A Failed Victory Pageant? Blame the NHS!
Planning and producing a successful pageant, especially at the height of the movement in the first half of the century - when size definitely mattered - was a major undertaking. Committees were formed, financing raised, scripts written, and enthusiastic performers enlisted. Once one or several of those steps had been taken it was usually all-hands-on-deck and full steam ahead until opening night. Pageants, then, that were planned but eventually cancelled are quite rare. One large proposed pageant in Nottingham for 1909 was cancelled the previous year, despite a synopsis having been created along with a committee, ostensibly due to a lack of ‘whole-hearted enthusiasm’ and a fear of financial loss. The one-off performance of the Hyde Park Empire Day Pageant in 1932 made it to minutes before performance, but had to be stopped due to a whopping and unexpected 150,000 people turning up – a ‘colossal but good-humoured failure’ according to the newspapers at the time. Plymouth’s Victory Pageant, scheduled first for 1945 and then put back to 1946, offers an even more interesting example – especially considering the level the plans had reached before it was permanently abandoned.
It was first suggested in 1944, as the city started planning how it would tackle the extensive rebuilding required after the horrific bombing the city had taken. Its proposed purpose was to raise some of the £250,000 needed to restore and modernise the local Prince of Wales’s Hospital. From the beginning a new hospital was envisioned as a ‘beautiful, but practical’ war memorial. After all, the hospital had treated 80% of the air raid civilian casualties in the city, as well as hundreds of wounded servicemen. As one of the planning documents, titled If the Dead Could Speak, argued:
Would not
those who died in defence of our Country by sea, land and air and in the heavy
air raids on the West Country, desire that we who are left should do something for
the living? Should not we, who owe them so much, endeavour to carry on in peace
time the adventure so gallantly carried out by them in time of war, and how can
we do that better than by the alleviation of suffering?
Other private documents were less emotive in describing the other effects a pageant could have, such as providing ‘a tremendous opportunity for educational publicity in regard to the hospital’, being ‘productive of good financial results’ and giving ‘the public what it wants and needs after five years of war’.
Captain H. Oakes Joseph, the famous producer of the Aldershot Tattoo for over twenty years, was brought in as the pageant master, while Clemence Dane, a well-known author currently writing a history of Plymouth, was brought in for the script. Noel Coward, friend of Lady Astor, had originally been approached before Dane. He had an affinity with Plymouth, or so C.P. Brown, representative of the hospital and chairman of the pageant committee, liked to think. At the least, Coward had visited Plymouth to research his patriotic 1942 war film In Which We Serve – and, according to Coward’s biographer Philip Hoare, also to visit Michael Redgrave, with whom he was ‘romantically involved’. Alas, he seemingly could not commit to writing the whole thing, but promised to read out the prologue – but only if he happened to be in the country.
With or without Coward the project ploughed on: the research and synopsis was put together, the support of Lord and Lady Astor (Mayor and Mayoress) was obtained, and the local press began to advertise in earnest. Pencilled in for summer 1945, the first postponement came in February of that year. As Brown told the Western Morning News, when the pageant was first proposed there was good reason to believe that the war would be over by last Christmas, but that had not happened and it would not be right to hold a pageant when the men were still fighting the Japanese. It was thus put back to summer 1946.
Almost exactly a year later, in February 1946, it was shelved again – this time indefinitely. According to Brown it was the fault – at least indirectly – of the central government. Reforming zeal was in the air and it seemed increasingly likelihood that Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health, was going to get his way in centralising the planned National Health Service – despite the opposition of voluntary or municipal hospitals like the Prince of Wales’s. As Brown now told the press, the pageant was deferred until ‘the position with regard to the Government’s intentions towards voluntary hospitals has been clarified… for reasons which I think must be obvious’. While he maintained that ‘the hospital still requires the generous help of the public’, the 1948 act confirmed the change, and the centralisation of healthcare meant that the older form of charitable support was not, in this case, needed anymore. The Victory Pageant, then, was dead in the water, and Plymouth would have to wait another seven years for the massive Pageant of Plymouth Hoe – on that, perhaps, more later…
Tom Hulme