a confectioner in the town, being the person who at one time took the most important part in the festival. Johnny Jack, wearing a gilded gingerbread hat, used to parade the streets shouting a word that sounded like "Pannamahoi"[1] all the "a's" being pronounced soft and short and the "oi" as is "oy" in boy. A crowd would then collect and follow him to Poulton. Arriving there, Johnny Jack proceeded to a sycamore tree that grew near the river, and then threw his hat into the air, and as it smashed on the ground the crowd scrambled for the pieces, which they ate. From a stall gingerbread, cakes, etc. were sold or given away. A "revel" then occurred and some rough horseplay was indulged in, and if the neighbouring farmer was not present to control the people much of his dead stock was often broken up and cast into the stream. Finally oranges were thrown into the water, for which a number of children scrambled, and then "threaded the needle" into Marlborough, knocking at the doors of all houses from which the occupants did not come forth to watch them pass by.
When Johnny Jack was ill about seventy years ago, another confectioner in the town, named Heywood, took his place, and his son, who carried it on for a few years, is still living. The crowd, however, pelted his wife so vigorously with turf sods that she soon induced him to give it up, and, as no one was found to succeed him, the fair quickly collapsed. Children used for some years to meet at the spot on the anniversary of the festival and thread the needle into Marlborough, but this, the last remnant of the old fair, has now died out.
A fair used to be held on the same day at Mildenhall, a village about a mile farther on. A conspicuous feature seems to have been the aprons worn by the children. This suggests a celebration of May Day, old style, which I am told might fall on the 14th as well as the 13th, but this affair at Poulton appears too rough for such an origin.
- ↑ This is on the authority of the younger Heywood. He did not know how it was spelt, so I have written it phonetically.
