The Peak District was formally designated the UK’s first national park in 1951, but the area had by then been informally known in such terms for a while.
One of the earliest guidebooks to the area was Ebeneezer Rhodes’ 1818 Peak Scenery, and a 1931 article in the second issue of this very magazine entitled 'The Beauty of the Peak District' clarified, ‘By this term is meant the hill country between Penistone and Ashbourne’.
To the public, the Peak District and Derbyshire are often synonymous. However, whilst the greater part of the former falls within our boundary, it does spill over into Cheshire, Staffordshire, South and West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester.
When I began researching and documenting Derbyshire’s folklore and traditions in 2014, I unearthed some deeply odd things that took place just over the county border that were too good to leave out. Consequently, I decided to widen my area of focus to ‘Derbyshire and the Peak District’.
‘Yes, we’re the nicest part of the Peak District here – they put us on the front of all the tourist brochures’, proclaims Geoff Annas, the (now-retired) Bishop of Stafford as we chat along a rural lane in the Staffordshire Moorlands in June 2015.
Following behind are a pair of bagpipers, local children on bikes, people carrying colourful pennants, and a quartet of locals carrying a giant papier-mâché teapot aloft on a sedan chair style frame.
This remote spot high on the moors is close to the Three Shires Head, where the counties of Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire meet.
Earlier, a young police officer holds up his hand commandingly to halt traffic. I imagine the thought process of the driver first to be halted: ‘Oh no, has there been an accident? Hang on, am I hallucinating? Why are 50 people marching down the road with a giant teapot?!’
Why indeed? Well, as is often the case with folklore, there isn’t a clear-cut answer. The teapot is being paraded because this is the annual Flash Teapot Parade. Its roots lie in an era prior to the national comfort blanket provided by the Welfare State and the NHS.
Before these were established, organisations performing a similar function known as ‘friendly societies’ existed (examples being the Oddfellows and Foresters), administered at a much more local level.
Just as our taxes go towards funding the NHS and Welfare State, the friendly societies were subsidised through membership subscriptions, with payouts financing members’ funerals or providing cover if they were injured or too sick to work.
Some speculate that members of the Flash Loyal Union friendly society stored their subscription fees in teapots ready for collection. A competing legend has it that a feature of the annual club feast celebrations was a face-pulling contest, with the prize being a teapot…
Both theories sound a little fanciful. Another bizarre aspect of Flash’s teapot parade is how a seemingly unconnected event had a big impact on it.
In 1991 in the Atlantic Ocean, newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell fell off his yacht and drowned. A scandal subsequently erupted when it emerged millions of pounds had been embezzled from the pension funds of his Mirror Group employees.
Despite the fact the friendly society had long since been superseded, the Flash Teapot parade had been limping along ceremonially into the 1990s.
After the Mirror pensions scandal, laws were tightened to avoid similar eventualities, but the new regulations made things harder for small fundraising groups to operate, and the Flash Loyal Union was wound down.
Admirably, locals kept their unique annual event going and in 1996 the Teapot Parade was reborn (sometimes referred to as ‘Tea Pot 2’) under the stewardship of Flash Arts.
This was when the surreal element of the giant teapot was introduced (I asked one organiser where it lived the other 364 days of the year and was told they had a convenient barn to store it in).
In 2007 a well dressing was introduced to the proceedings, with a teapot worked into the design each year.
I first encountered our second obscure Peakland event in Living Traditions In The Peak National Park, a short pamphlet produced by the Peak Park Joint Planning Board in 1977.
For years I scoured the internet to try and obtain a copy to no avail, therefore it was a triumphant day when I finally bagged a copy for a bargain 49p from Matlock’s Oxfam bookshop.
The leaflet mentions ‘in Rainow a revival of a ceremony some two centuries old called “Mayor for a Day”’; elsewhere the tradition goes by the grander title of ‘Investiture of the Mayor of Rainow’.
Rainow is a small village in Cheshire Peakland, five miles from the Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge. In July 2018 I found myself again crossing the border to investigate.
Each year at the annual fete a mock-mayor is chosen as part of a deliberately farcical ceremony, the office holder having no official capacity.
In 2018 it was local childminder and Cubs leader Sue Grimes, with her strong commitment to the local community a deciding factor.
Sue was chauffeur driven onto the fete field in a vintage MG sports car before taking her place in a stage fashioned out of a converted lorry, gussied up with the addition of bunting, Union flags and pots of flowers.
Rainow vicar Steve Rathbone performed the ceremony of swearing in Sue, decorating her with a medal and wishing her a successful tenure.
‘I love Rainow, I've lived here for 43 years, I never thought I'd be picked to be mayor,’ announced Sue modestly in her inauguration speech.
Sue thought Rainow a lovely village to live - its only downside being it was located a long way from the seaside.
She was then presented with a tankard and asked to award certificates for the best fancy dress and scarecrows, before going on mayoral walkabouts and inspecting locals’ competitive offerings in the produce tent.
The root of the tradition lies in the village’s annual Wakes, an annual holiday many Peakland localities used to celebrate (a handful – including Tideswell, Hope and Winster – still do).
The time of year varied from place to place – in Rainow it was October, but the revived mayor of Rainow ceremony has now shifted to the summer fete.
A surviving poster from 1877 refers to the ritual as ‘the old and ancient custom of Rainow’, suggesting it had been held some while by that point.
The proposed candidate that year was James Duffield Esq. and the poster gives us an idea of the proceedings: ‘Grand torchlight procession, accompanied by Rainow Brass Band, will start from the Township School to Kerridge End and back at half past seven o'clock. Mayor's feast at 8 o'clock sharp. To conclude with a grand display of fireworks’.
As would be the case with an official mayor, there was a degree of pomp and paraphernalia, the chosen nominee donning ‘a red robe, an immense chain of office and a hat with various colours of ribbons’ according to a village history booklet produced by the local Women’s Institute in 1952.
A fun former feature of the tradition in Victorian times was that the mayor rode in the procession facing backwards on a donkey; as previously stated Sue Grimes was chauffeured in a car so this aspect seems to have been dropped from the revival.
Our third and final Peakland custom was formerly held in the grounds of the Waggon and Horses Inn by Langsett Reservoir, falling in the South Yorkshire portion of the Peak.
The first full moon following the autumn equinox is known as the 'Harvest Moon', and the following full moon the 'Hunter's Moon'. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest known reference of this phrase to The British Apollo, a book of 1710.
I arrive at Langsett on the Night of the Hunter's Moon of 2015, where a few hundred are gathered in the car park of the Waggon and Horses to view a mysterious and dramatic ceremony, involving folk music, drumming, flaming torches, pyrotechnics, and elaborately choreographed dance steps by cloaked performers wearing fox masks.
The group call themselves Mr. Fox, a name they share with a psychedelic 1970s folk band.
The origins of the tradition are somewhat shrouded in mystery. Official publicity for the event states, ‘Legend has it the collection of dances found in a mysterious chest during the Langsett drought were performed during the Hunters Moon and brought an end to the drought and life back to the village of Langsett’, however an early version of the group’s website gives the date of the first revived performance as 1995.
Rumour abounds that one of the principal members originally hails from Lewes, the Sussex town famed for its elaborate annual bonfire parades, which may explain a thing or two.
In 2017, an enforced change of venue took place, with the group’s yearly performance now taking place at nearby Wortley Men’s Club – still in South Yorkshire, but technically outside the Peak District.
Outside their traditional flagship date, the troupe can sometimes be found performing away from their home turf; their performances are spellbinding and worth catching.
So, there’s an overview of what some of our Peak District neighbours get up to. Best to stay on the right side of them if you ask me – they seem almost as bonkers as us lot in Derbyshire…
