Pageants and People Part 2
To finish off our Pageants and People Exhibition, held at
the King’s College London Arts and Humanities Festival on Monday 19 October, we
heard three talks by people on the project. Paul Readman spoke first, giving a
general overview of Historical Pageantry. He discussed Pageantry's Edwardian origins at
Sherborne under the strict rules set down by Louis Napoleon Parker, through its
height in the 1920s, the use of Pageantry by many radical organisations from
the Suffragettes and the Communist Party, through to its present day iterations in such as the Axbridge Pageants, held every ten years since 1970, and Danny
Boyle’s massive Pageant to open the 2012 London Olympic Games.
Pageants, Paul
argued, were not merely an invented tradition imposed by elites n masses, and
neither were they dressing up in past costumes without respect for historical
fact (although he showed us an excellent slide of a dinosaur fighting cavemen
in the 1938 Pageant of Birmingham). Instead, they were a ‘melange of fact and
fiction’, incorporating aspects of folk memory, historically-informed
re-enactment, and communal remembering: in Parker’s words ‘remembrance of past
achievements.’
Tom Hulme spoke on the overall project and showed a beta version of the database. He also showed three clips Pageants held in Bury St Edmunds in 1907, 1959, as well as an extremely over-acted television film of a 1970s Pageant.
Ellie Reid, from the Oxfordshire Local History Archives, talked about souvenirs and memorabilia, drawn from her own extensive collection of Pageant Ephemera, much of which was on display during the day. As Pageants were trying to pre-sell tickets without being able to show what was going to happen they relied on strong graphical imagery to convey the sense of what the Pageant would display. The humble postcard was key to spreading images of Pageants among wider audiences. They were often used as the sole means of communicating between the huge numbers of people involved in the organization and staging of an event. Alongside books of words, programmes, and special souvenir editions of newspapers, which attempted to fill in for the Parker's refusal to publish cast-list, Pageants produced all sorts of souvenirs from tea-towels and medallions to a dazzling array of pottery to speciality commemorative beers.
The evening concluded with questions from the floor, followed by wine and nibbles.