a 'garland', an arc of bamboo swathed in red, white and blue tissue, grasped in both hands. Round and round the Nutters waltzed, sometimes twirling each other gaily and holding the bamboos aloft, sometimes joining to make a crown-like circle of garlands, sometimes bounding apart in pairs. The 11th man was a ring master with a striped whip and a collecting box.

Sometimes he blew a whistle to announce a change of dance. One of the men smoked a cigar the whole time. After a few minutes, the men threw their garlands to a mournful young girl who hung them about her shoulders, and began their intricate coconut routine, beating up a brisk castanet-type rhythm by patting their hands, with discs on their palms, onto the discs on their waists and knees. This they did with extraordinary agility, bending their knees in and out as in a Twenties dance, crouching, springing up again, hopping 'backwards and forwards in perfect line formation on one spot, and rolling their eyes at all and sundry.

Springing to their feet, each man then played 'pat a cake' with his partner, pointing a finger between each pat and withdrawing it before it could be crushed. Forming into two lines, they then danced straight at one another, kicking in between each other's legs, but cleverly avoiding mayhem.

Now the band formed a line and marched back to Bacup, blowing a sprightly hornpipe-tune called 'Claybank'. Forming two lines on each side of the road, the Nutters skipped along, throwing their belled legs up in the air with surprising buoyancy. Men who were big and lumbering in repose skipped like the Psalmist's high hills. As they hopped, the men jangled and clacked, and the ringmaster greeted the families gathered in each cottage doorway along the road.

Outside Bacup, the men danced down a farm track, avoided a large family in a gipsy-painted pony-drawn dog cart, and then performed all their dances again on the paved front garden of a bungalow where one of them lived, as a treat for the family. This done, on they pranced, the band following, until they reached a big house with a drive, set among rhododendrons. It was the Old Folks' Home; this was rather a poignant occasion, for Frank Ashworth, once a leading dancer, was now an inmate there. Clearly moved, he stood in the doorway, among elderly ladies propped up by nurses, and watched his old comrades perform. Sadly he stood watching, as they waved goodbye with their clackety hands and danced on down towards the mill.

Next stop was the fire station, on a hill slope by a large council estate. Here an enormous crowd gathered, and waited outside patiently while the Nutters drank tea with the firemen. Downhill through the council estate went the procession, children running from every doorway, leaving their parents behind. Then through terraced streets with washing strung across back alleys, ingenious coal cellar doors in unexpected places, and cobbles ringing once again to the sound of clogs as in a Lancashire of long ago. Down Gladstone Street, past Inkerman and Alma Streets, and so to the 'Joiners' Arms'. Children poured into the pub behind the dancers, and Bacup's pubs resembled school playgrounds for the rest of the chaotic day.

After lunch, upstairs at the 'George', the Nutters and the band split into two halves, the better to cover every pub in town before the afternoon closing. The half I followed serenaded some old people in their flats, and skipped along by the banks of the Irwell, Manchester's pride but here only a muddy stream. Terraced streets, the tiled roofs curving up the steep slopes like hills, undetached and without the roof-ridges of the Rhondda, led to council estates where Bacup's Irish population has been rehoused, making this rather a rough area. The night before I had narrowly avoided flying bottles that shattered on the cobbles as children played.

For two hours or more, the Coconut Dancers led me a confused, sweaty dance in and out of more pubs than I care to remember, through a market crowded with shoppers, and to the local Irish Club, where a notice warned against 'Abusive Behaviour or Violence', Wrongdoers, it seemed, would be hauled before the Committee. Irish and Lancashire-Irish alike acclaimed the dancers, and then returned to loud discussions about race horses and politicians.

'Labour or Conservative, they're all pigs of one sow.'

After some sad pauses for respect outside the closed pubs, the dance ended, hours later, in a grand finale, coconuts clashing, brass blaring and bells jangling, in the forecourt of the Glen Service Station, among the petrol pumps. By now the garlands were losing their paper petals, and the hilltops glowed in the setting sun. Townsfolk and children started for their homes, and the Nutters, the band, and a few diehard folklorists, their tapes still running, adjourned to the 'Dog and Partridges', which had just opened. With scarcely a break, they had danced and played from nine in the morning until six at night, and covered about ten miles of ground.

Now, as they sat exhausted, they had to put up with my peppering of questions, and I learned that the brass band had been formed about a hundred and ten years before, but that Nutters had been dancing since the 17th century, when the tin mines started to close and the Cornish began their migrations.

'There used to be lots of dance teams, competing against one another,' one of them told me. 'We're the last one. No one knows how the dance began, that's part of the mystery.'

'Soot! We 'aven't used soot for 50 years!' exclaimed the whipper-in, or ringmaster, quite shocked at my enquiry about his make up. 'We use Max Factor pancake!' And both set about demolishing the row of foaming pints in front of them. That night, in the Victoria Working Men's Club, after the Bingo, a noisy pop group came on stage, and the younger members began to dance. In the leaping of the dancers, the hands thrown in the air, behind the head and then clapped in front, I could see more than a trace of the Britannia Coconut Dancers. Perhaps the Coconut Dancers will flourish when rock and roll has become a thing of the past. Old customs, long thought forgotten, have a way of rising from the tomb, a suitable reflection at Easter time.