Summary: Vol. 31 Issue 1
Editor: Jeff Lawson
Published: February 2024

Table of contents

• Midwinter Dancing
• Handsworth Sword Dancers on Boxing Day
  1963 and 2023
• Editorial
• Amble Sword
• A History of Sword Dancing: an artificial, and inexact, version

Editorial

The Amble sword dance died out in the early 1930s, the King’s College Blue Stars collected the dance in 1960 from surviving dancers and a new Amble team formed in 2018. Given the history of rapper dancing I have always been intrigued as to why they started with longsword and have been trying to get an account of the re-founding for some time, I am grateful to Geoff Roberts for making the article happen and to Caspar Baldwin for writing it. If you are in Northumbria on 15th June Amble are having a day of dance and you can see them for yourself. Three years after the Amble dance was being collected.

Handsworth Traditional Sword Dancers decided to revive their Christmas dancing tradition after a 25 or so years gap. Lots of teams are now dancing in Midwinter and it gets harder to do them all justice in my account; if your team is dancing or you go to watch a side do send me a photo and better still an account of the event.

DERT will be happening in Whitby in April. Last year’s event in Rochdale was excellent and I’m sure Whitby will be just as good, so do go along and watch.

Artificial Intelligence is in the news a lot at the moment, so I thought it was time that longsword found out what it had to offer. I don’t think it is going to be taking over editing Rattle Up any time soon.

The last issue carried photos of the teams at the Longsword Competition, I managed to miss out SHH Sword, who were really Five Rivers Morris. A photograph of them at the competition is below.