‘History taught in the pageant way’: education and historical performance in twentieth-century Britain

ABSTRACT Historical pageants were important sites of popular engagement with the past in twentieth-century Britain. They took place in many places and sometimes on a large scale, in settings ranging from small villages to industrial cities. They were staged by schools, churches, professional organisations, women’s groups and political parties, among others. This article draws on contemporary studies of heritage and performance to explore the blend of history, myth and fiction that characterised pageants, and the ways in which they both shaped and reflected the self-image of local communities. Pageants were important channels of popular education as well as entertainment and, although they are sometimes seen as backward-looking and conservative spectacles, this article argues that pageants could be an effective means of enlisting the past in the service of the present and future.

developments, though rarely connected with them, has been a growing interest in public history and the 'uses' of the past, influenced by Raphael Samuel's Theatres of Memory, which itself engaged with earlier critiques of the 'heritage industry'. 11 Museum and heritage studies have seen a productive exploration of learning in heritage contexts, and this is useful to our analysis here. A substantial study by Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd, for example, examines the impact of 'performance' in heritage settings on learning, considering the broadsocial and experientialeffects of historical dramatisation. 12 For Jackson and Kidd, learning should not be considered 'solely in terms of the acquisition of factual knowledge': Rather . . . it is often in more subtle, complex and challenging ways that learning is supported and 'delivered' through performance; engagement, empathy, participation, challenge, understanding and taking ownership are also means through which learning may be generated. 13 We argue here that many of these learning experiences were encountered by pageant performers and spectators in twentieth-century Britain, undermining what Paul Johnson has called 'the perception of performance as a potentially unpredictable or unruly activity in comparison with the respectable task of learning'. 14 For Johnson, the demands of both history and fiction must be met when 'performing heritage'. 15 In this article we show how pageants straddled the boundaries between fact and fiction, and as a result had an uneasy relationship with academic history. Pageants were both applauded and ridiculed by academic historians, and in some cases explicitly foregrounded entertainment ahead of historical verisimilitude. Nevertheless, we argue, although pageants did attempt in some respects to be faithful to the historical record, their educational valueor indeed the 'authenticity' of the past which they presentedshould not be judged in these terms. Moreover, the learning experiences acquired through participation in a pageant transcended the historical material that was encountered. Those who took part in pageants created their own meanings of what they saw, heard and experienced.

Historical pageants and popular education in modern Britain
There were precursors to the pageant craze, not least the medieval traditions of pageantry that had featured in tournaments and mystery plays. A more immediate formative influence was the fashion for tableaux vivants, such as those staged at Winchester and elsewhere in and around 1901 as part of the celebrations associated with the 1,000th anniversary, or millenary, of the death of King Alfred the Great. 16 However, the modern pageant movement is usually dated to 1905, when the playwright and theatrical impresario Louis Napoleon Parker organised and produced a community celebration in Sherborne, Dorset, to celebrate the 1,200th anniversary of the foundation of the town. 17 The format was a dramatic re-creation of 11 successive scenes from the history of Sherborne, beginning with the foundation of the town by St Ealdhelm in 705, and ending with the visit of Walter Raleigh in 1593. In between, the pageant depicted the defeat of the Danes, the arrival of Alfred the Great, various events in the medieval history of the monastery and town, the establishment of the almshouses, and the expulsion of the monks in 1539. 18 Staged in June amid the ruins of Sherborne castle, and performed seven times, the pageant featured more than 800 performers, with more than 90 of these taking speaking parts; the temporary grandstand could seat 2,000, and many more sat on the grass to watch, so that a total of some 30,000 people saw the show. An adept self-publicist, Parker styled himself 'pageant-master', a title that was used by others thereafter. 19 Parker became one of the most prolific pageant-masters of the Edwardian periodhe staged pageants at Warwick (1906), Bury St Edmunds (1907), Colchester and York (both 1909), for examplebut many others followed, including the well-known Shakespearean actor and impresario Frank Benson, who produced the Winchester pageant of 1908, and Frank Lascelles, who was responsible for visually spectacular pageants both in Britain and overseas. 20 Many Edwardian pageants were much larger than Parker's initial effort at Sherborne. Benson's Winchester pageant, for example, featured more than 2,000 performers and a grandstand that could accommodate 4,500, and one of its eight performances alone had an audience of 8,000. Winchester was following in the footsteps of nearby Romsey, where in 1907 pageanteers numbering 1,200in a town of only 4,000 peopleperformed 10 scenes from local history set from 907 to 1648. Dozens more pageants were staged across Britain in the years before the First World War, including one at the Scottish National Exhibition of 1908, a National Pageant of Wales at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff in 1909 and a pageant of London at the Festival of Empire in 1911. In this period, the heartland of pageantry was the south of England, and the most notable pageants took place in relatively small towns with long histories: those named above, and also, for example, St Albans (Herbert Jarman, 1907), Bath (Frank Lascelles, 1909) and Huntingdon (Constance Benson, 1913). 21 Insofar as one can describe a typical English pageant from this time, it began with an episode depicting Roman times or the early medieval period, contained plenty of medieval scenes and concluded with something set in the age of the Tudors or Stuarts. Elizabeth I, the most widespread single 16  character in historical pageants, often closed the performance: according to many pageant narratives, it was during her reign that the modern English nation had come into being. Thus many pageants culminated in scenes of Elizabethan merry-making, featuring maypoles and morris dancing. 22 Pageant fever went into remission in 1914, but after the end of the First World War it soon took hold again. Indeed, the craze for pageantry spread even further than it had done before the war: it appeared in large towns and cities, small parishes, schools, churches, youth organisations such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, voluntary bodies including Women's Institutes, and political organisations from the Communist Party to the Conservatives. Thousands of volunteers could be involved: the monumental pageant of empire staged at Wembley in 1924, for example, had 15,000 human performers, as well as elephants, sheep, camels, monkeys, parrots and a bear. The village or country house pageant was another notable feature of the inter-war period, depicted most famously in Virginia Woolf's novel Between the Acts, but also in crime fiction and in Richmal Crompton's William stories. 23 However, the real heartland of inter-war pageantry was the large industrial town: as Tom Hulme has shown elsewhere, Manchester, Stoke-on-Trent, Liverpool, Bradford, Sheffield, Coventry, Birmingham, Nottingham, Newcastle and Leicester all staged major pageants at this time. Some of these were held in association with civic weeks: celebrations of local municipal, economic and cultural identity and strength. Pageantry thus became a medium for civic publicity and boosterism. 24 Pageants now sometimes included more recent history and often depicted municipal events and local industries: the Southampton silver jubilee pageant of 1935, for example, celebrated the civic history of the town as well as royal visits, bringing the action down to the nineteenth century and Queen Victoria (though the theatrical censors would not permit her to be depicted directly). 25 Like many others, the Southampton pageant had an explicitly educational purpose, as illustrated by the attention it paid to young people: it was organised to support the King George V Jubilee Trust, which funded youth projects, and was accompanied by an evening procession of 3,000 children.
As  30 Pageants were often filmed and shown locally in cinemas, and some were audio-recorded and presented on the radio, where script-writers and performers would provide insights into the characters and episodes. They also appeared in television documentaries. 31 In short, then, historical pageantry pervaded popular culture in mid-twentieth-century Britain to an extent that it is easy to overlook given its subsequent decline.
As with tableaux vivants before them, pageants often had a didactic function. 32 They aimed, to a varying extent, to educate, and many involved schools and other educational institutions. This was evident from the outset. At Sherborne in 1905, Sherborne School featured prominently in the drama, being presented as tracing its originsas did the town -  to the year 705; pupils, including the school choir, participated in the performance; and Parker himself had been a much-appreciated music master at the school between 1877 and 1892. 33 Three years later, at Winchester, the connection between town and school figured less prominently in the action, the event being billed as a 'national' pageant, but audiences would have been left in no doubt as to the importance of William of Wykeham, and the college he founded, to the history of the place. Of the seven script-writers, five had connections to Winchester College. 34 Elsewhere, many schools saw fit to mark their own institutional anniversaries with historical pageants, early examples including Kingston Grammar School in 1909 and Charterhouse in 1911. 35 Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the close involvement of churches in education, the didactic content of many pageants, particularly in the early years of the twentieth century, was closely related to religious instruction. Many denominations -Nonconformist and (to a lesser extent) Catholic as well as Anglicansaw pageants as a potent means of bringing the past into the service of Christianity. 36 In parishes up and down the country, pageants were embraced as a way of keeping alive the memory of church founders and missionaries, and more generally, in the context of pessimism about the declining role of Christianity in national lifeof demonstrating the antiquity of Christian worship in England. This last aim was especially important to Anglican clerics, who were closely involved in the organisation of many pageants, and indeed were responsible for one of the largest of all: the English Church Pageant of 1909. This event was primarily educational in intent, aiming to be 'a vehicle of enormous power in educating through the eye and mind the people of the Country in the history of their Church'. In the words of one of its lead organisers, Percy Dearmer, vicar of St Mary-the-Virgin in Primrose Hill, '[p]ageants . . . can stir the imagination. They can popularize the historic sense. They can point the way to future knowledge, and create the desire for it . . . They can give proportion, balance, breadth. In a word they can educate'. 37 As evident in its religious inflection, the educational agenda of historical pageantry was closely associated with a concern to provide instruction about the distant past, and the medieval past in particular. 38 This concern was a growing one, manifesting itself in among other thingsthe Alfred Millenary of 1901, which saw the erection and ceremonial unveiling of a large statue of the great king in Winchester, as well as other commemorative activities such as public lectures, a procession through the city and an exhibition of Alfrediana at the British Museum. 39 Involving learned societies, universities, schools and prominent clerics and intellectuals, the millenarystatue, procession, tableaux vivants and allwas conceived as having a great educative function, a means by which 'the people', in the words of the politician, historian and educationalist James Bryce, might be provided with 'a visible memorial . . . which should touch their imaginations and bid them remember and rejoice in the splendid figures who had made England what she was'. 40 This purpose was underlined on the day of the unveiling itself, which featured a special event at the statue for 2,000 Winchester schoolchildren presided over by the Lord Mayor and the Earl of Rosebery. 41 The educational agenda evident in the Alfred millenaryand in the historical pageants that followed hot on its heelspersisted into the post-war years, and indeed was amplified further. Pageants grew in scale, becoming still more popular with schools, and increasing numbers of schoolchildren were involved as performers. Perhaps the most striking indication of this was the Preston historical pageant of 1922, which saw the participation of no fewer than 11,000 local children and was organised on a voluntary basis by local schoolteachers. Figure 1 shows pupils of the Deepdale Council School re-enacting 'the onslaught of the Danes', in which the raiding Vikings burn down a church and rob a priest of the tithes his god-fearing flock have just paid, before killing him. 42 The pageant was written and produced by the town's director of education, A.J. Berry, who passionately believed that children and adults who had lived through the upheaval of the Great War could learn valuable lessons from the past, and could be inspired by the stalwartness, religiosity and ingenuity of local forebearssuch as the brave Prestonians who had stood up to the heathen Danes. 43 If the Preston pageant and those like it told the story of the town, other school pageants offered instruction in English history more generally, though still with some local detail: such was the aim of the Widnes Schools' Coronation Pageant of 1953, featuring 2,200 performers, for instance. Individual schools, too, told their own histories through pageants: exampleswhich could be greatly multipliedinclude the Parsons Mead School Golden Jubilee Pageant of 1947 and two pageants at Hull Grammar School in 1936 and 1979. Others offered a mixture of school and local history, such as the pageant at Kimbolton, Huntingdonshire, in 1957, while many schools were drawn into the organisation of larger civic pageants. Teachers were often responsible for scripts and music, and children could be coerced into pageanteering when adults were reluctant or unable to put themselves forward. Adult education organisations also staged pageants: the 'Pageant of College Green' in Bristol in 1930 was organised by the Bristol Folk House, one of a number of educational centres that participated enthusiastically in the amateur dramatics boom of the inter-war years. 44 Branches of the Workers' Educational Association (WEA) were involved in some inter-war pageants, ranging from the small village performance at Chittlehampton in Devon in 1936where the Association collaborated with the University College of the South-West Rural Extension Scheme and local religious organisations 45to the Bradford pageant of 1931, in which the WEA staged the episode depicting the industrial revolution.
The dramatic vividness of pageants could contrast starkly with the way that history was taught in the classroom. This was noted in commentary on 'A Pageant of Bishopsgate Ward', which was staged in 1926 by the Central Foundation Girls' School, in the City of London, as part of the school's bicentenary celebrations. Writing in the souvenir programme, the critic and historian Frederick E. Hansford explained what he saw as the educational value of the pageant: until very recent years, history was one of the worst taught subjects in the curriculum of our schools, very largely because events long past were depicted as a series of dull facts accompanied by meaningless dates. History taught in the pageant way becomes alive and vivid, for both the actors and the audience see the historical personages as alive and human, and feel that their joys and hopes, griefs and fears, their ambitions and temptations, exaltations and abasements are not, after all, dissimilar from our own. 46 Large civic pageants were also conscious of their duty to educate the population in a lively and accessible fashion, and therefore dress rehearsals were often opened to special sections of the public, particularly pupils of local schools. Indeed, for many peopleyoung and oldseeing a pageant was the first time that history seemed interesting and easily understandable: David Cannadine, Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon have contrasted the use of drama in some schools' teaching of history with the 'lifeless rote learning' inflicted on pupils elsewhere. 47 Adult educators also tried to use drama to inspire students: at Taunton in 1927, for example, the WEA put on a local history course, 'The Story of Somerset', in the build-up to the pageant of the following year; and at Stoke-on-Trent in 1930 John Thomas, resident tutor for North Staffordshire and script-writer for a large proportion of the pageant, expressed the hope that the 'stimulus given by the dramatic presentation of the episodes' would encourage more people to come to his WEA classes. 48 The potential of theatrical performance as a force for the promotion of historical understanding should not, perhaps, be surprising. Drama, as Martha Vandrei and others have emphasised, 49 has long been a powerful vector of historical understanding, and pageantslike filmswere powerfully expressive of this. Indeed, it could be argued that, psychologically, meaningful engagement with the pastwhether in the classroom, in the library or on the pageant arenanecessarily involves an element of dramatisation. The philosopher of history R.G. Collingwood suggested that anyone unable to appreciate the dramatic force of history 'will never be an historian'. 50 For Collingwood, history was 'the re-enactment of past experience', evenas he put it -'drama', the historian having to 're-enact the past in his [sic] own mind'. 51 Whether as a spectator or a cast-member, then, the experience of a pageant was cognitively consonant with the business of history, of learning about and understanding the past.
Pageants and the past: history, fiction and authenticity Strictly speaking, pageants, of course, were not historical re-enactments: they were explicitly and unashamedly theatricalised representations of particular historical moments. Even where the events depicted had actually happened, the dialogue was invariably and of necessity invented, though with much borrowing: it was not unusual, for example, to base an episode wholly or mainly on an excerpt from one of Shakespeare's history plays. Many pageants contained factual errors, both accidental and deliberate. Dates were moved and events creatively re-imagined. Many sins of omission were committed by pageant organisers, who preferred to focus on the distant past rather than more recent history, which seemed to offer scope for the depiction of fracturing divisions rather than social and political harmony. How to deal with the civil war, or the social effects of industrialisation, or the rise of party politics and organised labour? Pageants staged from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, often in industrial towns and cities, were more likely to include later periods, but even here the accent was generally on consensus rather than disharmony. Such an emphasis could provoke controversy. At Manchester in 1938, for example, the organisers initially had not intended to portray the Peterloo massacre of 1819, but this omission angered local trade unions as well as the Manchester and Salford District of the Communist Party. After a sustained campaign, Peterloo was eventually included in a processional tableau alongside the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and other industrial events of the early nineteenth century. This was too little, too late for the communists, however, who staged an alternative pageant entitled 100 Years of Struggle: Manchester's Centenary, the Real Story, in opposition to the main event. 52 There had been a similar reaction seven years earlier at Bradford, where the content of the industrial revolution episode, performed by the WEA, occasioned controversy. Here, last-minute changes were made to the section that featured the Luddites: the pageant's 'historical subcommittee' ensured that the main message of the episode was the positive benefits brought by industrialisation. 53 This in turn prompted the Bradford Charter Committee, an organisation run by the Communist Party, to publish a pamphlet excoriating the pageant and offering an alternative version of recent local economic history. 54 Criticism also came from academic historians, usually on somewhat different grounds. In 1910, the medieval historian J.H. Round condemned what he called the 'travesties of history' perpetuated in pageants, singling out for particular censure Parker's 1908 Dover pageant. 55 Here, Archbishop Stigand was shown rallying the townspeople to resist William the Conqueror in 1066, thereby winning William's admiration, the preservation of their liberties and the town's motto 'Invicta' (unconquered). 56 This episode was presented as factual, in contrast to the avowedly 'mythical' preceding scene featuring King Arthur, and Round was scathing about the inclusion of the Norman 'fable'. 57 The distant past was particularly susceptible to reimaginings and re-inventions, and it was not unusual to see Arthur or Robin Hood rubbing shoulders with characters for whom there is much more documentary evidence. Welsh pageants were especially keen to claim Arthur as a native hero and an example of the nation's valour and patriotism, while in Scotland the myth-history of Walter Scott was a staple of pageant narrativesindeed, some pageants were completely based on Scott's work. 58 Across Britain, prehistoric scenes featured fanciful accounts of attempted human sacrifices and druidical rites, and even dragons sometimes appeared: a Welsh one at Swansea in 1935, one slain by Bishop Jocelin at Wells in There is, however, an alternative perspective. It is true that pure invention and fantasy were evident in pageants, and increasingly so as time passed, but it is also important to note that pageants could be more faithful to the historical record than their critics alleged. Many historians were involved in producing pageants, ranging from major academic figures to indefatigable local antiquarians. Among the latter, one example is Charles H. Ashdown, script-writer at St Albans in 1907 and Hertford in 1914. A schoolmaster, local preservationist and author of a substantial history of St Albans published in 1893, as well as later works on military history, Ashdown also took the role of pageant-master at Hertford. His wife Emily, herself a world-renowned historian of costume, was 'Chief Mistress of the Robes' at both St Albans and Hertford. 61 Like many of its counterparts elsewhere, the souvenir programme at St Albans was larded with references to primary sources on which scenes were based, as well as 'historical notes' (written by Ashdown and others) on various aspects of the town and its past. 62 Ashdown himself was quite clear as to the importance of accuracy in pageants: 'Truthfulness in pageantry is one of its chief charms, differentiating it from the stage, for all representations of historical episodes should be reproduced as truly and as accurately as circumstances permit, and with that due solemnity and earnestness which all innately feel when dealing with ancestral themes'. 63 This did not mean that dramatic licence was forbidden, but Ashdown's pompous insistence on 'truthfulness' captures the spirit of the Edwardian pioneers of the new pageant movement. Some better-known academic historians shared Ashdown's enthusiasm for pageantry: one early example was Charles Oman, Chichele professor of modern history at Oxford and a strong supporter of pageants both in Oxford and beyond. 64 For Oman, writing in the 'handbook' of the Harrow Historical Pageant in 1923, pageants were 'an excellent means of teaching local patriotism and the sense of civic fellowship, by a display of local history'. 65 The prolific Cambridge historian G.M. Trevelyan was also an enthusiast: he wrote five scenes and an epilogue for the Berkhamsted pageant of 1922, and even acted in it himself, taking the part of Geoffrey Chaucer. 66 Yet another example was Agnes Mure Mackenzie, a wellknown Scottish historian and author of textbooks that were used for decades in schools across Scotland: she was heavily involved, until her death in 1955, with the series of pageants in Arbroath that began in 1947. 67 Here as elsewhere, the souvenir publications contained references to scholarly and antiquarian worksand, from 1949, the text of Mackenzie's own translation of the 'Declaration of Arbroath', on which the performance was centred. 68 For Mackenzie, the educational value of pageants was abundantly clear, and some of the academic historical establishment seemed to agree. Indeed, in 1907 Louis Napoleon Parker himself was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. 69 It is certainly the case that, four or five decades after Parker had first infected Britain with pageant fever, many pageant-masters emphasised the demands of entertainment more than education: by the 1940s and 1950s, pageants were influenced by cinema, radio and, increasingly, television, and this frequently involved simplified dialogue on the one hand, and elaborate lighting and sound effects on the other. At Nottingham in 1949, pageant-master Lawrence du Garde Peach told the local newspaper that a pageant should be 'simply entertainment. It must compete with the cinema across the way, and the dance hall . . . I would sacrifice any historical fact in order to get entertainment value in my script'. 70 Peach's pageant was full of humour, myth and legend -Robin Hood was an important character, of courseand other pageants followed his precepts. 71 At St Albans in 1968, the radio and television writer Arthur Swinson wrote the script of the pageant, declaring that his 'first concern [was] to construct a viable theatrical vehicle', ahead of any matters of historical accuracy or interpretation. 72 Such claims did not go unchallenged. At Nottingham, for example, Peach's somewhat cavalier attitude was criticised by correspondents in the local press: one asked whether 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'. 73 As at Manchester and Bradford in the 1930s, Nottingham's branch of the Communist Party attacked the 'distortion' of history in the pageant. 74 Yet, despite these criticisms, there was a serious purpose even behind Peach's efforts. At Nottingham his pageant featured a song, 'We Inherit from Our Fathers', which exhorted: 'In pictures of the storied past, learn us of the greater pride, honour those of this our city who for freedom died. Honour those who live undaunted, those for whom the common good . . . freedom's foes withstood'. 75 This was one of many pageant songs and hymns specially written in the post-war period to stir communities into action. 76 Swinson, too, was aware of the responsibilities that went with the production of historical drama, avowing that 'I have tried to give a reasonable (if highly personal) interpretation of certain events which have taken place in St Albans and so form part of the history of our community'. 77 His small pageant was performed by children from eight local schools and a youth theatre group: the educational aims of pageantry were by no means forgotten.
Pageants, then, demonstrate the mutual interplay between education and entertainment, and between the apparent opposites of history and fiction. This interplay is amply recognised in the literature on heritage: Johnson, for example, is careful 'not to advance the truth claims of history over those of fiction, nor indeed the narrative claims of fiction over those of history, nor even to suggest that one is more stable or trustworthy than the other'. 78 We go further than this and suggest that, in pageants, fictional and mythical pasts were often necessary elements of performed heritage: it would be difficult to imagine a Nottingham pageant without Robin Hood, or a pageant near Glastonbury that did not feature King Arthur. 79 Other characters from local legend also appeared, such as Guy of Warwick, a tenth-century figure with 'little or no basis in history', who appeared in both the Warwick pageant of 1906 and the 'Spirit of Warwickshire' pageant in 1930. 80 Indeed, in 1927 there was a pageant devoted solely to the life of Guy, performed at Guy's Cliffe, where he had supposedly retired as a hermit. 81 At Warwick and elsewhere, traditions were in evidence alongside and within the historical episodes performed. Thus the story of the 'bear and ragged staff', which gave the Warwick coat of arms its emblem, was of course a legend, but its symbolic importance to the identity of the town was such that its inclusion in the 1906 pageant was wholly in line with local custom and heritage: the legend, after all, was itself a part of Warwick's past. 82 It was a similar story with the tradition surrounding Dover's motto of 'Invicta', a detail of the Dover pageant that may have been mocked by J.H. Round, but was nevertheless central to local tradition and identity. Inclusions such as these demonstrate the importance of shared folk traditions to those who staged, performed in and watched pageants, and are echoed elsewhere, notably in Ireland, where, as Joan FitzPatrick Dean has shown, the historical and legendary roots of national identity were repeatedly blended in pageants across the twentieth century. 83 The stories told in pageants 75 Sheet music, 'We Inherit from Our Fathers', words by Lawrence du Garde Peach and music by William Summers, NA, DD/2464/2/1Q. 76 Freeman, '"Splendid Display"', 442. 77  rang true because they were based on strong, pre-existing and popularly understood traditions and versions of the past, and on understandings of local and national identity that were rooted in time and place.
The sense of place was particularly important: pageants derived authenticity from their setting. Most were staged outdoors, many on sites rich in local history that were central to landscapes of community memory. The Winchester pageant was held at Wolvesey Castle; the Arbroath pageants took place at the abbey; the Mayflower pageant, at Southampton in 1920, was performed on the quayside; examples could be greatly multiplied. Some of the early pageant-masters, notably Parker, 84 considered this a particularly important aspect of pageant-making, and others commented on it, too. The Western Daily Press, reporting on Bristol's 'Pageant of College Green' in 1930, averred that '[t]he fact of playing an historical pageant amid the mellowed ruins of the Bishop's Palace . . . added greatly to the effectiveness of the scenes', and noted further that '[t]wo at least of the incidents represented might very well have taken place on the spot'. 85 A common device was to have the pageant narrated by a character representing the 'spirit' of the place where it was staged, or simply a personification of the place, creating a dramatic link between place and past events. 86 This link remains important today: community plays and contemporary site-specific theatre often echo the importance of place in historical drama. 87 Moreover, performance itself can add new layers of meaning and memory to the locational context, as is recognised in contemporary heritage studies. Laurajane Smith, for example, argues that 'heritage' itself is a performance, not simply a place: 'not the historic monument, archaeological site, or museum artefact, but rather the activities that occur at and around these places and objects'. 88 We show below how pageants themselves created new memories and, in some cases, new monuments in the communities that performed them. It was also clear to many that pageants stimulated an interest in local history that had previously been absent or dormant: writing in 1962 and recalling the St Albans pageant of 1953, the city's former mayor Elsie Toms noted that '[s]ince that time all sorts of voluntary societies want lectures on the history of old St Albans, and anybody who knows about it is in constant demand'. 89 Pageants persuaded many people to look afresh at the ancient and medieval past that was inscribed in their surroundings.

Pageants and community
Pageants were celebrations of community togetherness: Parker and many pageantmasters who followed him insisted that all social classes should be involved. Parker declared that a pageant should be 'a great Festival of Brotherhood, in which all distinctions of whatever kind are sunk in a common effort'. 90 It was often a cause of satisfaction that this did indeed appear to be the case: at Romsey in 1907, for example, 'all classes' -'rich and poor, gentle and simple'were involved in the town's pageant, including mechanics at a local boat works, who built the Danish ships used in one of the episodes. 91 Many of the props used at Romsey, including brass helmets and shields, were made even lower down the social scale, 'by men were in some cases practically "loafers" who have been organised by a clergyman & taught their craft by a County Council teacher'. 92 Such evidence of cross-class collaboration was, of course, music to the ears of pageant organisers, many of whom were motivated by a desire to educateand so 'improve'the lower orders at a time of mounting middle-class concern about proletarian restiveness. Moreover, social hierarchies were replicated in pageants, with the leading roles often going to members of local elites: indeed, some asserted that greater authenticity resulted when individuals played their own ancestors. 93 Even where this was not literally possible, historical continuities could be emphasised in casting: at St Albans in 1948, the mayor and councillors played their own nineteenth-century predecessors in one scene, while at Sherborne in 1905 many of the performers in an episode recounting the foundation of local almshouses (in 1437) were themselves residents of the almshouses. Along with others involved in the pageant, they signed a lavish illuminated address that was presented to Parker after the event, to thank him for his 'genius . . . skill and patience' in realising the 'delightful celebration' that had shed such 'lustre . . . upon the ancient town, for which we all of us cherish so heartfelt an affection'. And as can be seen from the list of performers given on the page of the address concerning this episode, a number were illiterate, signing with a mark (see Figure 2). 94 Many pageants, then, were designed, in both content and organisation, to stimulate a spirit of social harmony under benevolent middle-class leadership: this, indeed, can be seen as an important element of their intended educative function, and one consonant with some of the objectives of classroom educationat least in the early part of the twentieth century. 95 In this sense, pageants could be socially and historically conservative, presenting a version of the past that shored up local inequalities and perpetuated the smugness of civic elites. Michael Woods has argued that events such as the Taunton pageant of 1928 played a role in maintaining and legitimating 'hegemonic power structures' at a time of class conflict; pageants could fall into Baz Kershaw's categories of 'spectacles of domination' or 'rituals of the powerful'. 96 Others have suggested that the focus on the distant past reflected a 'protest against modernity', with the common Elizabethan ending marking a reluctance to engage with a more recent history of social conflict and industrialism. 97 However, this interpretation should not be pushed too far, for a number of reasons. First, as we have seen, a conservative account of the past in pageants could and did provoke political dissent, and the pageant form was itself adapted for counter-hegemonic purposes. 98 Second, the community itself did not always function harmoniously when a pageant was staged: sectarian tensions and industrial strife could disrupt the smoothness of preparations. 99 Third, pageants' approaches to the past changed over time: a forward-looking agenda, never entirely absent, was increasingly in evidence by the inter-war period. Far from exemplifying a retreat into an imagined green and pleasant land, or illustrating the revulsion of 'English culture' against the 'industrial spirit', many pageants positively celebrated industry, and in some cases were accompanied by industrial exhibitions: examples include Carlisle in 1928 and 1951, Salford in 1930 and Dundee in 1945. 100 In this sense pageants were expressions of what might be termed an adaptive modernity: they were designed to help communities to cope with the economic and social changes of the twentieth century, informed by a rich sense of history and culture. As a number of scholars have recently emphasised, this adaptive and purposive (though by no means ahistorically instrumental) 'use' of the past was in evidence elsewhere in mid-twentieth-century British culture, notably at the Festival of Britain. 101 Finally, the scope that pageants offered for mass participation militates against a solely conservative interpretation of their impact on communities and individuals. People in their thousands freely chose to take part; pageants were events in themselves, participation in which had its own educational and social benefits. In this sense, Parker's aims were quite successfully met. His comments about 'Brotherhood' might be jarring to modern sensibilities (not least on account of their male-centredness), but they are echoed in the more recent literature on community performance. Indeed, in some respects the community play is a successor to the historical pageantalbeit on a more modest scale. One recent definition of a community play asserts that the whole purpose . . . is to draw together the local community and to involve as many people as possible in all its varying aspects . . . a good community play is one which not only earns accolades for the quality of its performance but succeeds also in uniting the community in a common artistic enterprise. 102 In a similar vein, the community play pioneer Ann Jellicoe argued that 'the fundamental event is not the play itself, but the opportunity the play provides for the continuing evolution of [the] community'. 103 This view has been endorsed by others, and would surely have found favour with Parker. 104 Jellicoe was herself criticised for helping to maintain local social inequalities through her plays, but both she and others have argued that they empower communities in the act of their creation, because the communities themselves are the sites of local historical knowledge. 105 The organisation of pageantsand, indeed, the sheer scale of many of themdid not allow for the same levels of popular input into the creative process, but participation served a similar purpose, giving personal and collective satisfaction, as the next section will show. Pageanteering was a learning activity in that it offered a potentially transformative experience of historical dramatisation and community engagement.

Remembering and commemorating pageants
Pageants were usually one-off events: they may have been staged several times over the course of their run, but it was rare for them to become annual, or even regular, events. However, their legacies were significant, both for communities and individuals. In many places, pageants entered the realm of memory in a significant way: intended as commemorative events, they were themselves commemorated. At Sherborne, pageant gardens were laid out with the proceeds of the event itself, and they remain available to residents and visitors as a public park. 106 There is a public memorial to the 1909 Bath pageant (in Sydney Gardens, not at the site of the pageant itself), 107 while the profit generated by the 1959 Bury St Edmunds pageant paid for an ornamental water garden and a public shelter, which was installed in the abbey gardens (see Figure 3). 108 There are streets named after pageants in Sherborne, Bridport, Framlingham and St Albans; and Arbroath has a pub called 'The Pageant'. Oftenas at Sherbornethe profits were used for a local charitable purpose, or to help restore or safeguard an historic building; thus pageants helped to give new meanings to place. Smith has argued that 'places receive heritage values as they are taken up in national or sub-national performances of identity and memory-making', 109 and pageants were among the most spectacular of such 'performances'quite literally. Many historical properties display ephemera from pageants held on-site in the past: examples include Framlingham Castle and Battle Abbey. Pageants, which did much to provoke interest in local history, have also themselves prompted much local historical research, sometimesthough often notconnected to the Redress of the Past project. 110 In 2014, local historian Philip Sheail published a book to mark the centenary of the Hertford pageant, and this was launched at an event at which the mayor of Hertford spoke, and at which a local choir, the Mimram Singers, performed music from the pageant itself. 111 Events held in collaboration with the Redress of the Past project partners have confirmed the widespread and continuing interest in pageants in many parts of the country. 112 At larger pageants, souvenirs were sold, and proved remarkably popular; there is now a community of collectors who buy and sell pageant memorabilia. Products ranged from programmes and books of words to postcards and commemorative photographs, to glassware and crockery, handkerchiefs and jewellery, and evenas at Carlisle in 1951 biscuit tins. 113 People kept tickets, their scripts and, in some cases, their costumes; the ephemerality of the performance itself was offsetat least to an extentby the sale and retention of memorabilia. 114 Local newspapers often featured pull-out sections, and usually covered pageants in great detail, sometimes listing the names of all the performers. Individuals also kept their own personalised records, notably scrapbooks. One example was a young girl, Mary Archer, who had a very small speaking part, as one  included a large number of photographs, including one of pageant-master Parker, next to which, significantly, Mary placed a picture of herself (see Figure 4). 116 She also kept a letter that she received from Parker, containing a poem that anticipated this kind of lifelong memorialisation of pageanteering: Another pageant scrapbook was kept by Win Scholfield, who was responsible for painting a horse-drawn coach that was used in a scene in the Runnymede Pageant of 1934. Her scrapbook contains photographs of various scenes from the pageant, including several showing the coach, as well as photographs of the pageant-master Gwen Lally and a letter from Lally herself about rehearsal arrangements. 118 Yet another example came to light at Bury St Edmunds, where one of our oral history interviewees, Liz Cole, showed us the scrapbook that she had kept since the 1959 pageant. 119 These heavily curated and deeply personal mementoes of pageanteering, kept for a lifetime and beyond, are strong evidence of the appeal of this form of historical and community engagement, especially to children and young people.
As well as collecting souvenirs, many people who performed in and saw pageants were willing to write to local newspapers about them, often decades after the events themselves. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, local newspapers carried historical accounts of pageants that had taken place many years before, and these often prompted further recollections from former performers and spectators. 120 Others wrote in on the anniversaries of notable pageants, and their published memories again emphasise the importance of ideas about 'community'. One correspondent to the Herts Advertiser in 1998, remembering the 1948 St Albans pageant (staged when she was aged 10), recalled 'a truly memorable event encapsulating a great sense of community spirit everywhere'. 121 This sense of community should not be simply dismissed as an illusion, as some contemporary critics have suggested. 122 Like the plays of Ann Jellicoe and others, pageants sometimes provoked 'confrontation' within communities, 123 but they managed to attract thousands of people, and were evidently remembered with fondness. They could clearly play a role in educational memories, too, as Cannadine et al. have shown. 124 Performances, often seen as ephemeral in contrast with more tangible manifestations of 'heritage', 125 can live long in the memory and affect both individual and collective futuresprecisely as many pageant-masters hoped.
The Winchester pageant of 1908 provides us with a final example. Benson's spectacular 'national pageant' featured more than 2,000 performers, raised £2,000 to help restore the cathedral and played to sell-out crowds, which on opening night numbered 8,000. In some respects, the pageant did not go according to plan. On that first night, according to the local press, [t]he crush at the gates leading to the ticket office was terrible; women screamed and fainted, and frantically tore their way out of the dense, swaying, pushing, surging mass of humanity behind. When the gates opened the constables were almost overcome, and again around the ticket office the crowd screamed and fought for the little piece of paper which entitled them to admission. 126 This account dents any image of high Edwardian summer stately decorum that one might associate with the pageantry of the time, and, if this were not enough, then the 'Russian gun riot' in the run-up to the pageant dispels the image completely. The riot was precipitated by an attempt by the local authority to remove the railings around a Russian gun captured during the Crimean War, which had become a symbol of working-class patriotism in the city. At the peak of the disturbance, some 10,000 people were assembled, and the pageant headquarters and pageant ground themselves were attacked: one large prop, a Saxon chariot, was thrown into the river. Ayako Yoshino sees the riot as evidence of social divisions in Winchester, resulting in 'resentment of a pageant designed to raise money not for the poor but for the cathedral'. 127 Yet, as Paul Readman has shown elsewhere, many working people in Winchester were involved in the preparations for the pageantfashioning scenery and making shields and spears at local authority workshops, for exampleand many others performed in the pageant itself, though admittedly taking less prominent roles. 128 As with other pageants, Winchester created lifelong memories for those who witnessed it. Sarah Dilcock, aged 11, spent some time there in the run-up to the pageant in the company of her sister and brother-in-law, who were members of Benson's company. Sarah did not act in the pageant, but her unpublished memoirs, written shortly before her death more than six decades later, describe it as 'one of the greatest events of my life'. 129 The pageant whetted her interest in the Saxon past, in particular, and she continued to play the pageant musicwritten specially for the event -'for years afterwards, producing a feeling of nostalgia', although she never visited Winchester again. 130 As for the earlier disturbances, these also feature in Sarah's memoirs, but, in her words, 'what the riot was about I have no idea'. 131 Like many other pageanteers and pageant-goers, her recollections were almost all happy ones. According to her granddaughter Fiona Grubb, '[f]or the rest of her life [Sarah] never stopped talking about her time in Winchester. It made such an impression on her'. 132

Conclusion
For much of the twentieth century, pageants brought communities together behind performed fabrications of the local past and its folk traditions, linked to wider national narratives. They were educational activities in both their content and organisation, even if historical accuracy was often sacrificed for the sake of dramatic effect. This need not undermine the value of the versions of history told in pageants, however: in a museum theatre context, Jackson has argued that 'if, in the interests of accessibility and the stirring of curiosity, factual accuracy does sometimes get compromised, this should not in itself be a cause for condemnation'. 133 The educational value of pageants, and of drama more widely, was understood not only in terms of content, but also the opportunities for participation that they offered: as one official report noted, participation in drama 'carries with it those intellectual interests and moral qualities which are developed by the art of acting and all other arts incidental to the production of a play'. 134 The unrivalled scale and scope of a pageant offered ample opportunities in this respect; indeed, Parker himself held that a pageant at its best 'becomes a school of Arts and Crafts'. 135 Taking part in a pageant could have a profound impact on people and places. In a contemporary context, it has been argued, participating in community performance can be 'a transformative personal and communal journey', 136 and this certainly happened through pageants.
Pageants were usually celebratory events, performed as a means of affirming a continuing sense of place, often in the face of rapid and disquieting change. As a result, unlike contemporary versions of educational theatrein both formal education and heritage settingsthey did not aim 'to unsettle their audiences' prior assumptions' and challenge their view of the past. 137 Rather, they confirmed and strengthened existing loyalties and identities. Yet they should not be seen simply as reactionary or retrogressive, even where they presented an elite-centred or nostalgic view of the past. Coherent local and national identities depend on the persistence of the past in public culture, and of a sense of the continuity of associated traditions, myths and heritage; 138 crucially, they also depend on popular engagement with that past. Pageantry offered opportunities for such engagement on a mass scale, and as such, although eclipsed today by other manifestations of historical culture, it stands as a powerful reminder of the importance of the past in maintaining a shared understanding of community. The communities in which pageants took place may not always have functioned in the smooth and socially homogenous ways that the organisers hoped, but pageants enlisted many thousands of enthusiastic participants who had a good time and came away with happy memories. Across much of the twentieth century, pageants were a notably successful means of promoting public engagement with the past, and as such, they merit a significant place in the social history of education.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Angela Bartie is Senior Lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh. She has published on arts festivals, youth gangs and oral history, and was a co-investigator on the Redress of the Past project.
Linda Fleming is a research associate at the University of Glasgow. She has published widely on multiple aspects of the social and cultural history of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Britain, and was a member of the research team for the Redress of the Past project.
Mark Freeman is Reader in Education and Social History at the UCL Institute of Education. He has published widely on modern British social history and the history of education, and was a coinvestigator on the Redress of the Past project.