St Elmo’s Day/ Whit Friday
Saint Elmo. Source: FindAGrave.com
Today is St Elmo’s Day and, in 2023, is also Whit Friday.
St Elmo’s main distinction is the manner of his death, of which there are two accounts, neither particularly pleasant. In one the saint is covered in pitch and set alight (several times) and in the other poor Elmo’s bowels are wound from his body with a windlass. The windlass remains St Elmo’s emblem and, perhaps mockingly, he is the patron saint of stomach disorders. The tarring and burning death led to St Elmo being associated with the electrical flashes of light seen around a ship’s mast during a storm, known as St Elmo’s Fire.
Whit Friday is the traditional date for Whit Walks in the north of England, the largest gatherings being in Salford and Manchester. They began life as a practical welcoming of the long days of early summer but were eventually taken up as charitable fund raising events by the pre-Welfare State Friendly Societies.
During this weekend Robert Dover’s Olimpick Games take place, dating from the early seventeenth century, in Chipping Camden, and are held to be the oldest athletic events in Britain. They are a robust affair including such self explanatory events as cudgels, wrestling, pitching the bar, throwing the iron hammer, leaping over the heads of men kneeling and the best avoided shin-kicking.
