Historical pageants and the First World War
by Mark Freeman
I have been spending some time this week working on our paper about depictions of the First World War in historical pageants. I’ve blogged about this before, and have enjoyed returning to this intriguing topic. How and why did pageant-masters and script-writers portray the war in its immediate aftermath?
When I wrote my article on historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain, focusing on the string of pageants staged at St Albans in Hertfordshire, I noted that most pageants shied away from depicting the First World War. This was in contrast to those in America, which, as David Glassberg has shown, tended to show the community’s contribution to the war effort. The war became one aspect of the social history of the community.
Although most pageants in Britain didn’t depict the war, at least not directly, I certainly underestimated the extent to which it did feature in pageants of the interwar and post-war years. Indeed, some pageants were very successful in incorporating the war into the longer-term history of the community. An early example was Salisbury in 1919, where the historical pageant, mostly performed by children, culminated in a dramatic account of the recent war, enacted by allegorical personifications of characters such as Fame and Peace. As with much interwar theatre, allegory and symbolism featured strongly in portrayals of the recent war, the horrors of which were sometimes considered too awful to present in a realistic form.
Some pageants did go for a realistic depiction of the events of the war, and were surprisingly popular in 1919. But the frontline events of the war did not place in British towns, cities and villages, and in community pageants it was often the local nature of sacrifice that was emphasised. There were, for example, poignant depictions of mourners at war memorials, the blowing of bugles, and poems that eulogised the local men who had gone to war and not returned.
There is no doubt that the war not only interrupted the craze for historical pageants in the interwar period, but also that it disrupted the nature of pageants themselves – this recently ‘invented tradition’ struggled at first to incorporate the enormity and temporal closeness of the events of the war. But over time the form showed itself to be remarkable resilient, and many communities were able to present the war as one of many historical moments in which their people had made a contribution to a larger national story.