Looking at peace pageants in the British Library
I’ve had an interesting afternoon in the British Library reading books of words from peace pageants from the early post-First World War years. This has been a welcome distraction from other academic activities!
In July, on behalf of the ‘Redress of the Past’ team, I’ll be presenting a paper at ISCHE: the International Standing Conference for the History of Education, for which I’m also on the organising committee, as it’s being hosted by the Institute of Education.
In this paper we will be focusing on the representation of the First World War in historical pageants. This is obviously a topical issue, as communities up and down the land turn their attention to the centenary of the outbreak of the war. I’m involved in this myself, as a member of the First World War group of the St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society.
Before we turned our attention to this subject, I hadn’t realised how many pageants depicted the war in some way. David Glassberg, in his book American Historical Pageantry, notes that most post-war pageants in the USA represented the community’s contribution to the war in some way, but in Britain this was not usually the case. Often pageant script-writers still shied away from the most recent past.
However, there were some interesting – and some quite striking – examples of war scenes being re-enacted. The ‘Great Peace Pageant’ at Cannon Hill Park in Birmingham in 1919, for example, would be better termed a ‘Great War Pageant’, as it depicted various scenes from the war. This video, which may be the Birmingham pageant but is certainly something very similar, shows the way in which the war was represented only very shortly after its conclusion.
We’re looking forward to seeing more examples of peace/war
pageants, and to asking what these depictions of recent events meant to local
communities, and to the nation as a whole, in the interwar years.