A Pageant that Wasn't
by Mark Freeman
I have been sent a picture of a flyer advertising a pageant
in St Albans to be held in July 1908. As the city had staged a historical
pageant in 1907, and few if any places had more than one in this period, the
document took me by surprise. The date of the flyer seems to be sometime in
late 1907.
Above: Flyer for the
St Albans pageant of 1908. Many thanks to Jon Mein for drawing this to my
attention.
It is possible that the original plans for the St Albans
pageant involved staging it in 1908 rather than 1907 – meaning that this flyer
would date from late 1906 – but I have found no evidence in any sources to
support this notion. If anybody does know anything about this, please let us
know!
There was, of course, no pageant in 1908, and it is hardly
surprising that, if the enthusiasm suggested in this flyer really existed, it soon
dried up. The pageant of 1907,
although successful, was hard work. Many years later, in 1920, the assistant
secretary William Young remembered that ‘[t]he stiffest job I ever had was in
connection with the St Albans Pageant ... It was like running a huge business
in addition to one’s own private concern’. The work did not end with pageant
itself: Young recalled that it ‘took months to wind up, and to get the accounts
in order’.
A pageant was
a one-off activity for most communities, in the Edwardian period and
subsequently. St Albans was unusual in having three pageants and one
pageant-play in the twentieth century – in 1907, 1948, 1953 and 1968. Some places had them
in consecutive years – for example, the village of Kilbarchan in Renfrewshire
in 1933 and 1934 – but this was rare. Unlike some ‘invented traditions’,
pageants happened in a place very infrequently, often only once, and it is
perhaps because of this that they held such a prominent place in the popular
memory of many towns and cities for so long.
There was an event
called a ‘pageant’ in 1909, which I have blogged about before. This featured 2,500 children taking
part in ‘drill’ in Clarence Park, which had been opened in the late nineteenth
century, and a maypole dance depicting the four British nations and celebrating
the entente cordiale with France.
However, there is no reason to suppose that the ‘1908’ flyer was connected with
this event.