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.
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/