English Dance and Song Winter 2019
This article was published in English Dance and Song, the magazine of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The world’s oldest magazine for folk music and dance, EDS was first published in 1936 and is essential reading for anyone with a passion for folk arts.
Angela Bartie, Mark Freeman and Paul Readman tell the story of historical pageants – vivid and spectacular, but now largely forgotten.
Historical pageants were a widespread form of popular entertainment in 20th century Britain. Presenting large-scale theatrical recreations of scenes from local and national history, they brought the past to life as never before. Tens of thousands of people performed in these vivid extravaganzas of music, dance and drama, and millions more watched them.
The rage for historical pageantry began in 1905, when the charismatic impresario Louis Napoleon Parker staged a pageant in Sherborne, Dorset. It was a great success, and ‘pageant fever’ soon took hold in villages, towns and cities up and down the country. A forthcoming exhibition at Cecil Sharp House, called Pageant Fever! Historical Pageants and the British Past, tells the story of these vivid, spectacular, but now largely-forgotten events.
Pageants presented the history of communities through a series of scenes featuring notable people and events from local history, myth and legend. They had a significant cultural impact and often showcased the folk arts, including dance and song. Right from the start, morris dancing and maypoles were widely featured, especially in episodes depicting the ‘Merrie England’ of Elizabeth I. Parker’s pageants were also known as ‘folk plays’, and other early ‘pageant masters’ such as D’Arcy Ferrars were closely involved with the first folk revival. Ferrars was a particular fan of sword dancing and worked with Cecil Sharp to revive this lost English art.
EFDSS itself was closely associated with the pageant movement and some of its key figures were heavily involved. Ralph Vaughan Williams collaborated with E M Forster (of Howards End and Passage to India fame) on two important pageants in Surrey – at Abinger in 1934 and Dorking in 1938. The second of these, called England’s Pleasant Land, tackled the issues of rural depopulation and decline, its proceeds going towards campaigns to preserve the countryside and its footpaths.
Earlier, the Winchester branch of the English Folk Dance Society (which merged into EFDSS in 1932) had staged its own Folk Dance Pageant in 1929. This told the story of folk dance from the time of Henry IV to the 20th century. All songs used in the pageant had been collected by Cecil Sharp.
Even in big city pageants, folk dance and song were important. At Manchester in 1938, Vaughan Williams’ music featured, including his arrangements of traditional folk songs. Hundreds of EFDSS members took part in public demonstrations of folk song and dance that ran alongside this pageant – a common feature of pageantry between the wars.
Pageants continued to thrive after the Second World War, with EFDSS and its people retaining a key role. Arthur Swinson, secretary from 1946 to 1949, was ‘marshal of the arena’ at St Albans in 1948, and EFDSS local organiser Mollie Du Cane was ‘mistress of the folk dance’. Du Cane reprised this role in the St Albans Coronation pageant of 1953, in which EFDSS members took part in three of the ten scenes. Here, there was a maypole dance, and songs included versions of Sumer is Icumen in, All in a Garden Green and the Agincourt Song.
Like folk revivalism itself, historical pageants can be seen as conservative, nostalgic events, but they did not have to be. Some more radical elements of the folk revival were involved. A L Lloyd, for example, assisted the Workers’ Musical Association with Music for the People, a pageant staged by Alan Bush in the Albert Hall in 1939 to support the left-wing Popular Front. The Labour Choral Union performed in this pageant, which depicted the Peasants’ Revolt, the Diggers and Levellers, and the French Revolution – as well as featuring, yet again, the music of Vaughan Williams.
Historical pageants declined rapidly from the mid-1950s, but their legacy survives today in many aspects of historical performance, not least in the activities of re-enactment societies such as the Sealed Knot. And vestiges of the movement proper remain, too: Axbridge in Somerset stages a pageant every ten years – the next being scheduled for 29 August 2020.
As well as the exhibition at Cecil Sharp House, there will be a day of talks, exhibitions and pageant performances on Saturday 21 March. This is free to attend and will feature scenes, music and dance from pageants, some of which have not been performed since their original staging. The exhibition will run from 29 January.
The exhibition and event are organised by The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain 1905–2016, in association with EFDSS, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. See historicalpageants.ac.uk for more information about the project.
