Blog

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.

Lawrence du Garde Peach, the Nottingham 1949 Quincentenary, and ‘The Town That Would Have a Pageant’

by Thulme May 7, 2014 Comments

By the 1940s and 1950s the pageantry movement had become decidedly less serious. Accentuated by the death of the former masters of Edwardian pageantry like Frank Lascelles and Louis Napoleon Parker, and increasingly competing with a range of popular and often spectacular visual experiences, a space was left for more adventurous pageant authors and masters. Performances now often included a range of new devices to display the history and culture of a place, deviating from ...
The Pageant Moment

by Thulme May 6, 2014 Comments

The Royal Historical event I mentioned in my last post got me thinking about the wider context of the British pageant movement. What was it about the early part of the twentieth century that caused so many people to organize, watch and perform in pageants? Pageants were not after all unique to Britain. The movement was especially strong in North America, and things similar to British historical pageants were staged in continental Europe from the ...
Pageants and Anniversaries

by Thulme May 1, 2014 Comments

On 30^th April the University of East Anglia held a symposium in conjunction with the Royal Historical Society. The subject was “The Age of Anniversaries: The Cult of Commemoration, 1905-20”. I gave a paper on behalf of the project team on pageants linked to particular anniversaries, beginning, of course, with Sherborne in 1905 – which commemorated the thousandth anniversary of the conquest of Mercia by Queen Ethelfleda. But other, lesser-known pageants were also connected to ...
Searching for Norman Carey

by Thulme April 25, 2014 Comments

Many of the pageant-masters we are researching in this project left large and easily accessible archives, along with reams of newspaper articles and photographs associated with each event they staged. Often working at the large town or city level, producers like Frank Lascelles, Louis Napoleon Parker, and Gwen Lally were known figures associated with the world of theatre. Bold, charismatic, and frequently eccentric, they seemed aware of the importance of projecting a captivating and confident ...
Introducing the Team: Linda Fleming

by Thulme April 17, 2014 Comments

Last to join the team, I'm a Research Associate based at the University of Glasgow and am responsible for undertaking research on pageants from Orkney to em... quite a lot further south! I came to the Redress of the Past project from another funded research programme at the University of Edinburgh that looked at the history of community policing in Scotland. Although I've ranged widely across the social and cultural history of modern ...
User Workshop

by Thulme April 15, 2014 Comments

As well as producing articles, books and oral histories on historical pageantry we also hope to encourage popular public engagement, especially through our website and twitter - @Pageantry_AHRC – as well as through the creation of a publically accessible database of the pageants we’ve researched. We’d like to get feedback on these aspects of the project, and so are looking for volunteers to participate in a user-group workshop. The purpose of this event is to ...
The Bath Pageant: A Plaque Quest...

by Thulme April 14, 2014 Comments

*Guest post by Laura Morgan - you can find her blog here*

There’s very little information on the internet about the 1909 Bath Pageant. All I knew as I found myself there one March morning recently was that a plaque commemorating the pageant could be found in Sydney Gardens, to the east of the city centre, so thence I wended my investigative way.

Sydney Gardens is a delight in itself – a beautifully laid-out and almost ...
First Conference Paper

by Thulme April 11, 2014 Comments

Three members of the team – Paul Readman, Tom Hulme and myself – attended the Social History Society annual conference at Northumbria University. I presented a paper on behalf of all of us. We were in the first session of the conference and got a good audience turnout. In the same session were papers by Tosh Warwick and Ben Roberts, both on civic ritual in Middlesbrough, which linked nicely with the theme of our paper. Tosh circulated ...
On Not Padging

by Thulme March 17, 2014 Comments

The question "Do you Padge?" enjoyed some currency in the early to middle decades of the twentieth century. But padging was not of course popular with everyone, or everywhere. Indeed, I've just heard from Linda that Stirling doesn't seem to have had a pageant. On the face of it, this is astonishing, not least because of the importance of Stirling as a site of Scottish national memory. After all, Stirling is home to ...
Arthur Bryant, Pageantry, and Anti-Semitism

by Thulme March 12, 2014 Comments

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 ...

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