Pageants and pleasure-seekers in Georgian Wellington
From the first year of its publication in 1773 until the later part of the decade, the Shrewsbury Chronicle newspaper promoted Wellington’s Jubilee every spring. According to these adverts, the “celebration of this ancient festival” began with a breakfast on the town bowling green, where the fashionable drinks of coffee, tea and chocolate were available. The procession followed later on in the day, and things were rounded off with a grand ball in the evening. Tickets for this ball, Chronicle readers were advised, could be picked up from The Talbot, The White Lion or The Pheasant.
You can still get a drink at two of these establishments, but The Talbot was demolished back in 1849 to make way for the railway. It had been one of Wellington’s larger and more gentrified inns, so was possibly the venue for the Jubilee Ball. A Rotary Club plaque on the station wall opposite the HSBC bank dates The Talbot from “circa 1800”, but its occasional mention in documents shows that it was in existence at least 50 years prior to that, and possibly much earlier.
And what of the great Jubilee Procession? Well, we can try to picture it in some detail thanks to the efforts of one lyrical Wellingtonian who attempted to drum up support for the event in 1773 by penning ‘An Ode to The Wellington Jubilee’. The poet invited readers to “Quit the town and with a friend, Some time in rural pleasure spend, And see our Jubilee!” It’s probably a while since anyone considered a day in Wellington as a day spent in “rural pleasure”, but it’s a nice thought. The procession the poet describes featured a host of characters – historical, modern and mythical. It displayed, amongst other things, a typical Georgian fondness for classical mythology, with the likes of Cupid, Venus and Bacchus putting in an appearance. Spectators could even look forward to seeing their own king represented – the occasionally ‘mad’ but nonetheless popular George the Third.
There’s no mention of these Whitsun Jubilees after 1778. They may have continued, unpublicised, or maybe the organisers gave up and they stopped. But even if they did, these weren’t Wellington’s only spring and summer festivities in the 18th century. More boisterous than the Jubilee – and several hundred feet higher – were the Wrekin Wakes.
Wakey Wakey!
In 1873, some decades after they had come to an end, one old Salopian remembered the Wrekin Wakes from his youth. “The top of the hill was covered with a multitude of pleasure seekers,” he wrote, “with ale-booths, gingerbread standings, gaming tables, swing-boats, merry-go-rounds, three-sticks-a-penny, and all the etceteras of an old English fair.”
A jovial occasion indeed, accept that the focal point – a hilltop fight between colliers and countrymen for ‘possession’ of the hill – made it all a bit more violent than just a typical “old English fair”. When these two opposing sides had been evenly matched, another aging Victorian recalled, the Wellington men would tip the balance by allying themselves with one side or the other – usually, he claimed, favouring the countrymen over their Coalfield opponents. Local historian Allan Frost has discovered that this annual brawl got so out of hand on one occasion back in the 1750s, the militia had to be called and the Riot Act read! And there you were thinking us 21st century youths were a handful.
In the year of this ‘riot’, the Wakes seem to have taken place in June, and yet according to Charlotte Burne’s book on Shropshire Folklore, written in the 1880s, the Wrekin Wakes had traditionally taken place on the first four Sundays in May. Were the old men she got here information from mistaken? Perhaps rather than being linked to Maytide, the Wakes – like the Jubilee – were instead linked to the moveable feast of Whitsuntide, and so could have taken place in either April, May or June, depending on the year.
Another possibility is that the wakes originally coincided with Wellington’s June Fairs, first sanctioned in the Market Charter of 1244. A fair was permitted on the eve, feast and morrow of St Barnabus – patron saint of farm labourers – which falls on 11th June, and which back then was the longest day. This changed in 1752, however, when the government re-aligned the nation’s calendar and cut 11 days out of the year. Wellington evidently decided that maximum daylight was more important than loyalty to St Barnabus and shifted their fair to the new longest day, 22nd June. Perhaps all this served to throw the date of the wakes into some confusion, and as they were not organised in any official way, maybe they just started erupting whenever enough people turned up. Whether they were wrapped up in May festivities, Whitsuntide holidays, June fairs or an amalgam of all these, the Wakes were an integral part of local culture for at least a century and probably much longer.
In the early 1800s, Georgian rowdiness began to give way to Victorian sobriety and a host of old fashioned popular pleasures died out, the Wrekin Wakes amongst them. A letter that appeared in one London magazine in 1826 stated that “their celebration has, of late been very properly discouraged by the magistracy, and they are going deservedly to decay.” Charlotte Burne believed that when the Cludde family purchased part of the Wrekin (the part that their descendants the Holt family still own), they determined to “put down the Wake by force”. This, she stated, led the family to employ constables and gamekeepers to clear the hill of visitors on one particular May Sunday, “and since then, the Wake has been done away with”.
If this is true, it probably happened some time in the 1820s or 30s. But as that Chartist-led procession up the Wrekin on 17th May 1842 suggests, the spirit of the Wakes still lingered in the local imagination. And maybe it was fond memories of wakes ‘battles’ that had attracted local ruffians to the summit a fortnight earlier on the first Sunday in May. A letter written that day by Wellington’s police inspector referred to a Primitive Methodist meeting that was taking place on the hill that morning, declaring that “all the bad characters in the town” would be there. Evangelising Primitive Methodists could be attracted to all sorts of places if they knew there would be plenty of sinners to preach at, but why should they have expected a bunch of ne’er-do-wells to be up The Wrekin in the first place? Probably because for these “bad characters”, what had become the May Sunday pilgrimage to The Wrekin Wakes was an old habit that died hard.
So, next time you walk up the Wrekin, imagine being in the middle of a brawling mob at the Wakes, or when you’re strolling through the middle of the town, imagine the colourful Jubilee Procession passing by – the music and the dancing and the cheering crowds. Hopefully your imagination won’t have to work quite so hard in summers to come, with live entertainment in The Square conjuring up something of that old festive atmosphere. To see pictures from our Midsummer Merriment and Sounds in The Square events last summer, click on the link below:
