The Succession Trap
Why the Person Doing the Work Can Never Be the One to Find a Replacement
Every living tradition in England faces the same structural problem, and almost none of them talk about it until it is too late.
The problem is this: the person who keeps a tradition alive is, by definition, the person least available to train someone else to do it. They are too busy doing the thing to step back and teach the thing. They are managing the insurance paperwork and the road closures and the costume repairs and the practice schedules and the fundraising and the thousand small negotiations with councils and landlords and neighbours that keep an annual event possible in modern England. They do not have a free evening to sit down with a younger person and explain how it all works, because every free evening is already committed to making it work.
And so the knowledge stays locked inside one person, or two, or a small committee of three who have been doing it together for decades and have developed a shorthand so compressed that an outsider cannot follow a single conversation. The tradition appears healthy from the outside. The event happens every year. The crowds come. And then one of those two or three people dies, or moves, or simply cannot do it any more, and the whole thing collapses with a speed that shocks everyone except the people who were holding it up.
This is the succession trap. It is not unique to English traditions, but English traditions are particularly vulnerable to it, because so many of them depend on a very small number of people doing an enormous amount of invisible work.
The Paradox of the Indispensable Volunteer
Consider the organisational reality of a Sussex bonfire society. The public sees the procession on the fifth of November: the flaming torches, the elaborate tableaux, the bangers and the barrel tar and the burning crosses carried through the streets. What the public does not see is the eleven months of preparation that makes the procession possible. The risk assessments. The road closure applications submitted to the county council months in advance. The negotiations with the fire service. The sourcing of materials. The coordination of hundreds of volunteers into a functioning processional order. The fundraising events - the quiz nights, the jumble sales, the summer barbecues - that generate the money to pay for it all.
In most bonfire societies, this work falls on a remarkably small number of people. A chairman, a secretary, a treasurer, and perhaps half a dozen committee members who between them hold the institutional knowledge of how the whole operation runs. They know which supplier provides the tar barrels at cost. They know which council officer to speak to about the road closure. They know the timing of the procession route down to the minute, because they have walked it every year for twenty years and they know exactly where the bottleneck forms outside the pub on the high street.
This knowledge is almost entirely undocumented. It exists in heads and in habits. And the people who hold it are so consumed by the annual cycle of organising the next event that they rarely pause to write any of it down, let alone to train someone else in it. The paradox is precise: the tradition’s survival depends on these people, and these people’s commitment to the tradition is exactly what prevents them from securing its future.
Growing Up Inside vs. Arriving from Outside
There are two ways a person comes to carry a tradition. The first is growing up inside it. You are born in Padstow and the Obby Oss is simply part of the texture of your childhood. You watch it before you understand it. You are carried on someone’s shoulders at the age of three, you run alongside the procession at seven, you join the crowd of singers at fourteen, and by the time you are twenty you know every word of the Morning Song and every turn of the route without ever having been formally taught. The knowledge entered you by proximity, by repetition, by the slow accumulation of annual experience. Nobody sat you down and explained it. You absorbed it the way you absorbed the layout of the streets.
The second way is arriving as an outsider. You move to a village in your thirties. You attend the local wassail out of curiosity. You enjoy it. You come back the next year and offer to help. Someone hands you a bucket of mulled cider and tells you to keep people’s cups full. Over five or six years you become a regular, then a committee member, then someone who understands how the event works. But the gap between you and the people who grew up inside the tradition never fully closes. There are things they know instinctively that you must learn deliberately, and the learning takes years that the tradition may not have.
The crisis facing many English traditions is that the first pathway is narrowing. Young people leave the villages and market towns where these traditions are rooted. They go to university, they move to cities for work, they build lives elsewhere. The pool of people who grew up inside the tradition shrinks with each generation. And the second pathway - the outsider who arrives and gradually learns - is too slow and too uncertain to replace what is being lost.
Morris dancing illustrates this with painful clarity. A morris side needs dancers, musicians, and organisational leadership. Historically, sides recruited from the local community: young men who had watched their fathers dance, who knew the tunes before they knew the steps. Many sides now recruit from a much wider and more diffuse pool. People find morris through folk festivals, through social media, through the unlikely algorithm of a YouTube video watched on a Tuesday evening. They arrive enthusiastic but uninitiated, and the side must teach them everything from scratch while simultaneously maintaining its performance calendar. The energy required to train newcomers competes directly with the energy required to keep the tradition running.
Spectators and Participants
There is a fundamental distinction that many traditions fail to navigate, and it is the distinction between attracting an audience and recruiting a workforce. These are not merely different activities. They are, in important respects, opposing ones.
A tradition that attracts large crowds can appear to be thriving. The Lewes Bonfire draws tens of thousands of spectators. The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance draws hundreds of visitors to a small Staffordshire village every September. The Haxey Hood fills the streets of a Lincolnshire village on the sixth of January. From the outside, these traditions look robust, even booming. But the crowd is not the tradition. The crowd is the audience for the tradition, and the tradition is the small group of people who organise and perform it, and those are the people who need replacing.
Large audiences can, paradoxically, make recruitment harder. They create a sense that the tradition is someone else’s responsibility - a show put on for public consumption rather than a communal activity that requires communal participation. The spectator thinks: that looks wonderful, I’m glad someone does it. The spectator does not think: that looks wonderful, I should be part of making it happen. The tradition needs the second thought, and everything about modern spectatorship encourages the first.
Social media intensifies this effect. A bonfire procession filmed on a phone and posted online can reach millions of viewers. It generates admiration, nostalgia, a warm feeling of cultural pride. What it does not generate is a single additional volunteer willing to spend their Tuesday evenings in a draughty hall assembling a tableau float. The tradition gains visibility and loses nothing in the short term, but visibility without participation is a slow form of hollowing out. The shell remains impressive while the interior thins.
What Works, and Why It Is Difficult
Some traditions have solved the succession problem, or at least managed it, and their solutions share a common feature: they require the current carriers to deliberately sacrifice some of their own involvement in order to create space for others. This is harder than it sounds. A person who has been running an event for twenty years has strong opinions about how it should be done. Handing control to someone less experienced means accepting that the event will, for a time, be done less well. It means watching someone make mistakes you learned to avoid a decade ago. It means letting go of something that has become, whether you intended it or not, a central part of your identity.
The bell-ringing community has developed one of the more effective succession models in English tradition. Tower captains are explicitly encouraged to train younger ringers, and the structured nature of change-ringing - the mathematical progression from simple methods to complex ones - provides a natural curriculum. A learner begins with rounds, progresses to plain hunt, moves through increasingly complex methods over months and years, and eventually becomes capable of ringing a full peal. The knowledge transfer is built into the activity itself, not bolted on as an afterthought. Crucially, the experienced ringer must step aside from a bell to let the learner pull it. You cannot train a replacement while simultaneously doing the job.
Some bonfire societies have addressed the problem by creating junior sections - structured programmes that bring children and teenagers into the organisational life of the society years before they are old enough to carry a torch in the main procession. The young people learn the culture of the society by growing up inside it, replicating the organic pathway that village life once provided but can no longer guarantee. Lewes Borough Bonfire Society and Cliffe Bonfire Society both run youth programmes that feed directly into their adult membership. The investment is significant - it requires adults to spend time teaching rather than organising - but the return is a generation that understands the tradition from the inside.
The Marshfield Mummers, who perform their paper boys play on Boxing Day in the Gloucestershire town of Marshfield, have maintained continuity through a different mechanism: a deliberately small and closed cast that recruits replacements only when a performer retires. The roles are few - seven or eight characters - and each is passed from one performer to the next in a direct, personal transmission. There is no open audition. The retiring performer chooses their successor, teaches them the part, and steps aside. The tradition trades scalability for reliability. It cannot grow, but it is very difficult to kill.
The Trap Remains
These solutions work, but they require something that the structure of voluntary commitment in modern England makes increasingly rare: they require the current carriers to think about the tradition’s future at the exact moment when the tradition’s present is consuming all of their available energy. They require long-term planning from people who are already overcommitted. They require an acknowledgement that the tradition is bigger than any individual, at the same time as the tradition is functionally dependent on specific individuals.
The succession trap is not a failure of will or imagination on the part of the people caught in it. It is a structural feature of how voluntary traditions operate in a society that no longer organises itself around the local and the seasonal. The traditions that survive will be the ones that find ways to interrupt the trap - to build the training of the next generation into the practice of the current one, rather than treating succession as something to worry about later. Later, in the life of a tradition carried by volunteers, is almost always too late.
The question is not whether England’s carrier traditions will face succession crises. They already are. The question is whether enough of them will recognise the trap before it closes, and do the difficult, unglamorous, identity-surrendering work of making themselves replaceable. That work has no audience. It generates no spectacle. It will never go viral on social media. But it is, in the long run, the only work that matters.
