Queer Places:
Priory Cottage, 1 Priory Ln, Ascott-under-Wychwood, Chipping Norton OX7 6AX, UK
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Tiddy Hall, 41 Shipton Rd, Ascott-under-Wychwood, Chipping Norton OX7 6AE, UK
Laventie Military Cemetery
Laventie, Departement du Pas-de-Calais, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France
Reginald
Tiddy (March 9, 1880 – August 10, 1916) was a student at the English Folk
Dance Society and in December 1911, he became a member (first reserve) of
Cecil Sharp’s demonstration morris side and also chairman of the newly established
Oxford branch of the Society. He planned events with Sharp and generally
encouraged the folk revival movement. Tiddy was a fellow of Trinity College
Oxford and lived for several years in the village of Ascott-under-Wychwood,
where he brought together a new morris side to restore its old dances. Above
all he is remembered for his research into Mummers Plays, of which he
collected at least 33 play texts. These were published in 1923 after his
death.
Reginald John Elliott Tiddy was born in Margate Kent on March 9, 1880. His father
William Elliott Tiddy, originally from Cornwall, was a schoolmaster who met
his wife Ellen Willett, when both were working at the Wanstead Infant Orphan
Asylum in Leyton, east London. He was an
assistant schoolmaster and she a governess, both aged 20. William was born in
1849 in Falmouth where his father was a ship's pilot but he sadly died in 1855
aged only 36. William was thus orphaned at age 6 and though his mother did
soon remarry, perhaps the experience stayed with him and led him to this first
job at Wanstead. At that time the asylum was looking after 600 children
between the ages of 3 and 14.
After their marriage in 1876 William and Ellen moved to Margate, Kent where
Reginald was born and grew up - he had a younger brother Claude. But his
mother Ellen was from Oxfordshire and Reginald used often to visit her brother
William Willett, who was a farmer at Ramsden (5 miles N of Witney). Ellen's
father John Willett had been initially a publican, then a farmer of 54 acres
(1881). With his mother’s rustic roots and his father’s sense of altruism,
it’s not surprising that once Reginald had won a place at Oxford and become a
fellow at Trinity College, he chose to combine Oxfordshire folklore studies
with a philanthropic role at Ascott village. Coming from a modest but
aspirational family, Reginald Tiddy campaigned for workers' educational rights
and built a Reading Room at Ascott.
During
a 1905
vacation, Raymond Laurent
went to England, and stayed there for a few weeks, which he used
marvelously to perfect his language and to choose among British masters
preferences. A lot of his prose poems or his ballads are felt from this first
stay. He lived in Essex. The following year, in 1906, he made a second trip,
going up the Thames, stopping at Oxford where
he was a guest of
Tiddy.
Soon after the outbreak of war he enlisted with the Oxfordshire and
Buckinghamshire Light Infantry but was killed at the Somme on 10 August 1916.
Tiddy's batman Ralph Honeybone (also from Ascott) wrote: 'Mr Tiddy was killed
by a shell on the night of the tenth, he must have died instantly as he did
not look to have suffered much when I got to him'.
Tiddy's death came 5 days after the loss of
George Butterworth at Pozieres.
Fellow demonstration dancers George Wilkinson and Perceval Lucas had also just
been killed on July 1 and July 6. Sharp wrote to his wife Constance from
America on 11 Sept 1916: 'The news of Tiddy's and George Butterworth's deaths
have just fairly done for me and bowled me over. In them I have lost two of my
best friends who have worked with me and loyally supported me through all the
troublous times ... and I find it hard to face a world that no longer contains
them. Perhaps the greatest pleasure I have had in the last 10 years has been
the intimacy and close association with men of the younger generation who I
felt were to carry on the work I had started and I had around me some, like
these two, who were really brilliant minds. They were men who counted. And now
except for Vaughan Williams, there is no one left.'
Reginald Tiddy was buried at Levantie cemetery.
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