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.
Well, a day for the History Books this one, and for many, although perhaps not quite a post-Flodden like disaster, it’s a black day nonetheless. Certainly, in my city, there’s a fair amount of soul searching going on. Because it seems that in 2014, the unionist essence that so infused historical pageants of yesteryear, lives on in Scotland…
Notably, even in Angus, where the UK’s most prolific pageant town of Arbroath is ...
Over the last couple of days the whole Redress of the Past team has been camped out in King's College London, beginning to put together an exhibition we are planning in collaboration with Magna Carta 800. This will take place in June 2015 in the Moyse's Hall Museum in the middle of Bury St. Edmunds, and will be totally FREE!
Vital to the exhibition is the extensive research we have done on the ...
It was my pleasure to give a paper at the European Association for Urban History conference this week in Lisbon on behalf of the Redress of the Past, contributing to a panel investigating the definition of European small towns, and the economic, social, and political challenges they have faced in the the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Papers on the impressively diverse panel of scholars from across Europe included an examination of the urban design challenges ...
Planning and producing a successful pageant, especially at the height of the movement in the first half of the century - when size definitely mattered - was a major undertaking. Committees were formed, financing raised, scripts written, and enthusiastic performers enlisted. Once one or several of those steps had been taken it was usually all-hands-on-deck and full steam ahead until opening night. Pageants, then, that were planned but eventually cancelled are quite rare. One large proposed pageant ...
*Guest post by Ellie Reid, Oxfordshire History Centre*
Edwardian pageants had many hundreds of performers but the names of the ‘pageanteers’ are often unrecorded and can be difficult to discover. In his autobiography Louis N Parker, originator of the Edwardian pageant, recorded advice to future pageant-makers stating: ‘The performers must all be anonymous. A pageant may include four or five thousand performers. It is obviously impossible to name them all; but the humblest member of ...
Oh, young Lochinvar is come out of the West,
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best,
And, save his good broadsword, he weapon had none,
He rode all unarmed, and he rode all alone...
I could go on... though I can hardly believe that it's now almost 50 years since I learned these lines from Walter Scott's epic poem, Marmion. Scott is of course famous as the originator of historical ...
Back at the beginning of this project I wrote a short blogpost about the ways Britons used historical pageants to make sense of the overwhelming shock of the First World War . Pageants, as a form of community theatre, enabled people to come together and express a variety of different emotions, such as remembrance, grief, or patriotism. More recently, as our research has expanded, Mark has presented a paper on this topic.
I noticed today that ...
I presented a paper on Wednesday at the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE). This is being held at my own university, the Institute of Education in London. It is certainly the largest gathering of historians of education in this country, with something like 550 delegates, most of whom are presenting a paper. With colleagues, I have been responsible for putting together the academic programme, which has been a challenging task.
ISCHE ...
One of the key aims of our project is to bring historical pageants to the wider population beyond the university, and especially to communities that have held historical pageants in the past. Bury St Edmund’s, as I wrote in my last blog post, has staged several large pageants across the twentieth century. Partnering up with the Magna Carta 800 and the St. Edmundsbury Heritage Service we are going to stage an exhibition in summer ...
We Scots are being advised these days that better times are coming... we're moving centre stage and emerging out of the de-industrialised shadows - no more in the economic backlands of the nation. What's more we're getting this advice from BOTH sides of the independence debate. Vote for independence say the Yes lobby and we're on a winner, all that's left of the oil is ours alone. Just say no, is ...