Introducing the Team: Paul Readman
I am the principal investigator on the Redress of the Past project. I’m a senior lecturer in modern British History at King’s College London, where I’ve been based since 2002.
I’ve been interested in historical pageants for some time. This interest was born of displacement activity. Having finished a doctorate on land and landscape in English politics and culture, I needed a break from thinking and writing about smallholdings, allotments, agricultural holdings acts and the like. I just couldn’t face immediately starting to turn the research I had done on my thesis into a book. So I cast about for a project to distract me for a while, to give me an excuse for putting off what I really ought to have been doing.
While working on my PhD I had developed an interest in what I called ‘the place of the past’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, having found that many of the landscapes most valued by English people were valued because of their historical associations, their links to times gone by, and by extension to English national identity. (I wrote articles about this in Rural History, and – later on – in Cultural and Social History.) This finding led me to consider the place of the past in English culture more generally. Embarking on research for a study looking at the twenty-five years or so before the First World War, I found out about the Edwardian ‘pageant fever’ that had been set off by Louis Napoleon’s Parker’s magnificent Sherborne Pageant of 1905. Discussion of this contagion, and what it might tell us about English attitudes to the past, formed a major element of two essays that resulted from this research: a long article in Past and Present, and a shorter piece in a collection of essays.
By the time these essays were finished, it was 2005, and I was running out of excuses for not knuckling down to work on my book about land. The award of some funded research leave from the AHRC further undermined the ramparts of displacement (I did briefly become addicted to a computer game called Battleground Gettysburg, but there’s only so many times you can recreate Pickett’s Charge); and pageants took a back seat while I finished my book. This duly came out in 2008.
Unfortunately, 2008 was also the year that I became head of the department of History at King’s, which served to stymie further work on pageants somewhat. That was, until I discovered that Mark Freeman was interested in pageants too. This galvanizing discovery was made through the good offices of Martha Vandrei, and was made in a pub somewhere in London or Glasgow, or possibly St Albans, or possibly Edinburgh come to think of it… my memory is a bit hazy on this score. But whatever the specific origins of this revelation, I have always founds pubs generally to be excellent facilitators of historical research, and thusly aided plans were made for a grant application to the AHRC. In making these plans with our co-investigators Angela Bartie and Paul Vetch, we were greatly assisted by my King’s colleague Arthur Burns. Arthur is a close associate of the project with his own longstanding interest in pageants, and who beside other services put us in touch with the Recorders of Uttlesford History, one of our project partners.
Having come to the end of my term as head of department in 2012, I’m now very keen to work on pageants in more earnest; I need to find other displacement activities now!