Capturing Customs
by Lou Stoppard
A custom can be a tradition, or it can be a kind of protest. Ellison’s images consider both possibilities. Of course, the images are about time, too – and about the way in which its passage both erodes and galvanises. William Litt, champion wrestler turned writer and poet, wrote about the popularity of “back-hold wrestling” in 1778 for Wrestliana (1823):
Since those days of our fathers, great indeed is the change effected in the habits, customs and manners, of all classes of people throughout England; and in no part of it more than in the north. The festivities of Christmas, the hilarities of sheep-shearing, and other seasons of mirth and jollity, are now but the mere shadow of what they were, even at the short distance of time we treat of. Though some dainties, neither much known nor wanted in those days, are now in common use, yet home-brewed, that soul and cementer of good fellowship, so often spoken of in raptures by aged, has nearly disappeared. At that time, if money was more scarce, ale was better and cheaper; and pastimes were not only frequent, but enjoyed with much less care for to-morrow.
Indeed, Ellison’s TEK HOD images are as much about societal memories (or the fantasies of those memories) and dreams as they are about pastimes. The punch of each picture – the pathos, the beauty, and, of course, the delicious yet respectful wit – comes in the contrast underpinning what we see. At its most basic, that divide is between something “basic, primitive” (as wrestling is described in Roger Robson’s 1999 Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling: a Documentary History) and something so committed to finesse; to performance, to posturing, to flamboyance. To fashion.
Robson dates Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling back centuries. Many have suggested that the Vikings brought their wrestling style to the Cumbrian coast during their colonisation; according to Robson, there’s “no way of knowing”. Some, buoyed by early Irish carvings depicting wrestling, theorise that Irish captive slaves introduced the sport to Iceland, teaching young Vikings who then in turn brought it to Cumbria on their invasion. Yet, and as Robson asks, “wouldn’t it have been easier for the Irish to have paddled over here direct?”
His history cites an educational treatise from 1581, which advocates wrestling as part of the curriculum: