Happy May Day

The Fowlers Troop/Deptford Jack in the Green will be out doing their traditional May Day procession on May 1st, details as follows:

12.00 Depart from Dog and Bell, 116 Prince St London, Deptford SE8 3JD.

(pub will open at 11.00),

12.45 Rose and Crown, 1 Crooms Hill, Greenwich, London SE10 8ER,

13.45 Star and Garter, 60 Old Woolwich Rd, Greenwich, London SE10 9NY,

14.25 Plume of Feathers, 19 Park Vista London, London SE10 9LZ,

15.25 Richard I (the Tolley), 52/54, Royal Hill, Greenwich, London, SE10 8RT,

16.10 Ashburnham Arms, 25 Ashburnham Grove, Greenwich, London SE10 8UH.

Report on last year's celebrations here.

Doug Adams

Doug Adams (left, on the accordion)
Photo from Francis Sedgemore

This will be their first year since the death last September of their musical stalwart Doug Adams, remembered as follows in The Guardian:

'Doug Adams, who has died of cancer aged 60, was the lead musician at the Deptford Jack in the Green. This traditional event, last seen in Deptford around the end of the 19th century, was revived in the early 1980s. The Jack in the Green, a large leaf-covered framework decorated with flowers, is carried through the streets on May Day, accompanied by a band of attendants and musicians. Doug also played melodeon for several morris teams in south-east London as well as leading bands and playing at English traditional music sessions.

Originally from Bratton Clovelly, Devon, Doug arrived in Greenwich in the mid-1970s after taking an applied physics degree at Lanchester Polytechnic (now Coventry University). He had a love of English traditional music which, at the time he started playing, was not as well known as Irish traditional music.

Doug had learned piano and recorder as a child, then switched to piano accordion and finally the melodeon. It was as a melodeon player that he joined his first morris team, Greenwich Morris Men, in the late 1970s. While pursuing his other great interest at the time, re-enacting civil war battles with the Roundhead Association, he broke his leg very badly, but continued as a musician, first using a wheelchair and then on crutches.

Doug then joined Blackheath Morris Men and gradually became their main musician. One of their enterprises in the early 1980s involved the revival of the Deptford Jack in the Green for which Doug was musician on the first and then most of the subsequent outings on May Day each year including 2012. Doug played regularly at English music sessions at the Horseshoe Inn, near London Bridge, and the Lord Hood in Greenwich as well as at the Sidmouth and Dartmoor folk festivals'