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 Paul Readman
I’ve just remembered a curious discovery Tom Hulme and I
made last summer, when we visited Sherborne. Before giving a talk to a
meeting of the Somerset and Dorset History Society, we had time for a quick
look in the Sherborne School archives.
Above: Paul in the archives
One of the highlights of the archive – apart from the life-size cut-out of Old Shirburnian Benedict Cumberbatch – is a large-format commemorative album of ...
A regular listener of the long-running compendium of rural sound effects The Archers has brought it to my attention that a current story line in the show involves the staging of a pageant at the Ambridge Village Hall. The Pageant being put on by Lynda Snell is a revival of E.M. Forster’s England’s Pleasant Land first staged at Milton Court, Surrey in July 1938.
England’s Green and Pleasant Land was Forster ...
It is perhaps surprising that the celebration of the opening a new cathedral should be marked by public nudity, however, the 1962 Coventry Cathedral Festival which marked the opening of the Cathedral almost twenty-two years after the old building had been destroyed in a bombing raid was accompanied by a search for someone to play what the Daily Mail declared as ‘the world’s most famous strip-girl’[1]
Above: Programmes of various Lady Godiva Pageants ...
by Mark Freeman
I have been sent a picture of a flyer advertising a pageant
in St Albans to be held in July 1908. As the city had staged a historical
pageant in 1907, and few if any places had more than one in this period, the
document took me by surprise. The date of the flyer seems to be sometime in
late 1907.
Above: Flyer for the
St Albans pageant of 1908. Many thanks ...
By Mark Freeman
On 28 January, as part of ‘Residents: Enjoy St Albans’
weekend, the St Albans Tour
Guides put on a performance of some Victorian courtroom scenes in the
courtroom in the old town hall. Built in the 1830s, this was a magistrates’
court, and also hosted grand jury proceedings, where the large jury considered
bills of indictment.
The proceedings that were re-enacted in 2016 came from various real trials and committals from the ...
We have a pool on about which historical figure crops up the most in Pageants. The obvious money is on Queen Elizabeth, largely because of the phenomenal numbers of visits she paid to towns and stately homes up and down the land. These visits, which could last weeks, could bankrupt local nobles through the expense of putting up her entire retinue of, servants, attendants and various flunkeys, nobles and ministers (and their attendants, servants and ...
by Mark Freeman
I spent a large part of Saturday night strolling around
central London looking at the various light displays that had been mounted –
for this weekend only – for the Lumière festival. Streets were closed, and thousands
came onto the streets of the capital to look at a whole range of installations,
ranging from the modest to the huge.
Above: Fish floating above Piccadilly
Highlights included lit-up fish floating above Piccadilly, a circus projected ...
Walking through the City of London the other night I came across a welcome sight, that of a street sign bearing the name Pageantmaster Court near St Paul’s Cathedral on Ludgate Hill. On doing some brief internet digging, the sign goes back to 1993 and commemorates J.R. Snowdon, Pageant Master of twenty of the Lord Mayor’s Shows.
Though not strictly a historical pageant the Lord Mayor’s show, which dates from 1189 ...
Mark Freeman
On Monday the ‘Redress of the Past’ team met with the project advisory board for the second time. Along with many other projects, we made provision in our application to the AHRC for an advisory board, on which a range of academic perspectives are represented, as well as stakeholders in the project from the heritage and information sector. One member, David Glassberg, came all the way from Massachussetts to attend the meeting. His ...
Like every other four year old, I was obsessed tractors. As a twenty-seven years old, I still am (privately). The best tractor, as I’m sure you will know, is the red Massey-Ferguson.
Sadly (or, from another perspective, fortunately) hay fever prevented this relationship from every truly blossoming although my cousin’s farm has a thoroughly respectable collection. One event I’m sure I would have loved to go to as a small child was ...
