Pictures of Local History
Pageant type
Performances
Place: The Old Garden, Hitcham House (Hitcham) (Hitcham, Buckinghamshire, England)
Year: 1926
Indoors/outdoors: Outdoors
Number of performances: 2
Notes
1 July 1926, at 3.30pm and 6.30pm.
Name of pageant master and other named staff
- Written by [Pageant Master]: Drummond, Barbara
- Arranged by: Barbara Drummond and Rev. C. Grimes
- Music: Mr. Lees Chapman
- Chronicler: Mr. Madeley
- Costumes: Mr. Heslewood
- Community Singing Leader: Mr. Gibsen Young
- Dances: Mrs. Granville Ram
Names of executive committee or equivalent
n/a
Names of script-writer(s) and other credited author(s)
- Drummond, Barbara
Names of composers
- Strauss, Richard
- Strauss, Leonard
- Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich
Numbers of performers
100Number of performers is an estimate
Financial information
Object of any funds raised
The newly formed Women’s Institute of Hitcham-Burnham and Hedor Cliveden.
Linked occasion
n/a
Audience information
- Grandstand: Not Known
- Grandstand capacity: n/a
- Total audience: n/a
Prices of admission and seats: highest–lowest
6d.–3d.
Admission 6d.; children 3d. With WI badge: free.
Associated events
The pageant was part of a garden fete which included community singing, a tug of war and dancing.Pageant outline
Episode I. The Crispin Brothers’ Tragedy, AD 1067
The two sons of Milo Crispin, first Norman overlord of Hitcham, loved the two daughters of the Lord of Dorney. The elder couple marry, but Dorney refuses to consent to the marriage of his younger daughter. The elder sister assists the lovers, but her husband overhears them and suspects his wife of being unfaithful with his brother. He fights his brother. His wife, in trying to part them, is slain. Their Father Confessor tells the elder to go to the Holy Land as penance. He begins the journey, but, after fighting in France, returns, his vow unfulfilled. The Confessor pronounces a curse—that no member of the family shall die happily. Whenever a member dies and his coffin-plate is put on the church wall, a ghost comes and muddies it. It can thus never be kept clean.1
Episode II. Edward, the Black Prince, AD 1350
Edward, the Black Prince, was overlord of Hitcham. Here he is represented saying farewell to his lady-love and riding off to the wars—with her favour tied to his arm.
Episode III. The Nuns Expelled from Burnham Abbey, AD 1540
Alice Baldwin, Abbess, and her nine nuns were driven out of Burnham Abbey by King Henry VIII’s commissioners. Their chief work was prayer, praise, teaching, nursing, farming and assistance to travellers. They were driven out by emissaries of Thomas Cromwell and forced to sign a document acknowledging the King, and not the Pope, as head of the Church of England. The King seized their lands and goods for his own use, allowing them only a small pension.
Episode IV. Queen Elizabeth at Hitcham House, AD 1602
In 1602 Queen Elizabeth visited Sir William Clarke, then Lord of the Manor, and stayed in Hitcham House. Sir William’s grandfather distinguished himself greatly in battle and was given honours by Henry VIII, and his father, Sir Nicholas, married Elizabeth Ramsay, heiress of Hitcham. Sir William has a fine tomb in the church. Trumpets announce the Queen’s arrival and the court appears on stage. The Queen receives the family individually. Interlude with dancing and madrigals.
Episode V. Dr Newborough, Headmaster of Eton College, and Some of His Pupils, AD 1694
Dr Newborough, the famous Headmaster of Eton College, died at Hitcham on 4 June 1712 and is buried there. Sir Robert Walpole, Prime Minister for over 20 years, was one of his pupils. Dr Newborough predicts a great future for Walpole, who alone of the boys seems at all interested in the lessons (they are playing leap-frog). Afterwards, we see him alone as his later character in brocaded coat, flowered waistcoat, and powdered wig. He delivers an ‘amusing and cynical speech on his policy, referring to the virtues of his Excise Bill and the efforts he had made to wipe off the National Debt.’
Episode VI. Dr Friend, Having Been Sent to the Tower, is Welcomed Home, AD 1722
Dr Friend was Lord of Hitcham Manor, 1715–1728. He was a student of Christchurch, Oxford, Professor of Chemistry, Physician to Queen Caroline, and author of a History of Physic in two languages. He was sent to the Tower in 1722 for his Tory principles. His Whig rival, Dr Mead, was also an eminent physician. He wrote treatises on poisons and infectious diseases, attended Queen Anne on her death-bed, and was appointed physician to George II. Dr Mead attended Dr Friend’s patients during the latter’s detention in the Tower, but on his rival’s return generously handed all the fees to him. We are shown these two united and celebrating.
Finale
Procession.
Key historical figures mentioned
- Edward [Edward of Woodstock; known as the Black Prince], prince of Wales and of Aquitaine (1330–1376) heir to the English throne and military commander
- Clarke, William (bap. 1639, d. 1684) physician
- Elizabeth I (1533–1603) queen of England and Ireland
- Walpole, Robert, first earl of Orford (1676–1745) prime minister
- Mead, Richard (1673–1754) physician and collector of books and art
Musical production
Community Singing led by Mr. Gibsen Young.Songs by Leonard Strauss and dances by Mrs. Granville Ram.
Newspaper coverage of pageant
Windsor, Eton and Slough Express
Bucks Free Press
Wycombe, Maidenhead and Marlow Journal
Book of words
n/a
No book of words
Other primary published materials
- Programme: Pictures of Local History. np: 1926.
References in secondary literature
n/a
Archival holdings connected to pageant
- Hampshire Local History Centre, Winchester. Papers of Barbara Drummond. 220M85W/13.
Sources used in preparation of pageant
- Grimes, Rev. C.H. Ye oulde storie of Hitcham: the little grey church on the windy hill. Woburn, 1926.
Summary
Women’s Institute Pageants were highly popular during the 1920s and early 1930s, and county pageants were also greatly successful (see entry for the Pageant of Staffordshire, 1928, and the Pageants of Hampshire and Northamptonshire, both 1930). The Institute already possessed many of the organisational skills which made for successful pageantry, as well as skills in costume-making and catering. This was one of the smaller pageants and was devised by Barbara Drummond, niece of Frank Benson who was responsible for a large number of pageants in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Pageant was to have had Viscountess Nancy Astor (the first female MP to sit in the House of Commons) as patroness. She had been conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton from 1919. As it happened, Astor was prevented from attending the pageant due to a three-line party whip. The chief business of the day was the third reading of the Coal Mines Amendment Bill, which was an unsuccessful attempt by the Conservative government to diffuse the Miners’ Strike (which had continued after the General Strike in 1926).2 In the event, Colonel Lionel Hanbury, who owned Hitcham House, officiated.
A world away from the bitter industrial conflicts taking place from South Wales to Fife, the pageant presented a colourful history of a past England. The Windsor, Eton and Slough Express remarked that the ‘remarkably interesting and beautiful’ scenes ‘were enacted in the sloping lawns of the gardens, and a more naturally beautiful setting could not be imagined.’3 Many of the scenes were taken from the short local history by Rev. C.H. Grimes, Member of the Royal Historical Research Society, who played a decidedly old schoolboy in the Walpole scene.4 The Bucks Free Press and Wycombe, Maidenhead and Marlow Journal struck an even more poignant note, seeing the pageant as an elegy for the old England destroyed by London’s suburbanisation, memorably described in George Bourne’s Wheelright’s Shop and William Clough Ellis’ England and the Octopus. As the paper recounted:
All our English villages have their being rooted in the records of a remote past, which have mostly been engulfed in the shadows of oblivion, but whose memoirs are faintly echoed in the stones of our village churches and manor-houses. With some, indeed, the thread of continuity is so slender that it is with difficulty that we can unravel it, but it is good to make the effort if thereby we can preserve that sense of unity with the past which is so necessary to uphold in our national life.5
However, the paper’s dewy-eyed reminiscence did not blind it to the many inaccuracies in the pageant or the fact that many of the historical connections to the place were tenuous at best: ‘Let it be admitted that several of the incidents depicted rest on the flimsiest foundation.’6 The paper suggested that Milo de Crispin, Lord of Wallingford and Wycombe, ‘probably had little to do with Hitcham’ and that ‘the presence of the Black Prince is dubious, though he leased the blessed manor to the Beauchamp family’.7 Scenes featuring the Black Prince and (especially) Elizabeth I had long been commonplace in pageants as a means of introducing colour and spectacle. Furthermore, the paper noted that ‘Sir Robert Walpole had no connection with [Hitcham], and the playing fields of Eton are somewhat far away for us to see Dr Newborough and his pupils.’8 It was suggested that Walpole, rather than being the one studious figure among the schoolboys, was a dilettante after all and no doubt would have excelled at leap-frog, or jumping over his peers, which he was later to put to great effect in the world of politics.
Nonetheless, the newspaper reporter was not so jaded as to be blinded to the true merit of the pageant, ultimately conceding that ‘historic truth in these matters is after all not of the first importance, and the antique pageantry which evoked these shades of bygone days created a significance and impressiveness which must have thrilled some chord of ancient memory in many of the large audience who beheld it.’9 The erudite pressman was struck by the tragedy of the first episode, which reminded him ‘a memory of the story of Rimini’, a character from Dante’s Inferno, whose affair with a married man led to her being murdered by her husband and damned to inhabit a circle of Hell.
Most impressive was the Finale, which comprised a procession ‘of all the characters, the ghost included, filing slowly down the slopes of the sunlit terrace’. And, ‘as the antique dresses passed before the eye, as though aroused from the shades by an enchanter’s wand to vanish thence into the shades again, there could not but be felt some emotion and pathos at the days that were and the transcience of earthly things.’10
The pageant, though small, was a success in depicting the continuity of the past in an area that was rapidly becoming part of what John Betjeman memorably described as ‘Metroland’.
Footnotes
- ^ Synopses taken from Pictures of Local History, Hitcham House (np: 1926).
- ^ ‘Mining Industry Act 1926’, legislation.gov.uk, accessed 25 November 2015, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/16-17/28/introduction/enacted?view=plain; ‘Coal Mines Bill’, Hansard, accessed 25 November 2015, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1926/jul/01/coal-mines-bill.
- ^ The Windsor, Eton and Slough Express, 9 July 1926, 2, cutting, Barbara Drummond’s scrap-book, Hampshire Local History Centre. 220M85W/13.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ The Bucks Free Press and Wycombe, Maidenhead and Marlow Journal, 16 July 1926, 8.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
How to cite this entry
Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alex Hutton, Paul Readman, ‘Pictures of Local History’, The Redress of the Past, http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/1095/