The House of Bethel Centenary Pageant of Their Church and Its Times

Pageant type

Jump to Summary

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 Bethel

Audience 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/