St. Albans Pageant, 1907: Queen Elizabeth at Gorhambury.
Courtesy of St. Albans Museums.
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.
I’ve been thinking about the limits of ‘pageant fever’. There’s no doubt that it took hold in a big way, particularly before World War I, but it struck with varying degrees of intensity. After the great successes of Sherborne and Warwick, the idea of having a pageant in Nottingham was mooted. A public meeting was held on 30 August 1907 with a view to holding a performance in July 1908. Honorary secretaries were ...
I am a keen follower of cricket, and am fortunate that my father is a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). This year has seen many events to mark the bicentenary of the current Lord’s cricket ground – the home of MCC – including a match between MCC and Hertfordshire, on the exact anniversary of the first match in 1814, featuring the same two teams (in both instances, MCC won).
The final event was ‘Lord ...
The First Annual Pageant Dinner was held in 1907 to celebrate the successes of the new form of community theatre invented by Louis Napoleon Paker just two years earlier. The dinner took place at the famous, fabulous, and fashionable "Restaurant Frascati" on Oxford Street, in the middle of London. Over 100 people attended - mostly those who had been involved in the Sherborne (1905), Warwick (1906), and Bury St Edmunds (1907) pageants, as well as eager ...
Mark and Tom
On Friday 24 October we were both in Bury St Edmunds for a stakeholder engagement meeting organised by the Magna Carta 800th Committee. The Magna Carta Trust has received £1m of direct funding from the Treasury in advance of the 800th anniversary of the ‘Great Charter’ in 2015. The Committee is chaired by Sir Robert Worcester, the founder of the polling organisation MORI (now Ipsos-MORI), and is charged with the distribution of ...
Over the last few weeks I’ve been ramping up our research on the First World War and historical pageants. Mark will be giving a talk on this theme at the Institute of Historical Research on the 4th December 2014, and I’ll be doing the same 4000 miles away on the same day at the University of Madison (Wisconsin)! Pageants in the interwar period have not really received much attention – most historians have ...
Two members of the project team went to St Albans Beer and Cider Festival in September, largely to attend a tutored tasting led by Roger Protz. We didn’t expect to be thinking about pageants very much, but one of the beers that we tasted prompted some thoughts about re-enactment, history and identity.
Windsor & Eton brewery has recently launched Magna Carta Ale, inspired by the impending 800th anniversary of the signing of the charter ...
Perhaps the one constant in historical pageantry across the twentieth century was the prominence given to royalty. From patrons to characters, almost all pageants featured a King, Queen, Prince or Princess in some way, all the way back from the Anglo-Saxon rulers to even legendary figures, like King Arthur. Providing an opportunity for spectacular crowd scenes and fabulous costumes, the visit of royalty in a pageant episode was also one of the most obvious ways ...
Today's blog post features some of the stunning material held at the Sherborne School Archives in Dorset, kindly provided by the School's archivist, Rachel Hassall. The Sherborne Pageant of 1905 was the invention of Louis Napoleon Parker that kicked off 'pageantitis', and fully deserves its popular title of the 'Mother of all Pageants'.
This beautiful album, bound in white vellum, was presented to Parker in the Digby Assembly Rooms in Sherborne on the ...