Pageant treasures of the British Library #2
In my last blog I
mentioned the pageant-related manuscript sources, such as the scripts and
scores relating to the Communist Party Centenary Pageant, which are held in the
British Library. But of course the library also holds a wealth of other
material too. Indeed it is the range and variety of the items held at the BL
that truly impresses. As might be expected, there are many published books of
words and souvenir volumes, one especially striking example being the souvenir
of the Pageant of Empire of 1924, which was held in conjunction with the
British Empire Exhibition. This is a spectacular large-format hymn to British
patriotism, containing many high-quality coloured images specially commissioned
from the artist Sir Frank Brangwyn.
The imagery is rich and powerful: one page features the text of Rupert Brooke’s
poem ‘The Soldier’ alongside a picture of Nelson’s funeral barge.
The 1924 Pageant of Empire was an enormous event, but the BL holds material – some of it ephemeral and hence rare – for many lesser-known pageants as well. One example is the Hinchingbrooke Pageant of July 1912. For this pageant, staged in a small town in Cambridgeshire, the BL has a unique album of photographs and press cuttings, which taken as a whole give an invaluable insight into a performance which, as one newspaper at the time put it, was ‘the sight of a lifetime’. The Library also holds material relating to historical pageants performed outside the British Isles. As might be expected, United States pageants loom particularly large here, but books of words and souvenirs for pageants held in other places are not hard to find. One example would be book of words for the ‘grand historical pageant’ held in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1913 in commemoration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the marriage of Princess Elizabeth Stuart of Great Britain with the count palatine Frederick V. And then there are the souvenirs of imperial pageants, such as the Quebec pageant of 1908, which – surprisingly for an event attended by the Prince of Wales – celebrated not only Wolfe’s victory on the Heights of Abraham in 1759, but also the French general Lévis’s victory over his British counterpart Murray the following year.
Finally, there is in the British Library much evocative oral material relating to pageants, including a 1992 BBC recording of Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts, which has as its subject a village pageant (the BL, incidentally, also holds two letters by Woolf about this novel). But there are other, more personal oral testimonies too. One example is Gladys Turner’s recollections of the Bury St Edmunds pageant of 1907. More than ninety years after the event, Gladys recalled not only how the pageant had told ‘the story of Bury, set in the ruins’ of the Abbey, but also how she had taken a penny bun to eat during the performance!
Over the next few months, as we get deeper into the Redress of the Past project, we will be bringing you more detailed examinations of this wealth of material.
Paul Readman