Above: the (shortly-to-be) May Queen in her carriage, attended by her Ladies-in-Waiting. The two small gentlemen up front are Pages. Later in the afternoon, the May Queen will receive her crown. And here's the lucky lad who'll be officiating - The Crownbearer:
The "Queen" has an entire "Court" to attend her every need. This consists of numerous colourful characters, such as "Will Scarlet", Forresters, Yeomen of the Guard ("Beefeaters") ...
Heralds, "Robin Hood", "Maid Marian" (I'm not sure why, exactly!)...
"The Royal Falcon-Bearer" ...
Court Ladies, Trainbearers (similar to Pages) ...
Maids of Honour - and yet more Train-Bearers ...
In addition to all these there is a rich panoply of other splendid characters, portraying not merely traditional English culture, but also representing just about every country in the world! Far too many for me to do justice to, in a blog post. (It would take me all night uploading photos!)
Here are just a few impressions:
And here (above) are some of "King Henry VIII's wives" accompanied, as it happens, by my (only) wife, Caroline. She's the tallest one, by the way. Actually, she's a steward - one of several adults enlisted to attempt to keep order (some hope!). The procession meanders through the town, eventually ending up on The Heath (ie the common), for the crowning of the May Queen. The whole journey takes well over an hour, and as there are something like 450-500 children taking part things can tend to get a bit fraught. So the stewards are a necessary addition, acting as chaperones and givers of moral support; no doubt issuing such helpful encouragement as: "we're nearly there now". That sort of thing.
I remember (just about) pounding the self-same route myself as a little lad. The one thing that you never forget is the aching feet.
For those who aren't familiar with Knutsford's "Royal" May Day festival, incidentally, it got its regal title from the fact that (so the legend goes) it was once attended by actual real royalty.
Now for some video of the varied forms of entertainment en route:
The last clip above depicts a scene, and characters, from Mrs Gaskell's novel Cranford, which was adapted and broadcast by the BBC as a highly successful costume drama starring Judi Dench as famous local heroine, "Miss Matty". The novel described daily life during the Victorian era (late 1800s) in a fictional small market town that was in fact based on Knutsford: my hometown; one with which Mrs Gaskell had a particularly close relationship, and wherein she is buried. It is just such a great shame that Knutsford itself could not have been chosen as the location for filming. (That honour went to Laycock Abbey in Wiltshire which, while unquestionably a splendid location, is not even close to Knutsford geographically). There were all sorts of reasons for this, including the fact that Manchester Airport is less than 10 miles away, thus on many occasions, when the wind is in a particular direction, hardly a minute goes by without a low-flying aircraft scraping the town's roof tops and donating some 98dB of unwanted sound. Also, our town has changed out of all recognition since Miss Matty's days; for one thing, it now appears (at least to me) to be virtually gridlocked with traffic for much of the time.
A well, c'est la vie! Still, hopefully the subtitle to my blog will now make more sense to you (assuming you hadn't already worked it out).
You can see more about this year's Mayday festival here, on the website of The Knutsford Guardian.
And finally, for previous postings of mine relating to the Knutsford Mayday, try this link; or this one.
Bye for now.
Mike
No comments:
Post a Comment