The folk dancers who refuse to stop blacking up

Prefer to listen? You can hear Ophira telling the story of the Coconutters by clicking here, or via the Apple Podcasts player below.

The folk dancers who refuse to stop blacking up

Podcast Episode · The Manchester Weekly from The Mill · 25/04/2025 · 11m

Apple Podcasts

The Britannia Coconut Dancers of Bacup line up in two straight rows of four. They raise their hands to their ears, as if listening out for danger overhead. “Are we listening out for a roof fall?” one dancer will later suggest to me. “Folk dancing tells a story,” he explains.

The story of this particular folk dancing troupe is a fraught one. One look at them and you’ll understand why. Most people I’ve shown photos of the group to have responded with either open jaws or grimaced teeth, and I can assure you that the real-life spectacle is altogether more disconcerting. The troupe more-or-less as it exists today (conceptually, that is, the cast has since changed) dates back to 1857, though the tradition itself in various forms has existed a great deal longer. Just about every Easter since then, the Coconut Dancers have danced in the streets and the pubs and the working men’s clubs of Bacup and nearby, adorned in knitted jumpers, candy-striped kilts, Lancashire clogs, velvet breeches, with their faces painted completely black.

While the arguments the dancers may have for continuing with their costume are numerous and varied, rooted in oral histories, longstanding traditions, and unconfirmed and at times contradictory theories — the reasons to not paint your face black as a white person are singular and obvious: It’s hurtful. This isn’t exactly fertile ground for lively debate. But the fact remains that the tension that this group’s very existence presents is a tension that exists in every corner of England now — namely, the determination to maintain white Englishness in a country that has for all living memory been multicultural, and in the face of a society veering, according to multiple onlookers I spoke to last Saturday, ever woke-ward.