Penny for the guy?

What’s the longest-lived and most successful fundraising ‘ask’ ever? It has to be “Penny for the guy”.

Boys in England have been asking for money from strangers in the street using this phrase for, possibly, hundreds of years, raising the equivalent of millions in the process to pay for their fireworks and festivities on the fifth of November.

Remember remember
The fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot…

For more than 250 years after the English ‘Thanksgiving Act’ in January 1606 the fifth of November had been celebrated as a holiday to give thanks for the failure of the plot by a group of Roman Catholic conspirators to blow up the House of Lords along with King James I on that day in 1605. Guy Fawkes was to light the fuse, and from early days people had been burning him in effigy.

In my boyhood, during the 1950s, Guy Fawkes Day was one of the highlights of the year. Of course we looked forward to Christmas because of the presents we’d get, but Bonfire Night was much more exciting to us.

There was the thrill of flirting with the dangers of playing with explosives (there would always be someone missing from school the next day because of burns) and we relished the chance to terrorise the neighbourhood under cover of darkness. We lobbed bangers at each other and in turn hopped around squibs tossed at our feet. We threw them back, if we could catch them before the fuse ran out, imagining they were hand grenades. Sometimes we mistimed the count, and someone would go home with scorched fingers and tears. (My gran’s remedy for burnt fingers was to cover them with lots of butter.) We might drop a big banger through a letterbox or toss it onto the roof so that it exploded in the downpipe of a house where someone we didn’t like lived — but only if they were at home. Even though my friends and I drew the line at scaring animals, pets were best kept indoors on the fifth of November.

We never started a fire, but every year the young men from the neighbourhood built a huge bonfire on the bombsite at the end of the street. That’s where we boys would meet and watch immense pyre being lit, staying until the fire had consumed the guy made of newspaper and sticks that topped it. And it was where we returned after our adventures, laden with potatoes that we’d bury in the embers and bottles of home-made ginger beer or Corona Dandelion and Burdock to drink while they cooked. Without kitchen foil we sometimes coated the spuds in damp earth before baking them, but mostly we ate them hot from the ashes — charred skins and all. The first jacket potato I ever tasted was served on board the Ascania during our Atlantic crossing back to England in November 1951. I hated it, but I relished every one I baked on Bonfire Night.

Today in Toronto people are wishing each other Happy Diwali (the festival of light that Hindus and Sikhs celebrate at this time of the year), but nobody, except maybe a few die-hard Anglos in British Columbia, has mentioned Guy Fawkes Day. They tell me that Halloween is now a more important celebration in England, too.

I do remember trick-or-treating in Pembroke, Ontario, in 1950 with another five-year-old boy. It was great fun, but it paled beside my first Guy Fawkes Night when I was back in England. So why is Halloween growing in popularity while Bonfire Night is waning? In a word: promotion. Halloween is more commercial. It sells more movies, pumpkins and pies, as well as costumes, cards, parties and booze-ups. Bonfire Night, on the other hand, has always been a home-grown type of festivity. True, there are fewer places to have bonfires inside towns and concerns for public safety prevent us from building open fires or using fireworks in the streets — indeed, firecrackers have been banned, and the boys that brandished them are called hooligans; potatoes baked in the ashes are for camping holidays not street celebrations here in Toronto, where we have to buy food from licensed vendors; but, most important, Bonfire Night does not present a marketing opportunity to mass merchandisers — only to little boys trucking their guy around the streets and asking for pennies (or pounds).

Pity!