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May Queen in Chislehurst – 2006

May Queen in Chislehurst – 2006. Chislehurst has maintained the tradition of crowning the Chislehurst May Queen on the first Saturday of May each year since 1923 and last Saturday held its ceremony to crown its 2025 Queen. I was busy elsewhere this year, but spent an enjoyable day photographing the event on Saturday 6th May 2006. Here is the post I wrote back then (with the usual minor corrections) with a few of the pictures – and links to more on My London Diary

Chislehurst May Queen Ceremonies

Chislehurst, 6 May 2006

May Day celebrations were traditionally times (known as Beltane) when the New Year and Spring was celebrated, and young men and women danced together, and a Queen of the May was chosen to lead the event. Cromwell banned them as sinful pagan events, and although they came back with the restoration in 1660, in most places the traditions slowly died out or were made more formal.

There was a revival of interest in old customs in the Victorian era, with various ‘Merrie England‘ events being organised. Some schools had maypoles and learnt the dances and many Sunday Schools had their May Queens who often took a leading part in Whit Walks.

In 2005 I photographed the Hayes Merrie England And London May Queen Festival, which began in 1913 and is probably the largest as well as the oldest continuing event of its type (Brentham had its “gaily dressed maidens” dancing around a maypole in 1906, but it isn’t clear if there were festivals in all of the early years. Certainly there appear to have been none in 1927-30.)

Chislehurst got its first May Queen in 1923, when the organisers of the Merrie England Festival at Hayes, which had been going for around 10 years, asked Agnes Everist to organise a new ‘realm‘ with her daughter Olive as the May Queen. Agnes continued to organise the ceremonies until 1945, when the ceremony was delayed until June to be a part of the World War II Victory Celebrations. Her grand-daughter and Olive’s daughter Beryl was May Queen that year, but sadly Agnes died 2 days later.

The Everist family continued to organise the festival for some years, but others then took over. Any girl five or over who lives or has grandparents who live in Chislehurst can join the retinue. They then work their way up the ranks, with the oldest girl of the year of joining having the choice of being Queen or Prince. Several months of twice-weekly rehearsals are required, and as well as the festival they also perform at other events over the year.

*The retiring May Queen puts the crown on the new May Queen’s head*

The procession is led by a Banner Bearer, and each of the ‘realms’ that takes part in the Hayes festival is also identified by a distinctive colour. The May Queen and Prince walk under a hoop garland held by two of their retinue, while others hold the Queen’s train. Before the crowning, the retiring Queen and Prince are at the head of the procession with the Queen and Prince elect in the middle, but after the crowning they change their places. Also in the procession are three attendants carrying the basket of flowers, the crown on a cushion and the sceptre and scroll. At the rear of the group is a decorated cage or lantern on a pole.

*The new May Queen and Prince take their place under the hoop garland for the return procession*

Chislehurst is one of the few may queen societies that still dance round the maypole properly, and they performed 4 different dances during the event with surprising precision.

*And the May Queen cuts the cake with the Prince*

At the end of the day the various groups marched off down the road for tea and cakes in the Methodist hall, along with a little more ceremony. I stayed until they had cut the cake, then had to run to the station to catch my train home.

You can read more about the May Queen tradition and London May Queen in particular in the preview of my book, London May Queens. The book is available as a PDF or more expensively in print

You can find out more about the Chislehurst May Queen Society at their web site. There are more pictures from the 2006 event, including the other local groups that take part in the event on My London Diary.

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May Queens in April – 2007

May Queens in April: Most years on April 28th I’ve photographed events around one the the more important but largely overlooked by media occasions of the year – International Workers Memorial Day – which remembers those who have died in the workplace, with the slogan ‘Remember the dead – fight for the living‘. You can read a number of accounts of some of these events on My London Diary – such as this one from 2013.

But some years – and this year, 2025 is another – I have other commitments on April 28th and have not been able to cover International Workers Memorial Day. In 2007 I was working hard on a project on London’s May Queens for a museum exhibition (unfortunately cancelled at the final stage due to financial constraints) and needed to be in south-east London to work on that. My day on Saturday 28 April began in Chislehurst and then moved on to Bromley where a number of local May Queens were crowned.

After the exhibition was cancelled I put together some of the pictures from these events in a book, London’s May Queens, still available. It’s perhaps important to say that these events are not beauty competitions but activities to raise the confidence and abilities of the girls who take part, including in public speaking and performance and that the various roles in the local groups and the London May Queen group to which they can move on are assigned solely on their length of membership. It still follows the structures and texts from its founding years.

All of the rather detailed text from the second edition of the book both about the history of May Queens, this and other May Queen events around London and around half of its pictures can be viewed in the book preview on-line. Here is the text about the book on Blurb:

2012 saw the crowning of the London’s 100th May Queen. The first Merrie England and London May Queen festival was held in 1913 and it has continued every year since, still on the same lines. In the 1920s and 30s it was a major event, covered by cinema newsreels and competitions in daily newspapers, but now it is known to few outside the over 20 local realms that take part in the annual event. The 72 pictures in this work give a unique insight into this community event.

Here with the usual corrections are the two posts I wrote in 2007 on My London Diary. The pictures here are all from that day and you can see more at the links below each post.

Chislehurst May Queen Society – Fund-Raising Pub Crawl

Chislehurst isn’t far from the central London but is surrounded by woods and commons and feels very different to Hither Green a couple of stations closer to the centre. Even as a suburb it feels very rural, with what looks like a large village pond and village green.

Chislehurst is one of the ‘realms’ in the London May Queen Festival, but is finding it hard to keep going and attract new young girls to carry on the tradition (see London May Queen 2005 and Chislehurst May Queen 2006) for more pictures of them.

So getting publicity in the local area is very important. They need people to notice them and the May Queen Festival, and to bring their daughters and grand-daughters along to take part in the fun. Obviously the girls who do take part are enjoying it, but it is also a commitment and takes hard work to practice the maypole dances and so on.

To get some publicity the week before the May Queen Festival they organised a sponsored fancy-dress pub crawl. I met up with them at The Lounge, a fairly newly refurbished bar at the top of the hill to the north of the town centre, with an interesting decor.

From there we went down into the centre of Chislehurst, letting people know about the May Queen and collecting money both on the street and in the pubs we visited.

I was sorry to have to leave after the third pub, when perhaps things were beginning to warm up a little, but it was fun, and I hope will help to raise the profile of the May Queen group in the area.
more pictures

London May Queen: Bromley May Queens

I’d promised this year’s London May Queen, Erin, that I would try to photograph her, and unfortunately I had to be elsewhere for her actual crowning at Hayes in May. So Bromley seemed a good place to catch up with her and take some pictures, as there she would be appearing with five local may queens from groups around the area – Bromley Common, Shortlands, Hayes, Hayes Common and Hayes Village.

Erin, the 2007 London May Queen, is easy to recognise in my pictures as she is carrying a frame with pink roses and white flowers that says ‘I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley‘, as well as a sash saying ‘London May Queen‘.

Unfortunately we got on the wrong bus to get to Bromley and enjoyed a long tour of most of the outer reaches of south-east London before finally arriving there. It didn’t help that the address I had for the start was rather vague, but finally we met up with the procession almost exactly where we had got off the bus 15 minutes of wandering earlier, and walked with the procession through the centre of the town to the gardens.

It was a shame that the police had apparently insisted that the procession rush through the town centre. It was led by the band of T S Endeavour, playing ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’ (and other popular tunes) and I’m sure they could have marched at half the pace without causing great traffic chaos – much of the centre is in any case pedestrianised.

Some of the younger girls taking part really had to run to keep up through the town centre. Events such as this enliven towns (and Bromley could do with an awful lot of enlivening, being total shopping hell) adding colour and individuality, and it seems far more important to celebrate them to the maximum than worry excessively about traffic flow.

At the gardens things were more relaxed, and the London May Queen was able to crown those of the other queens who had not already been crowned at their own local ceremonies, and there were many pictures taken by me and the mothers and fathers.

Again it’s a shame that Bromley doesn’t have a maypole and there wasn’t any singing or dancing or acting. But it was a nice summery afternoon and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.

more pictures

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Bromley May Queens Crowning – 2008

Bromley May Queens Crowning – On Saturday 19th April I went to Bromley to photograph the crowning ceremony of the May Queens from Bromley Common and Shortlands in an event also attended by May Queen groups from West Wickham, Hayes, Hayes Village and Hayes Common. This is the largest of the May Queen events before the annual crowning of the London May Queen in May.

Although in recent years my photography has largely been around protests, with the occasional walk thrown in, back in the first decade of this century I was also photographing a wide range of cultural events in London, including a number of religious festivals and other celebrations. And one of the lengthier projects I engaged in was on May Queen festivals in London.

Although I’d grown up in London and lived near it for most of my adult life (and still do) I had never come across May Queen festivals, though perhaps I may have seen some of the old newsreels from pre-war days I thought they were a thing of the past.

In a post written earlier in April 2008 I described how I came to find out more and to start a project which led to me finding out more and starting a project on them in 2005:

It was the work of Tony Ray-Jones that first attracted me to May Queens, with his posthumous ‘A Day Off’, published in 1974 containing half a dozen of his pictures from May Queen festivals (though only four really connected with May Queens.) One of these – certainly the least interesting image – showed around 30 young women in three rows in front of a maypole, all wearing crowns. Despite the misleading caption, ‘May Queen Gathering, Sittingbourne, 1968’, in a later publication it was identified correctly as a picture of the annual London May Queen festival at Hayes, Kent.

Although I didn’t think it one of his better pictures it struck me as an interesting event, and even more so when I went to photograph it in 2005, and started to look up a little of its history.
Crowning of the Hayes Realms

Eventually I had enough pictures to publish a book, and had been promised an exhibition at a major museum – though this never materialised. The book, London May Queens ISBN: 978-1-909363-06-9 is still available from Blurb, either as an expensive print version or as a PDF, and the work has also been featured on other web sites including Lensculture.

Here is the Blurb blurb:
“2012 saw the crowning of the London’s 100th May Queen. The first Merrie England and London May Queen festival was held in 1913 and it has continued every year since. In the 1920s and 30s it was a major event, covered by cinema newsreels and competitions in daily newspapers, but now it is known to few outside the over 20 local realms that take part in the annual event. The 72 pictures in this work give a unique insight into this community event.“

It’s worth going to the Blurb link to see the extensive preview of the work, which includes all of the text of the book as well as many of my favourite images from the project.

Girls generally join their local May Queen group at an early age and progress through the various roles in the group as they get older – and if they stay long enough become their group May Queen, after which they can join the London May Queen group and similarly progress to become London May Queen. As well as practising for the festival events the groups also have other activities – and teas etc.

The Bromley area May Queens Crowning is one of the larger events in the May Queen Season, with a number of local May Queen groups processing through the centre of Bromley to Church House Gardens next to the Churchill Theatre where some of the May Queens were crowned. The previous week I’d been to another event where three of them had previously been crowned and the following week there was another crowning festival in Beckenham a week before the final crowning of the London May Queen at Hayes.

At the end of the ceremony the girls process back to a church hall for a tea, but I was too tired to go with them and felt in need of something stronger.

Many more pictures at Bromley May Queens Crowning.

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The Sultan’s Elephant, Buddha’s Birthday & May Queens

The Sultan’s Elephant, Buddha’s Birthday & May Queens – Satiurday May 6th was another varied day for me.

The Sultan’s Elephant – Westminster

“Just why does it take so many people to drive an elephant when one elephant can do it on its own?” was the question that came to me while watching the Sultan’s Elephant making its ponderous way around central London. The 12 metre high mechanical elephant, along with the Little Princess was constructed by French company Royal De Luxe and appeared to have around 20 drivers as well as a cast of under-employed actors.

And, as I commented, “it did occur to me to ask why the Arts Council was spending so much of our money on guys who wanted to play with big toys.” Rather than art it seemed to me to be “more or less a larger version of model railways to me, or perhaps even more a simplistic version of a computer game fantasy made manifiest” and little about art. “More Disneyland.”

Buddha’s 2550th Birthday – Leicester Square

A quarter of a mile to the north, celebrations were taking place in Chinatown of Buddha’s 2,550th birthday, organised by London Fo Guang Temple, one of two UK branches of the Taiwanese Fo Guang Shan Order who have a temple in Margaret St in a rather nice Grade II listed former Parish School and Church House designed by William Butterfield and built in 1868-70.

The festival was continuing over two days, but I only stayed for around an hour, photographing a colourful procession which included two lions and the Mayor of Westminster.

Chislehurst May Queen Ceremonies – Chislehurst

Chislehurst is around ten miles from the centre of London, in Kent until brought into Greater London on the edge of the London Borough of Bromley in 1965. Fortunately trains from Charing Cross go there in around half an hour, which makes it a popular commuter town, and took me there, where I had been invited by the organisers of the Chislehurst May Queen to photograph their May Queen Ceremonies.

Traditionally May had been a time when the New Year and Spring was celebrated, when young men and women danced together and often rather more, and a queen of the may was chosen to lead the event. Oliver Cromwell banned the celebrations as sinful pagan events, and although they came back after the restoration the events slowly died out or became more formal.

As I noted: “There was a revival of interest in old customs in the Victorian era, with various ‘Merrie England’ events being organised. Some schools had maypoles and learnt the dances and many Sunday Schools had their may queens who often took a leading part in Whit Walks.“

I became interested in these continuing events in 2005, going to photograph the Merrie England and London May Queen Festival at Hayes, Kent (also in LB Bromley.) It was the start of a project that led to my self-published book London’s May Queens (ISBN: 978-1-909363-06-9) and almost to a major museum exhibition, plans for which fell through at the last hurdle.

Book Preview

The book preview contains an essay on the history of London’s May Queens and a number of photographs from various May Queen events. Although print copies of the book are expensive you can purchase a reasonably priced PDF version.

But putting the pictures from this first event I photographed in 2005 on-line attracted a great deal of interest, particularly among the families involved, and led to me being invited to other events such as this at Chislehurst, who were particularly keen that I should photograph their proper maypole dancing.

*Last year’s Queen crowns the new May Queen*

As I explain on My London Diary, “Any girl five or over who lives or has grandparents who live in Chislehurst can join the retinue. They then work their way up the ranks, with the oldest girl of the year of joining having the choice of being Queen or Prince. Several months of twice-weekly rehearsals are required, and as well as the festival they also perform at other events.” From the various ‘realms’ such as Chislehurst, the girls then move on to become a part of the London May Queen group. The Chislehurst group is now open to both boys and girls.

Chislehurst first took part in the London May Queen festival in 1923, ten years after it was founded by Dulwich schoolmaster Joseph Deedy in 2013 – there is more of the history in my book. Their festival involved other groups in the area and seemed very much a community festival. It ended with a tea for the May Queen group in the Methodist church hall, and I waited for the May Queen to cut the cake with the help of her ‘Prince’ before leaving to catch the train back home.

I’m pleased to see that the Chislehust May Queen Society is still continuing – and has a Facebook group and a web site. They will be crowning their 99th May Queen tomorrow, as usual on the first Saturday of May.

More on all these events on the May 2006 page of My London Diary.

8th May

I sat for some time wondering what to write about today. Perhaps the obvious choice would be to point out that this is the 76th anniversary of VE Day – and I did attend some events to mark the 60th anniversary back in 2005, both on Saturday May 7th in Ilford and May 8th in Bromley. Sixty years on from the event itself, this was probably the last occasion when a significant number of actual veterans were still around in their 80s and 90s and able to take part.

But looking at the pictures I found it too depressing – and things now have got even worse when with none left who actually fought in WW2 to provide some realism celebrations related to the war have grown more militaristic and jingoistic, more based more on the propaganda of films and TV series and the claim “two world wars and one world cup” than the reality of a fight against fascism – and where Little Englander views have defeated the vision of a united Europe, particularly in the Brexit campaign.

I needed something to cheer me up a little, so instead some pictures from the London May Queen crowning which takes place around this time of year on the second Saturday in May, which in 2010 was May 8th. It was an unusual year in that the weather was terrible, with cold driving rain making the usual outdoor ceremonies on Hayes Common and the parade around the village impracticable, and the event took place with a smaller number taking part inside the crowded village hall. So I’ve added a couple of pictures from other years which show a more normal view of the day.

I’ve written about the event – with help from some of those involved – in various posts on My London Diary, and also in the book, London May Queens, still available as a reasonably priced download or expensively in print from Blurb. Getting to know some of the organisers and taking an interest in the history of the event enabled me to overcome some of the now inevitable suspicions around a male photographer photographing young girls and I was there in 2008 by invitation of some of the mothers involved.

May Queens have a long history, although the traditional May festivities were rather different and bacchanalian. Like many English traditions, this was revived in a bowdlerised form by the Victorians, largely as a festival for children and young people. The ‘Merrie England And London May Queen Festival’ came a little later, founded in 1913 by Joseph Deedy, a master at Dulwich School, and at its peak, I think in the 1930s, involved 120 ‘realms’ from different areas mainly around south London each with their own May Queen, with well over a thousand children coming together for the crowning of the London May Queen at Hayes.

Deedy wrote some rather quaint texts which are still used in the various stages of the ceremonies around Hayes, as well as setting the general principles and rules for the realms and the event. Girls work their way up through the organisation based on length of service, progressing though various roles, first in the local realms, and then in the London May Queen group. They can join from age three, and can remain involved until they are 18. Organisers see it as a way of encouraging social skills and developing self-confidence in the girls who take part. They often take part in local fetes, visits to care homes, and other activities as well as enjoying tea parties. The crowning of the London May Queen is the culmination of a series of events on previous Saturdays when the different realms crown their own Queens.

Working inside the crowded hall in 2008 was difficult, but I was pleased to have the opportunity, and it provided some variety in my coverage of the event – as did the various crowning events in some of the local realms. Covid will doubtless have prevented the 2010 and 2021 events taking place but I hope it will resume for 2022. It’s a charming survival from an earlier age and one which invokes a community spirit which enriches local life.

There are too many posts on My London Diary featuring May Queen Events between 2005 and 2013 to list them all, but you can find them easily on the web site as they are all on the pages from April and May. Here are just a few of them.

London May Queen 2005
London May Queen 2008
Merrie England & London May Queen 2010
London Crowns 100th May Queen 2012
London’s 101st May Queen 2013
I posted even more pictures than usual from these events as I wanted to share them with those who had taken part and tried to include everyone in the pictures.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.