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entirely comfortable with the couple’s socialist leanings.
    The Needhams were not easily discouraged, and in 1925 they found just what they were looking for in the Essex village of Thaxted, twenty miles from Cambridge. Here they uncovered as left-wing an Anglican prelate as it was possible to imagine: Conrad Le Despenser Roden Noel, the infamous “red vicar” of the Home Counties, the man the popular newspapers dubbed England’s most turbulent priest.
    Noel had been vicar of Thaxted since 1910, notorious as a firebrand, and having been forced from several livings by congregations who objected to his socialism. But among the parishioners of Thaxted he was to find a wellspring of liberal sympathy, and he flung himself into his role with ferocious enthusiasm. He asked the composer Gustav Holst, who lived nearby, to play his newly composed suite The Planets on the church organ; he threw out all the old fusty paintings and hangings in the nave and installed new, colorful linens and cottons; he found a tame pigeon and preached with it sitting happily on his shoulder; he staged a three-part Mass each Sunday, and greatly enlarged the choir to sing in it; and to display his support for revolutionary Christianity, the majesty of England, and the rights of the Irish to be free of colonial enslavement, he ran up the Red flag, theGeorge Cross, and the banner of Sinn Fein all at once on his church’s newly refettled spire. On hearing this, High Church louts from Cambridge swarmed into the village and climbed up the stonework to try to haul down the contentious flags; but Reverend Dr. Noel imported teams of striking policemen to guard them, and there was a standoff lasting some months before a consistory court finally ordered the vicar to remove them once and for all.
    Thaxted Church thus became, almost overnight, a place of great stimulation and fun. Before long Sunday Mass at Thaxted was one of the best attended in the county. Joseph and Dorothy Needham became committed members of the congregation, remaining supporters and friends long after Noel had died in 1942, and well on into their old age.
    At Thaxted, Needham also became an eager practitioner of the peculiarly English country ritual of morris dancing. Conrad Noel had first brought the old dance back to Thaxted at the urging of his wife, who felt it important to preserve rural traditions, even though this one was of pagan origin and was held to encourage fertility and the growth of crops. And Needham loved it—he loved the flamboyance and the merriment; the feeling of liberation and joy; the men dressed in loose white fustian with colored baldrics crossing over their chests and backs, bells on their ankles, and flower-ornamented hats; the handkerchiefs waved and sticks whacked against one another; the pipe and tabor played tunelessly, but hauntingly, in the background.
    Morris dancing was first brought back to England from the Muslim world during the Crusades—hence morris , from Moorish —and is the oldest unchanged dance in England. To Needham it was one of the “pure creations of the working class,” part of a series of dances which “will unite by their remarkable continuity the developed communism of the future with the antique primitive communism of the past.” Not for nothing did morris dancers come out and perform their ungainly and unusual dances on May Day, as they still do today: their rituals celebrate the rural workingman, and as such they were, for Needham, a demonstration that true socialism—a caring solidarity among workers—was woven deep into the warp and woof of English society.
    His claims may have been extravagant, or wishful thinking. But hedanced for most of his adult life, learned the accordion so he could accompany his fellow academic dancers, and played a significant role in creating a renewed enthusiasm for morris dancing which still exists in southern England today. It seems noteworthy that amid all