Introducing the Team: Mark Freeman
This post explains my personal interest in historical pageants. I am one of the co-investigators on the ‘Redress of the Past’ project. At the moment I work as a senior lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow, but in January I’m taking up a new post as senior lecturer in education at the Institute of Education, London.
My research interests are in the history of education in modern Britain, especially adult education, youth movements and informal education. Also in January, I’ll be taking over as co-editor of the refereed journal History of Education, the leading English-language journal in the sub-discipline. Over the years I’ve also worked on English rural history, the history of poverty and social research, and business history.
I first became interested in historical pageants when I was writing a popular history of my home town, St Albans in Hertfordshire, for Carnegie Publishing’s ‘City and Town Histories’ series. This was published in 2008. St Albans held one of the early pageants, in 1907, and this seemed to have been a very important episode in the history of the city. Like other Edwardian historical pageants, it had a mixture of Roman and medieval scenes, and ended with an Elizabethan episode, full of music, merry-making and morris-dancing. There was a large cast, and an audience of many thousands.
St Albans also had historical pageants in 1948 and 1953 – I also wrote a little bit about these in the book – and the three pageants led me to investigate the theme further. I discovered Paul Readman’s article on ‘The Place of the Past in English Culture’, which contained some interesting reflections on the uses of history in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. More recently, I also found Ayako Yoshino’s excellent book, Pageant Fever: Local History and Consumerism in Edwardian England, which presents pageants as a commercial phenomenon, in the context of the growth of tourism in this period.
It seemed, however, that few historians had considered the flourishing of historical pageants in the interwar period, and even fewer the years after the Second World War. After 1945, prompted by the Festival of Britain and the Coronation of the present queen, many communities staged historical pageants, often on just as big a scale as the Edwardian pageants that are so much better known.
I recently published a long article in Social History on the pageants of St Albans, arguing that the local focus of historical pageantry continued, and was perhaps even intensified, after the Second World War, as urban Britain came to terms with the rapid changes of this period. This article also considers how historical pageants changed and declined after the mid-1950s: a ‘pageant play’ at St Albans in 1968 was a completely different type of event, examining different historical episodes, from its predecessors of 1907, 1948 and 1953.
I also made a poster presentation on the St Albans pageants to the 2012 History of Education Society annual conference.
It is exciting to be working on this large AHRC-funded project. To continue on the theme of local history, I am particularly pleased to be leading the collaborations with one of our project partners,St Albans Museums, with whom we will be working closely with over the next three years.
Mark Freeman
www.markfreeman.org.uk
M.Freeman@ioe.ac.uk
The 1948 St Albans pageant will be a future ‘pageant of the month’.