'When Wembley welcomed the World' Sunday 27th October, Preston Community Library

 

Some forthcoming British Empire Exhibition talks you may wish to enjoy

 Guest post by local historian Philip Grant

 

Some images from Burma at the British Empire Exhibition

 

If you have found my recent articles about the Pageant of Empire in 1924 of interest, you might like to discover more about the British Empire Exhibition from one (or more) of the three illustrated talks I will be giving over the next few weeks, as part of its centenary.

 

The first, “The Jewel of Wembley – Burma at the BEE”, is on Friday 20 September, from 7.30 to 9pm, in St Andrew’s Church Hall, Kingsbury. This is at regular monthly meeting of Wembley History Society, but visitors are welcome [we just invite a contribution of £3 (£1 for students) towards the cost of the hall]. All the details you should need are here:

 

 

One of the aspects of the Exhibition’s history that I am most keen on is the perspective of people who came here from the countries of the Empire, rather than just the “official” British view. The album on which much of my talk is based contains dozens of newspaper cuttings and photographs. One of the most intriguing of which is an article by a female journalist of her interview with Ma Bala Hkin, the leading actress and dancer of the Burmese theatre troupe at the Exhibition.

 

One of the headlines from the “Evening News” article.

 

If you want to know what Ma Bala thought of the English women she saw in Wembley in 1924, you should come along to my talk!

 

The second of my talks, “A Harlesden Photographer at the B.E.E. – the West Indies at Wembley in 1924”, is a free coffee morning event at Harlesden Library, on Tuesday 8 October from 11am to 12noon. 

 

 

Back in the 1990s, Wembley History Society received a donation of photographs, together with some glass plate negatives, showing images of the Exhibition in 1924, especially from inside the West Indies Pavilion. They were the work of a little-known local photographer, whose stamp was on the back of some of the prints:

 

Harlesden Library seemed the ideal place to present this talk, and you can find more details and reserve your free place on the Brent Libraries, Arts and Heritage Eventbrite website. This talk is part of the Becoming Brent project, re-examining the British Empire Exhibition and its legacy.

  

The final talk I will be giving in the Exhibition’s centenary year is “When Wembley Welcomed the World”. This is being hosted by Preston Community Library on the afternoon of Sunday 27 October (exact time and further details will follow). It will be a free event, but with donations to the work of the community library invited from those who attend.

 

 

This illustrated talk is an introduction to the various nations which took part in the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park in 1924, and their people who came here for the event, but then moves on to show how Wembley has continued to welcome people from across the world ever since the 1920s.

 

I hope that “Wembley Matters” readers will find something of interest in these presentations, and I look forward to welcoming you to any of these events.

 

Philip Grant.

The Pageant of Empire, 1924 – Part 2: Eastward and Southward Ho!

 Guest post by local historian Philip Grant

Extract from the programme cover for Part 2 of the Pageant. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

Welcome back to my second article about this Pageant, which took place during the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park in 1924. If you have not read Part 1, you will find it here.

 

The Pageant was performed in three parts, and I have already dealt with the opening section of Part 2, “The Days of Queen Elizabeth”, which was played by local people from Wembley. Here are a few more pictures of that, which are screenshots from a British Pathé newsreel film. I found that on YouTube, incorrectly described as Wembley Exhibition Reel 3 (1925). It is definitely from 1924, and was almost certainly filmed at the matinee performance of Part 2 of the Pageant of Empire, on Saturday 16 August 1924.

 

More scenes from Wembley’s Elizabethan Episode. (Screenshots from a British Pathé newsreel film)

 

Part 2 continued with a scene from 1655, in which Admiral Blake and his naval squadron defeated Barbary pirates, making the Mediterranean safe for British ships and rescuing some sailors who had been captured and put to work as galley slaves. The commentary in the programme concludes: ‘The English flag has broken the power of the Corsairs’.

 

Although Part 2 was entitled “Eastward Ho!”, its next section was about, and staged by, the Dominion of South Africa. Its prelude depicted Phoenician sailors landing at the Cape, on a voyage around the coast of Africa on behalf of the Egyptian Pharoah Necho, around 606BC, ‘two thousand years before the first white man set foot in Africa.’ Scene 1 depicts the first Europeans to land on this coast, Portuguese sailors, including Vasco de Gama in 1496.

 

Scenes 2 and 3 show the first Dutch settlers arriving at Table Bay in 1652, and being joined by French Huguenot refugees, at the invitation of the Dutch East India Company, from 1688. It is not until scene 4 that South Africa’s first British settlers arrive, in 1820, under a Government financed scheme to claim “Cape Colony” for Britain. 

 

Two images from scene 4, showing British settlers arriving in South Africa.
(Screenshots from a British Pathé newsreel film)

 

It is this scene which helps to show the scale of the scenery used in the Pageant. It was all designed by the artist Frank Brangwyn R.A., and used 25,000 square feet (over 2,300m2) of Baltic timber. The full-size replica sailing ship did move across the scene, and the artificial sea at one end of the stadium, on which real boats were rowed, held 220,000 gallons of water.

 

Zulu warriors preparing to attack the Boers at Blood River. (Screenshot from a British Pathé newsreel film)

 

Scene 5 shows the British meeting the Zulu King Tchaka in 1824, and getting permission to start a small coastal colony in Natal. Moving on to 1886, scene 6 shows a breakdown in relations between the Dutch Boer community, who wish to move further inland, and a later Zulu leader, resulting in a staging of the Battle of Blood River (on Wembley’s “hallowed turf”!). The Boers defenders overwhelm the native warriors’ spears with gunfire, and ‘demoralise the Zulus and completely rout them. Thus the Boers are left to settle where they please.’

 

The British were also trying to settle where they pleased, and push north into what is now Zimbabwe. Scene 8 is described in this extract from the Part 2 programme, and it is this patriotic version of how our country treated the lands of other peoples that I find so distasteful.

 

Scene 9 shows Cecil Rhodes, a leading figure in the expansion of the British Empire in Southern Africa, travelling without an army to negotiate with the Matabele kingdom in 1896. He is successful in getting agreement for British settlers to come and start farming in their lands. The fruits of his success were seen at the Exhibition less than 30 years later, when the South African Pavilion included a section for Southern Rhodesia (a country named after him), showing the produce of its British-owned tobacco plantations.

 

Postcard showing Southern Rhodesia tobacco at the BEE in 1924. (Brent Archives online image 9961)

 

The final scene 10 of this section of the Pageant is entitled “An Allegory of the Union of South Africa”. It portrays the benefits of a federal state, in which both British and Boers can govern their own provinces, within the British Empire, and the scene ends with the choir and orchestra performing “Land of Hope and Glory”. The Pageant’s history of South Africa does not include the significant (but uncomfortable to the storyline!) episode of the Boer War, 1899-1902.

 

Part 2 of the Pageant, “Eastward Ho!”, ends with India. It has only one scene, “The Early Days of India”, but that puts on a spectacular show. It depicts the Mogul Emperor Jehangir receiving Sir Thomas Roe, an envoy from the British East India Company, in 1626, seeking to set up trading ties. The scene begins in a busy eastern bazaar, then a parade featuring seven elephants shipped in from the subcontinent, and camels from Egypt. We also see Sir Thomas having his audience with the Emperor.

 

Some scenes from the Indian section of the Pageant. (Screenshots from a British Pathé newsreel film)

 

Most readers will know that there was more to the history of Britain’s relations with India than trading between equal nations! Yet this is how the Pageant’s programme notes move on from this scene to sum up that history in two short paragraphs:

 

Extract from the Part 2 Pageant programme. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

You may recall that in an article at the start of this BEE centenary year I wrote: ‘It was an Act of Parliament in 1876, not any rulers of its many states, which awarded an additional title to Queen Victoria: Empress of India!’

 

Moving on, Part 3 of the Pageant was “Southward Ho!”, performed on Wednesday and some Saturday evenings between 27 July and 30 August. Its prologue shows King George III at Windsor Castle, sending Captain Cook on an expedition to “the Southern Seas”, where he has heard ‘there are great new lands there which may be added to our Realm’. Sure enough, the first scene of New Zealand’s section shows Captain Cook “discovering” the North Island of that country in 1769. After an initially hostile meeting with a Maori tribe there, his crew are allowed ashore to fill their water barrels. Cook takes the opportunity to stick a pole in the ground, hoist ‘the British Flag’, and take possession of the land ‘in the name of His Most Gracious Majesty’.

 

New Zealand’s scene 2 shows the first British settlers arriving in 1840, after ‘an attempt by French adventurers to establish a claim on the islands finally drove the British Government into a formal annexation.’ A New Zealand Land Company had been set up, which ‘bought a vast tract of land from 58 Maori chiefs.’ The programme notes record that this was soon followed with ‘the Treaty of Waitangi, by which the chiefs ceded the sovereignty of New Zealand to Queen Victoria, receiving in return a guarantee of the rights and privileges of British subjects.’

This section of the Pageant is quite frank in revealing that the Maori people of New Zealand did not understand the “bargain” they had made with the British. I will include the programme text for scene 3 in full, because it does show the reality of how the Empire treated the indigenous people of the lands they annexed, if they resisted.

 

Extract from the Part 3 Pageant programme. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

New Zealand’s final scene 4 is entitled “Peace and Prosperity”, and begins with these words: ‘The Maori rebellion died out after many years. Much of the land of the rebel tribes which had been confiscated was returned to them, and under tolerant and tactful administration their troubles were soon forgotten.’ That may be largely true, but when King George V visited the Maori house, beside the New Zealand Pavilion at the Exhibition in 1924, a Maori delegation complained to him that Britain had not honoured its side of the Treaty of Waitangi!

 

Postcard showing King George V, with Queen Mary and his officials, visiting the Maori house in 1924.
(Brent Archives online image 969)

 

The Maori’s had rebelled in the 1860s because of the growing number of emigrants from Britain settling on their land. But at Wembley Park in 1924, the New Zealand Pavilion was still handing out leaflets, like this one, encouraging more people to come!

 

Outside cover of a New Zealand promotional leaflet from 1924. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

The Australian section of the Pageant followed on from New Zealand, but I will not spend much time on it. It begins with the first settlement in the newly-created Colony of New South Wales in 1788, passes through an “era of development” in the 1800s, before ending with a great parade celebrating the produce and resources that Australia wants to trade with the rest of the British Empire, and the world. 

 

Unlike its New Zealand neighbour, there is not a single word in Australia’s Pageant about the aboriginal people of this southern continent, and how appallingly they were treated (and in some ways, continue to be treated). For an insight into their story, we have had to wait for programmes like The Australian Wars (still available on BBC iPlayer).

 

Part 3 closes with a finale, featuring all the nations taking part in the British Empire Exhibition, and the people from them. This is how the programme describes it, although history shows it would be a few more decades before there was a true ‘Commonwealth of Free Nations’:

Extract from the Part 3 Pageant programme. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

The Burmese contingent on their way to the Pageant finale. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

I am lucky that, in 1964, Wembley History Society received donations of several albums put together by people involved in the Exhibition forty years earlier. One featured Burma (above, now Myanmar), and another was from Mr Beck, who had been the Resident Superintendent of the Nigerian Village at Wembley. In his album were copies of photographs taken by a daily newspaper of the Nigerians rehearsing in the stadium for their part in the Pageant’s finale. 

 

The Nigerian “horse race” at the stadium rehearsal, with Mr Beck arrowed. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

Mr Beck had annotated some of the photographs, and in the one above he had marked himself (disguised in Nigerian robes) with a “x”, which I have replaced with an arrow, for clarity. His caption shows that he was meant to be leading the group of horsemen (plus a horsewoman in disguise, Mrs Cumberbatch – any relation of Benedict?) at a trot. Instead, Bala, a silversmith from Kano, led a charge down the stadium, just for fun, during the rehearsal!

 

There were other photographs showing the Nigerians in high spirits, but the “News Chronicle” chose to print just this one, showing Mamman, Bala’s young brother and apprentice, in a more docile pose from the Pageant rehearsal, with two donkeys.

 

Mamman and two donkeys, at the rehearsal in the stadium. (Source: Brent Archive – Mr Beck’s album)

 

In all, the Pageant made use of fifty donkeys, which when not taking part in performances were kept at the nearby Oakington Manor Farm (known locally by the farmer’s name, as Sherren’s Farm). Wembley’s police force became familiar with them, when every available policeman was called out to round them up, after they escaped from their field one night in August!

 

Article from “The Wembley News”, 14 August 1924. (Brent Archives – local newspaper microfilms)

 

On that lighter note, I will end my description of Part 3, and of the Pageant of Empire at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924. But what are we to make of that event? The “Daily Express”, at the time, described it as ‘the climax of centuries of British heroism, pride, endeavour and struggle.’ My own view is less glowing, as you will have gathered from reading these articles.

 

Yes, the history is important, but we need to look at it honestly, the bad as well as the good. We need wider education about it, seeking and listening to the views of people from the countries which were part of Britain’s Empire, in order to get a wider perspective and understanding of the past. This centenary year of the Exhibition at Wembley Park provides a good opportunity to start doing that.

 

You will have the chance to share your views, and your family’s stories of Empire, through the “Becoming Brent” project. You can find details of its events on the Brent Libraries, Arts and Heritage Eventbrite site, or read about it on the Museum and Archives blog. Or, if you prefer, add a comment below.

Philip Grant.

The Pageant of Empire, 1924 – Part 1: Wembley and Westward Ho!

 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.