Pageants and people: an exhibition at King’s College London
Pageants and people: an exhibition at King’s College London
Mark Freeman (19 October 2015)
Today we staged a one-day exhibition in the River Room, overlooking the Thames, at King’s College London. This was part of the KCL Arts & Humanities Festival, which this year has the theme ‘Fabrication’. The idea of the festival is to showcase the range of research that goes on at the college, and it was an excellent opportunity to make our presence felt.
Above: visitors to the exhibition.
Above: St Edmund about to be executed in the 1959 Bury pageant film
We showed the banners and handheld display boards, or ‘paddles’,
from our Bury St Edmunds exhibition, which was held at Moyse’s Hall earlier
this year. Our Carlisle exhibition has only just finished, so we couldn’t get
the display boards down in time. We also showed some of the video footage that
we also presented at Bury, both in the exhibition itself and on the three very
successful film nights that we held in the Hall. We have footage from both the
1907 and 1959 Bury pageants.
Above: selection of programmes and other memorabilia from the collection of Ellie Reid
We were also fortunate to be able to display a range of items from the collection of Ellie Reid, who has worked with us before, notably at the St Albans pageants study day back in June. Ellie brought a wide selection of pageant scripts and programmes, including Sherborne (1905), York (1909 and 1971), Wakefield (1933), Runnymede (1934), Shrewsbury (also 1934) and Jersey (1955). The most recent was the Warwick pageant of 1996. Ellie also brought some interesting objects, including some performers’ and stewards’ badges, souvenir cups and saucers, and a wooden cross from the Romsey pageant of 1907.
Below: a tea-towel from the 1959 Bury St Edmunds pageant (from Ellie Reid’s collection)
Later tonight there will be a public lecture, also entitled ‘Pageants and people’, given by Paul Readman, Ellie Reid and Tom Hulme. There will, I’m told, be free wine! This brings back memories for me in particular, as the last time I was in this room was to lead a whisky tasting as part of the 2013 KCL food and drink festival.
So far we have had some good feedback from the exhibition. One feedback form tells us that the exhibition ‘has enlightened me’, and another visitor feels that they have ‘gained a lot more insight into the world of historical pageants’. This is just what we hoped to achieve, so it has been a good day so far!
Pageants and People Exhibition at King's College London Festival of Arts and Humanities