Children's Guy Fawkes Customs in Sheffield

Abstract

AS Homer Sykes observes, Guy Fawkes Day is, 'apart from religious festivals, the one annual celebration that continues to be widely practised in Great Britain. Yet despite the importance and widespread celebration of this day, almost no attempt has been made to document and analyse its contemporary observance. The Opies' work, which is well documented, comes closest to doing so. However, their very brief discussion offers a report of scattered, far-flung practices rather than a comprehensive description of any one community's traditions. In the twenty-five years since the Opies did their work, Britons have also become more affluent, more safety-conscious, and used to huge, institutionalised public bonfires, at least in urban areas. Such developments would seem to threaten some elements in the traditional Guy Fawkes observances. All of these factors point to the value of the following essay, which describes and analyses in detail the recent Guy Fawkes observance in one geographical area. It is based on data from a questionnaire administered to 649 schoolchildren in the northwestern part of the Sheffield Metropolitan District in the autumn of 1981, supplemented with interviews with thirty of the respondents.3 The information on Hallowe'en customs that was also generated by the questionnaire has already been written about elsewhere.4 As that essay emphasises, and as a subsequent essay will clarify further,5 both the Hallowe'en and the Guy Fawkes observances should really be viewed as constituting a single autumn season of related activities. Although Guy Fawkes Day will be isolated here for convenience of discussion, the full implications of the data will be understood only in the context of the later discussion of the season as a whole. Since the scope of the survey and the rationale for the study have been presented in the essay on Hallowe'en, those details will not be repeated here. However, it will be necessary to repeat the description of the school populations sampled if the data is to convey its richest meanings. The schools and the ages of the children surveyed in them are as follows: Hallam Middle School in the Fulwood area (ages 8-11); Tapton Comprehensive School in the Ranmoor area (12-14); Wisewood Junior and Infant (7-10) and Wisewood Comprehensive (11-16) Schools, both in the Hillsborough area; Bolsterstone Church of England Junior and Infant School (7-10) in the small village of Bolsterstone; Bradfield Comprehensive School in Worrall (11-16); and St. Catherine's Roman Catholic Junior and Infant School (10) in the Pitsmoor area. Since Hallam School supplies students to 'Tapton, and since Wisewood J & I supplies students to Wisewood Comprehensive, these school systems are referred to as 'Hallam-Tapton' and 'Wisewood-Wisewood' whenever data for a broad, chronological range of children within a single community are cited. Similarly, even though Bolsterstone students go on to Stocksbridge rather than Bradfield School, the combination 'Bolsterstone-Bradfield' is sometimes used, since the Bolsterstone and Worrall communities are adjacent and represent rural areas on the fringes of Sheffield proper. To oversimplify in socio-economic terms, Hallam-Tapton students come from