A solid tactic for how to open opinion pieces is to start with a famous or meaningful quotation. I can think of nothing better than this: ‘I just remember hitting my head, and now I have the cheese’. Wise words, indeed. For this is a piece about what we can learn from one of the oldest, silliest and most eccentric of British traditions – cheese rolling.
Every year on the late May bank holiday, a competition is held on a terrifyingly vertiginous slope called Coopers Hill, outside Gloucester, to chase wheels of double Gloucester cheese. If you haven’t heard of this before, you really must look up some videos to get a sense of how bone-crunchingly bonkers this is. Full disclosure, I grew up a few minutes from this event, and though I’ve never taken part, this revelation may explain to those of you who know me something of the lens through which I see the world.
Cheese rolling was first officially recorded as happening by Gloucester’s town crier in 1824, though many locals insist it was happening for hundreds of years before that. I’ve heard more outlandish claims still. Some locals claim that it was a Phoenician tradition brought over in pre-Roman times; others that the famous ‘Gloucester golfer’ on the Crecy stain-glass window in Gloucester cathedral, supposedly the oldest ever image of a golf game, actually depicts a wheel of cheese rolling down a hill.
What is certain, however, is that there is a depth of local pride in the tradition, and that has helped it withstand multiple attempts at the event being cancelled. The writer Kenneth Hare, in his book on Gloucestershire, asked a local if cheese rolling could survive the Second World War. ‘Of course,’ a local told him: ‘Us were Cheese Rolling bevore newfangled vootball an’ cricket were thought on!’ Even if the ‘cheese’ was a wooden replica during the war (due to rationing), he was right.
It has even survived that other great blight on our land – Blairism. The 1997 cheese roll was held less than a month after Tony Blair’s first victory, a landslide of a different sort. Unfortunately, so many were injured that there was pressure to cancel the event, and the following year the event was officially called off. But, wonderfully, locals ignored the busybodies and did it anyway. It continued on thereafter.
When an attempt to professionalise the event was proposed in 2011, complete with paid ticketing and more, there was such local outrage that that the idea was scrapped. The BBC reported that without the benefit of a bit of central control, the cheese rolling would die. Or go downhill, as it were.
Au contraire.
With local volunteers, the event is bigger than ever. Individual cancellations may have happened, for foot and mouth and Covid, but spontaneous order of a sort that would make Hayek proud has kept the show going. Cheeses are donated by local mongers, a local rugby team stand at the bottom to catch competitors, and enterprising locals sell merch and cheese to the visitors on their pilgrimage to the hillside.
The whole bonkers event is still madly un-PC. The amount of booze consumed is respectable, if nothing like it was in the good old days. Bill Brooks, Master of Cheese Ceremonies in the latter half of the 19th century reminisced: ‘In my young days, every brewery for miles about sent us a barrelfull FREE!’
I cheered as his successor at the 2025 roll earlier this week lit a cigarette and puffed away at the top of the hill, live on BBC News, just before calling the next race, in another glorious display of disregard for health and safety culture.
In short, this event is a miracle of free and consenting people organising without state interference to put on a spectacle unthinkable in many parts of the world. It makes me proud to be from the area and proud to be British.
The only real problem is, obviously, the injuries. It’s hard to square the idea that people willingly throwing themselves down an incredibly steep hill, for nought but cheese and glory, should be entitled to unlimited free medical care on the British taxpayer, especially with so many international competitors.
The cheese rolling ought to represent a rebuke, therefore, to the unlimited largesse of the welfare state, in the most absurdist way possible. People should absolutely be free to partake of a bonkers old tradition, and others should be free not to have to pay for the ensuing medical costs. This is true, too, of the latest Reform announcement on ending the two-child benefit cap, as well as much of the bloated spend of the welfare and NHS bills.
It may sound cheesy, but I camembert (get it?) to see taxpayers having to foot the bill for such things. If we want to keep our wonderful traditions free from the state, we need to curtail its power to spend our money, as well as how to live our lives.
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