Lawrence du Garde Peach, the Nottingham 1949 Quincentenary, and ‘The Town That Would Have a Pageant’
By the 1940s and 1950s the pageantry movement had become decidedly less serious. Accentuated by the death of the former masters of Edwardian pageantry like Frank Lascelles and Louis Napoleon Parker, and increasingly competing with a range of popular and often spectacular visual experiences, a space was left for more adventurous pageant authors and masters. Performances now often included a range of new devices to display the history and culture of a place, deviating from the concentration upon the linear dialogue-heavy and moral approach of pageants like the Romsey Pageant of 1907 or the English Church Pageant of 1909. While the ‘play within a play’ had always been a popular feature, most often using the mystery or morality plays of the fifteenth century, postwar pageants frequently included more abstract ballets, symbolic representations of industry, and a lot more bawdy or self-deprecating humour.
Lawrence du Garde Peach, b. 1890, was one of this new breed of pageant enthusiasts. A nationally renowned playwright and author, known especially as a pioneer of radio drama, he was also enthusiastic about community amateur dramatics, having started a company of thespians in Great Hucklow in 1927. In 1948 he wrote the script for the Sheffield Pageant of Production, a piece of self-aware local industrial boosterism that he described as ‘a pageant for the want of a better word… not… a pageant of doublets, hose and top hats, but… colour, music, movement, thrills and even emotion in pictorial form.’ Asked to author the Nottingham Pageant of 1949, the main draw of the city’s Quincentenary celebrations, he pushed this style even further. A couple of months before the pageant began he told the Nottingham Rotary Club that it should be a cross between a review, a musical comedy, and psychological play, but, above all ‘simply entertainment. It must compete with the cinema across the way, and the dance hall.’ More worryingly he admitted that he would ‘sacrifice any historical fact in order to get entertainment value in my script’ though Nottingham’s reputation for ‘some of the most amusing and colourful murders in history’ meant this wouldn’t be necessary. As Louis Napoleon Parker probably turned in his grave, Peach went on:
"We are going back to Merrie England – a fabulous England that probably never existed. In the real England the men marched off to fight at Crecy and Agincourt and came back to rotten houses and no drains, and no cars, and no. B.B.C., and no telephones."
Not everyone in Nottingham immediately thought this was funny, and the allure of Peach’s vision was especially lost on some commentators. From the beginning of the pageant, and until well after its finale, the local press and the letters page of the Nottingham Evening Post was a cauldron of debate. Responding to Peach’s comments, one man worried that such an approach would be a ‘deplorable misuse of a golden opportunity’ and, concerned about the sacrifice of historical fact, wondered if it would ‘be impertinent to ask if the pageant script was passed by any local body of experts such as the appropriate faculty at the University or the Thoroton Society’. Also unimpressed was the local branch of the Communist Party. Intending to publish their own pamphlet, ‘A working class history of Nottingham’s 500 years of struggle and progress’, they called upon
"the organised working-class and progressive people of Nottingham not to permit this distortion to take place, but to proclaim to the world the great contribution that our city and its people have made in the long and terrible struggle for social justice, and political equality and freedom, for a world rid of the terrible diseases of poverty and war"
finding it ‘alarming’ that ‘tendencies exist to present this great history of ours in a pageant as a cross between a review, a musical comedy, a psychological play, and entertainment.’ In the actual event the Nottingham Pageant was wildly successful, proving that audiences were more in tune with Peach’s pageantry than the local Communist party.
While Peach seemingly never commented on the initial Nottingham controversy, two years later he published The Town That Would Have a Pageant, a satirical and farcical play about the staging of a quincentenary pageant in the fictional town of Mangle-Wurzleton, perhaps inspired by those experiences. Ironically, it came to be the most performed of his ‘pageants’ in the post-war period, and even caused some trouble in the Welsh town of Abergavenny, when its proposed staging by the Gavenny Players in the town’s Borough Theatre in 1953 was banned by the town clerk, T.G. Hardwick. Explaining his decision to the Players, he said:
"Although it is an excellent farce, the first scene depicts a meeting of a council committee and the dialogue is such as to cause ridicule to members of the council and the Town Clerk, and is derogatory to the dignity of office. I do not wish to appear pernickety, but, as the licensee of the Borough Theatre for the corporation, I have a duty to perform to see that there are no offensive personalities or representations of living persons on the stage. One character is that of Councillor Pool, and, as you are aware, there is a Councillor Poole, who is a member of this council."
The bewildered producer of the Players, J.F. Stanley, told the press
"It seems to me that the Town Clerk has no sense of humour and is acting on his own as a censor. He has quite a wrong conception of the play. It does not represent a meeting of a council committee, but a public meeting of representatives of public bodies, with the Mayor presiding, to discuss whether or not the town should have a pageant, as was generally done in connection with the Coronation celebrations. By no stretch of imagination could it be said to ridicule the local authorities. It pokes fun at everyone who parts part in it, even the producer… There is no bad feeling between the society and the Town Clerk, and I hope the matter will be settled amicably."
When Peach caught wind of the dispute he responded characteristically:
"I have never even heard of Abergavenny, let alone know that they have a Councillor Poole on their Council… It was first produced at the village theatre at Great Hucklow, where I live. Both the Town Clerk and the Lord Mayor of Sheffield were present in their official capacities. They thoroughly enjoyed it. Since then the play has been performed all over the country. I think it is very stupid of the Town Clerk of Abergavenny to ban it. Now people will laugh at him. The play certainly pokes no fun at anyone in that town."
The debacle even escalated to the House of Commons when, on the 21st July 1953, the Labour MP for Pembrokeshire, Desmond Donnelly, asked mischievously whether the attention of the Minister of Housing and Local Government, Harold Macmillan, had
"been drawn to a statement by the town clerk of this local authority in which he announces the council's refusal to let the town theatre for the showing of a play by Mr Du Garde Peach because it poked fun at some councillors and, worse still, at the town clerk? Will the hon. Gentleman give a firm assurance that he will reconsider any grants to local authorities who seek to suppress Shakespeare because he pokes fun at the Beadle?"
Macmillan’s secretary, Ernest Marples, dryly answered ‘Fortunately, the supervising of the censoring of entertainment by local authorities does not come within the jurisdiction of my right honourable Friend.’
In the end the ban was maintained, and the Abergavenny Players instead performed the play successfully in nearby Crickhowell. Meanwhile, national newspapers like the Daily Mirror continued to heap ridicule on the presumably mortified Town Clerk – an early example of the Streisand Effect - his unwise attempt to censor having the unintended consequence of publicising the information even more widely. This amusing episode can tell us a couple of things about the historical pageantry movement which we will hopefully continue to pick up on as our research progresses. Firstly, even though pageants had changed somewhat in format from the early twentieth century, this shrewd adjustment meant that they could remain crowd-pleasers in a greatly changed context – despite the reservations of a few. Secondly, and in an echo of the coverage they had received in magazines like Punch in the first decades of the century, historical pageants remained relevant enough in the public imagination that they could still be used as the basis for popular satire.