Hull Grammar School Historical Pageant

Pageant type

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Performances

Place: City Hall (Kingston upon Hull) (Kingston Upon Hull, Yorkshire, East Riding, England)

Year: 1936

Indoors/outdoors: Indoors

Number of performances: 4

Notes

1–3 October 1936

  • 1 October at 7.30pm
  • 2 October at 7.30pm
  • 3 October at 2.30pm and 7.30pm

Name of pageant master and other named staff

  • Written and Directed by [Pageant Master]: Bell, F.R.
  • Musical Arranger and Master of Music: Harold Ellis
  • Master of Heraldry: E. Haworth Earle
  • Episode Producers: E. Haworth Earle, Wm. S. Blakeney, L.B. Nicholson, J. Sydney Cahill, Tom L. Witty, F.R. Bell and Harold Barton
  • Stage Manager: Norman Furlong
  • Organist: Norman Stafford
  • Property Master: E.J. Devane and J. Middlebrook
  • Accompanist: Leslie Gradon
  • Incidental Dances Arranged By: Dorothy McAusland and Marie Laverack
  • Stage-Setting: Allanson Hick, E.J. Devane, J. Barrie Robinson and Norman Ashton
  • Decorations and Banners: J. Barrie Robinson, E. Haworth Earle, Ida Robinson and Elsie Palmer
  • Wardrobe Mistresses: Elsie Palmer and Margert Wheatley
  • Make-up: E.C. Martin
  • Stage Lighting: Hull Corporation Electricity Department
  • Business Manager: Norman J. Gogson
  • Hon. Ticket Secretary: C.H. Ashburn

Names of executive committee or equivalent

Executive Committee

  • Chairman: Councillor S.H. Smith
  • Mrs Forty, Mrs. Pearlman, Miss Elsie Palmer, Mr F. Mayor (Headmaster), E. Haworth Earle, J. Barrie Robinson, E.J. Devane, N. Furlong, W.S. Blakeney, N. Ashton, C. Dugdale, J.L. Robinson, C.H. Ashburn

Production Sub-Committee

  • Mrs Forty
  • Business Sub-Committee
  • Mrs. Cargill

Names of script-writer(s) and other credited author(s)

Bell, F.R.

Names of composers

  • Elgar, Edward

Numbers of performers

n/a

Financial information

The Pageant was a financial success, though did not raise the required amount.1

Object of any funds raised

Net proceeds towards endowing ‘Alcock’ scholarships from the School to Jesus College, Cambridge.

Linked occasion

450th Anniversary of the Founding of the Grammar School

Audience information

  • Grandstand: Yes
  • Grandstand capacity: 1500
  • Total audience: 6000

Notes

The hall was reported at capacity each night.

Prices of admission and seats: highest–lowest

1s 3d–3s

Associated events

  • 27 September: Thanksgiving Service at Holy Trinity Church
  • 28 September: Historical exhibition
  • 29 September: Annual Prize-giving at the City Hall
  • 30 September: Old Hullensians luncheon club and football matches
  • 1 October: a ‘Past v. Present’ football match

Pageant outline

Prologue. The Source of All Our Pride

Episode One. Bishop Alcock Resolves to build a Grammar School. 1485

The wars of the Roses have ended and amid rejoicings, the new King Henry VII announces his betrothal to Elizabeth of York. He appoints John Alcock, Bishop of Worcester, as his Lord Chancellor. In gratitude for this honour, Alcock vows to raise a ‘Free Grammar School’ in his father’s town of Hull.

Episode Two. The School is Founded. 1486

A crowd has gathered to see Alcock’s dedication of the school next to Holy Trinity church, whose choirboys are to become its first scholars. Various civic dignitaries witness a procession of clergy and choristers. The bells of Holy Trinity ring out and all rejoice. At the end of the episode, an announcement comes of Bishop Alcock’s appointment to the See of Ely.

Episode Three. Alderman Gee Rebuilds the School. 1583

The schoolhouse, now almost one hundred years old, has been confiscated in 1552 under Edward VI’s ‘chantries act’. Though it has been returned after a spirited protest, very little money was available to repair the dilapidated building. An old boy, the wealthy Alderman William Gee and Mayor of Hull for the third time, arrives and announces his intention to rebuild the school with bricks from his own company.

Episode Four. Queen Elizabeth Comes to the School’s Rescue. 1587

En route to York Queen Elizabeth is met by the Mayor of Hull. The Mayor petitions her to reverse a decision by Robert Dalton to claim as his own the property on which the school was built (Dalton’s plan being to knock it down and build a windmill). The Mayor is supported by burgesses and Sir Francis Walsingham, who notes the town’s fierce loyalty to the crown. The Queen, impressed, reverses the decision through exercise of the Royal Prerogative.

Episode Five. The Siege of Hull: Andrew Marvell and His School. 1643

This episode imagines Marvell returning from abroad to participate in the second Siege of Hull (where his father, the former master of the Grammar School, had recently drowned). It portrays Marvell meeting Lord Fairfax and his daughter Molly, whom Marvell later tutored, and joining with the boys who defended the town.

Episode Six. John Catlyn: The Royalist Headmaster who defied his governors. 1670

Catlyn, an usher of Charles II, was appointed headmaster in 1664 after the dismissal of Commonwealth masters. Though the town was still opposed to Royalists due to the sieges of Hull, Catlyn asserted ultra-royalist views, imposing holidays celebrating Charles II’s escape after the Battle of Worcester. The episode depicts an unsuccessful attempt to sack him by Puritan governors who gave the Puritan usher a far greater salary than Catlyn the headmaster. Catlyn, however, remained popular with the boys if not the governors. The episode shows Catlyn teaching the boys Greek and the boys dancing around, whilst the Aldermen try to sack him unsuccessfully and are forced to leave with the boys cheering their headmaster.

Episode Seven. Let us now Praise Famous Men. 1790

We see boys and former pupils at the school who later became nationally famous, including George Pryme, first professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and the borough’s first MP; Isaac Milner, later Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University; Samuel Marsden, who build the first church in New Zealand; and Wilberforce, the liberator of the slaves. Wilberforce, already a prominent campaigner and statesman, came to the school to offer Marsden his chaplaincy.

Episode Eight. The Present School: Laying the Foundation School. 1890

Despite a new school, fit for the growing number of pupils, was offered in 1878, the foundation-stone laying ceremony was only held in 1890, which depicts the ceremony after a heavy snowfall.

Epilogue. ‘Floreat Nostra Schola’

A record of the twentieth century and of the number of old boys killed in the First World War. The narrators present the history of the school, with a choral tribute to the fallen. There is then a procession of all the characters.

Key historical figures mentioned

  • Henry VII (1457–1509) king of England and lord of Ireland
  • Vere, John de, thirteenth earl of Oxford (1442–1513) magnate
  • Stanley, Thomas, first earl of Derby (c.1433–1504) magnate
  • Elizabeth [Elizabeth of York] (1466–1503) queen of England, consort of Henry VII
  • Alcock, John (1430–1500) administrator and bishop of Ely
  • Elizabeth I (1533–1603) queen of England and Ireland
  • Walsingham, Sir Francis (c.1532–1590) principal secretary
  • Marvell, Andrew (1621–1678) poet and politician
  • Fairfax, Thomas, third Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1612–1671) parliamentarian army officer
  • Pryme, George (1781–1868) economist
  • Marsden, Samuel (1765–1838) missionary and farmer
  • Milner, Isaac (1750–1820) natural philosopher and dean of Carlisle
  • Wilberforce, William (1759–1833) politician, philanthropist, and slavery abolitionist

Musical production

  • ‘Here’s a health unto his majesty.’
  • School Song ‘Carmen Hullense.’
  • National Anthem

Newspaper coverage of pageant

Hull Daily Mail

Book of words

Bell, F.R. Hull Grammar School Historical Pageant Book of Words. Hull, 1936 [Price 1s.]

Other primary published materials

n/a

Hull Grammar School Historical Pageant [Programme]. Hull, 1936.

References in secondary literature

n/a

Archival holdings connected to pageant

  • DEHG/9/1/1/7 and DBHM/16/51 Copies of Book of Words

    Hull History Centre

  • DMX/237/1 Tickets to the Pageant

    Hull History Centre

  • DEHG/9/1/1/9, C DBHM/13/39, DBHM/16/51, Copies of Programme

    Hull History Centre

  • C TCG/102 Minutes of Executive Committee

    Hull History Centre

  • There is an image of the pageant available at ‘Hull Grammar School’, Hull History Centre, http://www.hullhistorycentre.org.uk/discover/hull_history_centre/our_collections/local_history_sources/hull_grammar_school.aspx, accessed 5 July 2016.

Sources used in preparation of pageant

  • Binyon, Laurence, ‘For the Fallen’, from Binyon, For the Fallen, and other Poems. London, 1917

Summary

Hull and East Yorkshire came fairly late to historical pageantry, favouring civic processions instead (at Hull in 1931 and Beverley in 1936). The Hull pageant of 1936 was held in aid of the ‘Alcock’ Scholarship Fund, intended to send a pupil to Jesus College, Cambridge, which Bishop Alcock of Ely (whose father came from Hull) had founded in 1496.2 In fact, a number of schools had organised pageants in order to send pupils to universities, (see for example at Bilston (1935), which was staged by pupils of the Bilston Girls’ High School). A ‘preliminary appeal for financial help had elicited a satisfactory response’, and further donations were expected from old boys ‘both in England and abroad’ and ‘also from the general public’.3

The pageant celebrated the illustrious history of the school and of its many equally illustrious pupils, including the seventeenth-century republican poet Andrew Marvell and the MP and abolitionist William Wilberforce. The author of the pageant script was F.R. Bell, a local literary figure, secretary of the Hull Playgoer’s Society and second master at the school. For Bell, ‘The stage-setting depicts symbolically the close link that has existed down the centuries between the School and the “mother church” of the city, that of Holy Trinity, beneath whose shadow Bishop Alcock founded his “chantrey school” 450 years ago.’4 On receiving the book of words, the Hull Daily Mail concluded that the pageant would be ‘nothing to do with superficial publicity’, and praised ‘an excellent piece of work, recapturing the authentic life of the different periods – and not neglecting the humour.’5 The primary Guest of Honour at the pageant was Richard Wilberforce, great-great-grandson of William Wilberforce, with other guests including W.L. Andrews, editor of the Leeds Mercury and an old boy of the school. At 80, the Master of Jesus, Arthur Gray, who had come to the opening of the new school building in the 1890s, was too old to attend, instead offering to donate a copy of a portrait of the grammar school owned by the college.6

The pageant, for the most part, was fairly typical in terms of its content, even including a visit by Elizabeth I who saved the school from an unscrupulous landowner seeking to knock it down. Episodes Five and Six told the story of Hull’s conflicted loyalties during the Civil War, when the town, which acted as an armoury, resisted the King early in the conflict. It also depicted continuing disquiet after the Restoration in the form of the conflict between the ultra-Royalist Headmaster John Catlyn and the Puritan school governors who attempted to sack him. Catlyn is treated sympathetically and, as usual, the Puritans were presented as dour kill-joys. The final episode poignantly gave tribute to the pupils killed during the First World War.

The Hull Daily Mail, which almost certainly contained a few former pupils on its staff, was rapturous in its praise: ‘’Last night Hull Grammar School – a place well known to be full of life and the promise of much more to come—enjoyed an experience conventionally reserved for those about to die. It vividly recalled the outstanding events of its existence, parading a reminiscent cavalcade before a crowd which packed the City Hall.’7 The paper went on to declare:

Mr Bell has intelligently avoided this by making his characters first and foremost human. They are conscious of their importance only when that sort of attitude is consistent with their natures, and not because tradition has magnified them all for us. Mr Bell has mixed frivolity with good taste and produced something which, if it falls short of the exacting truth, at least succeeds in being highly probable… No sententious rubbish about being proud of an honour of which, in any case, he could not possibly be aware, comes from the first Grammar School boy. Instead, there comes from the much more likely sentiment, “I don’t want to be a scholar!”8

The newspaper went as far as praising the rowdy school singing for being ‘good without being too good. Where the children have to sing, they do so like a grammar school choir and not like a cathedral one.’9

There were no empty seats during the run of performances, which closed to huge rounds of applause, with Bell praising the boys’ efforts.10 The pageant was followed by several other events including a dinner and dance led by Old Boys’ Associations, which raised further funds. However, although the council offered to provide £250 for five years in aid of the fund, the Alcock Scholarship did not materialise.11 Whilst the pageant was an effective means of promoting the spirit of the school, it was not sufficient to raise the necessary amounts of capital for the scholarship. The School held a subsequent pageant in 1979.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Hull Daily Mail, 5 Oct. 1936, 10.
  2. ^ Jesus College, History, accessed 5 July 2016, http://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/about-jesus-college/history/ and ‘Bishops John Alcock and Nicholas West’, http://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/about-jesus-college/history/pen-portraits/john-alcock/
  3. ^ Hull Daily Mail, 22 September 1936, 10.
  4. ^ F.R. Bell, Hull Grammar School Historical Pageant Book of Words (Hull, 1936), 1.
  5. ^ Hull Daily Mail, 12 September 1936, 5.
  6. ^ Hull Daily Mail, 22 September 1936, 10.
  7. ^ Hull Daily Mail, 2 October 1936, 6.
  8. ^ Ibid.
  9. ^ Ibid.
  10. ^ Hull Daily Mail, 5 October 1936, 10.
  11. ^ Hull Daily Mail, 30 September 1937, 5.

How to cite this entry

Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alex Hutton, Paul Readman, ‘Hull Grammar School Historical Pageant’, The Redress of the Past, http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/1290/