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.
