Another form of traditional dance which I first learnt at Chingford County High School Was both longsword and rapper. We learnt figures from the North Skelton longsword dance and Peter also taught us the Newbiggin rapper dance from the booklet published by EFDSS. I still have my original copy of the booklet as well as a later reprint.
We really enjoyed dancing rapper so Peter invited Brian Hayden to teach us some new figures. Brian had been a member of Kings College Morris Men, now called Newcastle Kingsmen, and had been the person who had collected the traditional dance from Amble in the late 1950s. He taught us the entire Amble dance which was later published in the Journal of the EFDSS in 1966. Although we never performed the dance as a whole I was the leader of the rapper team and responsible for putting together the sequences we performed and I like to take the “best” figures and sequences from different sources, including the Amble dance, so our dances were a mixture. We started going to Sidmouth in 1966 and saw other teams there as well as at other festivals. By this time we were beginning to develop the dance to include the Tommy and Betty and Alan Brown’s routines as Betty for Monkseaton were a major influence as well as some of the Walbottle figures which Monkseaton used to dance.
Rapper featured heavily in Chingford’s performances at Sidmouth Folk Festival in the late 1960s and early 1970s and a photo of the team was on the front cover of the Spring edition of English Dance and Song in 1968.
Sidmouth 1967 in Connaught Gardens
l-r John Squires, Jim Tidmarsh, Roger Avery, John Watcham, Me
During that period we had a friendly rivalry with the rapper team from Hammersmith Morris Men which included ex-members of the Sheffield Cutlers rapper team which had danced processional rapper for 45 minutes along the seafront from Port Royal to the Mocha café at a previous festival. When I heard about this I was determined to beat that and with Graham Cole as adjudicator we danced the full length of the promenade taking just about an hour. Hammersmith managed to beat our record so the following year we did 2 lengths (there and back with a single back flip at the far end and finishing with a double/ 2 man flip back at the Ham) in just over 2 hours – a record which still stands as far as I know! I wore out the soles on my shoes in the process and had to buy a new pair to wear for the rest of the week.
I never like doing the same as other teams and always tried to put something different or original in the dance. One year at Sidmouth we gradually built up the dance by doing the 5 man dance for the first few days finishing with the single back flip, then introducing a few more figures and the double flip later in the week before adding the Tommy and Betty and finishing with the triple flip on the last day.
In the final year using Connaught and Blackmore Gardens for the shows before the Arena was introduced we got together with Hammersmith for the final night and did a few figures each before putting the 2 sets together and doing a multiple flip. My memory tells me it was a 4 man flip but the maths suggests it should have been 11 dancers and a 5 man flip.
One year at Sidmouth we were selected to be the final act of the Friday night Arena Performance. We only had 6 dancers that year and the dance finished with a double flip with the 2 dancers (including me as Betty) going in opposite directions.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s I had been asked to run the rapper workshops in the Drill Hall on more than one occasion and one year we put on a display at the Late Night Extra with an all female team, something unheard of in those days. The members of the team were al from a folk club in Derby and chose the name Star and Garter based on the kit they put together for the performance.
At Felixstowe Festival one year I was asked to teach some rapper to a group from The Crown Folk Club in Hoddesdon. They became the Hoddesdon Crownsmen and I occasionally danced as Betty with them. On 
one occasion we were joined by Alex Boydell, the clog dancer, as Tommy. Hoddesdon Crownsmen were guests at Rumworth’s 10th Anniversary weekend and in the Sunday afternoon pub session produced their Betty costume for me to join them once again. It’s not easy doing a back flip in NW clogs!
After leaving Chingford and moving to Lancashire I gave up dancing rapper to concentrate on NW Morris but in 1979 I was invited by CDSS to teach at Pinewoods along with Hugh Rippon. The invitation was at the instigation of Tony Poile, ex-Sheffield Cutlers and Hammersmith who had moved to America. I also caught up with Roger Avery, ex-Chingford dancer who was living and working in Washington DC. I taught NW Morris, clog stepping and rapper. One of the musicians at the camp was Tom Kruskal whom I’d briefly met in 1966 at Sidmouth and was later responsible for teaching rapper in the USA
By 1996 I was missing dancing longsword and rapper so I founded Seven Stars Sword and Step Dancers, based in Wigan. The team no longer dances rapper but we are still dancing longsword, including North Skelton and our own 3 figure dance which we put together with the help of Trevor Stone when we first started. Trevor also arranged for us to dance North Shirley Volunteers which we learnt from Orion Longsword from Boston USA. We actually performed it at one of the Sword Spectaculars attended by Orion and on the final day we put out a joint team to perform the dance. Since then I have created 2 new dances for the team. Makerfield, which is based on the dance from Kirbymoorside and a completely original 5 man dance.