Bampton Morris dancers c1924/5 outside the Elephant & Castle.
The sign over the pub door says Posting House, Horses, Carriages, Brakes. Personal attention given, Albert Townsend. The 3rd and 4th lines are hard to read which is a pity but it looks like 'For Hire All Trains Met On The Shortest Notice.
On 23rd September 1935 the Townsend family moved across the road to Castle View and made a farm of it having much more room to fatten more pigs.
Horse Fair pre-WW I outside the Wheat Sheaf inn. Boys are collecting horse manure for vegetable gardens. Note the windows are quite different in what is now the HSBC bank and the butchers. The Wheat Sheaf became the Post Office about 1971 and became a private house in 2010 when the post office moved to the Town Hall and it became a private house.
William Nathan 'Jingy' Wells danced, fooled and played the fiddle for Bampton Morris from the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. In this picture he is seen with his fiddle. The hat, waistcoat, trousers and socks (odd socks) are still cared for by the Bampton Traditional Morris Men.
This photograph, taken in 1922 according to the date on the bottom right corner, is of a class at Bampton National School in Church View. It is sad that we don't know the names of any of the children in the picture.
Sam Bennett born (1865-1951) from Ilmington, a frequent dancer and musician in Bampton, this photo dated 1920 Sam had the distinction of being called “a rotter” by Cecil Sharp. He was responsible for reviving the Morris tradition in the Warwickshire village of Ilmington. Although a fiddle player himself, he learned the tunes from a local pipe and tabor player, Tom Foster, who “no longer had enough teeth to hold the pipe in place” In the process of reviving the dances, Bennett did some improving and inventing along the way. To Sharp, this was inexcusable meddling; what he most treasured about traditional dance was that is was supposedly not the work of individual creativity, but of centuries of continuous evolution by the common, preferably uneducated people. Bennett was recorded in 1933 by a Harvard academic, James Madison Carpenter. Being a self-taught fiddler, and having learned his tunes directly from a piper, it is little wonder that his playing, though very rhythmic, was plain and unadorned except with frequent open-string drones.