Pageant treasures of the British Library #1: The Communist Manifesto Centenary Pageant of 1948
Many archives and libraries hold material relating to pageants. One prominent example is provided by the British Library. Of course we were expecting to discover a great deal of material in the Reading Rooms at St. Pancras, but thanks in part to the BL’s (relatively) new archive catalogue we have made some unusual finds. One example is a set of manuscripts and musical scores associated with the Communist Manifesto Centenary Pageant of 1948, which was held in the Albert Hall on 30 March that year. This material, deposited in the Alan Bush Collection, includes a typewritten copy of the script of the pageant, as well as an annotated piano score of most of the musical items. It also includes a document detailing the proceedings of the music sub-committee meeting that Bush – a pianist, composer and committed communist – convened under the aegis of the Communist Party of Great Britain in preparation for the pageant. It seems to have been decided at this meeting that all Communist Party branches in London were to be instructed to provide a minimum of two and a maximum of six singers “as an official party responsibility”. The problem of how to approach possible composers with invitations to provide music for the pageant was also discussed. Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland and Malcolm Arnold were all considered as possibilities but, as Bush noted in a memo, ‘some of the aforementioned composers will only compose for us, if at all, if their names do not appear”. To get around this, Bush suggested that “It might be a good stunt to advertise the music as having been written by ‘eight British composers’, come and spot your favourite, style”. In the end a number of composers were involved, including Arnold, but it doesn’t seem to have been the case that their contributions were anonymised.
The example of the Communist Manifesto Centenary pageant is an illustration of the extent to which pageants were used by political movements of the left as much as the right. For more information on this, see – for example – Mick Wallis’s essay in Andy Croft’s A weapon in the struggle: the cultural history of the British Communist party.
Paul Readman