Malvern Pageant

Pageant type

Notes

The Pageant was sponsored by the Malvern Little Theatre Society Limited and with the support of the Malvern Urban District Council.

Jump to Summary

Performances

Place: Priory Park (Great Malvern) (Great Malvern, Worcestershire, England)

Year: 1951

Indoors/outdoors: Outdoors

Number of performances: 7

Notes

20–26 July 1951

20, 23–26 July at 7pm; 21 July at 2.30 and 7pm)

Name of pageant master and other named staff

  • Pageant Master: Lally, Gwen
  • Producer: George Sayer

Notes

Pageant Sponsored by the Malvern Little Theatre Society Limited and with the support of the Malvern Urban District Council

Names of executive committee or equivalent

Pageant Committee

  • Chairman: R. Le Grand
  • President: Lord Lieutenant of Worcestershire, Admiral Sir William Tennant
  • Vice-Presidents: Earl and Countess Beauchamp
  • Sir Walter and Lady Monckton
  • Sir Barry Jackson
  • Captain Roy Limbert
  • Mr and Mrs C.W. Dyson Perrins
  • Ivor Griffiths
  • Arthur Jones

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

  • Billingham, Edgar

Notes

Billingham was a local schoolmaster and dramatist.

Names of composers

n/a

Numbers of performers

500

Financial information

n/a

Object of any funds raised

n/a

Linked occasion

1951 Festival of Britain

Audience information

Prices of admission and seats: highest–lowest

n/a

Associated events

n/a

Pageant outline

Prologue

Primitive Inhabitants Battling a Dragon

Roman Invasion

Saxon Invasion

Danish Invasion

Norman Invasion

A Medieval Fair during the life of William Langland

The Threatened Destruction of Malvern Priory

The Battle of Powick During the English Civil War

Re-enactment of an 18th Century Prize Fight

A Visit by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

The Malvern Festivals

Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden Discussing the Setting Up of the Malvern Radar Establishment

Key historical figures mentioned

  • Langland, William (c.1325–c.1390) poet
  • 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
  • Elgar, Sir Edward William, baronet (1857–1934) composer and conductor
  • Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950) playwright and polemicist
  • Eden, (Robert) Anthony, first earl of Avon (1897–1977) prime minister
  • Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874–1965) prime minister

Musical production

n/a

Newspaper coverage of pageant

Leamington Spa Courier
Worcester News

Book of words

n/a

Other primary published materials

  • Malvern pageant, 1951...Priory Park, Great Malvern, July 20th. – 26th. Malvern, 1951. [Copy available in Malvern Library.]

References in secondary literature

  • 'Pageant to mark Festival of Britain', Worcester News 10 Aug 2001, accessed 9 March 2017, http://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/7746655.Pageant_to_mark_Festival_of_Britain/?ref=arc

Archival holdings connected to pageant

  • Copy of Pageant Flyer in Museum of London, Reference 82.158/502, accessed 18 October 2016, http://collections.museumoflondon.org.uk/online/object/546564.html

Sources used in preparation of pageant

n/a

Summary

The 1951 Festival of Britain saw something of a revival of historical pageantry in a world in which it appeared increasingly outmoded when competing with cinema, theatre and—most of all—television. Though based on the Southbank of London, home of the famous ‘Skylon’, the Festival also supported many local exhibitions, concerts and events, which were staged across the regions.1 The Festival, which embraced technological modernity, also harked back to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and sought to foster a spirit of communalism created by the shared experience of war and Britain’s welfare state; as such, it was ideally represented by historical pageants, of which there were at least fifty and possibly many more. These ranged from relatively large affairs such as the Three Towns Pageant at Hampton Court to relatively small village pageants at Headley, and Rushden.

The Malvern Pageant was one of the final pageants produced by the veteran pageant mistress Gwen Lally, who also produced a Festival of Britain Pageant at Dudley that year. Malvern had previously held a pageant in 1928.2 Lally had directed one of the largest ever pageants at Birmingham (1938), which featured a first episode where prehistoric people fought - somewhat anachronistically - with dinosaurs, a scene which was reprised at Malvern. Lally had been connected to the Malvern Festival, which featured in the Pageant, since at least 1931 when she appeared in a promotional literature alongside Laura Knight and George Bernard Shaw. The Pageant, according to the Worcester News, which declared that 'The performers in the nine episodes appeared and vanished as if by magic to give the effect of the passing of time to a dreamer sitting beneath the trees in the park', was the first to be dubbed throughout, with the performers miming the entire performance.3

Footnotes

1. ^ Becky Conekin, ‘The Autobiography of a Nation’: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester, 2003), 88–104. See also Mark Freeman, ‘‘Splendid Display; Pompous Spectacle’: Historical Pageants in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Social History 38 (2013): 423–55. 
2. ^Cheltenham Chronicle, 28 July 1928, 10. 
3. ^'Pageant to mark Festival of Britain', Worcester News 10 Aug 2001, accessed 9 March 2017, http://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/7746655.Pageant_to_mark_Festival_of_Britain/?ref=arc

How to cite this entry

Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alex Hutton, Paul Readman, ‘Malvern Pageant’, The Redress of the Past, http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/1357/