Sam Bennett of Ilmington

Sam Bennett (1866 -1951) was responsible for reviving the Ilmington Morris Dances which were noted and published by Cecil Sharp. He also sang a number of songs which Sharp included in "Folk Songs for Schools", of which the best known song was "The Keeper".

Sam was a fruit farmer who was also the local Morris fool and fiddler, as well as an important song repository, in the Cotswold village of Ilmington, near Stratford-on-Avon. He was both fiddler and morris dancer (famously, at the same time - he would dance a jig and play simultaneously) and spent his life in Ilmington. He lived in 'The Fox House', a small cottage opposite the village hall which has a crude outline of a fox carved in the wooden panel over the door. He is buried in the village churchyard.

According to Roy Dommett,

'Morris dancing in Ilmington can be traced back to the beginning of the 19th century, perhaps 1805, when George Arthur came to the village and set up a workshop. The morris probably stopped first about the time of the end of Dover's Games in 1852, and then again a little later, 1858 -1861. It was revived from 1886 to 1888/9 stimulated by the local interest in the Bidford team, in 1897 for Queen Victoria's second Jubilee and again in 1906 because of the growing wider interest in morris ...... Cecil Sharp collected dances from those who had been in the 1886 and 1897 revivals. He even recorded the dances of the early 20th century side when it was dancing at a Stretton-on-Fosse Flower Show, and these notations and an interpretation have been published by the Morris Ring under that village's name. Sharp realised that he could recover older forms of the dances from the senior dancers in the village and his reconstruction was published in his revised edition of the Morris Book. Because of Sharp's public condemnation of the then active Ilmington side, for which Bennett was playing although he was not responsible for the dances, Sam recollected the dances himself and produced a version which was seen and recorded by Kenworthy Schofield'.

Both Cecil Sharp and Mary Neal collected from Sam Bennett, although Sharp, at least, did not seem to have much time for him. He taught several revivals of Morris in the area, the last being a team of schoolgirls in Stratford just after the second war. As a fiddler, he was in demand over a wide area, and certainly played for the Morris in Bampton-in-the-Bush at one time. In the early thirties, he was invited to the United States by Henry Ford to teach Folk Dances to the Detroit Motor workers.

In 1899, Sam Bennett had the horse made which the present-day side still use. It was preserved in the village by the Women's Institute. The modern side have composed a dance in Sam's memory called 'The Keeper', danced to the tune of the well-known folk-song which was originally collected from Sam.

Recordings of Sam Bennett playing the fiddle were made during the early 1930s by the American collector James Madison Carpenter and are held at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., with copies in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. A film of Sam playing the fiddle, but with no accompanying soundtrack, is in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. Sam was also recorded by Peter Kennedy in 1950 and can be heard playing and singing on Songs and Ballads: Warwickshire and Birmingham. Sam Bennett and Cecilia Costello (Folktracks FSA-60-098). The songs on this tape are:

He was also visited by Percy Grainger in 1908.