The View from St. Paul's
One
of the questions our Pageants team repeatedly ask and are asked is just how much did spectators really get
from Pageants? Did people in the cheapest seats at the pageant, who most likely
did not buy a programme or book of words (whose grip on
history might have been tenuous at best) really know what was going on? Could they really tell the eleventh Earl of Arundel from the twelfth? During
the 1938 Pageant of Birmingham the crowd burst into loud cheers at the moment a
Saxon monastery was burnt to the ground by the Danes and all the inhabitants slaughtered. Even with sound amplification, reports of pageants often complained dialogue that most of the dialogue was inaudible.
Generally,
eyewitness accounts are limited to journalists or very occasionally correspondents who wrote
specifically to say how much they enjoyed a particular pageant. We are left
in the dark about how the majority, who left no written record, viewed a particular
pageant. Thankfully, we do have one source. Mass Observation was set up in 1938 by Tom
Harrison and Charles Madge with the aim of documenting the hidden aspects of everyday life using methods from anthropological fieldwork. Mass Observation managed to recruit thousands of observers who
stood on street corners, sat in pubs, and in one case posed as a drunken tramp to
observe couples on the beach in Blackpool. Whilst these accounts can hardly be called scientific – several
observers in ‘Worktown’ (Bolton), recording the practice of Friday night mating rituals, considered it their duty to get as close as possible
to the native population – they provide
a wealth of material for the historian.
In
September 1942 Mass Observers were sent to spectate on the Pageant of Saint
Paul’s Steps, organised by Basil Dean and based on Clemence Dane’s anthology in
praise of Britain, which featured music conducted by Sir Henry Wood and many of
the most famous actors of the day including Sybil Thorndike, Eric
Portman, Robert Speaight, and Leslie Howard as Lord Nelson. Rather than the
morale-boosting patriotic spectacle intended the pageant was a confused affair which few of the spectators could actually see, directly contradicting press reports and even the newsreel clips of the event, which were edited to present a more unified view.
The
first Mass Observer, recorded his impressions in the third person, wrote that he ‘sees little of the pageant. The dense crowd behind him can have
seen even less. The crowd all through is comparatively silent. There is no
applause and only after “God Save the King” is played, is there clapping. It is
a tenuous ripple of clapping, pitifully thin. Somewhere, apparently on the
steps, somebody – a man – gives a cheer. There is no answering response from
the crowd. Inv[estigator] saw no emotion displayed by anybody.…Only visible
emotion Inv[estigator] noticed was of female anger. [due to pushing] Towards
1.30 a few of the people in crowd keep pushing out and again at 2. Apparently
they have to get back to work.’
Above: Wolfgang Suschitzky: View from St. Paul's Cathedral, August 1942
The
Observer concluded that the Pageant seemed ‘quite unimpressive, completely
swamped in the open air. [The Investigator] felt it might have been impressive
on a stage, with coloured lights and the other aids of theatre-craft. But to
[the Investigator] it seemed artificial, strained – mock melodrama. Inv[estigator]
has been moved by some of the excerpts uttered in different situations. Here in
this situation, they left him cold.’ This was further corroborated when the
Investigator asked people at his office what they thought, with the consensus
being that it was a ‘Rotten Show’: “All our girls went really to see Leslie
Howard. Some of them though the pageant was lousy; some said nothing at all; a
very few thought it was marvellous. It thought it lousy myself. You couldn’t
see anything.’
Afterwards,
there was a clamour to get autographs, prevented by barriers and a heavy police
presence, after which the crowd dispersed. Few people seemed to have drawn the intended patriotic message from this presentation of British history.
Above: Sybil Thorndike in The Pageant of St. Paul's Steps
The
Daily Mail, in its glowing report of
the pageant, explained that a lack of cheering and public singing of what should have
been well-known songs was due to the fact that ‘most
people found this spectacle, at such a time, too deep for cheers. Handkerchiefs
seemed to be applied to faces with suspicious frequency, even by hefty males,
until “God Save the King” was sung. Then came the reaction, and London went
laughing and singing and whistling back to work. Yes, here was indeed England.’[1]
A
further Mass Observer in the crowd disputed this fact: ‘When the masses bands
broke out into “Rule Britannia” there was some attempt at joining in, but not
much’. Spectators were heard to ask: “Do we sing?” “I don’t know the words.”
“Wait for the chorus”, But when the chorus came only a few voices took it up.’ The reports of the Mass Observers, who cannot entirely be described as impartial recorders of social history, supports the arguments put forwards in Angus Calder's The Myth of the Blitz (1991), that wartime propaganda masked a greater degree of uncertainty, fear and above all confusion.
There
are two films of the pageant, by Pathé and Movietone, intended primarily for
American audiences to boost the war effort there, allowing you to make up your
minds about precisely which England was on display:
http://www.britishpathe.com/video/on-the-steps-of-st-pauls/query/patriotism
http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/4ab7c204ead5414f837dcd9c5dd85b13
[1] Daily Mail, 26 September 1942, 3.