Pageants and Anniversaries
On 30th April the University of East Anglia held a symposium in conjunction with the Royal Historical Society. The subject was “The Age of Anniversaries: The Cult of Commemoration, 1905-20”. I gave a paper on behalf of the project team on pageants linked to particular anniversaries, beginning, of course, with Sherborne in 1905 – which commemorated the thousandth anniversary of the conquest of Mercia by Queen Ethelfleda. But other, lesser-known pageants were also connected to centenary celebrations of various kinds. One example was the Woodhall Spa Pageant of 1911, held to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of that town’s spa waters.
Indeed it seems there was quite a keenness to link pageants to anniversaries. So in advance of Stafford’s millenary in 1913, for example, the Lichfield Mercury was in no doubt that the anniversary ‘could be celebrated in one way only… by means of a pageant’. It also seems that people seized on questionable or unremarkable anniversaries as an excuse to have a pageant. Another pre-war example of this was the Oxford Millenary Pageant of 1912. Oxford had already had a pageant in 1907, of course, which had not been related to any particular anniversary. The justification for this later one, following so soon after the 1907 event, was the thousandth anniversary of the first recorded mention – in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles – of Oxford having the status as a county town! On the face of it, this was an event hardly worth commemorating. Certainly, it didn’t impress the Times, who quite reasonably suggested the centenary was an ‘arbitrary’ one. But people liked any excuse to ‘padge’!
Pageants continued to be linked to anniversaries in later years. Selkirk held a pageant to mark its quarter centenary in 1935; the Clackmannan pageant celebrated the 700th anniversary of the founding of the church there; Bridport marked the 700th anniversary of its borough charter in 1953. Pageants themselves even created their own centenaries. A recent example of this was the 2011 pageant held at Woodall spa, which was designed to mark the hundredth anniversary of the pageant that had been held in 1911. The memory of the pageant, not the centenary of the place, was the trigger for the event, which while quite different to that held one hundred years previously aimed – as its organizers put it – to maintain something of ‘the spirit of the first pageant’. It seems to have been a great success, involving music, flower shows, a beer tent, and other activities, as well as dramatic performance. You can read about it here.
Paul Readman