Ilford Children’s Pageant
Pageant type
Performances
Place: Pageant Field (Ilford) (Ilford, Essex, England)
Year: 1910
Indoors/outdoors: Outdoors
Number of performances: 3
Notes
11, 18 and 25 June, 1910
The initial planned performance on 4 June was cancelled due to rain. All performances were held in the afternoon.
Name of pageant master and other named staff
- Pageant Master: Robson, Leonard C.F.
- Artist: Mr. H. Glanville Spooner
- Treasurer: Mr. Charles E. Dustow
- General Secretary: Mr. David Gloag
- Accountant: Mr. Harry E. Crisp
- President: Rev. Chas. H. Vine
Names of executive committee or equivalent
Executive Committee
- Costume: Mrs Leonard C.F. Robson
- Rehearsals: J.W. Weeden
- Design: Miss Winifred Spooner
- Properties: R.J. Benbow
- Costume: Geo. Chisnall
- General Purposes: S.E. Dennis
- Tickets: C.J. Heeson
- Publicity: Forbes W. Hyslop
- Stewards: M.J. Lindsey
- Rehearsals: F.W. Reed
- Properties: T.J. Stow
- Grand Stand: Mr. Fred Wilmott
- Names of script writers
- Robson, Leonard C.F.
Names of script-writer(s) and other credited author(s)
Names of composers
n/a
Numbers of performers
750Despite the name of the pageant, performers were both adults and children
Financial information
Object of any funds raised
To raise funds for the extension of the Sunday School accommodation at Ilford Congregational Church.
Linked occasion
n/a
Audience information
- Grandstand: Not Known
- Grandstand capacity: n/a
- Total audience: n/a
Prices of admission and seats: highest–lowest
Associated Events
Associated events
n/a
Pageant outline
Part I.
Episode One. The Early Days
Historicus, a wizard, calls up bygone days, showing Ancient Britons from the Trinobantes tribe. Mandubratius, their leader, calls for Caesar’s aid in revenging his slain father, whilst refusing to serve him. This obviously doesn’t have a great effect as the Romans come and claim they have subdued the Britons, whilst the Britons themselves deny it. Historicus tells of the Romans’ departure and the arrival of the Saxons followed shortly by the Danes who burn and plunder a nearby abbey. William the Conqueror enters and the defeated Eadgar Atheling pledges his loyalty.
Episode Two. The Ilford Leper Hospital and the Abbess’ Dream
King Stephen with Matilda, bishops and attendants enter and are greeted by Adeliza, Abbess of Barking and her nuns. They greet one another; the King endows a hospital for lepers before leaving. The Abbess reads a book of devotion and is then put to sleep by the Spirit of Slumber, after which her dream is played out as an allegory of Saint Luke and Charity, attesting to the future of St. Bartholomew’s Priory and other great hospitals in London.
Episode Three. A Fifteenth Century Carolling, 1462.
A quarrel between John Rigby and the Abbess is interrupted by villagers singing Christmas carols.
Episode Four. Will Kemp’s Dance, 1599.
Episode Five. A Royal Progress of Queen Elizabeth.
The Queen visits Ilford House.
Part II. The Masque of Time
This tells a story of Christianity, ranging from Moses in Egypt through to King Alfred the Great, the Crusades, Magna Carta, Caxton and the Puritans, John Wesley and Whitfield—culminating in the present era of Sunday schools
Part III. A Fantasy of Spring
This is an imagined May Day performance
Key historical figures mentioned
- William I [known as William the Conqueror] (1027/8–1087) king of England and duke of Normandy
- Matilda [Matilda of England] (1102–1167) empress, consort of Heinrich V
- Stephen (c.1092–1154) king of England
- Alfred [Ælfred] (848/9–899) king of the West Saxons and of the Anglo-Saxons [also known as Aelfred, the Great]
- Elizabeth I (1533–1603) queen of England and Ireland
- Edgar Ætheling (b. 1052?, d. in or after 1125) prince [also known as Eadgar, Atheling]
- Fitzwalter, Robert (d. 1235) magnate and rebel
- Kemp, William (d. in or after 1610?) actor
- Ralegh, Sir Walter (1554–1618) courtier, explorer, and author
- Shakespeare, William (1564–1616) playwright and poet
- Caxton, William (1415x24–1492) printer, merchant, and diplomat
- Newton, Sir Isaac (1642–1727) natural philosopher and mathematician
- Wesley [Westley], John (1703–1791) Church of England clergyman and a founder of Methodism
- Whitefield, George (1714–1770) Calvinistic Methodist leader
- Watt, James (1736–1819) engineer and scientist
- Nelson, Horatio, Viscount Nelson (1758–1805) naval officer
- Raikes, Robert (1736–1811) promoter of Sunday schools
- Victoria (1819–1901) queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and empress of India
- Albert [Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha] (1819–1861) prince consort, consort of Queen Victoria
Musical production
Newspaper coverage of pageant
Chelmsford Chronicle
London Daily News
Ballymena Observer
Essex Newsman
Book of words
- Robson, Leonard C.F., Ilford Children’s Pageant 1910. Ilford, 1910.
Other primary published materials
n/a
The Pageant Mail; or, News & Notes on the Children's Pageant, to be held in the Pageant Field, Ilford, during June, 1910, to raise funds for the extension of the Sunday School accommodation at Ilford Congregational Church. Edited by ‘Quien Sabe’? no. 1-9. Sept. 1909–May, 1910. Ilford, 1910.
References in secondary literature
n/a
Archival holdings connected to pageant
- Copy of the Pageant Mail in the British Library
- Copy of the Book of Words in the John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library Oxford, Pageants, Box 3.
Sources used in preparation of pageant
n/a
Summary
Children’s pageants proved popular fixtures during the twentieth century, for instance in Stepney (1909), Kirkcaldy (1911), Windsor (1911), Berkhamsted (1922), and Leeds (1926). Many smaller-scale children’s pageants were of course also held in schools. The Ilford Children’s Pageant was designed to raise money for the extension of Ilford Congregational Church’s Sunday School. It was estimated that some 5.6 million children regularly attended Sunday Schools of whatever denomination during the first decade of the twentieth century.1 The Pageant, like many others, was intended also to have an educational purpose both for any children spectating and particularly those participating; the aim was to instil Christian values:
One can only hope that the children who have been so carefully and lovingly taught these episodes, will never forget their debt to former times, and will try to do as the best of the great of other days did “follow the gleam,” that those who see the Pageant will not omit a thankful thought to that great good Father of us all, “from whom all blessings flow,” and that every worker will look back on work done for this Pageant as some service rendered to Him.2
The writer of the Pageant, Leonard Robson, who was organist at the Ilford Congregational Church, stressed the amateur nature of the performance in a section of the pageant book of words, entitled ‘To the discerning reader and critical hearer’:
We, the Makers, Devisers and Presenters of this Pageant and Masque of Time, this Picture and Allegory, crave your charity. This is not a Pageant designed and carried out at immense cost by some large city; it is, on the contrary, a Home-made Spectacle, an Offering to the Church by a very large number of Adult Members of the congregation, with the help of some hundreds of our Ilford Children, and we Amateurs, we Makers of a Home-made Spectacle crave your charity.3
However spiritually edifying the pageant was, however, it did play rather fast and loose with the historical record. The first scene featuring the various waves of invasion up to 1066 was a novel way of presenting British history, suggesting that the Britons (not the Celts) had never been properly subjugated by the Romans, let alone the Saxons or Vikings. The conclusion of the episode, showing Eadgar Atheling’s pledge of loyalty to William the Conqueror, is presented as a final surrender. Much of the rest of the pageant, which included a number of masques featuring fairies and allegorical personifications of virtue, may well have bemused rather than educated the children.
Ilford had seen an earlier pageant procession in 1906, which had raised money to construct a local hospital.4 The first performance of the 1910 pageant on 4 June had to be cancelled due to torrential rain and was opened instead on 11 June by Lady Bethel, who was accompanied by Sir John Bethel, MP.5 The Pageant was evidently a success with a further procession held in July 1912.6 The Pageant of Essex was held in the town in 1932. Sunday Schools and pageants proved unable to stem the twentieth century decline in non-conformism and religious attendance in general and in 1986 the Congregational Church was demolished.7
Footnotes
- ^ R. Currie, A.D. Gilbert and L. Horlsey, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), 87-9.
- ^ C.H. Vine, ‘Fore Words’, in Ilford Children’s Pageant 1910 (Ilford, 1910), 6.
- ^ ‘To the discerning reader and critical hearer’, in Ibid, 6.
- ^ Chelmsford Chronicle, 20 July 1906, 2.
- ^ Essex Newsman, 18 June 1910, 2. London Daily News, 7 June 1910, 5; Ballymena Observer, 10 June 1910, 7.
- ^ Chelmsford Chronicle, 12 July 1912, 5.
- ^ ‘Ilford (Vine) Congregational Church, Ilford’, Essex Churches, accessed 19 July 2016, http://www.essexchurches.info/church.aspx?p=Ilford%203.
How to cite this entry
Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alex Hutton, Paul Readman, ‘Ilford Children’s Pageant’, The Redress of the Past, http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/1292/