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.
By Tom Hulme
As a historian whose work focuses mostly on local patriotism and civic pride, I’m also susceptible to a bit of misty eyed romanticism about my own home town and county. Whenever I reach the rolling hills of upper Derbyshire, before dropping back down into Buxton, the highest market town in England ™, it just feels like home. About seven years ago I did my first proper archival research in the Derbyshire County ...
By Tom Hulme
The first surprise of my research trip to Matlock was
finding a pageant about my hometown of Buxton. The second was uncovering a
pageant that had some intriguing links to the secrecy and suspicion of the Cold
War years – well, sort of – in the little town of Brampton, Cumberland.
The Naworth Castle Pageant was a pretty small event in 1960. It was really more of a fete and short play than a ...
The Redress of the Past team is involved in another exhibition, this one at Carlisle, opening in August 2015. The exhibition organizers have sent out an appeal for stories...
The Carlisle Historical Pageants Exhibition – Appeal for your stories
From 22nd August to the 18th October 2015 Tullie House will be showing a temporary exhibition which will explore the Carlisle historic pageants of 1928, 1951 and 1977.
Each Pageant will be carefully analysed to examine themes ...
We’re really excited at the moment, because we are trialing the beta version of our online public contribution tool. Once this goes live – soon we hope! – anybody will be able to upload pictures relating to pageants onto our website. We’d be delighted to see your postcards, photographs, diaries, newspaper clippings – you name it! You will even be able to add comments to any items in the collection, as it grows to become the ...
Last nightI went to a talk near where I live, Fleetville
in St Albans, part of the Fleetville
Diaries series. This group runs regular events with guest speakers,
focusing on local history and sometimes ranging more widely. They also have
guided walks around Fleetville in the summer months.
The evening’s speaker was Peter Swinson, whose father Cyril (1910-63) was the pageant-master in the St Albans pageants of 1948 and 1953. The first of these ...
Greetings from Glasgow! We’ve been ensconced in the meeting room at Lilybank House working on some essays on a variety of themes, ranging from the depiction of World War I in pageants to the pageant-crazed town of Arbroath. Fuelled by a potent combination of Tunnock’s Tea Cakes, fruitcake and muffins, we have made excellent progress on our drafts. You can expect to see these soon:
“Pageants and Anniversaries”, which explores the role played ...
Until recently I had never heard of the Luton Coronation Pageant of 1953. A correspondent from Australia, who got in touch with us via the website, sent me various pageant souvenirs and ephemera, including a four-page souvenir programme and a flyer for the event, held in the grounds of Luton Hoo, a large country house to the south of the town.
This was a very large event: there was seating for more than 14,000 ...
It is known – at least among the small community of people engaged in research on pageants – that these events featured in fictional literature from time to time. The best-known example is Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts, published in 1941, which features a pageant in the grounds of an English country house. Here a pageant is the centrepiece of a work of fiction, and pageants appeared elsewhere, even in books for children: Richmal Crompton ...
This is a guest post by Emma Greenwood, special collections librarian at the Jerwood Library, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. The library holds a number of pageant books from the early twentieth century including the book of words, book of music and the souvenir guide to the Chester Historical Pageant. Visitors are welcome: please see their website for more details.
Official Souvenir of the Chester Historical Pageant (Manchester, 1910).
Described by The Times ...