Arthur Bryant, Pageantry, and Anti-Semitism
One important aspect of historical pageants was their ability to carve out a space of social citizenship, providing a chance for participants to make a visible claim to membership in the life and culture of the village, town, or nation. Often, in the twentieth century, this cut across categories of class and gender, as the carnivalesque characteristics of local dramatic theatre allowed performers to be a King, Queen, Mayor, or folk-hero for the day. Pageant producers were clearly aware of the power their plays could have in creating a spirit of community and absolving, temporarily at least, these social hierarchies. Louis Napoleon Parker, the Father of the modern pageant movement, was open about his hopes that the Sherborne Pageant of 1905 would create classless cooperation; it is unsurprising, then, that he insisted the press should not publish the names of the cast, for fear that it might lead to public differentiation of what was meant to be a local and patriotic expression of the anonymous majority.
Like many rituals of civic community, the inclusionary nature of pageant performance also depended on a corollary idea of what it meant to be a ‘bad’ citizen. Most commonly this was around the inclusion of characters who displayed negative social traits – thievery, cowardice, and an absence of local pride. Characters like Simon the Retainer in the sixth episode of the Dorset Pageant of 1929, who treacherously led Parliamentary forces into Corfe Castle during the Civil War, were portrayed as immoral and disloyal – and thus not true Englishman. Almost always these bad citizens met their comeuppance, and the patriotic majority triumphed, local dignity and pride accordingly restored. It is unquestionable that pageants were often nationalistic and took as a primary aim the solidification of community at the same time as defining what it meant to be a patriotic citizen. Sometimes, unfortunately, this defining could turn nasty, based more on an exclusionary than inclusionary understanding of citizenship.
Arthur Bryant, one of the most famous national historians of the twentieth century, first honed his patriotic style of idealised rural history in pageants he staged in the mid-1920s. In recent years he is more famous for his castigation by historians analysing his anti-Semitic and Nazi appeasement books and activities in the run-up to the Second World War – though some have been kinder than others, acknowledging that he was simply part of an unfortunately common current of prejudice. While these analyses of his life and work have been based mostly on his quasi-intellectual statements about Jews, his pageants reveal more crass and basic feelings of anti-Semitism. His first pageant was the Cambridgeshire Pageant of 1924, organized for the Women’s Institute of that county, when he was still a school headmaster. In the numerous drafts of the storyline that survive in Bryant’s papers, one episode had blatant anti-Semitic overtones. Taking place at a medieval country fair, two elderly men begin arguing about money. Suddenly a cry of ‘Jew’ is heard, and a crowd gathers round in excitement. The Prior of the fair appears and a hearing takes place in the Court of Pie Powder, at which point the fair crowd becomes even more excitable – calling for the Jews to be sent to the ducking pond as punishment. Eventually the prior assents, much to the joy of the exuberant crowd. In later drafts Bryant crossed out Jews in pen, instead using terms like usurer, profiteer, forestaller, or regrator – revealing the characteristics he presumably thought common to the Jewish. It is unclear whether these Jewish stereotypes were in the final performance – though evidence from the Oxfordshire Pageant two years later, directed by Bryant and essentially the same narrative as the Cambridgeshire Pageant, suggests that it was understood on some level, since the Oxford Chronicle reported one character as a ‘Jewish money changer’. Even more damning is the fact that, in the only instance I have found of Bryant acting in one of his pageants, he took the role of the Prior – the man who condemned the Jews to the ducking pond. According to the press, Bryant ‘evidently’ ‘enjoyed his role’. Bryant’s characterisation of Jews as money-grabbers was distastefully continued in his Wisbech Pageant of 1929 when, upon the arrival of King John in the town in 1216, Bryant described how ‘Hugging the vicinity’ of ‘the Baggage and Treasure Train’ was ‘a little group of Jews, whose interested appearance suggests that the Royal Treasure is not unmortgaged.’ Again, it is not possible to truly know whether the ethnicity of these characters was obvious to the audience, but it shows that his stereotyping had not changed.
In Bryant’s pageants it was only Jews who were marked out as being ‘the other’. In other respects he went out of his way to make sure the reader understood that some races and ethnicities were acceptable - such as the noble Eastern traders, who conformed to what he saw as the correct social code. According to Bryant there were clearly both correct and incorrect ways to act at a quintessentially English fair. It is debateable whether malice was intended in Bryant’s depiction of the Jews, since he could have simply been depending on lazy stereotypes he thought the audience would find amusing. Certainly, in the furore over his activities in the late-1930s and early 1940s, he was quick to declare himself not an anti-Semite – pointing out his various friendships with Jews. Perhaps Bryant’s prejudices should be understood as a reflection of many sections of British society in the interwar period – though his self-censorship suggests that he understood on some level the possible contentiousness of such episodes. At the least, Bryant’s treatment of Jews in his productions shows that the nature of pageantry as confirming cooperation and community spirit could still also be based on a distasteful and exclusionary notion of social citizenship.
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For the debate on Bryant’s anti-Semitism, see:
A.
Roberts, ‘Patriotism: The Last Refuge of Sir Arthur Bryant’ in Eminent
Churchillians (1994); J. Stapleton, Sir Arthur Bryant and National
History in Twentieth-Century Britain (2005); R.N. Soffer, ‘Arthur
Bryant, Appeasement, and Anti-Semitism’ in History, Historians, and
Conservatism in Britain and America: From the Great War to Thatcher and
Reagan (2008); and Richard Griffiths, ‘The reception of Bryant’s
Unfinished Victory: insights into British public opinion in early 1940’,
Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 38, no. 1 (2004).
For the Dorset Pageant of 1929, see:
The Dorset Pageant Book of Words and Programme (Dorchester, 1929).
For the scripts of Bryant’s pageants, see: BRYANT J1, BRYANT J2, and BRYANT C3 at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London.