We are sad to report the death of Ron Shuttleworth, 1930-2025. Ron Shuttleworth, 1930-2025
Ron was major figure in the international mumming community, having contributed greatly to both the practice and scholarship of mumming.
Without doubt, Ron and the Coventry Mummers which he founded in 1966 were a seminal influence on the revival of mumming plays, through their workshops and especially Ron's introductory booklets, which were full of practical advice. He generously gave of his time to other enthusiasts.
The following obituary was written by Ron's sons Harry and Jack:
"Ron Shuttleworth died peacefully at home, keeping his wits to the end, on the 27th August 2025.
Ron was one half of Jean & Ron Shuttleworth who were regulars on the English folk singing scene.
Brought-up in Sheffield and Hathersage (Derbyshire), Ron was an enthusiastic cyclist and climber, discovering folk while on national service. He met Jean through the Camping Club Folk Camps and they remained inseparable, settling in Coventry. The family values they inherited perhaps made Ron the focus of achievement, but Jean was always vital to their endeavours.
In the early folk revival they created a handwritten card-index of folk songs, with the lyrics. This would often disappear at folk events, being passed around as a unique resource for aspiring singers.
Jean and Ron sang unaccompanied traditional songs and wrote comic parodies. As folk clubs increasingly fell to dependence on microphones and guitars, they held out for pure singing, lobbying festivals to add/keep songs and choruses in their programmes.
Ron was involved in the first Coventry Folk Club, hosting much of the folk 'A-list', and then was the cornerstone of the subsequent Coventry Folk Workshop (possibly inspired by a brief involvement in 'Critics Group'). Although being a reasonable concertina player, he realised it is a difficult instrument to sing to; so singing unaccompanied, he wrote the humorous lyrics to compensate. Over the next 40 years he was a welcomed visitor to clubs and festivals throughout the country where we could be depended upon to inject mirth with a couple of the dozens of songs he'd written.
As a singer songwriter working in the car factories he caught the eye of the vanguard of the left in the folk revival, but lost it when he equally lampooned corrupt trades union culture as much as bosses.
One of his proudest moments was at a Sheffield Sessions Festival 'protest songs' session when someone who heard his parody of 'Soldier, Soldier, Won't you marry me' that railed at a scandal of under-equipped troops in Iran, told him it was still sung in army mess-rooms - thus having become a true "folk song" of the people.
Being from Derbyshire, in 1966 he created a hooden beast of the Derby Tup, and then persuaded friends to re-enact the traditional mummer's play which features the giant ram. This led to the formation of the first dedicated mummer's team, Coventry Mummers.
He reworked the old mummers plays to appeal to modern audiences, introducing striking costumes and weapons, and texts full of jokes. These even developed their own oral tradition as the mummers tweaked their own lines.
Mummer's members went on to form Earlsdon Morris, and Peeping Tom; each rewriting the rules of their genre. Ron eventually persuaded the Morris Ring to alter its constitution to accept Mummers, without being dancers first.
Mumming became his life-long passion, assembling an authoritative archive of 'everything written in English about mumming' and supporting anyone interested in the field. His archive is now at Sheffield University. He lamented that the monthly trickle of enquiries about plays had stopped in the last few years.
Ron played the Anglo concertina, graduating from a harmonica whilst in the army. He set up 'Attics to Addicts', a project to rescue many concertinas which would otherwise have been thrown away by families clearing out 'worthless' junk. He rescued hundreds of concertinas, most of which were restored by Colin Dipper, feeding the resurgence of the instrument in the 1960s and 70s. One of his sons still plays his favourite box.
Highlights:
Early starts on Boxing Day mornings to perform the mumming play he'd help research and resurrect in the nearby village of Stoneleigh, where the final (public) performance revealed the depth of hospitality of the families they'd visited earlier.
Rev. Kenneth Loveless leaving the house full of pipe-smoke and empty of whisky after long nights.
A professional saying it was Ron who freed him from dependence on a guitar and mic, and making a lifelong career as a performer.
Having had an old acquaintance refer to Jean as "Joan", which was her alter ego as "Joan the Leather Queen", one of Ron's songs she took as her own and sang with relish.
Being roped in to play for a massed morris show, and afterwards being told that it was the piercing sound of his small concertina that the dancers heard, rather than a wall of melodions.
In the play, the time when St George loses his sword, but pulls out a .32 automatic and shoots the Turkish Knight in the back, having two plain-clothes cops dive for cover under the table.. and then having to laugh it off.
Ron explaining that he'd seen a hobby-horse, long sold-off and now painted as a zebra, used by a morris team. They didn't believe when he said he'd made it, until he showed hidden tubes that enabled the operator to blow down the nostrils, with the aim of freaking out innocent audience members."

Harry & Jack Shuttleworth (sons), September 2025.
The narrative is based on our flawed memories, so excuse errors.

More on Ron's Folk Play Interests

Symposium: Ron Shuttleworth with his antennae
Ever the showman, Ron donned antenna lights to read his paper on the Coventry Mummers at the Bath International Mummers Symposium, 2012.Starting in the 1960s, Ron began a personal collection which developed into the Morris Ring Folk Play Archive, and which is now held at Sheffield University.

While Ron was a collector of mummers' plays rather than an academic researcher, he was always happy to share his material with those of us who were, and we returned the favour whenever we could.

He was a regular attender at the Traditional Drama Conferences and Unconventions, where he talked about his experiences and staged displays. When it came to question time, he was always ready with an interesting question or point should we be getting too complacent.

Ron also did a good line in mumming related Christmas cards for his mumming friends, which on one occasion included a packet of Elecampane seeds, in case the Doctors were running short of miracle cures!

We will miss Ron and his Christmas cards.

Peter Millington

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