Sister's Pageant Memories
One of the key objectives of this project is to recover the experiences of the men, women and children who caught ‘pageant fever’ over the course of the twentieth century. What did performing in pageants mean to them? What were their views on the historical events they were re-enacting? It’s difficult for historians to answer these questions. This is partly because the experience of individuals was so variable, but mainly because most people don’t often leave many documentary records. Just occasionally, however, the researcher stumbles across material that gives a real sense of what it was like to be involved in a pageant, in one of the minor parts, and what this involvement may have meant to the individual concerned. One example of such material can be found in the Warwickshire County Record office. This is a scrapbook entitled ‘Sister’s Pageant memories’, which contains a great many photographs and postcards from the Warwick Pageant of 1906. It was compiled by a young girl called Jeanette Mary Archer, whose sister later deposited the book in the record office. What did Mary (as she was known) do in the pageant? Looking through the scrapbook there are several photographs of a girl going down on one knee with arms raised aloft. Why so many of the same or very similar photo? Probably because – it seems to me anyway – the person in the photo was the owner of the scrapbook. The girl is Mary. If this is right, we know exactly what she did in the pageant: she was one of the children who came forward to thank Thomas Oken for his generosity to the town in episode 10. Her sole line, delivered with the other children, was “Thank you, Master Oken!” (In the same collection in the record office there is also a copy of the book of words, with this line carefully circled in pencil.) Yet despite her very minor part, the pageant obviously made a big impression on Mary. She made a scrapbook, which she (or perhaps her sister) gave the subtitle ‘Just the elements of a memorable week in life’. The avuncular Louis Napoleon Parker obviously made a big impression on her too. Several postcard portraits of Parker appear in the scrapbook, and in one page his portrait is arranged side by side with a photo of Mary.
![Warwick Record Office: CR367/39/101-103]](/static/media/images/parker_in_album..width-800.jpg)
Warwick Record Office: CR367/39/101-103]
Perhaps more interestingly, Mary made something of an impression on Parker, for all that her part was a minor one among many hundreds of others. After the pageant had ended, he even wrote her a poem, sending it to her in a letter. It read:
Dear little maid, who [?stopped] and dreamed,
While kings and queens went glittering by,
Like knights in gorgeous panoply,
And Bishops and Priests, till it really seemed,
As if all England’s history
Had stepped from books and painted walls,
From Palaces, Cathedrals, Halls,
On purpose that your eyes might see
Its beauty and its dignity: –
In years to come, when you’re old and grey,
You’ll look at a faded picture, and say –
With perhaps a tear, and perhaps a sigh –
“That was Elizabeth – this was I”!
And I hope all memory won’t be gone
Of the lonely man, who stood aloof,
And rang the bells from the top of the roof,
And scolded and praised through his megaphone!
Warwick Record Office CR367/38. Credit: L. N. Parker