Blog

Showing posts by lfleming Show all

The project team produced regular blog posts over the course of the period 2013-2017 (covering the years funded by the first AHRC) grant. These blog posts can be found below.

Serving Their Communities: Girl Guides and Historical Pageants

by Thulme Oct. 1, 2014 Comments

The Border Pageant, held in September 1930, was planned as a relatively small event to raise money for the Girl Guide movement at a regional level, and to improve the local contribution to the organisation’s national funds. But despite the small scale and some bad luck with the weather (no Indian summer that year!) the pageant turned into something of a triumph. This Guides worked hard to organise their pageant and their efforts paid ...
When is a pageant a pageant – or not?

by Thulme Sept. 26, 2014 Comments

Many people ask us not just what our project is about, but what it’s not about. The word ‘pageant’ covers many activities, only some of which we are studying in our work. Some of our Twitter followers (@Pageantry_AHRC) seem to think we are looking at beauty pageants. (Perhaps if we were, we would have even more followers!)
But more seriously, we have discussed at length what ‘counts’ as a historical pageant and what doesn ...
Barons in Bury, 2014

by Thulme Sept. 23, 2014 Comments

Readers of our blog will now hopefully be aware of our partnership with Magna Carta 800 in Bury St. Edmunds, and the exhibition we have planned for Moyse's Hall in Summer 2014. Imagine our excitement then to to see photos from a recent performance of one of the 1907 Pageant scenes in the original location of the Abbey Gardens. What else to re-enact, of course, than the famous meeting of the Barons exactly 800 ...
Here’s tae us # 5: not quite over yet…

by Thulme Sept. 19, 2014 Comments

Well, a day for the History Books this one, and for many, although perhaps not quite a post-Flodden like disaster, it’s a black day nonetheless. Certainly, in my city, there’s a fair amount of soul searching going on. Because it seems that in 2014, the unionist essence that so infused historical pageants of yesteryear, lives on in Scotland…

Notably, even in Angus, where the UK’s most prolific pageant town of Arbroath is ...
Creating a Bury St Edmunds Exhibition

by Thulme Sept. 12, 2014 Comments

Over the last couple of days the whole Redress of the Past team has been camped out in King's College London, beginning to put together an exhibition we are planning in collaboration with Magna Carta 800. This will take place in June 2015 in the Moyse's Hall Museum in the middle of Bury St. Edmunds, and will be totally FREE!
Vital to the exhibition is the extensive research we have done on the ...
Conference Report: EAUH Lisbon 2014

by Thulme Sept. 6, 2014 Comments

It was my pleasure to give a paper at the European Association for Urban History conference this week in Lisbon on behalf of the Redress of the Past, contributing to a panel investigating the definition of European small towns, and the economic, social, and political challenges they have faced in the the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Papers on the impressively diverse panel of scholars from across Europe included an examination of the urban design challenges ...
A Failed Victory Pageant? Blame the NHS!

by Thulme Aug. 18, 2014 Comments

Planning and producing a successful pageant, especially at the height of the movement in the first half of the century - when size definitely mattered - was a major undertaking. Committees were formed, financing raised, scripts written, and enthusiastic performers enlisted. Once one or several of those steps had been taken it was usually all-hands-on-deck and full steam ahead until opening night. Pageants, then, that were planned but eventually cancelled are quite rare. One large proposed pageant ...
Tags
- Historical
- Pageants
- Coward
- Noel
- Plymouth
- Nhs
- Victory
Pageanteers in the Archives 1: Gwen Lally: a Pageant Master in the making.

by Thulme Aug. 13, 2014 Comments

*Guest post by Ellie Reid, Oxfordshire History Centre*

Edwardian pageants had many hundreds of performers but the names of the ‘pageanteers’ are often unrecorded and can be difficult to discover. In his autobiography Louis N Parker, originator of the Edwardian pageant, recorded advice to future pageant-makers stating: ‘The performers must all be anonymous. A pageant may include four or five thousand performers. It is obviously impossible to name them all; but the humblest member of ...
Here's Tae Us # 4: The Wizard of the North

by Thulme Aug. 5, 2014 Comments

Oh, young Lochinvar is come out of the West,

Through all the wide Border his steed was the best,

And, save his good broadsword, he weapon had none,

He rode all unarmed, and he rode all alone...

I could go on... though I can hardly believe that it's now almost 50 years since I learned these lines from Walter Scott's epic poem, Marmion. Scott is of course famous as the originator of historical ...
Axbridge 2014: Commemorating WWI through Historical Pageantry

by Thulme July 28, 2014 Comments

Back at the beginning of this project I wrote a short blogpost about the ways Britons used historical pageants to make sense of the overwhelming shock of the First World War . Pageants, as a form of community theatre, enabled people to come together and express a variety of different emotions, such as remembrance, grief, or patriotism. More recently, as our research has expanded, Mark has presented a paper on this topic.

I noticed today that ...

Blog

Showing posts by lfleming Show all

We need your help!