Burton Institute: Winster’s important community hub

Winster’s Burton Institute provides an important community hub for the village, hosting a wide variety of events: parish council meetings, concerts, yoga sessions, and the weekly senior club to name a few.

The Institute’s storeroom contains an array of items which sit here until they are required for village communal activities, neatly labelled up and stored on metal shelving: ‘Electric Piano – please don’t put anything on top’; ‘Duck Hunt’; ‘Plastic cups and cutlery – Carnival?’; and a shelf simply labelled ‘Gnomes’, with a smirking gnome perched on it.

Lurking amongst this paraphernalia is material of greater historical value: ten archive box files relating to the Winster Morris dance team.

There has been a Morris dancing tradition in the village since at least the 1860s. In 1908, celebrated folk music collector Cecil Sharp visited to record the Winster dances.

Winster Morris in 2001 with the Flagwavers of Monterrubbiano in Italy (Winster’s twinned village) and Eynsham Morris Men Photo: WCWCA Now, thanks to a recently-awarded grant by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, this material is to be made more widely accessible – alongside material generated by villagers which until now has been hidden away in private family photo albums.

The person helming the Winster Community Wakes and Carnival Archive Project is Celia Pendlebury, who has been involved in traditional folk music for 30 years, both on the performance side and academic study of the subject.

Celia moved from Sheffield to Tansley during the Covid-19 lockdown period, subsequently joining the Winster Morris team as a musician.

It was a conversation with a fellow folk music and dance scholar that led to the genesis of the project, as Celia explained to me over a cup of tea at the Burton Institute.

‘One of the senior members of Winster Morris is folklorist Ian Russell, who had amassed this enormous collection of archives since he revitalised the team in 1977,’ she tells me. ‘It was his idea to apply for funding to get it sorted out and to include the community in it as well, creating a general Wakes Week and carnival project.

Volunteers and depositors at the March session at Burton Institute – L-R Bev Atkins, Sheila Clapham, Barry Carson, Moyra Butler, Anita Dale Photo: Richard Bradley ‘So, I volunteered and led the application for the funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, with the support of Winster Morris, Winster History Group, Parish Council, and the school’.

Whilst Celia’s background as a project manager in the civil engineering industry has given her plenty of experience overseeing projects, she admits to being a novice on the practicalities of archiving.

‘Ian originally asked, “Do you know anything about archiving?” – well, not the slightest thing. None of us do. You have to have a certain mindset, which is on the slightly geeky end of the spectrum – you have to do things very carefully and meticulously. Some have recognised that and backed off, others have embraced it, so that’s been quite interesting’.

As my own career background is in libraries and archives, I can confirm you can never be too geeky or finicky a person in an archiving role!

Winster Morris dancers pose in front of the Market Hall on Carnival Day 1982 Photo: WCWCA Having received training from archivists at Derbyshire Record Office, the team working on the Wakes and Carnival Archive Project – a mixture of the Morris team and the History Group – are holding regular archiving and digitising sessions at the Burton Institute throughout the project’s duration. The next scheduled one takes place during Wakes Week, on June 30, from 4-6pm.

Volunteers have been going out and conducting interviews with various elderly residents about their carnival memories.

‘We’re at a point in society where, from around 100 years ago, making memories has been democratised,’ continues Celia. ‘Almost everybody had a camera, so you’ve got this vast amount of stuff and now it’s all degrading fast, so we’re at the stage where there’s this mountain of obsolete artefacts that have to have something done to them’.

As part of the project the group had an undergraduate History student on placement from the University of Derby. Whilst Celia describes him as a ‘very good student’, some of the 20th century formats were alien to this member of Generation Z.

‘It was really funny, Miles came in, got a cassette tape out a box, and said tentatively, “Is this a… cassette tape?”’, she laughs.

The course leader and senior lecturer in History at the University, Dr. Ruth Larsen, has been involved in the project from the funding bid stage.

‘She helped with our application because she said serious academic study of carnivals has been overlooked’, explains Celia. ‘It’s been more fashionable to look at the Industrial Revolution and urban industrialisation. But, back in rural communities, topics about cultural heritage such as traditional festivals have not really had much academic study. So, she was keen to include it in her undergraduate course’.

Having grown up just down the road from Winster, I brought along material from my own collection to donate to the project, which illustrate the variety of formats the Wakes has been recorded on over the years.

Some of the material Richard deposited in the archive Photo: Richard Bradley There are some born-digital photos from my visits in 2017 and 2018 as part of my own ongoing project to document Derbyshire’s folklore and traditions, transferred to a USB drive. There’s a photo taken on an APS camera which I liberated from one of my embarrassing teenage photo albums, and there are postcards and photos I’ve bought over the years depicting Wakes in the early 1900s.

During the team’s March drop-in session I attended, Moyra Butler and her father, Barry Carson, had brought along some photos from their family archive depicting Wakes Weeks events in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Carson family formerly lived at Sunny Bank in Winster, but Barry now lives at nearby Oaker. The atmosphere was very convivial – Moyra attended Winster Primary School with some of the volunteers working on the project, and everyone clearly enjoyed reminiscing about their shared community history.

The mood turned when one particular photo was handed round for scrutiny. It depicted two Winster schoolchildren of the 1960s dressed up for the Wakes. It would be an image of rural childhood innocence – were it not for the fact that the kids in question were sporting blackface minstrel-style makeup.

For carnival day in 1908, Winster’s Morris dancers were revived by Mrs Fletcher, the doctor’s wife – the tall hatted figure talking to a Morris dancer (left, near the dog) is thought to be the folklore collector Cecil Sharp Photo: WCWCA Everyone in the room agreed this photo was a perfect illustration of the maxim that times change – at the time it was taken, The Black and White Minstrel Show, which saw white performers don the same style of makeup, was mystifyingly viewed as prime-time light entertainment fodder, drawing audiences of 16 million on the BBC.

This highlights the complexities in a project of this nature, and the way in which something many wouldn’t have considered noteworthy a generation or two back nowadays needs to be handled diplomatically.

‘We’ve been advised to seek advice of a solicitor regarding matters like this’, Celia comments. ‘Anyone shown in photos like these could potentially now lose their job over it,’ Moyra adds.

Any potentially contentious material like this deposited as part of the project may be subject to 100-year access clauses.

A gnome guarding the archival material in the Burton Institute storeroom Photo: Richard Bradley As we have hurtled into the more individualistic, smartphone-dominated world of the 21st century, Winster remains an exceptionally vibrant village, retaining many of its community traditions and festivals whilst others in neighbouring localities have fallen by the wayside.

Although the Heritage Lottery funding lasts for a defined period and the project has a specific focus, Celia hopes the skills gained by locals involved could be applied more widely afterwards.

‘As I don’t live in Winster, I’m hoping the Winster group will take it on and run with it’, she says. ‘After this project – which runs May 2024 to May 2026, which is when officially we can’t ask for any more money – I’m hoping we’ll have the resources, software, hardware, and knowledge, to keep on this digitising service after that.

‘We had to start somewhere, with carnival and Wakes Week, but there’s a lot going on in Winster – there’s Shrove Tuesday Pancake Races, the Guising at Christmas – we want to encourage people to share those memories, we don’t want those memories to disappear’.

You may well be sat reading this wondering what kind of a goldmine of community memories is sat gathering dust in your own village hall, or scattered amongst family collections.

‘Every village hall has something’, agrees Celia. ‘We said in our application that we want to be an exemplar for other communities, so if anybody has similar ideas, not only to capture and digitise their mementoes, but actually re-instigate stuff as well, like carnivals – the message is, this is an example. If anybody’s got any questions, for instance, how to get funding, we’re happy to help’.

The group also plans to deliver talks about the project in local towns like Bakewell and Matlock.

You can monitor progress of the project and contact the organisers with any queries or offers of material to donate at winsterwakesarchive.org.uk.