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.

Lecture report: Madison (Wisconsin), December 2014

by Thulme Dec. 5, 2014 Comments

Pageantry and the portrayal of the First World War has become a major, and unexpected, area of our research. Over the first year of the project we've built up a solid foundation of pageants that featured either re-enactment of battles, or references to the conflict. Emerging from our analysis of these pageants is the idea that they were a nuanced and popular form of "collective remembrance" - the coming together of communities, and local ones ...
A Pageant Feast

by Thulme Nov. 24, 2014 Comments

The First Annual Pageant Dinner was held in 1907 to celebrate the successes of the new form of community theatre invented by Louis Napoleon Paker just two years earlier. The dinner took place at the famous, fabulous, and fashionable "Restaurant Frascati" on Oxford Street, in the middle of London. Over 100 people attended - mostly those who had been involved in the Sherborne (1905), Warwick (1906), and Bury St Edmunds (1907) pageants, as well as eager ...
Magna Carta 800 – Out and About in Bury St Edmunds

by Thulme Oct. 31, 2014 Comments

Mark and Tom
On Friday 24 October we were both in Bury St Edmunds for a stakeholder engagement meeting organised by the Magna Carta 800th Committee. The Magna Carta Trust has received £1m of direct funding from the Treasury in advance of the 800th anniversary of the ‘Great Charter’ in 2015. The Committee is chaired by Sir Robert Worcester, the founder of the polling organisation MORI (now Ipsos-MORI), and is charged with the distribution of ...
Theatre of War

by Thulme Oct. 28, 2014 Comments

Over the last few weeks I’ve been ramping up our research on the First World War and historical pageants. Mark will be giving a talk on this theme at the Institute of Historical Research on the 4^th December 2014, and I’ll be doing the same 4000 miles away on the same day at the University of Madison (Wisconsin)! Pageants in the interwar period have not really received much attention – most historians have ...
Thoughts on Magna Carta Ale

by Thulme Oct. 13, 2014 Comments

Two members of the project team went to St Albans Beer and Cider Festival in September, largely to attend a tutored tasting led by Roger Protz. We didn’t expect to be thinking about pageants very much, but one of the beers that we tasted prompted some thoughts about re-enactment, history and identity.

Windsor & Eton brewery has recently launched Magna Carta Ale, inspired by the impending 800th anniversary of the signing of the charter ...
A Queen who can't be seen: pageants and censorship in the 1930s

by Thulme Oct. 6, 2014 Comments

Perhaps the one constant in historical pageantry across the twentieth century was the prominence given to royalty. From patrons to characters, almost all pageants featured a King, Queen, Prince or Princess in some way, all the way back from the Anglo-Saxon rulers to even legendary figures, like King Arthur. Providing an opportunity for spectacular crowd scenes and fabulous costumes, the visit of royalty in a pageant episode was also one of the most obvious ways ...
The Sherborne School Archives

by Thulme Oct. 3, 2014 Comments

Today's blog post features some of the stunning material held at the Sherborne School Archives in Dorset, kindly provided by the School's archivist, Rachel Hassall. The Sherborne Pageant of 1905 was the invention of Louis Napoleon Parker that kicked off 'pageantitis', and fully deserves its popular title of the 'Mother of all Pageants'.

This beautiful album, bound in white vellum, was presented to Parker in the Digby Assembly Rooms in Sherborne on the ...
Serving Their Communities: Girl Guides and Historical Pageants

by Thulme Oct. 1, 2014 Comments

The Border Pageant, held in September 1930, was planned as a relatively small event to raise money for the Girl Guide movement at a regional level, and to improve the local contribution to the organisation’s national funds. But despite the small scale and some bad luck with the weather (no Indian summer that year!) the pageant turned into something of a triumph. This Guides worked hard to organise their pageant and their efforts paid ...
When is a pageant a pageant – or not?

by Thulme Sept. 26, 2014 Comments

Many people ask us not just what our project is about, but what it’s not about. The word ‘pageant’ covers many activities, only some of which we are studying in our work. Some of our Twitter followers (@Pageantry_AHRC) seem to think we are looking at beauty pageants. (Perhaps if we were, we would have even more followers!)
But more seriously, we have discussed at length what ‘counts’ as a historical pageant and what doesn ...
Barons in Bury, 2014

by Thulme Sept. 23, 2014 Comments

Readers of our blog will now hopefully be aware of our partnership with Magna Carta 800 in Bury St. Edmunds, and the exhibition we have planned for Moyse's Hall in Summer 2014. Imagine our excitement then to to see photos from a recent performance of one of the 1907 Pageant scenes in the original location of the Abbey Gardens. What else to re-enact, of course, than the famous meeting of the Barons exactly 800 ...

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