TAKING SIDES

A few weeks ago, Kent’s Morris sides were preparing for their annual highlight – May Day and the Rochester Sweeps Festival. But while this year’s events have been cancelled, the rising of the sun on the first day of May has been celebrated for centuries, and will be again.

- Caroline Read

May Day has long been celebrated as the beginning of the summer months. The traditional maypoles, folk music and festivities have welcomed this special time of year since the 14th century, along with the familiar clattering clogs, colourful costumes and clashing sticks of Morris dancers. But the roots of the celebration seem to date back even earlier - to the Roman festival of Flora, the goddess of flowers and spring. In Britain, Celtic people celebrated the festival of Beltane on the first of May to mark the halfway point between spring and summer. Many of the customs celebrated new life and fertility.

One of the country’s largest May Day events, which attracts thousands of revellers each year, is Rochester Sweeps Festival – which was due to celebrate its 40th anniversary this year. As with many of this year’s events, it was sadly cancelled as Kent Life was going to press. But organisers Medway Council are certain it will make a return next year.

The festival’s name harks back to a time when local chimney sweeps were permitted a rare day off to celebrate May Day. The sweeps – many of whom employed children to climb inside the filthy chimneys – staged a procession through the streets of Rochester right up to the early 1900s, when the tradition died out. Brought back by local businessman and historian Gordon Newton in 1981, Medway Council has supported the event ever since.

“May festivals and sweeps processions once took place all over the south east,” says Gordon, who is still heavily involved in the event. “Charles Dickens vividly described the sweeps celebrations in his book, Sketches by Boz.