St. Albans Pageant, 1907: Queen Elizabeth at Gorhambury.
Courtesy of St. Albans Museums.
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.
We had a team visit to Bury St Edmunds on Saturday, for a ’59-ers reunion event. Bury St Edmunds had major historical pageants in 1907 and 1959, and a smaller-scale event in 1970, and we currently have an exhibition on about these in Moyse’s Hall. Linda, Mark and I were excited to see this in situ, and to get the chance to pose with our large-size cut out of Boudicca. As it was a ...
Christopher Ede, by the time he took on the important role of pageant-master at Bury St Edmunds in 1959, was a man at the top of his game – known throughout Britain as the leading producer of pageants. He had actually started his working life as an organ-builder. One work trip took the University of Cambridge around 1931, when he was about 17, where he helped with the organ of King’s College Chapel. While in ...
Last nightI went to a talk near where I live, Fleetville
in St Albans, part of the Fleetville
Diaries series. This group runs regular events with guest speakers,
focusing on local history and sometimes ranging more widely. They also have
guided walks around Fleetville in the summer months.
The evening’s speaker was Peter Swinson, whose father Cyril (1910-63) was the pageant-master in the St Albans pageants of 1948 and 1953. The first of these ...
Greetings from Glasgow! We’ve been ensconced in the meeting room at Lilybank House working on some essays on a variety of themes, ranging from the depiction of World War I in pageants to the pageant-crazed town of Arbroath. Fuelled by a potent combination of Tunnock’s Tea Cakes, fruitcake and muffins, we have made excellent progress on our drafts. You can expect to see these soon:
“Pageants and Anniversaries”, which explores the role played ...
Until recently I had never heard of the Luton Coronation Pageant of 1953. A correspondent from Australia, who got in touch with us via the website, sent me various pageant souvenirs and ephemera, including a four-page souvenir programme and a flyer for the event, held in the grounds of Luton Hoo, a large country house to the south of the town.
This was a very large event: there was seating for more than 14,000 ...
It is known – at least among the small community of people engaged in research on pageants – that these events featured in fictional literature from time to time. The best-known example is Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts, published in 1941, which features a pageant in the grounds of an English country house. Here a pageant is the centrepiece of a work of fiction, and pageants appeared elsewhere, even in books for children: Richmal Crompton ...
This is a guest post by Emma Greenwood, special collections librarian at the Jerwood Library, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. The library holds a number of pageant books from the early twentieth century including the book of words, book of music and the souvenir guide to the Chester Historical Pageant. Visitors are welcome: please see their website for more details.
Official Souvenir of the Chester Historical Pageant (Manchester, 1910).
Described by The Times ...
I’ve been thinking about the limits of ‘pageant fever’. There’s no doubt that it took hold in a big way, particularly before World War I, but it struck with varying degrees of intensity. After the great successes of Sherborne and Warwick, the idea of having a pageant in Nottingham was mooted. A public meeting was held on 30 August 1907 with a view to holding a performance in July 1908. Honorary secretaries were ...
I am a keen follower of cricket, and am fortunate that my father is a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). This year has seen many events to mark the bicentenary of the current Lord’s cricket ground – the home of MCC – including a match between MCC and Hertfordshire, on the exact anniversary of the first match in 1814, featuring the same two teams (in both instances, MCC won).
The final event was ‘Lord ...