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.
Well I’ve come to the end of my ‘interviewing week’ in Suffolk. I did a bit of oral history for a project in Leicester a couple of years ago, but the format was quite different – I was set up in a local arts cinema, everyone came to me, and we didn’t have any specific questions about people’s memories beyond what it was like living in Leicester. This time I have been travelling ...
One of the most exciting and fun parts of this project is getting to meet people who actually performed in historical pageants. Through these 'pageanteers' we can learn what it meant to individuals to take part, and we can find out bits of information that were not printed in the press or official programme. All this week I am in Bury St Edmunds, recording oral histories with performers from the Bury St Edmunds Magna Carta ...
Pageants featured in twentieth-century fiction, as we’ve pointed out before. The best known example is probably Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (1941), which was set around a village pageant. I have blogged before about V. L. Whitechurch’s Murder at the Pageant (1930). It was not unusual for readers in mid-century to encounter pageants.
Until recently I hadn’t heard of Rosemary Manning and her Dragon series for children, which began in ...
...I know what you're thinking; how can I possibly link the two together? Well...
Over the last few days I have been reading various headlines (with a sense of disbelief that is strangely becoming common since about 8th May 2015) about the upcoming vote on the proposed Government amendments to the Hunting Act. As far as I can gather, the change will allow the traditional style of hunting to come in through the back ...
The Bury St Edmunds Pageant of Magna Carta made a pretty decent profit of £2,158, 17s 11d – about £33,000 in today’s money. With the imminent closure of the Playhouse theatre, yet good health of three cinemas, one local man hoped that the pageant was ‘proof of what can be done’ and that some of the profits could go to safeguarding dramatics in the town. But, following the pageant, there was only a ...
At our last Film Evening in Bury St Edmunds, we were delighted to meet Jill Burlingham, who was Christopher Ede's assistant during the 1959 pageant of Magna Carta. Jill very kindly gave us a series of photos from the event - some of which we had seen, but many we had not - and none in such high quality! You can see them below.
Aren't these just fantastic?! If you'd like to leave comments ...
This last weekend me and Paul finally visited Sherborne: the home of historical pageantry. As even the most casual observer of our website must know, it was in this small Dorset town in 1905 that the first historical pageant was held. Many different parts of the town still bear the imprint of this original event. We arrived on Friday night, and had time to look around the Pageant Gardens, laid out using the substantial profits ...
One of the central questions of our research is the vexed question of conservatism. Historians working from an explicitly left-wing perspective have tended to see the large-scale civic pageants of the first half of the twentieth century as attempts to re-assert class structures and invented ideas of a 'traditional' society. By portraying a long and varied history, pageant-masters aimed to give a sense of stability to a rapidly industrialised and urbanised nation. Not surprisingly, this ...
Mark Freeman
Last Saturday – 20 June – I went to see the annual puppet re-enactment of the martyrdom of St Alban, the first Christian saint in Britain. This is organised by St Albans Cathedral, and attracts hundreds, if not thousands, of spectators. The archbishop of Canterbury was present and made a short speech at the start of the event, and various church dignatories were also in attendance.
The re-enactment is not a historical pageant as such ...