Pageants that didn’t happen
I’ve been thinking about the limits of ‘pageant fever’. There’s no doubt that it took hold in a big way, particularly before World War I, but it struck with varying degrees of intensity. After the great successes of Sherborne and Warwick, the idea of having a pageant in Nottingham was mooted. A public meeting was held on 30 August 1907 with a view to holding a performance in July 1908. Honorary secretaries were appointed, committees were set up, and a provisional venue was fixed - the idea being to hold the pageant at Wollaton Park (later the venue of successful pageants in 1935 and 1949). It was all very serious: the great Louis Napoleon Parker was even invited to mastermind the affair. But in the end, it came to nothing. The pageant was deferred to summer 1909 and then abandoned entirely. The organizers put their failure down to the financial risks involved, but the key factor was probably a lack of enthusiasm at local level. Meetings held to discuss the pageant were poorly attended and, apparently, uninspiring, as a cartoon published in the Nottingham Evening Post made devastatingly clear.
What were the reasons for this lack of enthusiasm? One view is that in the early years of the movement, pageant fever was largely confined to small market towns, places that perhaps felt challenged by the past of change in the early years of the twentieth century – felt, perhaps, that they were being left behind or somehow forgotten about. And then in the interwar period, it was more the larger urban centres that felt challenged, as the Depression and mass unemployment hit home. Was this the key context, perhaps, for the pageants held in the 1930s in Bradford, Manchester, Nottingham (!) and elsewhere?
On the other hand, this explanation might be too simple. Pageantitis was not confined to small towns before World War I, or larger places in the interwar period. Liverpool, London and Bristol all held large pageants before 1914, and village pageants were a key feature of cultural life in rural areas in particular in the 1920s and 1930s (as clear from Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts). As this project progresses, the more I am struck by the difficulty of making generalisations!
Paul Readman