In towns and villages around Britain, local people perform strange and ancient folk customs – and for six decades, one man has been documenting them. Doc Rowe gives us a glimpse into his astonishing archive
Words: Richard Lines
It’s May Day 1963 and the Padstow ’obby ’oss circles, wheels and jigs to the drums, working its way through the crowds towards the maypole on Broad Street. Devon art student David ‘Doc’ Rowe was in the crowd; little did he know this day would change the course of his entire life.
“I couldn’t believe it was so emotional, so personal, local people celebrating – singing and music,” he recalls. “I went back in 1964 because I couldn’t believe what I had seen.”
Padstow May Day became an annual pilgrimage for Doc, meeting the locals, embedding himself. “I’d made friends with people, but I didn’t think anything of it,” he says. “I didn’t think about taking pictures until the second or third year. There’s probably about eight snaps from 1964, and then thousands from last year.” Inadvertantly, Doc had taken the first steps on a 60-year journey that would culminate in a priceless record of some of our most spectacular folk traditions.
THE WHITBY ARCHIVE
After several wrong turns, I arrive at St Hilda’s Business Centre on the outskirts of Whitby, an unassuming Victorian block – not the sort of place you’d expect to find a folk heritage archive of international significance.
I push open a creaky door to find Doc perched on a chair in a 6m-by-6m space. He is warm and charming, and a natural storyteller. Now in his 80th year, over the last six decades, Doc has immersed himself in UK folk culture, attending and documenting hundreds of events and rituals, accumulating a collection of audio and visual material that amounts to thousands of hours of footage and tens of thousands of still images. Around us are the artefacts of his labours – shelves groaning with VHS tapes, bookcases lined with reel-to-reels, filing cabinets crammed with transparencies. The famous archive. And it all started with that impromptu trip to Padstow in ’63.
His Cornwall connections led him to document Abbots Bromley Horn Dance in Staffordshire, Bampton Morris dancers in Oxfordshire, the vigorous game of Haxey Hood in North Lincolnshire, and scores more.
