I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked, in a quiz, to name the originator of the remark "You should try everything once, except incest and morris dancing".
This is a nonsense question in so many ways. For a start, it's a misquote; the original remark referred to folk–dancing, and not morris dancing specifically.
Leaving that aside for the moment: no one really knows who first made the remark. In quizzes, the answer required is inevitably "Sir Thomas Beecham." But there is no plausible record of Beecham ever having said anything along these lines. (The same could be said of most of the remarks that are commonly attributed to him – including the one about the lady cellist and the one about the harpsichord.)
But, to return to the one about incest and folk dancing: if you search, you can find attributions to Oscar Wilde, Dr. Johnson, Winston Churchill, and George Bernard Shaw (among many others) – all the usual suspects, in other words. But there is no actual evidence for any of these.
One source for which there is definitive evidence – cited by the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, no less – is the English composer Sir Arnold Bax (1883–1953). If you've never heard of him, you're not alone; it's probably fair to say that hardly anyone listens to any of his works nowadays. In his 1943 autobiography, Farewell My Youth, Bax wrote that in 1898 he became a student at the Hampstead Conservatoire, which at the time was "ruled with considerable personal pomp by the afterwards celebrated Cecil Sharp". Sharp was probably the best–known collector of English folk songs and dances, and he founded the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). Bax describes a lecture in which Sharp "went so far as to insist that the melodies of the great masters, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and the rest were scarcely to be mentioned in the same breath with the ditties of rustic Somerset." He goes on to describe "enthusiasm for folk–dancing" as an "affliction", adding: 'I, for one, would have been happy to cry: "their nine men's morris is choked up with mud."'
His final words on the subject are:
'A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, "You should make a point of trying every experience once, except incest and folk–dancing."'
So in fact, Sir Arnold Bax did not originate the remark; he doesn't even claim to have done so.
There is actually a documented source that predates Bax's reference by eight years; but tantalisingly, this one also fails to name the originator. In 1935, Jan Struther (real name Joyce Anstruther; creator of Mrs Miniver, and composer of several hymns including Lord of All Hopefulness) wrote in The Spectator:
'one should try anything once. ("Except," as one of our younger composers has immortally remarked, "incest and folk–dancing.")'
It is just possible that Jan Struther was the "sympathetic Scot" that Arnold Bax referred to. But although of Scottish descent, she appears to have been brought up in England from an early age – if not born there. In any case, her own article attributes the remark to a third party.
Was that third party, the "younger composer" referred to by Struther, Arnold Bax? Well he would have been 52 years old in 1935, so it seems unlikely. There would seem to be every possibility that Struther's "younger composer" and Arnold Bax's "sympathetic Scot" were one and the same person.
I have to admit that I would struggle to name a Scottish composer who could have been described as "young[er]" in the early–to–mid 20th century. But even if I could, I have no evidence for attributing the quote to him (or her). It seems that the originator of the remark will have to remain anonymous, and to ask a quiz contestant to name him (or her) is nonsensical.
As well as being a keen quizzer, I am an equally keen morris dancer. (Did you guess?) So even more annoying to me than the mistaken attribution is the way everyone seems to think that the target of the jibe was morris dancing, when it was actually folk dancing in general.
Morris is not by any means the only kind of folk dancing. Wikipedia lists over thirty European styles of folk dancing, several of which have been established in England for generations (barn dance, clogging, English country dance, and maypole dance – to name just some of them). To bundle the whole lot up into the same bag (as Bax appears to do) is a bit like saying all popular music (including pop, rock, jazz, blues, heavy metal, r 'n' b, rap, musicals, easy listening – and yes, folk) is the same. But if you infer that Bax (or his source) was referring specifically to morris dancing, you are only revealing your own prejudices – not those of Sir Arnold.
We've seen that Bax mentions nine men's morris, but that is a game (related to Chinese chequers) and not a dance. It has nothing to do to morris dancing; the word 'morris', in this context, refers to the game pieces. (Most morris dance teams have six men, or women, or occasionally multiples of six; others are based on eight or multiples thereof.)
When he wrote "their nine men's morris is choked up with mud", Bax was quoting Shakespeare. (Actually, he was misquoting.) In A Midsummer Night's Dream there is a famous speech in which Titania berates Oberon for having ruined fairy land. "The winds", she says, "have sucked up from the sea contagious fogs;" these have made the rivers burst their banks. "The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain, the ploughman lost his sweat; ... The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud".
Titania is referring to the game, not the dance; giant outdoor boards were often laid out in gardens or on village greens, and these, she says, have literally been filled up with mud.
It can hardly be a coincidence that Bax picked out a line that mentions the word 'morris'. I take him to mean that Sharp and his middle–class associates, who collected English folk songs and dances in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had spoilt them by intellectualising them and isolating them from their rural roots.
I would argue that morris dancers such as myself have returned the dances to those roots, by performing them in communities all around the country (and, indeed, the world at large). Most morris dancers are well aware, however, that Joe Public regards our favourite leisure pursuit as pointless at best. Many of them would no doubt describe it as "sad". It may be regarded as a great shame that the majority of English people so despise their own heritage; but because they do, those of us who cherish that heritage are all the more determined to do what we can to keep its traditions alive. As for Arnold Bax: I doubt if he'd ever seen morris dancing, but whether he had or not, I don't believe he was criticising the young men of Bampton, Abingdon or Kirtlington (to name just three villages that have long traditions of morris dancing).
In fact, as the originator of the remark was a Scot, it's doubtful whether he was referring to morris dancing at all; I would suggest that he (or she) was far more likely to have been talking about Scottish country dancing. And I'd like to think that he (and Bax) would have been inclined to appreciate the efforts of the thousands of enthusiasts who have taken morris dancing out of the conservatoires and the libraries, back to the kind of communities that it came from.
© Haydn Thompson 2017