Telescombe Pageant

Pageant type

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Performances

Place: No information (Telescombe) (Telescombe, Sussex, England)

Year: 1925

Indoors/outdoors: Outdoors

Number of performances: 1

Notes

Summer 1925

Name of pageant master and other named staff

  • Producer [Pageant Master]: Russell, W.
  • Organiser: Ambrose Gorham

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

250 - 350

Financial information

n/a

Object of any funds raised

n/a

Linked occasion

n/a

Audience information

  • Grandstand: Not Known
  • Grandstand capacity: n/a
  • Total audience: n/a

Prices of admission and seats: highest–lowest

Free with collection

Associated events

n/a

Pageant outline

A Romance of the George III Era

As a newspaper report recorded,

The Pageant tells the story of Mr Crew and Mr Day, both in love with Miss Honnor Elizabeth Higgins. Mr Day confides that he will propose to Higgins, and Crew tells him that he has secretly become engaged to her. Day, though crushed, decides to bless his friend and then sails for America. In the interim Crew dies and asks his wife to marry Day. Eventually Day returns to Telscombe and marries Elizabeth. [Article from an unspecified newspaper, cutting, nd., in Photo Album of Telscombe Pageant 1925, East Sussex Archives, Reference AMS 7087.1.1.]

Key historical figures mentioned

n/a

Musical production

n/a

Newspaper coverage of pageant

n/a

Book of words

n/a

Other primary published materials

n/a

References in secondary literature

n/a

Archival holdings connected to pageant

  • Photo Album of Telscombe Pageant 1925, East Sussex Archives, Reference AMS 7087.1.1.

Sources used in preparation of pageant

n/a

Summary

Little is known about this pageant, which was evidently a sizeable village pageant (there were about three hundred performers) and organized by Ambroce Gorham, a local village benefactor. A photo album of the pageant belonging to Gorham survives in East Sussex Archives but a book of words has not been recovered. One Sussex newspaper wrote of the pageant that:

Brighton seemed so desperately modern yesterday that quite a number of people went to Telscombe to see what the eighteenth might be like. Telescombe, of course, is much older than that. A village held that lovely cup in the encircling Downs far back in unrecorded time. But people from all the region round did not flock to Telscombe yesterday in the hope of recovering the atmosphere of the Middle Ages. They went to have a later period recovered for them, and it certainly was suggested vividly, artistically, and with scholarly accuracy in the Rectory Garden.1

Footnotes

1. ^ Article from an unspecified newspaper cutting, nd., in Photo Album of Telscombe Pageant 1925, East Sussex Archives, Reference AMS 7087.1.1.

How to cite this entry

Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alex Hutton, Paul Readman, ‘Telescombe Pageant’, The Redress of the Past, http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/1467/