Once a Year, Mercifully
Homer Sykes, photographer — a survey of the collected works
THERE is a particular species of Englishman who, on one appointed morning each year, will rise before the dawn chorus, enrobe himself in a costume that would mortify a pantomime horse, and proceed to roll a flaming barrel through the streets of a market town while several hundred of his neighbours watch with the glazed reverence normally reserved for a state funeral or a political disembowelling. I had always assumed this man to be a figment — a damp invention of the regional tourist board, conjured to lure coachloads of bewildered Bavarians to Ottery St Mary. Then somebody pressed upon me a book by Homer Sykes, and I discovered to my lasting distress that he is real, that there are battalions of him, and that for the better part of fifty years he has been photographed.
The book was Once a Year, and a more accurate title was never affixed to a spine, for once a year is precisely as often as any sane nation should be made to look at this sort of thing. Across some hundred customs and seven uncomplaining years, Sykes pursued the British folk-ritualist in his natural habitat — the rain-lashed village green, the saloon bar reeking of damp tweed and thwarted ambition — and returned with evidence that ought, by rights, to have been suppressed for the good of the realm. Here is a man swaddled head to foot in burdock burrs until he resembles a privet hedge that has developed legs and a drink problem. Here are the Coconut Dancers of Bacup, capering in formation with the grim determination of accountants who have been told the morris is now part of basic compliance. Here is Maypole, Plough Monday, beating the bounds, and roughly four thousand otherwise employable adults pretending it is still 1487.
You will have gathered that I came to scoff. The trouble — and it is a trouble, because it has quite ruined a perfectly good sneer I had been saving — is that the photographs are magnificent. Sykes, you see, committed the one unforgivable sin available to a chronicler of English eccentricity: he took it seriously. Where a lesser man would have nudged us in the ribs and invited a Parr-like snigger, Sykes simply stood very close (he favours a short lens, which means he must practically share a pasty with his subject) and waited for the half-second after the ceremony, when the burning barrel has been set down and the burr-man is merely a tired bloke in a costume, wondering whether the pub is open. That is the genius of it. He photographed not the spectacle but the gentleman recovering from the spectacle, and in doing so accidentally produced something approaching a national portrait. Cartier-Bresson hunted the decisive moment across the boulevards of Paris; Sykes found his loitering outside a chip shop in Lancashire, and frankly the chips look better.
Nor, I am obliged to report, is the man a one-custom pony. He has motored four times across America like a Friedlander with a travelcard, hung about with foxhounds and hunt saboteurs, loitered in village pubs in the line of duty, and documented punks, glam rockers and the general moult of British society through the 1970s with an anthropologist’s eye and a poacher’s patience. He is, in short, the David Attenborough of the saloon bar — except that Attenborough’s gorillas have the decency not to set themselves alight.
So I find myself in the unaccustomed and faintly nauseating position of recommending something. The customs themselves remain, in my settled view, evidence that this country lost its mind somewhere around the Reformation and has been quietly enjoying the condition ever since. But Sykes has done them the enormous and undeserved favour of making them permanent, dignified and — worst of all — moving. Buy the books. Study the burr-man. And then thank whatever deity you torch barrels for that the whole grotesque carnival comes round, as advertised, only once a year
