William Kimber and Headington
The famous Headington morris dancer William or "Merry" Kimber (1872–1961) was born at Huggins Cottage in Old Road (left) on 8 September 1872.
He was baptised at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry on 1 January 1873. He was the eldest of the six children of William Kimber (1849–1931), a brick-maker of Headington Quarry, and his wife Sophia Ann (née Kimber) (1850–1931), a smock-maker from Horspath. Kimber’s father William (son of Joseph and Frances Kimber of Quarry) was also a morris-dancer.
This part of Titup was then deemed to belong to Shotover, so in 1881 the family is listed in the census for Shotover rather than Headington. William was then aged eight and still at Headington Quarry National School, but was to leave the next year to start work as a bird-scarer.
In 1894 Kimber married Florence, the daughter of Thomas Henry Cripps, a railway labourer of Cold Harbour (at the south end of the Abingdon Road, then in Berkshire). They first lived at Cold Harbour after the marriage, and their children Florence, Lilian, and William were born there between 1895 and 1899. By the time of the 1901 census the family had moved to Lime Walk, Highfield, where they had five more children. (Their Lime Walk house was demolished to make way for Lime Court.)
At Christmas 1899 there was a significant meeting between William Kimber and Cecil Sharp. Sharp, his wife Constance, and their three young children were spending Christmas with Constance’s mother, Mrs Dora Priestley Birch, who lived at Sandfield Cottage just opposite the north end of Lime Walk (where Horwood Close is now). In the spring of that year the building firm of Knowles & Son had done some work on her house, and William Kimber had been the foreman of the gang. On Boxing Day 1899 the Headington morris dancers, with Kimber on the concertina, came to this grand house (which was anything but a cottage) to try to earn some money, as the bad weather had led to a shortage of building work. Sharp saw the dancers performing 'Laudnum Bunches' with Kimber playing the concertina, and as a result asked Kimber to come back the next day to play the tunes while he wrote them down.
Sharp became interested in collecting morris dances in the Midlands and he would lecture on them while Kimber demonstrated the dances and played the concertina (often losing bricklaying jobs as a result). His fame grew, and he danced at the Royal Albert Hall, the Mansion House, and in front of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra at the Chelsea Hospital.
In about 1908 "Merry" Kimber built a house for himself which
he named "Merryville" (right). It was the very
first house to be built in St Anne’s Road, Headington. In 1921
it was given the number 34, but the street was renumbered in the 1930s as it became more built up, and it is now No. 42.
Kimber’s first wife Florence died in 1917, and in 1920 he married Bessie Clark, the widowed daughter of William Joseph Kethro, a stonemason
of Oxford. That year he revived the Headington Quarry side that he
had formed in 1910, although some of them had been killed or wounded
in World War I.
In 1922 Kimber was presented with the gold medal of the English Folk
Dance Society at the music festival held in the gardens of New College,
Oxford, with the professor of music, Sir Hugh Allen, presiding in
a smock and a garlanded top hat.
From 1946 Kimber taught morris dancing to boys at Headington Secondary School. In October 1958 he cut the tape to open the crescent named after him in Headington, and on Boxing Day 1959 he unveiled a plaque commemorating the momentous meeting at Sandfield Cottage sixty years before.
Merry Kimber’s last appearance with his morris dancers was on Whit Monday 1961, and on 26 December that year he died at the age of 89 at "Merryville". He is buried at Holy Trinity Church, and at his funeral his coffin was carried by the Headington Quarry morris men in their morris regalia.
His grave (left) shows his concertina on top of a pair of bells pads (worn by morris-dancers around the shins).
Note that there is a much fuller entry on William Kimber in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
