Guest post by local historian Philip Grant
1. Extract from the programme cover for Part 1 of the Pageant. (Source: Brent Archives)
Today, we are used to Wembley Stadium staging spectacular shows (most recently Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour), but 100 years ago another huge entertainment event had just ended. It was part of the British Empire Exhibition, and this is the first of two articles which I hope will give you a taste of it, starting with the leading role played by the ordinary residents of Wembley.
The Pageant of Empire was described as ‘an historical epic’, setting out to portray the history of the British Empire. It was performed in three parts on successive evenings, twice each week, during late July and August 1924. I have not written about it before, partly because I feel uncomfortable about how that history was told, but in this centenary year of the Exhibition, I felt that I should “bite the bullet” (and many of those were fired as Britain’s Empire was built!).
Plans for this Pageant at the Exhibition had been drawn up by senior representatives of Britain and its Dominions (principally Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa) for many months, and the Government had promised £100,000 towards its cost (through the Department for Overseas Trade). The first that most people in Wembley heard about it, however, was in April 1924, less than two weeks before King George V opened the Exhibition.
2. Front page article from “The Wembley News”, 17 April 1924. (Brent Archives – local newspaper microfilms)
Wembley Council had been asked by the Exhibition organisers to set up a committee, which would undertake to stage one of the major episodes in Part 2 of the Pageant (to be performed on Tuesday and Friday evenings). It was chaired by Dr Charles Goddard, Wembley’s Medical Officer of Health, assisted by R.H. Powis, a local contractor and County Councillor, and included a group of local councillors. Their task was to recruit around 2,000 volunteer performers, and get them ready, within three months, to take part in the Pageant.
3. Article from “The Wembley News”, 12 June 1924. (Brent Archives – local newspaper microfilms)
4. Article from “The Wembley News”, 26 June 1924. (Brent Archives – local newspaper microfilms)
In return for giving up much of their spare time to take part, performers were offered free entry to the Exhibition throughout the weeks when the Pageant would take place, and six free tickets for reserved seats in the stadium, so that their family and friends could watch the show. An added attraction, perhaps negotiated by Dr Goddard, who was the prime mover behind the project, was that a share of any profits made from the Pageant of Empire would go towards funds being raised for a proposed Wembley Hospital.
5. Pageant of Empire performer’s certificate, given to Miss E. Rogers. (Source: Brent Archives)
By the middle of June, Wembley had set up a Pageant of Empire office in the High Road, to deal with recruiting performers, and all the administrative details required to organise their participation in the event, which would have an Elizabethan theme. School teachers and organisers of local Societies were asked to offer contributions to the performance, such as folk dancing or a “mystery play”. Ladies who did not feel able to take part in the Pageant itself were encouraged to spend any available morning or afternoon at St John’s Church Hall, to help Mrs Bannister, Mistress of the Robes, create the 2,000 costumes which were needed.
6. The Day and Robinson families in their Pageant costumes. (Brent Archives online image 2684)
By July, rehearsals for Wembley’s section of the Pageant, “The Days of Queen Elizabeth” (remember, there had only been one English Queen of that name in 1924!), were taking place. The stadium could not be used for these, so they were held in King Edward VII Park. When the 2,000+ Wembley cast members finally got the chance for a single dress rehearsal in the Empire Stadium, the local newspaper reported that: ‘Owing to its immensity, many of the performers themselves feel that at times there is considerable confusion.’
The Pageant was meant to start its six-week run with Part 1 on Monday 21 July, with Wembley performing the opening scene of Part 2 the following evening, but because of bad weather preparations in the stadium were delayed. The first night was actually on Friday 25 July, and it was Wembley’s performers who stepped out into the stadium to open the show. One critic wrote: ‘The costumes in the Elizabethan Episode are most gorgeous, and from the seats in the Stadium the effect is wonderful.’
7. Article from “The Wembley News”, 31 July 1924. (Brent Archives – local newspaper microfilms)
The pageant scene performed by Wembley residents represented a festival day in London in 1588, culminating in Queen Elizabeth arriving at St Paul’s Cathedral for a service giving thanks for England’s victory over the Spanish Armada. The action is described in detail in the programme: ‘The life of a Tudor feast day is shown in dances, quarter staff, the joust of knights ….’ After all these crowd scenes, a trumpeter and herald announce the Queen’s procession (hence the ‘300 Horsemen Wanted’, although a few of them were horsewomen in disguise!) with various lords and other dignitaries. ‘…and lastly, in her chariot, THE QUEEN ELIZABETH, followed by the ladies of her court on horse, and her Yeomen of the Guard.’
8. Scenes from Wembley’s Elizabethan Episode. (Screenshots from a British Pathé newsreel film)
I only have the names of a small number of the around 2,300 local residents who took part in the Pageant, either as performers or members of the choir. However, it was reported that Dr Goddard had the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and one of the “stars” at the climax of the drama, Sir Francis Drake, was played by R.H. Powis!
As the 31 July article above records, the following Tuesday evening’s performance of Part 2 ‘was abandoned owing to the rain’. However, weather permitting, the Wembley cast performed at the Pageant each Tuesday and Friday evening through to the end of August (except when they gave two shows, at 2.30pm and 7.30pm on Saturday 16 August, rather than one on the previous evening). And as a thank you, for all who wished to take part (tickets cost just 2s/6d!), a ball, in their Elizabethan costumes, was held from 11pm to 5am in one of the Exhibition’s Amusement Park dance halls, immediately after their final performance on 29 August.
That is my “local history” story, and I’ll move on to the history of the British Empire, as portrayed in the three parts of the Pageant. The events included in it, and the dates they occurred, are correct, as you would expect when the Pageant’s historical adviser was Sir Charles Oman, a distinguished military historian and Professor of Modern History at Oxford (as well as being the Conservative Member of Parliament for Oxford University from 1919 to 1935!).
It is how the stories of those events were told, and what was omitted from the history, that I am not comfortable with. That will not come as a surprise, because the British Establishment wanted to paint a picture of the Empire being “a good thing”, as I showed in my earlier article on why we should commemorate the British Empire Exhibition in its centenary year, The Government was keen to ensure that this message reached all levels of society, so 19,000 free tickets (mainly for standing on the terraces) were available to the public for each performance.
Part 1 of the Pageant, which finally premiered a week late, on Monday 28 July, was entitled “Westward Ho!”. It opened (as did the other two parts) with “The Empire March”, specially written for the Pageant by Sir Edward Elgar, who had also composed musical settings for a series of poems by Alfred Noyes, played by 110 musicians drawn from three top London orchestras.
9. Sheet music for
The Empire March, and the music programme for Part 1 of the Pageant.
(Source: Brent Archives,
ref. 19241/PRI/3 – BEE primary source material)
Part 1’s opening prologue is set in 1496, and shows King Henry VII and his court approached by a deputation from Bristol. The Mayor of that city introduces John Cabot, who gives the King a gift of furs brought back from a voyage across the Atlantic. King Henry agrees to give him a Royal commission, urging him (and this may be poetic licence) to ‘go forward in his quest of the new found land.’ This is the event credited as the beginning of the British Empire. That scene is followed by a parade of “Pioneers”, described as merchant adventurers (although the victims of their activities might have called some of them robbers and pirates!).
10. Postcard of the
Newfoundland Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition.
(Brent Archives online image
0988)
The small Dominion of Newfoundland (it did not become a province of Canada until 1949) staged the first Pageant scenes in Part 1. Cabot landed there in 1497, and had some contact with the indigenous people already living on the island. Because of the huge stocks of fish found in the seas off Newfoundland, fishermen from several European countries came to work there. It was not until 1583 that Sir Humphrey Gilbert was sent to take possession of the island, in the name Queen Elizabeth, ‘lest it should be forgotten that Newfoundland was English soil ever since the day that the Bristol adventurer landed there.’
On that basis, Newfoundland should have belonged to Iceland, because the Norse navigator, Leif Erikson, landed in Vinland, as he called it, nearly 500 years before Cabot! But at least the Pageant scenes staged by Canada begin with that country being claimed on behalf of the King of France in 1534 (that is, if you ignore the claims of the existing inhabitants who had been living there for several thousand years before then).
Canada was part of the French Empire for more than 200 years before scene 4 of its Pageant portrayed the British military campaign in 1759, which saw victory over the French at Quebec, and the land become part of the British Empire. Then comes scene 5, from which the following description is taken:-
11.Extract from the programme for Part 1 of the Pageant. (Source: Brent Archives)
‘When the thirteen original Colonies of North America seceded from the British flag ….’ That is the only reference, in this section of the Pageant about the western hemisphere, to the fact that British people had colonised parts of what is now the United States. And there is nothing at all in the Pageant of Empire about the British colonies in the West Indies, or the trans-Atlantic slave trade that was the foundation of much of the wealth that flowed, to a few, from the British Empire.
That is all I will write about Part 1 of the Pageant of Empire. However, I should mention that, even though it was seen by nearly one million people, the Pageant made a loss, so that Dr Goddard’s Wembley Hospital project received no funding from it. One reason for the loss was the bad weather for much of the five weeks that performances ran, and it is perhaps fitting that one of the advertisers in the programme booklets was Burberry, “The All-British Weatherproof Worn in All British Possessions”!
12. One of the advertisements pages from the Pageant programmes. (Source: Brent Archives)
If you have found this article of interest, please look out for the second part of it in around ten day’s-time, when the Pageant heads Eastward then Southward, before a grand finale.
Philip Grant.
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