The village fête is a summer afternoon fundraiser held in a field, on a green or in a school playing field, run entirely by volunteers, and repeated in thousands of British villages every year between June and August.
The standard components
The line-up varies less than you might expect:
- The tombola — a drum of numbered tickets and a table of donated prizes. Tickets ending in 0 or 5 win. Prizes are jars of chutney, bath sets and a bottle of wine somebody clearly received as a gift.
- Bric-a-brac — the village’s unwanted objects, sold to other villagers, who will donate them again next year.
- The cake stall, which sells out within twenty minutes.
- The plant stall, run by whoever has the best garden.
- The raffle, drawn at the end, with the hamper as first prize.
- Teas — in the marquee or the village hall, served on proper crockery by the WI.
- A bouncy castle, and a queue for it.
The competitions
Three classics, all designed to extract fifty pence at a time:
- Guess the weight of the cake. Nearest wins the cake.
- Name the doll or the teddy — a list of names on a grid, one of which is written in a sealed envelope.
- How many sweets in the jar.
Alongside these run the produce and craft classes, and these are taken with total seriousness. The longest runner bean, the heaviest marrow, the best Victoria sponge, six identical eggs, and a “flower arrangement in an unusual container” are all judged by a visiting expert against written criteria. Rivalries in these classes can run for decades, and disputes over judging are the stuff of village legend.
The entertainment
A brass band, a morris side, a dog show with categories like “waggiest tail” and “dog most like its owner”, a tug of war, and — where the village is committed — welly wanging, throwing a wellington boot for distance.
The fête is traditionally opened at two o’clock by a local dignitary or whichever mildly famous person lives nearby, who declares it open and is then obliged to buy raffle tickets.
The weather
Central to the whole institution. The fête is planned for months on the assumption of sunshine, and a fair proportion of them take place under grey skies with a gazebo blowing over. The organisers will say “well, it held off” regardless of what actually happened, and everyone will agree.
What it is for
Money — usually for the church roof, the village hall or the primary school, and rarely more than a few thousand pounds. But the more honest answer is that the fête is the day a village looks at itself: the committee meetings, the volunteers, the same families running the same stalls their parents ran.
Village fêtes have declined with rural populations and with the difficulty of finding volunteers, and each one that stops is noticed. Where they survive they are one of the pleasantest and least self-conscious things in English life.