The Curious Incident of a Dornier in the Night

Guest post by local historian Philip Grant

 

 

A WW2 German Dornier DO-217-M bomber aircraft. (Image from the internet)

 

The distance from Wembley to Cambridge is around 50 miles (80 kilometres) as the crow flies. This story links both places. I was contacted by someone who knew the Cambridge half, and asked what I knew about the Wembley part. At the time it was nothing, but after a little research in the local newspaper microfilms at Brent Archives, I can now share a remarkable story with you.

 

The events in this article took place on the night of 23 February 1944. The Second World War had already been going on for 4½ years, and it would be another fifteen months before the country could celebrate VE Day, the end of the war in Europe. After several years with little or no German bombing, London was in the middle of a “mini-blitz”. Just five nights earlier, eight members of the Whitfield family and seven members of the Metcalfe family had been killed when their semi-detached homes in Birchen Close, Kingsbury, suffered a direct hit from a high explosive bomb. An air raid warden, who’d been blown across the road by the blast, died in hospital two days later.

 

The first report of the incident in Alperton was this short article in “The Wembley News”:

 

A brief report from “The Wembley News”, 25 February 1944. (Brent Archives local newspaper microfilms)

 

The following week’s edition of the newspaper had more time for a full front-page report of what had happened:

 

“Fireguards Arrest German Airmen”, headline from “The Wembley News”, 3 March 1944.
(Brent Archives local newspaper microfilms)

 

Fireguards were ordinary local residents, not otherwise serving in the Home Guard or as air raid wardens. After the widespread damage caused by German incendiary (fire) bombs in the “blitz”, regulations were introduced in early 1941 that adults should spend 12 hours a week (often split into four-hour shifts) on night-time fire watching duties. The Wardens in charge of Wembley’s eighty A.R.P. posts had to organise firewatchers for every sector in their area. 25,000 Wembley civilians were given the necessary training, and supplied with bags of sand, galvanised water buckets and stirrup pumps to use in putting out fires.

 

A WW2 fireguard bucket, stirrup pump and hose. (Source: Imperial War Museum)

 

The local newspaper report on 3 March included this eyewitness account, from an Alperton man, of what he saw during an air raid on London by over 200 German bombers that night:

 

‘I was watching the barrage [of anti-aircraft gunfire] when suddenly a plane could be seen caught by about eight searchlights. The guns put up a terrific barrage and got him “boxed”, and then closed in on him. It was obvious that no plane could stay up there long, and all of a sudden there was a flash. They had got him. The next thing I saw was two parachutes sailing down. They were picked up by the searchlights and followed down.’

 

 

A WW2 photograph showing searchlights on a bomber, and anti-aircraft gunfire.
(Image from the internet)

 

Two firewatchers, Mr W. Hall of 47 Douglas Avenue and Mr F. Harrison of 1 Christchurch Green, were sheltering under the front porch of his house. They had seen a parachute descending, and heard a bump as something hit the roof of number 49. The newspaper report said:

 

‘A high hedge separates numbers 47 and 49. The airman went one side and the parachute the other. After a discreet wait Messrs Harrison and Hall, who thought it was a land mine, hurried over to investigate.’

 

47 and 49 Douglas Avenue, Alperton, as it might have been at the time.
(A Google Street View image, painted to restore the wartime hedge!)

 

The firewatchers were right to be cautious. “Land mines”, as they were commonly called, were  500kg German bombs dropped by parachute, which drifted through the air until they hit a solid structure, killing indiscriminately. On the same night in September 1940, two such bombs had killed four people, women and young children in flats above shops in Kingsbury Road, and four more (two married couples) in District Road, Sudbury.

 

The newspaper report continued:

 

‘After releasing the Nazi from his complicated harness, Mr Hall picked him up. He was thoroughly dazed, helmetless and dressed in a blueish grey uniform. First-aid was rendered, he was given smelling salts and asked if he was alright. He nodded his head, answering in the affirmative.’

 

‘By this time neighbours began to collect, and the head fireguard of the sector, Mr W. Thornton, disarmed the Nazi by removing his belt and revolver. He offered no resistance and was quite docile. When the young airman had sufficiently recovered, he was taken to the wardens post in Christchurch Green and the police were sent for and he was taken to Wembley Police Station.’

 

Locations from the incident, marked on a map from 1939.
(Extract from page 30 of the original A to Z Atlas and Guide to London and the suburbs)

 

Mrs Hall, the wife of the fireguard at 47 Douglas Avenue, had also spoken to the reporter:

 

‘The German airman proved to be a youth, aged about 20, fair haired and according to Mrs Hall “a good looking young boy”.’

 

The young German who landed in Douglas Avenue was lucky. In April 1943, Ronald Francis, a 21-year old RAF airman who’d lived just along the road at 19 Douglas Avenue, was killed with the rest of the 7-man crew of a Lancaster aircraft which crashed in The Netherlands, after being shot down while returning from a bombing mission over Germany.

 

The newspaper mentioned two German airmen in Wembley’s streets. There were brief details of the other one:

 

‘The second defeated raider landed in Wembley Park Drive about the same time. He also was captured without any difficulty, and after being taken to a nearby Army unit’s headquarters was handed over to the police.’

 

But all four crew members of the Dornier bomber had baled out. The airman captured in Wembley Park was described as being around 30 years old, so might have been the pilot. I don’t know where the other two landed, but it may have been earlier, just over the Wembley Borough boundary in Ealing. If you have any information on this, please add a comment below!

 

The Dornier’s pilot must have thought that his aircraft would crash, after being damaged by anti-aircraft “flak” shells. He locked his plane’s controls so that it stayed level while he and his crewmen baled out. If it had crashed, the plane and its load of 860 incendiary bombs would probably have come down on a built-up area in Kingsbury or Edgware, causing massive damage and potential death or injury to local residents. But the Dornier DO-217-M did not crash. It flew on in a north north-easterly direction, over Hertfordshire and beyond.

 

Later that night, a lady at 302 Milton Road in Cambridge heard a loud noise behind her house. When she dared to look out, there was a German bomber aircraft with its nose up against her back garden fence!

 

Two photographs of the Dornier bomber where it came to rest in Cambridge, February 1944.
(Screenshots from the “German Ghost Bomber” video)

 

The Dornier bomber had flown over fifty miles, without a pilot, gradually getting lower. Miraculously, it had passed just east of the centre of Cambridge, missing the University’s historic colleges, and the homes in its northern suburb, and made a “wheels-up” landing across a large allotment site. Although it left a trail of unexploded incendiary bombs behind it in the vegetable plots, the remaining fuel in the aircraft’s tanks had not ignited. No one was hurt.

 

The Cambridge end of this curious incident is told in an excellent 9-minute video film from 2022 by Mark Felton, “German Ghost Bomber – The Mysterious Case of the Cambridge Dornier”, which I will leave you to watch and enjoy!

 

 

Thank you, Mark Felton, for the video that led to the enquiry, and which has enabled me to share the Wembley end of this story.

 

Philip Grant.

[With apologies to Mark Haddon, for borrowing from the title of his award-winning book “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”. When the idea flashed into my head, it fitted this story so well that I just had to use it!]

 

UPDATE: Internet Success! Photgraph of R.D. Douglas Found: Lest We Forget – looking for relatives of a WW2 Wembley airman

 Guest post by local historian Philip Grant in a personal capacity

Extract from a document produced by the Dutch Airwar Study Group 1939-1945.

 

The Second World War seems a long time ago, and we probably don’t think about it very often, unless we were personally affected by the loss of a family member. But there are some people who still give their time and effort to ensure that those who lost their lives in that awful conflict are remembered with respect. I was contacted recently by one of those, asking for help to try and find relatives, and hopefully a photograph of, an RAF airman from Wembley who died in 1943, and I’m writing this guest post to ask for any help that you can give, please.

 

Ronald Douglas Francis (no relation to the editor) was born in May 1921. By the age of 21, he was a Sargeant in the R.A.F., and the wireless operator / air gunner on a Lancaster bomber flying missions to bomb industrial sites in Germany. On the night of 3 April 1943, his aircraft was shot down by a German night fighter, and at around midnight it crashed in flames in a forest near Stevensbeek, in the south of The Netherlands. All seven members of the Lancaster’s crew were killed, and their graves are now in a war cemetery at Eindhoven.

 

Some of the war graves at Eindhoven, and the gravestone of Sgt. R.D. Francis.
(Source: Commonwealth War Graves Commission website)

 

The Dutch Airwar Study Group 1939-1945 have been collecting information about this aircraft and its crew, and have sent me an excellent information sheet, prepared by one of their members, Rene, which I will ask Martin to attach at the end of this article. As you will see, they have yet to find a photograph of Ronald Francis, or of the plane’s pilot, 20-year old Pilot Officer W.H. Swire, and rear gunner Sgt. R.R. Feeley. They would very much like to have photographs of all the crew members, to include on a memorial it is hoped to erect near the crash site. A similar memorial was recently installed to remember the crew of a Wellington bomber, who also died in April 1943 when it crashed, just inside the Dutch border, after being damaged by “flak” (anti-aircraft gunfire) on a mission over Duisburg.

 

Memorial board to a Wellington bomber crew. (Courtesy of Leo Janssen)

 

As well as photographs, the Study Group would also like to contact any living relatives of Ronald Douglas Francis, and his fellow crew members, so that they can be invited to, or at least aware of, the steps being taken and events to commemorate the lost Lancaster bomber. Ronald’s parents, John Charles Francis and Winifred Edith Francis, lived at 19 Douglas Avenue, Wembley (a turning off of Ealing Road). Does anyone in the area still remember the family, including the names of any of Ronald’s brothers or sisters who might still be alive, and where they might be found now? If you have any information which might help, please send it to Leo Janssen at: leojanssen1954@ziggo.nl  (with a copy to Wembley Matters, if possible).

 

Wars are horrible things. They bring about terrible loss of life and injury, destruction and disruption of people’s lives. Bombing, especially the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas, is one of its worst aspects. But it is not the men and women who volunteer, or are called-up, to serve in the armed forces of their countries, who cause the wars, or decide what acts of war are inflicted on “the enemy”. If they lose their lives (or suffer life changing injuries or trauma) in the course of their service, they deserve to be remembered with respect.

 

It is moving, and humbling, that there are groups of people in The Netherlands who are working to ensure that British and Commonwealth war dead are not forgotten. Another organisation, in the same North Brabant province as Stevensbeek, is the Overloon War Chronicles Foundation. They are collecting the photographs and stories of the Allied soldiers who fought and died in the Battle of Overloon, a crucial victory in the advance towards Germany in October 1944, and are among the 281 who are buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the village.

 

A remembrance service at Overloon war graves cemetery. (Courtesy of Leo Janssen)

 

For the past few years, people the municipality of Land van Cuijk, which includes Overloon, have been holding a special remembrance event at their local war graves cemeteries each Christmas time. Any relatives of the dead, or others interested, are invited to join the local community for this. On Tuesday 24 December 2024 the tour of four cemeteries will end at Overloon, with a programme of music, speeches, poems and readings, starting at 4pm. And on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, candles will be lit on each of the graves, as part of the annual Lights on War Graves commemoration.

 

The annual commemoration and Lights on War Graves at Overloon cemetery.
(Courtesy of Leo Janssen)

 

Lest we forget!

UPDATE February 23rd 2025 from Philip Grant

Douglas Avenue cropped up again in a February 2025 WW2 guest post:
https://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-curious-incident-of-dornier-in-night.html

I sent a "link" to that article to the Dutch team and their English family history researcher. I'm pleased to say that I have heard back from them that they have managed to contact a relative of Ronald Francis, and obtained a photograph of him in his RAF uniform. Here it is:

 

 
 

Philip Grant.

 

LETTER: A Wembley airman and wartime POW, 1940-45

My father in the first weeks of captivity, when razors were not available, and consequently (as he wrote home) 'most of the fellows here look like Biblical characters'.
 

Dear Editor,

An article written by me about my father G.C.G. 'Todd' Hawkins is about to appear in the November 2024 issue of Bristol Blenheim magazine. I've taken the liberty of writing a 288-word description of the article, which is attached to this e-mail, and which might perhaps appear on the Wembley Matters blog if you thought it of sufficient interest to readers.

In the first half of last century Todd's family was well known to such Wembley personages as G. Titus Barham, the Rev. J.W.P. Silvester (who as vicar of St John's church married my parents), and his son Victor, the prominent dance-band leader. Todd's own career ended in a stroke of extraordinarily bad luck after nearly five years in captivity.

 

‘Todd’ Hawkins, 1911-45

An RAF airman, from a family once well known in Wembley, was shot down over occupied France on the first day of the Battle of Britain and spent nearly five years as a prisoner in Germany, only to be killed by ‘friendly fire’ a few days away from liberation.

‘Todd’ (Gordon Cyril George) Hawkins flew as a navigator/bomb aimer in Blenheim bombers. His story, illustrated by photos and his own drawings, is now told in an article by his son Richard in the latest issue of Bristol Blenheim, the magazine of the Blenheim Society. The article is based on material preserved by Todd’s family, including letters he wrote home and cartoons he drew while a prisoner, as well as wartime mentions in the Wembley News.

Todd was born in 1911, left school at fourteen, and became a clerk in the Workers’ Travel Association. His life before the RAF was nearly all spent in Wembley, while its population grew from 10,000 to 100,000. His parents were Henry Frederick Hawkins (shopkeeper, organiser of the Wembley town band, and active in the Wembley Tradesmen’s Association and sports club) and Susannah Jane Hawkins, eldest daughter of James Wood Blackmore, the first LMP policeman to be stationed in Wembley.

Todd met many Canadians among his fellow prisoners, and might have emigrated to Canada if he had survived the war. Over 200 of the cartoons he drew as a POW did survive. It is hoped that they will have a permanent home in the RAF Museum at Hendon.

Copies of the Nov. 2024 issue of Bristol Blenheim with the article on Todd can be obtained from the editor, Ian Carter, through the Blenheim Society website, https://blenheimsociety.com/contact

 

 

Richard Hawkins

 

 

'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 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.