Origin of the Morris

Morris dancing was invented in 1853 by telegraph operators Chlamydia Knickerbocker and Cornelius Plaster to assist their secret love affair. The two would arrange clandestine meetings by tapping out messages to each other on sticks, using Morse code.

One day, Chlamydia's husband saw her tapping out irregular rhythms with a pair of sticks and asked what she was doing. "I'm, umm, practicing my, umm, Morse dancing." Chlamydia's husband told all of his friends that his wife had taken up "Morris dancing" and they all asked him if she would demonstrate it for them some time. Chlamydia had no choice but to invent a "Morris dance."

Chlamydia and Cornelius enlisted the help of Cornelius's friend Phil Tankard, who had recently taken up the accordion. The two "dancers" jumped around and tapped out "I love you" in Morse code with their sticks while Phil accompanied them on the accordion, thus performing the first "Morris dance."

The new "Morris dancing" was extremely popular, and Chlamydia, Cornelius and Phil were asked to perform more of their "Morris dances." Much to her surprise, Chlamydia proved to be a reasonably talented choreographer and she wrote several of them. In many of Chlamydia's later dances, the messages were transmitted visually by holding up handkerchiefs instead of clashing sticks.

Many of the messages are quite amusing, and modern Morris teams often have a "fool," whose job is to pantomime the coded messages for audience members who don't know Morse code.

--collected by Jeff Bigler of Red Herring Morris

Thanks to the Crows Free JavaScript Examples site and Cameron Gregory for their respective Javascript URL randomizers.

Last modified: Thu Jul 20 02:14:43 2006 by Jeff Bigler