The House of Bethel Centenary Pageant of Their Church and Its Times
Pageant type
Performances
Place: Bethel House, Clouds Hill Road (Bristol) (Bristol, Gloucestershire, England)
Year: 1958
Indoors/outdoors: Indoors
Number of performances: n/a
Notes
4, 5 and 6 December 1958 at 7pm
Name of pageant master and other named staff
Names of executive committee or equivalent
n/a
Names of script-writer(s) and other credited author(s)
Names of composers
n/a
Numbers of performers
n/a
Financial information
Total income: £67 19s. 3½d.
Total expenditure: £13 10s.2½d.
Total Balance: £54 9s.1d.
Object of any funds raised
n/a
Linked occasion
Centenary of the building of the House of BethelAudience information
- Grandstand: No
- Grandstand capacity: n/a
- Total audience: n/a
Prices of admission and seats: highest–lowest
2s.–1s.
Associated events
A museum exhibit (presumably in a room of the chapel), for which the ticket provided free admission.
Pageant outline
Part One
Prologue
Scene 1: A Stable in the White Way
Scene 2: In Far Scutari – Crimea
Scene 3: A Room in the Home of the Landowner
Scene 4: Again – the stable
Scene 5: A Roadside: The Comment of the Collier
Scene 6: The Industrial Revolution
Scene 7: Outside the Chapel: Sunday Night, two weeks before Christmas
Scene 8: A Classroom in the Chapel
Interval – Five Minutes
Part Two
Scene 9: A Tableaux of Peace
Scene 10: The Deck of an Atlantic Liner
Scene 11: A Room in Anyhome
Scene 12: On a hill in Anytown
Scene 13: The Chapel Schoolroom
Scene 14: A Blitzed Site
Scene 15: The Choristers Greet Christmas
Finale and Epilogue
Key historical figures mentioned
n/a
Musical production
Newspaper coverage of pageant
Book of words
n/a
Other primary published materials
The House of Bethel Centenary Pageant of Their Church and Its Times. Bath, 1958.
Other primary published materials
n/a
References in secondary literature
n/a
Archival holdings connected to pageant
- Copy of programme, flyers, typescript and financial information in Bristol City Archives, Reference 41460/1/6.
Sources used in preparation of pageant
n/a
Summary
The House of Bethel – also known as St George Methodist Church – was founded in 1858, and it seems that as many as 200 people were involved as performers in the pageant that marked its centenary. If this suggests the vitality of Methodism in mid-twentieth-century Bristol, however, such vitality was not to last for much longer: Bethel Chapel closed its doors in 1989, and the building which once housed it is now a gymnasium.
Footnotes
How to cite this entry
Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alex Hutton, Paul Readman, ‘The House of Bethel Centenary Pageant of Their Church and Its Times’, The Redress of the Past, http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/1007/