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.
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
500Financial 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/