Merched Anrhydedd
Pageant type
Notes
Information drawn from 'Survey of Historical Pageants' undertaken by Mick Wallis; with thanks to Angharad Jones of Gwynedd Archive Service.
Performances
Place: C.M. Chapel (Talysarn) (Talysarn, Carnarvonshire, Wales)
Year: 1957
Indoors/outdoors: Indoors
Number of performances: 1
Notes
12 Dec. 1957
Name of pageant master and other named staff
Names of executive committee or equivalent
n/a
Names of script-writer(s) and other credited author(s)
- Davies, Rev. Tegla
Names of composers
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Numbers of performers
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Financial information
n/a
Object of any funds raised
Proceeds towards Talysarn C.M. Chapel.
Linked occasion
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Audience information
Prices of admission and seats: highest–lowest
n/a
Associated events
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Pageant outline
Key historical figures mentioned
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Musical production
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Newspaper coverage of pageant
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Book of words
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Other primary published materials
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References in secondary literature
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Archival holdings connected to pageant
Gwynedd Archive Service holds a pageant programme.
Sources used in preparation of pageant
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Summary
Merched Anrhydedd was a small pageant staged in the Calvinistic Methodist Chapel in Talysarn. The pageant was performed once, on 12 December 1957. It seems to have been performed in Welsh: its title, roughly translated, was 'Women to be Honoured', and its content—as the title suggests—dealt with notable women through the ages. As Amy Binns has shown in a recent article, the use of pageantry as a means of celebrating women’s contribution to history was very popular within Protestant Nonconformity in the period between the First World War and the 1950s, and especially in the 1930s.1 This event appears to have been a relatively late example of just such a pageant of ‘noble women’ and illustrates the appeal of the form in a Welsh context.
The same pageant was performed again in February 1958 at another Calvinistic Methodist Chapel, in Morfa Nefyn.
1 Amy Binns, ‘New Heroines for New Causes: how provincial women promoted a revisionist history through post-suffrage pageants’, Women's History Review (2017), DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2017.1313806.
Footnotes
How to cite this entry
Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alex Hutton, Paul Readman, ‘Merched Anrhydedd’, The Redress of the Past, http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/1564/