Pageant of Cannock Chase

Pageant type

Notes

Information drawn from 'Survey of Historical Pageants' undertaken by Mick Wallis; with thanks to Dan Brown of Cannock Library.

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Performances

Place: Cannock Town (Cannock) (Cannock, Staffordshire, England)

Year: 1951

Indoors/outdoors: Outdoors

Number of performances: n/a

Notes

July-August 1951

Name of pageant master and other named staff

  • Pageant Master: Peach, Lawrence Du Garde
  • Assistant Producer: Ivor Hughes


Names of executive committee or equivalent

n/a

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

  • Peach, Lawrence Du Garde

Names of composers

n/a

Numbers of performers

n/a

Financial information

n/a

Object of any funds raised

n/a

Linked occasion

n/a

Audience information

Prices of admission and seats: highest–lowest

n/a

Associated events

n/a

Pageant outline

Key historical figures mentioned

n/a

Musical production

n/a

Newspaper coverage of pageant

Staffordshire Advertiser, 3 Aug. 1951.

Book of words

n/a

Other primary published materials

n/a

References in secondary literature

n/a

Archival holdings connected to pageant

n/a

Sources used in preparation of pageant

n/a

Summary

Many pageants were held in association with the 1951 Festival of Britain. Masterminded by the prolific Lawrence Du Garde Peach, this was planned as fairly large-scale outdoor production. As it turned out, however, the organisers bit off more than they could chew: the pageant was abandoned two weeks before its scheduled performance owing to a lack of volunteers. By that time, the bill for the non-event had exceeded £2000, so this was a costly failure. Had the pageant gone ahead, it would have ended on an unambiguously modern note, the subjects of the final episode being an early twentieth-century coal miner and a mechanic

Interestingly enough, the Channock Chase players later staged Peach's play, 'The Town that Would Have a Pageant'.

Footnotes

How to cite this entry

Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alex Hutton, Paul Readman, ‘Pageant of Cannock Chase’, The Redress of the Past, http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/1548/