Bringing pageants to more people…
Last weekend I went to Birmingham at the invitation of the course team teaching the MA in History at the Open University. This was the second of six day schools that students on this programme attend, and took place at University College Birmingham.
I had been asked to talk about the project in general, but also the ways in which I went about writing my recent article on twentieth-century historical pageants, published in Social History last year. This was mainly based on a local study, of the St Albans pageants of 1907, 1948, 1953 and 1968 – the 1948 pageant recently featured here as a ‘Pageant of the Month’.
There was an audience of about 40, from across the UK and Ireland, and this proved to be an excellent opportunity to spread the word about historical pageants to an interested audience. Only one member of this audience had been in a historical pageant herself: the Ditchling Pageant in Sussex, which is held every ten years.
Historical pageants are an excellent topic for student dissertations: there is often abundant material in local record offices, and the local press often covered them in great depth. Souvenir programmes and books of words often include the names of all the committee members and sometimes even the cast, which allows an in-depth reconstruction of the event. These items, and various pageant ephemera, can also be bought on eBay, though this can be very expensive!
One of the attractive things about studying historical pageants is the range of lenses through which they can be examined: cultural history, social history, urban and rural history, religious history and theatre history, for example. This audience seemed very interested in the subject-matter, and I hope that many will want to dig more deeply into the historical pageants that took place near where they live.
Mark Freeman