I'll be honest, I've been dying to bring up Fluffy Morris before, but thought I'd better do some research on this before I brought the subject up. Well, the cat's out of the bag now, and I still am no wiser. The little I know is : From Liverpool and Manchester, to just over the Scottish border there are large patches of the country where the general public are very familiar with Morris, which they have danced for generations, mainly in street parades and fetes. This is Fluffy Morris. Generally these people know of no other Morris. It is not a Morris revived by a group of eccentrics, it is a mainstream activity taught at school.

A few years back I heard of a half-Marathon being held in Manchester by a Morris team, for fund raising. I turned up in Cotswold kit to run. The crowd just gawped. They didn't know what they were looking at.

The English half of my family live in Jarrow, near Newcastle, in the North East of England. My mother told me that as a kid they used to practice Morris in the back alleys, just as her mother and grandmother before her. Unfortunately I can't quiz her further without a ouija board. I was working back near there a few years ago, and one evening I was cruising an area where tower blocks replaced the terraced houses, and there in the streets were the kids practicing Morris.

Without the facts at hand I believe that it is older than revival Morris and bigger. It suffered losses throughout the 1970's and 1980's as teams embraced more contemporary dance styles. I imagine its current style originated at the end of the last century or the beginning of this, influence by popular US entertainment. It may be that Fluffy Morris is older, but like in the 70's and 80's it adopted contemporary forms. But isn't that what real Morris has done through history?

Why isn't Fluffy Morris involved in our Morris community? Why ask me? Perhaps the Morris revival of the 1930's was the opposite of Fluffy Morris. Male Adult Revival versus Female Youth we're-still-doing-it-so-there. There's plenty of room for us all. Personally I think that whatever happened in Morris today is only mildly interesting, and does not affect what I dance tomorrow. Does anyone have the facts?

Carnival Morris is the accepted name for what others (Certainly colectors in the 1960s) dubbed Fluffy Morris because of the ubiquitous use of shakers.

Here's a copy of an earlier MDDL mail (June ) on this subject. All the places mentioned are within 20 miles of Manchester.:

Carnival Morris can (probably) trace it's origins to a single team, the so-called 'Cranford Team'. There were a number of teams of young boys and girls in the 1920's, trained by men who had danced before the first world war. For example at Hayfield teams of boys were trained by former dancers and at Clitheroe Chris Winkley, leader of a pre-war men's team trained a troupe of girls in 1920 and appeared with them as late as 1935.

"Not all teams were, however, so firmly rooted in the older tradition. At Knutsford there was formed in about 1918 a girls' troupe - later mixed - which based its dance on what it remembered from seeing the Peover men dance at Knutsford May festival before the war. The girls who trained this team added figures of their own, and in the years following taught the resultant dance to many other newly formed troupes (between 1924 and 1930, three members of the Cranford team alone trained new troupes at Alderley Edge, Altrincham, Aughton, Morley and Mobberley) who no doubt passed it on again to others. Indeed it is probable that most of the troupes now dancing are in some way descended from this Cranford team." (Dan Howison and Bernard Bentley)

There is a clear lineage from pre-war teams in all North-West areas to today's non-carnival teams employing a wide range of steps and figures. Carnival Morris, tracing it's routes to a single example of NW morris, became preponderant in 1920-30 when judges appointed by carnival organizations favoured the style adopted by the Cranford team.

On Carnival Morris, Howison and Bentley add:

"Using either a skipping or 4/3 step, in which the body is kept rigid, the knees raised high, and the free foot pointed stiffly to the ground, they execute various figures. In the early days, these figures were clearly recognizable as having been taken from the dance formerly performed by men, but the tendency nowadays is to discard the traditional figures, which are considered too simple, and to replace them by more grandiose evolutions..... This produces a display which can be quite spectacular, but is stilted and very slow, and shows little trace of the older Morris".

Only last week after dancing for a group of people at Ashton Town Hall, we were approached by a women who says she danced "between the wars". We have made an arrangement to see her and get the details. It is interesting that she clearly connected our NW dancing with that which she took part in and did not consider there being a seperate Carnival Morris at that time.

The collection process still continues to certain extent. A few weeks ago we were dancing in Broadbottom (not far from Hyde, Godley Hill and Mottram). We've danced there for years but this time the usual pub had been closed down. A local directed us to the Cheshire Cheese where we saw, on the wall, an enlarged copy of an old photograph of the pub with a team of morris dancers outside led by a brass band. The team costume could be Godley Hill in their sash era (prior to braces - suspenders) and the type of instruments in the band place it in the 1900's. So, enquiries led us to an old man who said that his uncle was one of the children in the picture, the band was Broadbottom Band (he said "Brawb't'm) and that some houses which were built in 1906 are not in the picture.

Unfortunately the landlord was not there and we could not find out where the photograph came from other than suggestions to try Mottram or Hyde Library. A little more work over the summer might turn up something.