Bishopstone Union of Morris Men

Our first outing of the year and what a wonderful place to be invited to perform. Roves Farm (http://www.rovesfarm.co.uk). We’re currently fundraising for an extension at Bishopstone C of E Primary School here in our home village and the farm and public both donated very well to our cause. Thank you from all of us.

Over the winter we’ve done a lot of bar practice but very little (none) Morris practice, so everything we did came together over the last 3 practice sessions during April. I think you’ll agree from the videos and photos below, we didn’t do too badly.

We also nearly won a race with some sheep (see the video if you don’t believe it). This is one of those fantastic things that just seems to happen when we’re around. Someone suggested we race the sheep in the animal races at the farm and we rose to the challenge. Only in England will you find Morris Men racing against sheep… (unless you know otherwise).

A fine evening was had in the True Heart on June 10th. Just as we were watching England thrash Andorra 6-0 on the wide screen TV in the pub the Icknield Way Morris Men turned up. With around 25 regular members they are very lucky to always have enough people available for a Stand. Unfortunately we could only provide 5 members for the evening and all our current dances are for 8 so we were unable to perform.

It poured with rain (just as it did last year when they came) and some improvisation was required. One of the more amusing was this Bar Stool Dance [which I feel we should copy and use regularly!].

Very funny indeed.

A great evening and invitations to follow up to go and join them for a dance one Wednesday when they are out.

A laid back day in and around the grounds of the Royal Oak with a surprise visit to a 100 year old who couldn’t come and see us. Some of the BUMMs are in a band with BUMM WAG [The Cheese House Band - because that is where they practice] and they played too. A Bishy day once again.

We performed in front of the pub in the road, in the garden and in the car park.

Here we are on Cues Lane outside the pub.

Later in the day we were told that Bishopstone’s oldest resident wanted to see us perform but was unable to come to the Pub. Last year several of us attended her 100th Birthday party so we took a short walk down the lane and performed in her garden just for her. Just for you Queenie! Perhaps we can perform for your 101st party later this year?

Throughout the day the Cheese House Band played in the pub garden. 2 of the BUMMs play guitar (Mike and Dave) and a BUMM WAG sings (Liz). Here they are with a BUMM daughter joining in (Millie).

Note Mike (on the left) is still wearing his Morris bells. How many Rockstars do that!?!

We were approached again by several people wanting to join us, and also asked if we could do a Stag Party at the Dorset Steam Fair. That would be a brilliant stand to do.

A lovely day out with families and friends was had by all. Our last chance to dance with Mike for a while as he’s off to Cairo to work for a few weeks. We all felt sad about that at the end of the day but wish him well out there. Hoping he gets a picture of himself by the pyramids in his BUMMs kit!

BUMMs in the Royal Oak

Come and see the BUMMs at The Royal Oak, Bishopstone on May 9th 2009.

We’ll be dancing on and off during the course of the day from around 12.30pm, probably in the road outside the pub and in the car park area.

If you find us in the bar - its because we’re resting and need a beer or two…

The local paper has written about us:

Joke Morris Men become Big Hitters

BUMMS in the Paper

Tonight we were also joined at our practice by a lovely lady called Anita Lasocka who has been travelling around taking pictures of Morris Sides practising for an organisation called School of Everything. She’ll be publishing them shortly and we’ll link to them from here.

Anita Lasocka

Anita joined us in the pub after for a pint of our local beer of course.

What a fabulous day. It was a bit overcast weather wise, but we had loads of fun and raised over £200 for the school which is one of the best reasons for doing this.

Here are the BUMMS in their new Border Style. All home made by the BUMMS themselves.

The following videos are samples from the events of the day.

Practising the Bishy Haka at the Royal Oak before the gig

The Real Thing - Haka in the playground with an audience

Hankies

Missed a bit off the begining of this unfortunately but you get the idea!

Sticks

Our first stick dance. After a year we can more or less do this without making mistakes. Its a bit dangerous and many hands have been bruised doing it.

Sheila’s wheels

Our adaptation of a popular dance. Named after the twirling round and round.

Only one injury. @swarrick had to remove his wedding ring after a blow to his finger swelled it. Don’t think its broken, but he reports it being a ‘bit painful’.

Its nearly a year ago since we started. As many of you will know the reason the BUMMS formed in the first place was as a fund raising idea for a Bishopstone School event last summer. We all enjoyed the camaraderie and beer so much we decided to keep going. Since then we’ve acquired more members, and been asked to do a few other events and its kind of snowballed into something really fun. We’ll never take it too seriously and want it to stay fun.

On Monday May 4th 2009 we will be dancing again in aid of Bishopstone School in our brand new Border Style kit (all home made, begged and borrowed from all sorts of places). There will be a full article on how we made it coming soon. Some of the anecdotes behind the acquisition of cloth and top hats are hilarious.

So - come and see us at 2pm on Bank Holiday Monday at Bishopstone School.

We’ve also got a new logo in the making to go on the website and for some T-shirts which we’ll sell through the site. We seem to have fans all over the world now through our active Twitter Followers (Hello all of you!).

Here is the new in progress logo

BUMMS logo in progress

Let us know what you think, come and see us and join in the fun.

Its getting close now to our first gig of the year, and just as last year we seem to be getting worse at our dances as we get closer to the gig!

To lighten up a bit we created our own Haka style start to our dancing ceremony. You won’t see the whole thing until we’ve completed it, but lets just say it involves something scary, something with hankies and something with the Archers theme tune.

Here’s a snippet of the first bit - Haka stylee.

Later in the afternoon we received a very obnoxious tweet from someone clearly unable to communicate without using very offensive swearing. It made a couple of us think a bit tho. We’re going to just check that doing this isn’t offensive to anyone and hope that it is seen for the fun that it is and nothing more. As luck would have it we actually know a Maori who I am hoping will be able to shed some light on it. Watch this space…

Meanwhile, if it is offensive to you, please let us know and we’ll take on board what you say. We certainly didn’t set out to cause offence to anyone and used for inspiration many of the other interpretations we’ve found on YouTube as the start of something we thought would be a lot of fun and give pleasure to many people.

We’ve got a good lot of video from today’s practice session which I’ll process over the next few days and post here. It will be fun looking back at this and seeing how we’ve developed our routines in the coming months.

Some shots of our fun evening making our rag shirts.

As the evening wore on, it got harder to thread needles. The beer, bourbon, cider and the infamous He-Goat Czech lager cannot have helped. Here is Ian BUMM trying, watched by several of us…

By the end of the evening we’ll have created 4 more rag shirts. Another 4 to go…

We met at 7pm at the village hall for dance practice with Sue.

2 Dances practiced. Hanky and new stick dance [we must give these things names...]. At the end of the session we felt we had much pretty mastered the new dance but the old hanky dance was still a bit rusty. Discussion progressed to our new outfits.

After 10 mins or so debate we agreed on GREEN and BLUE colour scheme for our Border Morris costume. So please make sure you all make your shirts to this formula. Get any fabric you can in Green and Blue and stick it in strips to a white shirt.

This is the closest I’ve found to what we have in mind. A side from Exmoor seem to be using various shades of blue. Here tho you can clearly see how the shirts are made.

Later we re-hydrated at the Royal Oak and we were surprised to see Lord Bath [Longleat House owner] and family in there. He was dressed in his usual flamboyant style and I considered asking him if he is a Morris Dancer, but hadn’t had enough beer before he left. What a fine patron he could be I thought as I drifted off to sleep later… [?]

Tim Finney confirmed we are booked for May 9th and that our fee would cover what the school owes the pub plus an allowance for beer behind the bar. Fingers crossed we have enough people available for a side on the day.

In discussion later we decided we would like to copy the Haka Morris dance and add it to our repertoire of dances. This can be seen here:

Let us know what you think. Sue - are you up for it?