Pageants 50
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The Barking Historical Pageant
The Barking Historical Pageant in October 1931 was a hastily organised event, designed to commemorate the granting of a municipal borough charter of incorporation that year. Barking had been trying... -
Dornoch Historical Pageant: Tercentenary Celebrations
Given that Dornoch is one of Scotland's smallest burgh towns, and situated in the Highlands, this pageant made quite a big splash, at least for a while. The reason for this was the involvement of n... -
The Dover Pageant
Dover’s staging of a historical folk-play in 1908 was a nationally important and spectacular example of an Edwardian town gripped by ‘pageantitis’. Directed by the original master himself, Louis Na... -
The Harrow Historical Pageant
The Harrow Historical Pageant was one of the first of the inter-war pageants to return to the traditional civic style of the pre-1914 movement (see also the entry for the Reading Historical Pageant... -
Hinchingbrooke Pageant
Hinchingbrooke was a country house a mile or so to the west of Huntingdon, which was, until 1974 (when the county as a whole was assimilated into Cambridgeshire), the county town of Huntingdonshire... -
Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Historical Pageant
The Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Historical Pageant took place in June 1935, in Wollaton Park. According to a correspondent writing in the Nottingham Guardian, the city’s effort was inspired by L... -
St Albans Millenary Pageant
The Millenary Pageant of 1948 was the second time a historical pageant had been staged in St Albans. The first was in 1907, during the wave of ‘pageant fever’ that swept Britain before the First Wo... -
Defendamus: A Pageant of Taunton
The Taunton Pageant was a medium-sized event, much in the mould of the Parkerian style of pageant, performed times in one week in the summer of 1928. Its other title was ‘Defendamus’—the town’s (at... -
Coronation Pageant
Press coverage for this pageant has not been consulted; but it seems likely that it was an event that only attracted attention in the immediate locality. Given the number of celebrations, including... -
George Herbert Tercentenary
Pageants often attracted a range of eminent writers, poets, historians and other ‘literary types’. Examples include the historian Charles Oman in the 1907 Pageant of Oxford; the writer Arthur Quill... -
The Greenwich Night Pageant
Taking place against the backdrop of economic depression, the Greenwich Night Pageant partly aimed to stimulate the new ‘important industries’ that had sprung up along the Thames, and, during the r... -
The History of Boldre
The Women’s Institute (WI) was extremely active in the interwar pageant movement. Although responsible for some very large-scale pageants, such as that held in Warwick in 1930, the WI also staged a... -
Bramshill Park Historical Pageant
This pageant was held in the grounds of Bramshill House in Hampshire, and is an example of the many small pageants held in and around great country estates in the interwar period. Perhaps appropria... -
Nottingham Quincentenary Pageant
The Nottingham Quincentenary Pageant was a key attraction of city-wide anniversary celebrations of the 1449 charter granted by King Henry VI. It took place in the Nottingham Ice Stadium, an indoor ... -
The Isle of Wight Pageant
Historical pageants were always demonstrations of civic defiance or loyalty towards authority, emphasizing the importance of a place in wider national history, of which the 1907 Historical Pageant ... -
Warwickshire Coronation Pageant
The Coronation of Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953 heralded a ‘new Elizabethan Age’, evidenced by the music of Benjamin Britten (whose opera Gloriana was unfortunately a failure), the photography of Cec... -
The Grand Historical Pageant of Gloucester
The Grand Historical Pageant of Gloucester took place in the summer of 1930 and was the top billed event of a fundraiser for the Gloucestershire Royal Infirmary—which was trying to raise £20000 for... -
The Pageant of London
The Pageant of London was the main attraction of the Festival of Empire at Crystal Palace in 1911. Undoubtedly the largest and most ambitious pageant of the Edwardian period, if not the whole twent... -
Farfar Will Be Farfar Still: A Cavalcade of Forfar's Story
One of the county town of Forfar's neighbours in Angus is the coastal township of Arbroath, which by 1965 had hosted no fewer than twelve historical pageants, the first having being held in 1947. R... -
Farnham Pageant 1988
After the first Farnham Pageant (1910), Dr Ealand (who had played Henry de Blois) suggested that ‘in the year 2010, when Farnham had the pluck to again put Historical Episodes before the people—and...