About the Round
The Round is Cambridge University’s English Country Dance Society, and was founded on November 28th, 1928. The Round originally danced mainly Playford dances (think Jane Austen but much more informal) but now dances a mix of Playford dances, ceilidh dances, American style contras and anything else the callers fancy. This site holds notation for many of the dances.
The Round meets every Thursday during full term between 8 pm and 10pm in Wesley Church Hall, Cambridge, England (by the Jesus Lane Roundabout on King Street) and also holds other events during the academical year.
The Round is a student society and as such is run by student members of the University, although in practice the Committee includes non-students and ex-students, and others also help in the running of the Round.
If you have any enquiries about the Round then email round at CambridgeSU dot co dot uk, or come along to a Thursday night meeting at Wesley Church Hall, or feel free to contact any of the committee members directly.
The Round Committee
- Chairman
- Lucy Richman (ler42) Trinity Hall
- Junior Treasurer
- Jonathan Griffiths (spikey at rosepip.com)
- Publicity
- Jane Usher (ju242) Murray Edwards
- Senior Treasurer
- Hugh Stewart (hugh.stewart at acm.org), 14 Silverwood Close
- Other committee members
- Sam Ellis (sce196 at icloud.com)
- Dominic Rumball (dominic.rumball at yahoo.co.uk)
- Anthony Stone (ajs1), Emmanuel
- Hannah Stone (rehstone at lithoi.org.uk)
- Sally Vernon (sally.vernon at empire.ucam.org)
- Erin Young
Email lists
The Round runs two main mailing lists: soc-round and soc-round-chat.
soc-round
The main soc-round list is for general announcements. It is here that events organized by the Round are advertised, as well as the occasional important administrative message. This is a moderated list; postings will be forwarded to the list if considered relevant.
If you are interested in the Round or its legendary ceilidhs, you should definitely be on this list! To join, go to lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/info/soc-round. The list of members is kept private and you will not be added to other lists without your consent. Use the same link if you want to be taken off the list. Note that if you subscribe with your Cambridge email address you should unsubscribe when you leave the university as your Cambridge account will be cancelled, but of course you may want to have messages sent to your new email address instead!
soc-round-chat
The soc-round-chat list is for general chat between Round members. It is mostly unmoderated, but to combat spam, messages from addresses outside Cambridge University which aren’t on the list will be forwarded for moderation in the same way as for soc-round. It is intended for regular Round goers (although anyone is free to join) and is where info on good gigs, random requests for help, info on weekly Round meetings, etc. should be posted. Messages sent to soc-round which are not considered suitable may be forwarded to soc-round-chat instead. To join or leave the list go to lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/info/soc-round-chat.
There are two other mailing lists which have very specific functions. If you have left Cambridge and no longer come to the Round’s regular meetings, and you don’t want to see everything that's posted to soc-round, but you wish to get an invitation to the annual playford ball, you should subscribe to soc-round-ball. If you have called for the Round recently, you will probably have been added to the soc-round-callers list, which covers administrative arrangements and general discussion about calling, but you can unsubscribe if it’s no longer relevant for you.
Comments about the mailing lists should go to
‘soc-round-managers at lists dot cam dot ac dot uk’.
Comments about the Round in general should go to ‘round at CambridgeSU dot co dot uk’.
That’s a lot of addresses... don’t worry, if you send to the wrong one it’ll get forwarded to the right one fairly quickly, and roughly the same people are behind most of the administrative ones anyway. Just remember to sign up!
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to:
- Anthony Bearon
- For creating the original site.
- Dan Sheridan
- For looking after it between Anthony and Richard and doing lots of work.
- Richard Morgan
- For providing most of the original site, including the Round Band Book of Playford. Also for coming up with most of the original house style for the site, putting it together and managing it for two years or so.
- Andrew Swaine
- For writing all of the scripts from which the previous version of the site was generated, using altogether too much perl and Makefiles.
- Dave Ansell
- For creating the earlier site style, introducing photos everywhere, and generally bringing it up to date.
- Hugh Stewart
- For providing swathes of really useful content, most notably the Elements of English Country Dance, his History of the Round and details of Kentucky Running Set, and for entering Palmer’s Pocket Playford and transcribing all of Cecil Sharp’s Country Dance Book except the bits that are still in copyright.
- Anthony Stone
- For maintaining the dance history pages, and for rescuing the site and moving it to Drupal 8 when changes to PHP and Apache meant that the site wouldn’t work any more in its existing form.
The current site manager is Anthony Stone. Any matters relating to the site should be sent to him unless a page specifies a different maintainer.