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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.

Pageant treasures of the British Library #1: The Communist Manifesto Centenary Pageant of 1948

by Thulme May 30, 2014 Comments

Many archives and libraries hold material relating to pageants. One prominent example is provided by the British Library. Of course we were expecting to discover a great deal of material in the Reading Rooms at St. Pancras, but thanks in part to the BL’s (relatively) new archive catalogue we have made some unusual finds. One example is a set of manuscripts and musical scores associated with the Communist Manifesto Centenary Pageant of 1948, which ...
A historian of pageants watches a battle re-enactment

by Thulme May 27, 2014 Comments

I spent Sunday afternoon at Bernard’s Heath in St Albans, with about 2,000 other people. It was a re-eanctment of the second battle of St Albans in 1461, one of the most important of the Wars of the Roses. The event was part of Sandridge 900+, commemorating the anniversary of St Leonard’s Church, Sandridge, a village to the north of St Albans.
The re-enactment was carried out by the Medieval Siege Society ...
Pageantry at the Chelsea Fringe Festival!

by Thulme May 22, 2014 Comments

Last night, as part of the Chelsea Fringe Festival, I gave a free talk at King's College London to a small-but-enthusiastic audience made up of members of the public. The Fringe first took place in 2012, and is aimed at anyone who is interested in gardens and gardening. Most events are free, participation is encouraged, and it runs alongside the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Anyone can enter an event, as long as its legal ...
Bringing pageants to more people…

by Thulme May 13, 2014 Comments

Last weekend I went to Birmingham at the invitation of the course team teaching the MA in History at the Open University. This was the second of six day schools that students on this programme attend, and took place at University College Birmingham.

I had been asked to talk about the project in general, but also the ways in which I went about writing my recent article on twentieth-century historical pageants, published in Social History ...
From pain to pleasure: rethinking data entry

by None May 11, 2014 Comments

With any digital project which involves the capture of information from analogue sources, there are two possible approaches. For projects like Old Bailey Online or London’s Pulse, where a single body of source material exists and is readily accessible, automated or outsourced mass digitisation (using OCR, rekeying, or a combination) is practical and effective. But where primary materials are disparate, widely distributed, and require mediation, ‘data entry’ is an inevitable – and frankly a rather ...
Bringing Pageants to the People

by None May 10, 2014 Comments

Over the past few months the project team has been working hard to establish some basic parameters around the capture of data about each pageant. In other words, what do we need to record, and how?

This is an ongoing process, and it is an important one for us to get right because this will shape the way in which our pageants database develops, and ultimately determine the information and features we can offer on ...
Lawrence du Garde Peach, the Nottingham 1949 Quincentenary, and ‘The Town That Would Have a Pageant’

by Thulme May 7, 2014 Comments

By the 1940s and 1950s the pageantry movement had become decidedly less serious. Accentuated by the death of the former masters of Edwardian pageantry like Frank Lascelles and Louis Napoleon Parker, and increasingly competing with a range of popular and often spectacular visual experiences, a space was left for more adventurous pageant authors and masters. Performances now often included a range of new devices to display the history and culture of a place, deviating from ...
The Pageant Moment

by Thulme May 6, 2014 Comments

The Royal Historical event I mentioned in my last post got me thinking about the wider context of the British pageant movement. What was it about the early part of the twentieth century that caused so many people to organize, watch and perform in pageants? Pageants were not after all unique to Britain. The movement was especially strong in North America, and things similar to British historical pageants were staged in continental Europe from the ...
Pageants and Anniversaries

by Thulme May 1, 2014 Comments

On 30^th April the University of East Anglia held a symposium in conjunction with the Royal Historical Society. The subject was “The Age of Anniversaries: The Cult of Commemoration, 1905-20”. I gave a paper on behalf of the project team on pageants linked to particular anniversaries, beginning, of course, with Sherborne in 1905 – which commemorated the thousandth anniversary of the conquest of Mercia by Queen Ethelfleda. But other, lesser-known pageants were also connected to ...
Searching for Norman Carey

by Thulme April 25, 2014 Comments

Many of the pageant-masters we are researching in this project left large and easily accessible archives, along with reams of newspaper articles and photographs associated with each event they staged. Often working at the large town or city level, producers like Frank Lascelles, Louis Napoleon Parker, and Gwen Lally were known figures associated with the world of theatre. Bold, charismatic, and frequently eccentric, they seemed aware of the importance of projecting a captivating and confident ...

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