On Not Padging
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 the
National Wallace Monument, erected in the 1860s and since then a great
symbol of Scottish national identity. As Graeme Morton has noted, more
than 50,000 people attended the laying of its foundation stone in 1861;
in the year 1905-1906, just as pageant fever was taking hold, it
attracted more than 21,000 paying visitors. (It's an even bigger tourist
draw today, the attractions at the Monument including "The Hall of
Heroes" and "The Wallace Story".) Why, I wonder, did Stirling not have a
pageant? Quite apart from the monument, it's a big place with an
important history stretching back to medieval times; it was once the
capital of Scotland; James III is buried there. With its fortress and
medieval old town, it seems just the sort of place to have had a bad
case of pageantitis. Yet it seemed immune. Why?
More generally, I wonder: which is the largest British town never to have held a pageant? And what made a place, whether large or small, more or less likely to stage pageants? What were the characteristics of a typical pageant town? We're asking these questions in this project, of course, but I've not really considered them from the perspective of places that didn't padge.