Blog

The project team produced regular blog posts over the course of the period 2013-2017 (covering the years funded by the first AHRC) grant. These blog posts can be found below.

Pageants at ICHS 2015

by Thulme Aug. 28, 2015 Comments

Two members of the project team, Mark Freeman and Tom Hulme, are in Jinan, in Shandong province in China, to attend the 22nd International Congress of Historical Sciences. This massive quinquennial event has well over 2,500 delegates, and has caused quite a splash in China. It has attracted the attention of the English-language newspaper China Daily, and the opening ceremony was addressed by vice-premier Liu Yandong.

The ICHS is organised into ‘major themes’, ‘specialised ...
Tales from the Bury St Edmunds Pageant - (4) Liz Cole

by Thulme Aug. 5, 2015 Comments

Liz Cole (nee Ascott) was born and bred in Sudbury in Suffolk. In 1959 her family became involved with the pageant of Magna Carta in Bury St Edmunds through the Eatanswill Society (the penultimate scene featured the infamous Eatanswill election scene from Dickens's Pickwick Papers, and was supposedly based on the town of Sudbury).

Liz has very kindly allowed us to share some extracts from the interview, which you can listen to in the ...
Tales from the Bury St Edmunds Pageant - (3) Mary Brett

by Thulme July 28, 2015 Comments

Next up in our series of blogs on 'Tales from the Pageant' is an interview with Mary Brett (nee Pike), carried out by Tom Hulme on the 16th July 2015 in Horringer, just outside Bury St Edmunds. Mary was born in Bury St Edmunds, the daughter of a well-known butcher in the town, and was 12 years old at the time of the pageant. She was in one of the early crowd scenes - of which ...
Tales from the Bury St Edmunds Pageant - (2) Bernard Plume

by Thulme July 27, 2015 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about our first interview with a pageanteer from Bury St Edmunds. Today's blog features sound clips from an interview Tom Hulme carried out with Bernard Plume on the 15th July 2015.
Bernard was from a family of 'Suffolk people', and lived in Bury St Edmunds. At the time of the pageant he was 8 years old; he played a chorister in the final scene, set in 1914 ...
Pageants at the IHR local history summer school

by Thulme July 27, 2015 Comments

On 22 July I took part – on behalf of the project team – in the Institute of Historical Research local history summer school. This is an annual event, and the 2015 theme was ‘Local History of the Twentieth Century: Possibilities and Pitfalls’. The organiser was Richard Hoyle, director and general editor of the Victoria County History. As Richard remarked in his opening address to the summer school, the twentieth century is surprisingly under-researched by local historians ...
Dragon in Danger: a pageant in children’s literature (part 2)

by Thulme July 24, 2015 Comments

In my last post I introduced Rosemary Manning’s popular story Dragon in Danger (1959), and left readers on a cliffhanger, with the baddies Mr Bogg and Mr Snarkins resolving to kidnap R. Dragon the dragon, who was living temporarily on an island in the lake at St Aubyns, soon to play the part of the dragon slain by St Aubyn in episode 1 of the forthcoming pageant. I should issue a spoiler alert now ...
Oral History and Pageants: Some Lessons and Reflections

by Thulme July 21, 2015 Comments

Well I’ve come to the end of my ‘interviewing week’ in Suffolk. I did a bit of oral history for a project in Leicester a couple of years ago, but the format was quite different – I was set up in a local arts cinema, everyone came to me, and we didn’t have any specific questions about people’s memories beyond what it was like living in Leicester. This time I have been travelling ...
Tales from the Bury St Edmunds Pageant - (1) Peter Wood

by Thulme July 16, 2015 Comments

One of the most exciting and fun parts of this project is getting to meet people who actually performed in historical pageants. Through these 'pageanteers' we can learn what it meant to individuals to take part, and we can find out bits of information that were not printed in the press or official programme. All this week I am in Bury St Edmunds, recording oral histories with performers from the Bury St Edmunds Magna Carta ...
Dragon in Danger: a pageant in children’s literature (part 1)

by Thulme July 15, 2015 Comments

Pageants featured in twentieth-century fiction, as we’ve pointed out before. The best known example is probably Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (1941), which was set around a village pageant. I have blogged before about V. L. Whitechurch’s Murder at the Pageant (1930). It was not unusual for readers in mid-century to encounter pageants.

Until recently I hadn’t heard of Rosemary Manning and her Dragon series for children, which began in ...
Fox-hunting and historical pageantry...

by Thulme July 13, 2015 Comments

...I know what you're thinking; how can I possibly link the two together? Well...
Over the last few days I have been reading various headlines (with a sense of disbelief that is strangely becoming common since about 8th May 2015) about the upcoming vote on the proposed Government amendments to the Hunting Act. As far as I can gather, the change will allow the traditional style of hunting to come in through the back ...

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