43 f T
hey still talk in awe of Hurricane Charley that nearly wiped out Towersey in 1986; Sidmouth’s finances were devastated by the unrelenting downpour of 1997; and Cambridge came close to being deci- mated by storms in 2002 (Joe Strummer Year). “There are always lots of chal- lenges,” says former Sidmouth organiser Steve Heap, who has also run Towersey for four decades. “There’s competition, reces- sion and legislation, but weather has been the creator of most near-disasters.”
Alan Bearman, who programmed
Towersey between 1990 and 2012 and is now in his second spell as artistic director at Sidmouth – notching up nineteen years in all – still shudders at the memory of 1997. “We’d ridden recessions in the ’80s, but six days of rain that year wiped out our reserves for many years after. You can guard against these things all you can but if it’s wet in April or May, it’s hard to get people to book for a festival in August. And two years ago we found ourselves going head to head with the Olympics, with the sailing being held just up the road at Weymouth. That wasn’t easy.”
With a combined service of 160 years of folk festivities between them, they’ve all had their fair share of thrills and spills. One of Cambridge’s biggest dramas occurred in only its third year when the club tent burnt down, giving rise to the legend of Alex Campbell standing in the bar screaming at the fire brigade “For Christ’s sake, save the booze!”
All three festivals had modest begin- nings in primitive circumstances with tiny attendances (the number of people attend- ing Sidmouth in 1956 was listed as 130 – a small increase on its inaugural figure).
It was exclusively a dance event in those days. With great relish, the inim- itable Mike Waterson would tell of the frosty reception accorded the Watersons when they arrived in Sidmouth unan- nounced asking to sing, only to be given the bum’s rush (“but we did get a letter of apology afterwards”). Song may not have got a look-in during those early years, although Derek Schofield’s exhaustive 50th anniversary commemorative history of the event, The First Week In August, does make mention of some scattered, informal shanty singing.
Running the event on behalf of the English Folk Dance & Song Society, Bill Rut- ter labelled it Sidmouth Folk Festival in 1962 to recognise the inclusion of song, making it the country’s first official folk festival. In fact there was serious con- tention that year among the organising committee when an invitation to Scottish duo Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor – already stars of radio and TV – was rapidly withdrawn when their agent demanded a princely, unaffordable fee of £130. The wonderful Cyril Tawney stepped in with his nautical songs to replace the Football Crazy duo as headline act.
Sidmouth has subsequently grown into a gathering that effectively marries the tried and trusted with the bold and experimental; old and new; diversity and reliability; formal and informal; dance and song. These days, too, it’s a meeting of young, in a wonderfully rambling and inspirationally eclectic and thoughtful car- nival of folk culture, which artistic director Alan Bearman describes as “a lot of little festivals held in the same place at the same time under one umbrella” and envelops the whole of this normally quiet little seaside resort.
In 1968, Bill Rutter re-branded it Sid- mouth International Folk Festival and with its dazzling array of overseas dance teams and singers, the event’s role in pro- moting and raising awareness of multi- cultural folk traditions shouldn’t be underestimated. At a time when anyone east of Dover was regarded as an alien, the plethora of exotic displays and music demonstrating the traditional folk cul- tures everywhere from Israel to Ukraine seemed almost miraculous.
Towersey had even more modest beginnings. Denis Manners, a morris dancer, Communist and community activist, was relatively new to the village when he joined a committee set up to raise money to rebuild the rotting First World War Memorial Hall. It was he who suggested a variant on the usual village fête idea with a ceilidh dance, and it was he who was charged with organising an initially intimate affair heralded by a pro- cession where local residents were required to march wearing their normal work clothes. He presided over Towersey for the next decade as it evolved into a
… and the low-key second stage at Towersey 2013 with Italy’s Nidi D’Arac
Eddie Barcan and friends at Cambridge 2008
programmed three-day event with regular song spots from the likes of The Yetties, Dave & Toni Arthur, Roy Bailey (a fixture for many years and now the festival’s patron) and Valley Folk, a young group who featured one Steve Heap. Indeed, the Festival At Towersey LP recorded at the 1968 festival featuring The Yetties, John Kirkpatrick, Brian Perrett, Valley Folk and others is now much sought after by those who seek such things.
“I was at the second Towersey in 1966 and it was very small but very beautiful – basically a giant singaround that lasted three days with ceilidhs and morris dancing and a beer stall and we were clearly watching something that was going to get bigger and bigger. It was essentially a com- munity arts festival. In 1975 Denis Manners decided he didn’t want to do it any more and asked if I would take over and I thought I’d give it a try and bluffed my way through it,” Steve Heap remembers.
While it has grown substantially in the intervening years, Towersey’s community arts ethos essentially remains the same (the word ‘folk’ has never, ever appeared in any of its official posters or marketing).
Sidmouth’s Alan Bearman (at Towersey)
Photo: Judith Burrows
Photo: Judith Burrows
Photo: Ian Anderson
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