Pembury School Centenary Fete and Pageant

Pageant type

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Performances

Place: Pembury School, Pembury (Royal Tunbridge Wells) (Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England)

Year: 1973

Indoors/outdoors: Unknown

Number of performances: 1

Notes

16 June 1973 at 3.30pm

Name of pageant master and other named staff

  • Master of Ceremonies: Mr Colin Holman

Names of executive committee or equivalent

  • Chairman: Ivor S.M. Beyon

Names of script-writer(s) and other credited author(s)

Names of composers

n/a

Numbers of performers

n/a

Financial information

n/a

Object of any funds raised

To raise £4000 towards a swimming pool, of which £1000 had already been raised.

Linked occasion

Centenary of the school.

Audience information

Prices of admission and seats: highest–lowest

5p-2p.

Associated events

Fete

Pageant outline

Pembury School Centenary Pageant

The Pageant was presented by schoolchildren. It depicted Pembury and the countryside throughout the ages.

Key historical figures mentioned

n/a

Musical production

n/a

Newspaper coverage of pageant

n/a

Book of words

None known

Other primary published materials

  • Centenary Fete and Pageant [Programme]. Tunbridge Wells, 1973.

References in secondary literature

n/a

Archival holdings connected to pageant

  • Copy of Programme in Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone, Reference Kent, K/Pembury PEM

Sources used in preparation of pageant

n/a

Summary

Historical pageants were popular with institutions such as political parties, churches, youth groups, and the Women’s Institute. They were also popular with schools. From the early days of the movement, pageants had been staged by schools on the occasion of their centenaries, one example being Kingston Grammar School, which had celebrated its six-hundredth anniversary in 1909;1 another being Charterhouse, whose tercentenary fell in 1911, to the Elsworth Pageant, commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the school.2 They continued to be seen as appropriate means of marking such occasions into the late twentieth century. This is one such example. Performed just once in June 1973, it marked the one hundredth anniversary of Pembury School, near Tunbridge Wells in Kent; its cast seems to have been made up of current pupils.

Footnotes

1. ^ Daily Graphic, 21 July 1909, 4.
2. ^ Ibid., 10 July 1911, 5.

How to cite this entry

Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alex Hutton, Paul Readman, ‘Pembury School Centenary Fete and Pageant’, The Redress of the Past, http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/1430/