 Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Cara Rodway. I'm the interim head of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and I'm very happy to be chairing our wonderful talk this afternoon, which is the second in our three lunchtime talks looking at the legacy of the Mayflower voyage in British culture. So I hope some of you were able to join us last Monday and we have another talk coming up next Monday, but today we have Dr Tom Ahul who will be talking about some really fascinating popular theatre. And I've had a look at his presentation and some really wonderful images. So I think this is going to be a really fantastic, fantastic lunchtime talk. Tom is the principal investigator on the AHLC funded project Voyaging Through History, the Mayflower in Britain, 1620 to 2020. And the British Library Eccles Centre was a partner on that programme and we were really delighted to be able to support what's really fascinating and insightful project. So when Tom's not working on Voyaging Through History, he's a lecturer in modern British history at Queen's University in Belfast from where he joins us today. And his research interests span urban history and ideas of belonging and the place of the past in modern British culture. And you can see from those interests how this this broader project was developed. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Tom. He's going to talk for about about 35 minutes and then we'll have time for questions afterwards. So if you would like to ask a question at any point, you can just type it down whilst Tom's talking when you think of it. If you want to use the Q&A function, which you can see in the options that Zoom provides, that will be really lovely. And I will then have a nice opportunity to ask Tom your questions and we can unpack some of the themes a little bit more and we will be done by two. So thank you once again for joining us and I'm going to pass over to Tom and we look forward to hearing your paper. Thank you. Okay, thanks Cara. I'll share my screen first. A special welcome to those of you that have joined us from across the pond, given that it is somewhat early there in comparison to the UK. So it sort of makes sense I think to start in the USA and where we know that the story of the Mayflower has been popular for a long time, since at least the early 19th century. On that side of the Atlantic, the Pilgrims are a powerful part of a sort of national origin myth how that country understands the ethos of its own beginnings. But I think it's much less well known, especially to those that haven't made the talk last week, that the Pilgrims used to be popular back in the country that they had left as well. So, by the late 19th century, and indeed all across Britain, different groups of people were coming together to try and find something to celebrate in their connection, whether individual or as a group to the Pilgrims. Non-conformist churches, especially the Methodists, the Quakers, but particularly the Congregationists, were starting to put in pretty pieces of stained glass. These depicted the Pilgrims, like this one in Lancashire, and claimed them as ancestors to their own creed. But city councils and local history associations as well, were also starting to erect their own memorials, like this one in Southampton. These memorials, built out of stone, connected this local pride in place to the great deeds that those people associated with the Pilgrims. As those of you that listened to last week's talk by Ed will have heard, the Pilgrims were also a popular topic for novels and for poems, and they were used not just to instill virtues of patriotism or piety in the school children that were set these books, but also to entertain people, especially adults, with romantic and humorous tales of the voyage and the settlement of New England. So in today's talk, I'm going to really follow on from those artistic depictions and to look at what I think is one of the most interesting and arguably unique ways that Britons engage with the Mayflower story, and this was the historical pageant. So it's probably fair to say that most people now are not that familiar with the historical pageant, you may not have even heard the term before, but at one time, these were arguably the most popular way that people experienced the sense of the past in Britain. Eagle-eyed observers among you may recognize some of what I'm going to talk about as being a little bit familiar from the pageant-esque aspects of Danny Boyle's great opening ceremony for the Olympics in 2012, The historical pageants burst onto the social stage over 100 years earlier in 1905, and they took place across the country and also later the Empire and the USA too, all the way from the smallest villages or churches to the largest cities. So what exactly was a historical pageant? Well, the essence was the theatrical reenactment of a series of episodes usually taking place outside, if the weather permitted, in front of huge grandstands erected by local production companies. And these were always amateur casts, and sometimes up to 10,000 people and I should stress that that is not a typo. Huge crowds of people took part in reenacting these events. They were brought together by ingenious so-called pageant masters to perform their local history, and there would be audiences of up to 100,000 people across several weeks that bought tickets and spectator. So today, I think, as you will see from some of these images, the historical pageant might seem to be a little bit twee, but back then they were all the rage. So the storylines for these pageants, which is where we kind of learn about what history people in Britain at the time thought was important. They usually began in a dim and distant past of ancient Celtic Britain before the arrival of the Romans heralded the beginnings of civilization. So a trope that we're all familiar with, what did the Romans do for us? Well, following episodes though, cycled through other groups that arrived in Britain as well. This was a sort of island nation story of migrants. Episode cycled through conquering Saxons and Normans, but then also the different monarchical reigns from Tudor to good old Queen Bess in the late medieval period. Some pageants, and especially as the 20th century went on, even came all the way up to the recent past to depicting events and processes like industrialization. And, in a way, might seem incredible to us today, even First World War battles as well, reenactment of that event started in 1919 incredibly. But above all, these romantic reenactments were telling a story of a local and national progress that was intertwined. The historical foundations for great power in the present, Britain and its empire, all the way to how that was founded in the past. So many of the episodes depicted in pageants then were kind of distinctly parochial and inward looking. If you're going to try and connect a small place to a big story, you have to look at small happenings locally. So that might be the granting of medieval charters. It might be the visits of kings and queens, or the local experience of much bigger events and processes like wars or the dissolution of the monasteries. So how then could the historical pageant take on the story of the Mayflower? Because its central element was instead of inward looking, distinctly outward looking, it was about emigration, not in migration, and of an oppressed group no less. How could this story of the pilgrims be fitted into a form of history that was all about stressing continuity in national growth, not the bad actions of the church and the state in the past? So that's the question I'm going to try and answer today, to think about how were the pilgrims depicted in these pageants, what can that tell us about Britain and how communities in Britain understood themselves. So we can start then with the earliest attempt as far as we're aware to depict the pilgrims, which came with the pageant of London staged in 1911. So I mentioned before some of the huge casts of these events, and I think it's difficult to overstate today just how huge this pageant in 1911 actually was. It was the biggest and most ambitious before the First World War, and probably the whole 20th century, only Danny Boyle's event in 2012 comes anywhere near close. And it cost a whopping 66,000 pounds to produce might not sound like much today, but that was the equivalent of about 3.7 million pounds in today's money. And there were 120 performances of this pageant over a period of several months. So if we put all of the attendance figures together, we think that over a million people in Britain saw a performance. This pageant in 1911 was staged by a director called Frank Lassels. So Frank was, I think it'd be fair to say, quite the eccentric and prosario. He was a friend of the much more famous Noel Coward and also a self-styled lord of the manor, despite being from quite humble origins. And he trod the boards in his youth as well in London theatre. He started smaller than this event in 1911 with pageants in historic British cities like Oxford in 1907, but eventually he became what the press like to call the man who staged the empire. So he put on huge imperial spectacular in places like Canada and South Africa. And if we look at the list of other people, not just Lassels that were associated with the production of this pageant, it reads like a sort of who's who of British arts and culture in the Edwardian period. Leading academics of the day, advised on historical scenes, men like R.G. Collingwood and Charles Oman, John Knox Lawton to name just a couple, while both established an emerging talent provided the music. So Gustav Holtz, for example, wrote original pieces, as did Edward Elgar and McEwen. Princess Louise, the Duchess of Argyll, she was on the general council for the pageant, and there are too many sirs, earls, dukes and marquesses to mention. But it wasn't just the great and the good of Edwardian society that were involved in this event. It's important to remember that the 15,000 amateur performers that took part, again, not in a typo, there were 15,000 of them, they were drawn from all levels of society. So to think a little bit about the storyline then of the pageant of London, in the first three parts of the pageant, it was told through events just in Britain, all the way from what was called primitive London and its small Celtic community to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. So then the fourth part of the pageant, instead looked further afield to the Empire, with episodes that was set in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. And the whole thing ended with what was called an imperial mask on the advantages of Empire, and probably doesn't need to be pointed out that this was the advantages to Britons, rather than to the colonised. Then the third part where the theme was eastward and westward hoe that saw the appearance of the pilgrims. So set in Plymouth Harbour in 1620, the script describes how the pilgrims, their wives, children and servants, the governor-elect Deacon Carver, William Brewster, Edward Winslow, William Bradford and Captain Miles Standish all gather on the key. Last goodbyes are exchanged and purits and ministers bless the pilgrims who silently walk down to the water side to embark upon the Mayflower. So we can see here this is a kind of reverential, pious approach to understanding these people, almost quite sadly leaving their country of birth to journey to the so-called New World. But the pageant of London was overall a quite inventive attempt to try and show how and why Britain was proud of their empire and why London was its beating heart. You think about the period in which this is taking place, other nations, particularly Germany, were expanding their own colonial territories too. So this is a sort of defensive mechanism to say why Britain did it first and did it best. But it was also a way to celebrate friendly alliances that were beginning to build beyond the empire. And the Pilgrim Barber scene was a good example of this. The story that was told connected Britain and the USA. USA at this point, of course, is not a colony of Britain, but it was still part of that imperial story. And at this point, Britain and the USA are enjoying a sort of friendly period of relations after decades of animosity. So I think it's quite notable that Americans who were based in London were brought on board to organize the scene of the pilgrims in this pageant. It was a way of kind of reenacting these friendly relations between those two groups. But I think it is also important to say that if the pageant of London was huge, the pilgrims part in this was pretty small. There were tens or 20s of episodes and the pilgrims were just one tiny bit. But when the great Tercentenary or 300th anniversary of the Mayfire came around a few years later in 1920, this was the opportunity to put the pilgrims at the center stage of historical reenactment. By that point, after the experience of the First World War, producers and directors and cast members, too, were much more aware of the link between these two countries of Britain and the USA. Just two years before during the First World War, the Americans, of course, three years before had entered the conflict on the side of the Allies. And this was an event that was symbolically referred to at the time as being the return of the Mayflower. You have people like Rudyard Kipling making speeches and writing the local press talking about this event and what might grow from its significance. You can see here a small postcard that was produced at the time that sort of commemorates that idea in cotton, I suppose it would be rather than silk. Now, with the welcome return of peace, the pilgrims could be put to work again as a way to celebrate that new Anglo-American alliance. Whole pageants about the pilgrims, instead of just one or two scenes, were now performed in British towns and cities. And again, literally hundreds of thousands of people just across that summer of 1920 will have seen the story of the Mayflower come alive before their very eyes and by their friends and relatives in fancy dress. So probably the most inventive of these pageants that took place in 1920 was called John Alden's Choice. So John Alden being dubiously claimed, we could say, from the hometown of Southampton. About 440 performers gathered on the town's West Key in front of a specially erected grandstand. And if you look in this picture here towards the right, you can see that this grandstand was just a stone's throw away from that Pilgrim Fathers Memorial that's been put up seven years previously. In 1913. This story began with John Alden, of course, in Southampton, and then the leaving of the Mayflower. And it brought together a mix of fun and farce. John Alden was depicted as being put in the stocks at one point at another point and unlucky Frenchman a Huguenot was found in a barrel escaping the intolerance of that country. So there were jabs put towards the French in this pageant, as well as celebrations of Anglo-American identity. But the main focus of this event was actually not on the past, but on the future. So the choice that was referred to in the title was whether John Alden would leave his home in Southampton and England if he saw the destiny of the country to which he was going to travel. So this was shown through, inventively, a mystical fortune telling gypsy. So John Alden was brought to this gypsy and saw a future unfolding of the history of the USA. The declaration of peace between the Pilgrims and Native Americans in 1621, the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and the beginnings of course of the American Revolution in 1789. And then the breaking away of the New England colonies. It was even the case that Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address in 1863, a complete unfortunately as we can see here with actors in blackface that was depicted as well. But it was only when John Alden was shown by this gypsy, the return of the Mayflower from the USA in 1917 on its way to help Old England win that war that he understood that the future of the world, not just his own life quite simply depended on him and journeying on the Mayflower. So Southampton's pageant in 1920 was a huge affair and it made headlines across Britain. But it was also the case that historical re-enactments were taking place in far smaller places as well. So bread and Norton in the Cotswolds would be a good example. This small village was home to an old Tudor manor house with a very notable owner, a woman called Victoria Woodhull Martin. So Woodhull Martin was born in Ohio in the late 1830s, and she made a name for herself in America as a theory campaigner for women's rights. In 1872, she became the first woman ever to run for president of the United States with the civil rights campaigner and former slave Frederick Douglas as a running mate. So soon after this move to England and settled at her late husband's country estate in bread and Norton, she never forgot the USA and her heritage in that country. So around about this time she began to throw her copious energies into forging Anglo-American friendship. She was instrumental in helping purchase Sulgrave Manor, which was the family home of George Washington, and a powerful ally in the remembering of the Mayflower and the Pilgrims. So in 1920, with the celebration already happening, the Pilgrims were an obvious subject for a lavish and quite elite garden party. So if you look at the old manor house here, the entrance to which you can see the archway, this was a fitting backdrop for an elaborate cast of historical characters. The producers always seem to work better if they took place in a kind of historicised local setting, so whether that be the ruins of a monastery or of a medieval manor house like this. And the characters in this pageant spanned the Elizabethan years to the sailing of the Mayflower. So it concentrated on a relatively small amount of time. Gloria Ana Regina was present in all her splendour, as was Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare of course, and a great many others. And to the delight of the photographers and filmers, the costume characters also spent lots of time milling around picturesquely in the manor grounds before getting down to the serious business of performing in the pageant. So I'm going to try and show a short video here, which gives you a sense of what this looked like. It doesn't have sound so I'll continue to talk as the video plays. So this pageant was divided into two parts. The first told some earlier episodes of the mostly Tudor history, but the second focused, especially on the Pilgrim Fathers and Christopher Martin and Edward Winslow of that group of people. Then came from the West Midlands where this pageant was being staged. What all Martin's pageant emphasised the immediate relationship between America and Britain by glossing over the 11 years the Mayflower voyages had actually spent in Holland in Amsterdam and then Leiden. The scripts describe this as merely being a delay before they move swiftly on to that perilous journey to the new world. The concluding scene was described like this, the Mayflower Pilgrims rooted in the virgin soil of the new world, the finest characteristics of our English speaking race, race is the important part of that statement. So what all Martin's pageant showed how despite the hardships of cold hunger and hostility, the colonies of New England and Virginia have flourished all the way to the present day because of the events of the Mayflower. The pageant then ended with a so called Mayflower Ode, which was written specially for the occasion. I'll read it out. I won't do it. I won't sing it. I'll just read it. But the concluding verse went like this. Hallelujah and rejoicing hymns and praises for the past Pilgrims of the ages voicing joy and song while ages last. Hallelujah and thanksgiving. We will keep your children free by good laws and righteous living for the centuries to be. After that rousing song where the audience was encouraged to join in, everybody evidently exhausted, they then retired to the Manor House for tea. So in these last two pageants I've just spoken about Southampton and Reddens Northam, there was clearly an Anglo American element at the heart. This was a way to celebrate the alliance in the shadow of the First World War that only ended two years previously. But I think it's worth saying as well that for many people at the time, the main selling point of the Pilgrim story was their religious piety. It wasn't about diplomatic relations. So those non-conformists and the congregationists especially that I mentioned at the start of the talk, they like to trace their own separation from the established church all the way back to the Pilgrims who had left an intolerant country to find freedom on their own. So I don't think it's surprising then that when 1920 came around, these communities latched onto this story and held their own religiously focused pageants and these were immensely popular across the country as well. So the most important was the Reverend Hugh Parry's simply titled historical Mayflower pageants. Parry was the popular minister of Haircourt Chapel in London and a keen author of non-conformist plays and pageants, and he was commissioned to write this one by the hastily organized Mayflower Council of England. Again, this was a somewhat elite body chaired by Prime Minister Lloyd George at the time. Parry's pageant, written in 1920, was first performed by a cast of 300 people in Plymouth, so it was somewhat smaller than other pageants performed at the time. But we think from adding up the attendance figures that it was still seen by about 30 to 40,000 people in Plymouth. Over that summer and into 1921 and beyond, he toured this production across many other towns and cities in Britain, Sheffield, Preston, London, Huddersfield to name just a few. In all of these places, it was local non-conformist congregations that came together, not just to watch, but also to take the roles in the pageant as well. And like Southampton's pageant, there was some element of the present. John Olden did again see a vision of the American entry to the First World War, though this time in a crystal ball given to him by Native Americans rather than an English gypsy. The pageant stuck more faithfully to the history of the pilgrims. It was from events in screwy manner, that small Midlands village where the pilgrims would come together in the early 17th century. And it also did depict the time they'd spent building their community in the Netherlands. So though Parry was drawing on the romance of older literary treatments, like the poetry of Henry Longfellow and the Courtship of Miles Standish, this was still really a story that was steeped in religious memory. It was a way for congregation lists and other non-conformist denominations to celebrate their one origin for their beliefs. And there was another historical production that premiered in Plymouth as well, called Mayflower, A Play of the Pilgrim Fathers. This was written by W.Edward Sterling and Alfred Hayes, a sort of double-act team. Prologue by James Randall Harris, who was another eccentric Mayflower figure you'll be able to hear about next week if you tune in to Martha's talk. The Prime Minister, the American Ambassador, the American Consul General, and another number of other British and American dignitaries lent their support to this play, so it ensured that it got a really good run in the popular press. And the text of the play was even published by Mills and Boone, better known today for us for them, romantic literature, and this brought more attention to the pageant as well. But because it took place indoors, the storyline relied much less on those large crowd scenes of thousands of people, and it was more on the dialogue and the interaction of the characters away from the wailing winds that play those outdoor pageants, which had often made subtleties of the dialogue both mute and moot. This was a standard-led character drama, I think. In comparison to those pageants that I spoke about as well, it was also somewhat lacking in humour. It stuck even more rigorously to the original story, although it did bring in that romance element from Longfellow's Love Triangle between John Olden, Patricia Mullins, and Miles Standish. So, though it was technically a play and used those sorts of motifs in its production, the local newspapers quite sniffily, I think, insisted that it had to be judged by the more limited criteria of the notorious pageant dramas. In that limited way, they said it was satisfactory, but they did also add that the superficiality of the characterisation and what they saw as being the general anti-climax of the action, sailing to the new world, not being enough of them, they said this was likely to stand, not, sorry, not likely to stand the test of the footlights after the special occasion for which it was written had gone by. So the Sterling and Hayes play, which you can see here, seems destined, I think, to fade into obscurity, but that didn't happen, and that was because of its opening night of its London run at the Surrey Theatre on St George's Circus near the Elephant and Castle since demolished. So during the second act of this opening performance, just as the Mayflower was about to set sail from the elaborate stage version of the Barbican at Old Plymouth, the ship, which had been built to be about 10 or 12 feet in height, suddenly collapsed, and sent all the pilgrim fathers and passengers tumbling unceremoniously onto the stage. So the Westminster Gazette, a somewhat tongue in cheek, gave a vivid description, which I think is worth quoting in full, of this mishap on the opening night. As they put it, the sails were set, and the pilgrim fathers and mothers were gathered on the deck and standing the old hundredth as a preliminary to the setting sail. Suddenly something gave way, the ship gradually healed over towards the audience and then collapsed, the whole company being thrown to the ground in the very midst of their psalm, and the ship piled on top of them in a heap of debris and smother of dust. The crash was tremendous, and the audience held its breath as the curtain fell and a glimpse of the pilgrim fathers falling, higgledy-piggledy, heels overhead towards the footlights. No casualties were reported, but the scene was ruined. Laughter, loud and long greeted the opening sentence of the next act. God have brought us safely across the ocean. Incidentally, the Westminster Gazette, where that quote is from, they were damning in their critique of the play anyway. They declared it as not at all worthy of the occasion it seeks to commemorate. And other newspapers took equal pleasure in reporting this incident with headlines like the Daily Chronicles, Mayflower collapses on pilgrim fathers, and the play itself, the Chronicle also declared to be nothing more than a crude melodrama with its romantic subplot clearly lifted from Longfellow. So perhaps in comparison to some of those regional newspapers, London critics were not inclined to pull their punches if they did not enjoy a performance. So to move on in time then, what happened to Mayflower reenactment, incredibly popular at this moment in 1920, when that 300th anniversary of itself also become history? Well, Hugh Perry's pageant that we mentioned that premiered in Plymouth, arguably the most successful of those 1920 events, that was still being performed in the 1930s, especially by those religious congregations that like to trace themselves to the pilgrims. But I think it would also be fair to say that into the mid 20th century decades, the story of the pilgrims, despite being popular in the USA, was beginning to dim in the British public imagination. In the huge historical pageants that were still taking place in towns and cities, the Mayflower now went back to being just one episode of many, just like it had been in the pageant of London in 1911. In Southampton and Plymouth, these two places that arguably played only a minor role in the story of the coming together of the pilgrims, but had nonetheless inserted themselves front and centre in public memory. If they held a pageant, they did usually show at least one pilgrim related episode. So a couple of examples at the demonstrate why they might still do this. You've got to remember that Southampton and Plymouth were ports. They depended on commerce and transatlantic commerce, especially in their own profitability. So the Mayflower, this was a sort of useful way to boast about their long history as places of adventure and trade. So as an example, in the pageant of Hampton in 1929, the finale to that consisted of the spirit of Hampton, which was essentially a woman dressed as the spirit of Southampton being hailed as the queen of ports and being presented with a model of the Mayflower and also one of a modern steamliner too. As you can see, clearly making an action between the two. In the pageant of Plymouth Ho in 1953, one episode showed the pilgrims enjoying what the script described as being the kindness of Plymouth before they left in 1620 on their way to the new world. And even Boston in Lincolnshire, again a place that played only a minor role in the story, they started to get in on the act as well. In their pageant of Boston in 1951, which took place in a local football ground, the pilgrims were seen being apprehended before their failed escape attempt from the Lincolnshire coast in 1607. So even if this was a negative event in the actual history, it was something that this town for was worth celebrating commemorating in the present. At the midpoint of the century, I think there was still a loose sense of religious belief in these pageants and episodes, but the exploits of the pilgrims were now being shown more and more as a symbol of each town's contribution to the unfolding of history, negative or positive. The highest remembrance of their trials and tribulations, both in the old and the new world, was simply becoming something of a distant memory in the popular imagination. And I think this process really accelerated in Britain with the rise of secularism in the 1960s. So, by that point, it was no longer a primarily religious story, and we could argue that the Mayflower is instead starting to become a sort of form of local heritage, something that was available for everyone and not just religious congregations. I think really that is the theme and the interest in the Mayflower that continues to the present day. But I'll leave it there and I'm happy to take any questions on these pageants or indeed any others. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tom. That was that was absolutely fascinating. We've had several questions I think people really taken by this idea of the sort of historical pageant it isn't something that really has a huge amount of resonance. Now I suppose, although I hope you might reflect a bit more on the on the kind of Olympics, which you touched on. You know, these obviously these were really sizable events. And, you know, could you just reflect a bit on how important were they in sort of forming this this modern sense of national identity. And, you know, where and what really supplanted them was it was it television was it film a little earlier kind of other ways that that Brits decided to talk about themselves. And I think they were definitely linked up with building a sense of national identity. The key really is how they did that by thinking about what does the local contribute to the national. It was the sense that if you are locally patriotic, and you can build into this bigger story that will create a stronger patriotism altogether. So especially in the early days of the movement, there were echoes of empire within that. But I think especially the century went on, it remained a way to focus inwardly to think about the history of Britain on its own really. So that is kind of how they became linked to these national identities. And it's important that a lot of the historians that were associated with this might be as what we could see as being sort of patriotic, leaning historians as well. What they were popular for other groups of people. So the Communist Party of Britain used to put pageants on, for example, women's issues used to put pageants on various other left wing groups as well. So, you know, there was something that people could draw upon and I think that's why it was something that could be used by Danny Boyle in 2012, even if we hadn't seen a historical pageant before. It did sort of make sense to some set some idea of how British people see history is this kind of unfolding of events. But of course Danny Boyle took that and put it on its head by depicting what we could see is the birth of social democracy instead. You know, we've seen that focused on the NHS. So he sort of reinvented the pageant for a new audience. Why they declined in their sort of original, original production. There's a few reasons for that. I mean, on the one hand, they were incredibly expensive to prepare and incredibly time consuming as well. So I think the infusions and putting on those events just gradually waned because of the sheer effort involved. And when you then had cheaper ways of achieving the same sort of thing, like sonnet Lumiere, which were light shows that were sort of pageant-esque in their telling of history. That was one way that you could do this on a smaller scale. But also, if you consider that after the Second World War, Britain is becoming a more suburban nation. People aren't living in towns and cities in the same way they were before. So, you know, they're removed from this action as well. And the rise of the television, like you say, that means, you know, there is a leisure activity that doesn't involve you standing in the rain in the British summer. So those are some reasons why it declined. No, that's really helpful. Thank you. Yeah, you touched on the weather, which I couldn't help feeling was a major issue in a British effort to do something outdoors. But just to touch a little bit on their sort of success. You mentioned some of the massive numbers of people who were attending. Do you have any sense, you know, were they commercially successful? I mean, was that, you know, was that the reason that people didn't particularly say that like 1911 example? I mean, you know, were there sort of specialist costumers? I mean, you know, this seems like there could have been a lot of kind of going on to support this kind of enterprise. Yeah, so they were both sorts of commercial, not commercial. They always aimed to make a profit, of course. They were never meant to be loss making ventures, although they frequently were loss making. But the money raised almost always went to charity. So it might be for a particular thing like building a new local history, sorry, a new local museum or a new local hospital. But the money could be dispersed to other charitable groups as well. And it was the case that the performers in the pageant were almost always amateur, definitely before the Second World War. They might be part of amateur drama societies, but they certainly weren't paid actors in any sense. But there were other people that would be paid. So the pageant master, like Frank Lassel, he was paid, and quite a substantial amount of money as well. So he was a sort of, he would travel around doing different pageants in different places and being paid for them. And some of the other roles might be paid as well. On the other hand, lots of the effort of creating and producing them was voluntary. So you would have sewing parties of thousands of women that would come together to make the costumes, for example. Very rare that the costumes were bought as new, although you did sometimes have costumes cropping up from old pageants in new ones. So there was a sharing of resources in that sense. No, that's that's great. And I did wonder that, you know, since the sort of key element to conveying pilgrimness just seemed to be a pointy white collar and a little white cat. So that's pretty easy to to churn out if you were going to do it for you, as you say, for us a local group. We've got a lot of questions. I'm sorry, I'm trying to work my way through them. And there's a couple touching on, I mean, obviously, you know, you showed us examples of a black face, it's obviously a performance tradition, which was still still had a lot of resonance in the 20th century. But we also had a question from Alan, who was asking, you know, how did the relationship with the Native Americans appear if it did in any of these pageants that you know across the sort of, I guess, kind of 50 year period you're looking at and did it change in any way. That's a great, that's a really good question. And I think it goes, there is no constant. There was also no sort of identifiable trend and Native Americans were sort of used in these pageants in different ways. So they could provide quite simply, you know, a moment of dramatic tension between the meeting of these two peoples, or they could be what we could see is like, you know, a noble romantic savage in a way, you know, a plot device to enable the pilgrims to move on in their story. So I was reminded when I was putting this talk together of Spike Lee's description of what he calls the magical Negro, which is an African American character that pops up in a film to help the white characters on their quest or whatever they're trying to do. And I think Native Americans in these pageants sort of operate in the same way. You know, so in one of those examples I used there, they give a crystal ball to allow John Alden to see the future. So there's always this kind of mysticism around the way in which they're portrayed. And there's an apologetics as well. You know, it's certainly not the case that they're interested in portraying the later history of Native Americans. You know, in the massive dispossession of lands and the genocides that take place as well. So it's kind of a complex. Some pageants just ignore it altogether. Which in a way is possible to do if you're focusing on the story in the English context, they show the pilgrims leaving, they don't often show what happens on the other end. And that's, that's really very interesting. And yeah, it's definitely a sort of pause for thought because, you know, particularly when you think about how the story is understood in America. And this came up with seeing Ed's talk last week, which I would encourage if anyone hasn't seen it, you can you can see it on YouTube. And he's touched on the fact that obviously you then have this relationship between the Mayflower story and Thanksgiving, which becomes a very sort of distinct vision of kind of, you know, American, particularly Anglo American kind of cultural birth. And obviously the role that the Native Americans play in that story and it's really interesting that, you know, that essentially they, you know, can be can be done away with entirely in a British retelling of this story that that is, you know, and there's a lot to reflect on there that this is in the context of empire. And, you know, that there's an awful lot of parts of the world where it's very easy to, you know, to just, you know, think of this great British project and ignore the, you know, that as you say, the colonized the example that you had of the pre-World War One example. We had a question from one of the viewers who was asking, in your sort of observing of the 400, Mayflower 400, commemoration has obviously been quite disrupted this year. Do you see any themes sort of continuing from through the 1920s and can you see any new angles coming into this this kind of British examination of the story? That's a great question as well. And I think, yes, there are continuities in their disjunctures as well. So there is an Anglo American element of this still I think, you know, the values of freedom and tolerance that are sort of, in some way, worked their way through the 400 commemoration. They were sort of emphasized in the past as well. So at moments when Anglo America was pretty cohesive or brought together, unsurprisingly, that was moments where the Mayflower was a popular story as well. So it ebbs and flows, you know, it reaches low points when the relationship is a low point. So when this was articulated five or six years ago as an event that was going to be held, this 400 commemoration, it was articulated as an Anglo American thing. You know, it's between Mayflower 400, this organization that is in charge I guess, at one point they said that the Mayflower even sort of represented ongoing fights against the war on terror. So, you know, that these two countries were still, you know, leading the world in that sort of fight. So that is a continuity. It might have lost the language of race in the same way. So, you know, we don't talk about Anglo American identity in terms of Anglo Saxonism or whiteness anymore, for obvious reasons. But a bigger disjuncture is the attention now on the Wampanoag people that was not there in 1920 at all. And that arguably starts in the 1960s and 1970s with the Red Power movement in the USA, but that didn't have any effect in Britain. You know, we can see that there's an obvious reason for that. There is no great Native American population in Britain. So this was a story or a problem, I guess, for Mayflower commemoration that could just simply be ignored. So there were some Native Americans that visited Britain in 1970, but it's a very, very small part of that commemoration. But now we live in a globalized world, even more so than ever. It was impossible to do this commemoration or to do it in any way that was respectful without involving those people as well. So that is another big change, I think. That's really useful, thank you. And I've got a handful of questions I'm going to try and roll together. Turning back to this idea of the historical pageant, I think you've definitely piqued everyone's interest in. And lots of a couple of people reflecting on different forms of this sort of entertainment that still kind of have a place. And I suppose something like The Lord Mayor's Show, somebody has suggested, has the Mayflower ever sort of cropped up in that kind of context. And somebody also saying that they can really see that argument you made about kind of adjutant prop theater and this performance tradition. But are there any particular links that you know of from your research with sort of things like mystery plays, which obviously another form of kind of religious popular drama, I guess. Huge, huge links. So to go back to 1905, the man that invented the historical pageant was called Louis Napoleon Parker. And he was American, British, French heritage and incredibly well traveled as well. So he pulled together all sorts of influences to create this new medium. So the historical pageant in a way is I guess old wine and new bottles in some senses. So medieval mystery plays or passion plays were part of the pageant movement. It would often be the case that even though they were depicting local history, they might have the local people depicting in their pageant and medieval mystery play of the time. If you see what I mean, a sort of play within a play, but they drew on other traditions as well. So the passion play of Oberammergau in Germany, but also closer to home, things like Shakespeare. And like you said, the Lord Mayor's show as well was Louis Napoleon Parker produced some of the Lord Mayor's shows in the late 19th century. So he was definitely aware of those and it is in those sorts of traditions that I think it has continued. So I don't know if the Mayflower has appeared in the Lord Mayor's show. I'm not quite as familiar with that event, but it certainly crops up in carnivals and parades, especially in these towns and places that link themselves to that story. And again, those are much easier ways to include that form of local history without having to ruminate on it too strongly in a parade or a carnival, you know, the characters aren't speaking, they're just processing so it's slightly easier. Oh, that's brilliant. And Christina has just asked a question which I think neatly kind of draws together some of the threads that you were, you were talking about she says you mentioned that a lot of dignitaries and aristocrats took part in the pageants. But you know, as well as obviously local, you know, ordinary local people as well. Were these pageants seen as some way sort of official or kind of establishment retellings of history. That's a great question. I think the short answer to that is yes. So the production of these sorts of marriage society in a way. I mean, for those that are familiar with the idea of the carnival less where, you know, these rituals turned society on its head with, you know, the lowborn people if you want to call them that taking, you know, the rituals, that's not really happening in historical pageants. So if you're a nobleman at the time if you're you know you're a knight of the realm or whatever, you often play a night of the realm of the past in the pageant. If you're a laborer in the present, you play a peasant of the past. So it sort of recreates the hierarchies of society. And for that reason pageants did have their challenges. You know, some people said that these were, you know, not progressive ways of understanding the past. And there was a move towards trying to include everyday people more and more as the pageants went on in the 20th century. So I've written about this elsewhere in the book that you kindly mentioned, Star. You know, people would perform visits of kings and queens but they would do it from the perspective of the everyday person. So the sort of say, well, yes, kings and queens are important, but so are the local people, the everyday people that keep towns and cities moving. But that still wasn't enough for some people and there were these kind of alternative pageants performed. So, as a good example, in 1938, there was the Manchester Historical Pageant, which was all about the official history of the city. And they had this big debate about whether they would contain Peterloo in that pageant, you know, this event where people have been killed by the local yeomanry. And they owned an artifact whether they were going to keep this episode in and they decided to just have a tiny, tiny reference to it. And that wasn't going to go down very well with the local Communist Party. So they staged their own historical pageant, which celebrated, you know, these movements through history that challenged the elites. So trade unions, for example, suffrage campaigns, that sort of thing as well. So it's a malleable form, historical pageant. The big ones are almost always the kind of official viewpoint, but you get these smaller ones that challenge those viewpoints as well. And so in your research, where were you encountering these events? Because obviously, you know, you gave that very enjoyable, you know, the Metropolitan Press delight at the disaster of the Mayflower ship that collapsed on the pilgrims, which was very enjoyable. But, you know, where were these sort of well covered in local, is it newspapers or were there with, you know, with these sort of with the, sorry, with the playbills published, sort of how do you as a historian sort of find these materials? So it's all of the above really. So the scripts would be published, and often beautifully illustrated as well. You would have postcards of the scenes, which sold really well, and they still crop up on eBay if people want to buy them now. But there was film of pageant as well. So the development of film coincided with the development of pageants. And it was a particularly good thing to show because you could keep the camera still in one place to depict the scenes, and they were hugely spectacular as well. So ideally when across to film, and they would often be shown short clips like the one I showed in the talk would be shown in cinemas before, you know, the main event before the feature film, they would have these newsreels or press reels that showed these things. So they survive in film as well. But you were right, it's the local newspapers, you know, before the kind of arguable decline of the local press in the mid to late 20th century. They would cover thousands and thousands of words on these events. They would sometimes reproduce the whole script in the local newspaper, but they would say what the audience reactions were. They would say how many people attended, you know, how much profit or loss the pageant made and they would review it as well about what was included what should have been included. The local newspapers are an incredible source for understanding this. I mean, in a way, it's not surprising that the historical pageant I think declines at the same time as, you know, the local press does as well. Well, and you touched on earlier, didn't you, about other, you know, other forms of mass entertainment. Obviously, you know, you have those nice examples from the early 50s, which is the period when television was, you know, had it sort of boom with Elizabeth's imagination and sort of arrives in British living rooms and you know that those obviously very different ways of consuming popular culture. And that actually had me thinking, you talked a little bit about the sort of struggles of the shows being outdoors, and about dialogue. Were the, did these generally have sort of large scripts, or would I as a, you know, if I was attending would I sort of have a kind of playbill and would I, you know, would that list the scenes and that is that how I would be following it or, you know, did they have amplification and that kind of stuff. Yeah, so in the early 20th century they had an interminable amount of dialogue. So they would be, you know, three hours long sometimes and it would be almost entirely dialogue and the audience has often couldn't hear what was going on. So if they'd chosen to buy the script, you know, some of which were expensive when they were beautifully illustrated ones, they could follow along, but other people turned up just more for the fun of the occasion. You know, that experience of being in the crowd, especially if they'd had a drink as well, you know, it was a fun day out in a way, and they might just be there to see their friends or family that were performing. They weren't interested in the actual history so much. So we have lots of humorous examples of people misunderstanding what was happening in the pageant. So in Manchester in 1926, they wanted to depict this, this local sailing of a ship, right, in reality that ship sank on the river and loads of people died and it was a huge disaster in Manchester's history. So they depicted this in the pageant, they had this kind of papier, mache, ship, and it capsized and everyone laughed because they didn't know what it was meant to depict and they just thought something had gone wrong. So, you know, to what degree to the audience is understand or care about the history that is being portrayed. That worked on different levels. The kind of people that bought the scripts probably did care about the history, and certainly the people that wrote them cared about the history, but other people could engage with them on a more simple level of spectacle as well. So when the 20th century went on, it was the spectacular ones that survived, the ones with flashing lights and music and huge processions of people and dancing, whether that be ballet or folk dancing. So those are the ones that remain really popular, I think, because the dialogue was hard to understand and often a little bit boring. Yeah, and with that account, you can sort of see why I suppose, you know, they perhaps some of these traditions merged into other things like kind of the, you know, the post, you know, the late 20th century acceptance of carnival as sort of something in, you know, meaningful in British culture, for example, or parades as sort of, yeah, where it's a bit more, it's easier to comprehend perhaps. I did have a question from Alan, who's asking a little bit about I guess was it going back to some of the business side of it. Did people, I mean, were these published to the extent that people were copywriting particular versions and so, you know, was it possible to just take a take a pageant off the shelf or was part of the whole point that particularly for the local ones that people really wanted to write their own. That's a great question. You have both, I presume they were all copyrighted in a sense but some were the copyright allowed to re-performance so Hugh Perry's Mayflower pageant, for example, that was performed in lots of different places. But it was those ones that didn't relate to local history that could be re-performed, because, you know, they made sense anywhere, you know, people aren't going to perform the pageant of Plymouth in Nottingham, for example. Those ones, yes they were copyrighted, but they were one-off events, you know, they happened once, never again. But there were these other ones that did continue to be produced in other places as well. I don't know the business side of that, presumably they would have to pay some form of royalty to the people that had written those original pageants. And similarly a question just come in which I'm not sure if you know from the work that you did at the BL or the Ed did, but did these plays, were they sent in for approval by the Lord Chamberlain's office? Did they have to have that level of official stamp? That's a very, very educated, good, good question, which I do know the answer to, but it was something I learned relatively recent in the research on these events, but yes, they did have to be sent to the Lord Chamberlain. And we know this because before the 1930s, they refused to depict Queen Victoria in these plays. The Lord Chamberlain wouldn't pass it. And it was only when, I'm not very good on royal history, but it was only when the last remaining child of Victoria had died, I think, that they deemed it okay to portray Queen Victoria in these pageants. So, on a whole occasion, she does slip in, and I don't know how they got past the Chamberlain, but definitely they were of you, which again might suggest why they were often quite conservative tellings. Well, that's really helpful. And for anyone listening who doesn't know that the Lord Chamberlain's office was the state's theatre sensor, and the office was eventually defunct by 1968, but the archive of the Lord Chamberlain's office is at the British Library. It's one of our, one of our most interesting kind of theatre history collections. So I'm quite sure that a number of these texts that you're talking about are there. And obviously they also have the correspondence for the plays, which weren't deemed acceptable, and interesting linking back to the mystery plays. They obviously, another thing that wasn't allowed to be performed on British stages by professional companies was you couldn't depict God. And so that was often a stumbling block. And you then had, certainly I know from the reading that I've done, later in the 20th century, you have people saying, well, look, you used to do this for that, you know, you'd let us re-perform a mystery play, you know, why can't we do it? You know, why can't it be a new play featuring God? So that was a sort of interesting kind of ongoing cultural, cultural dialogue. But I think we're drawing to a close. I'm just going to do a quick scan, see if there's any final, final questions that we need to pick up. So I think just as a last question, and this may be something that you that, you know, there's nothing worse than somebody ending with something which is completely outside the frame of your research. But I was just curious, you know, in the scholarship and in your research, you know, how do any of these themes that you've spoken about or kind of these of the popular performance, how does that carry through into sort of contemporary historical re-enactment? Kind of what threads do you still, do you still see? That's a good question, a difficult one. So there are some friends that continue. And I think if we see that on a simple level, the joy of historical passion for many people was the taking part. It was the, it was the chance to dress up and have fun with friends and family and perform. And I think that lasts into the more recent historical re-enactment culture as well. So the sealed knot, which is the English Civil War re-enactors, that formed in the 1960s, I think it was. And I think, you know, there was some crossover from that. And some of those older aspects of historical pageantry about accuracy and authenticity, they're still important in re-enactment now as well. So, you know, there was this attempt to make sure the history, you know, they may have taken some liberties with the telling to make it more enjoyable. They did care about accuracy as well. You know, you couldn't depict things that hadn't happened without people picking up on it and saying, you know, well, this isn't real. And they did care about the costumes as well, even if, as we know now, you know, the pilgrim costumes are a complete stereotype and that they probably didn't wear those costumes. So some of those elements have lasted into the present, I think, is the detachment of historical re-enactment from telling a grand story. And that's what has been lost. You know, many of the re-enactment societies are about individual events like wars, you know, and about the accuracy and understanding of those. They're not about a sort of teleological history from, you know, ancient past to the present. And that's probably because historical scholarship, I think, is matured by now. And we see it as being problematic to say, you know, well, this nation developed like this because of this event and this event. You know, the unfolding of what historians call wiggish history, you know, leading up to this great present, that simply won't do anymore as a form of history writing. So the pageant struggles because of that, I think. Yeah, and where do you then, just as a final note, I suppose, bring us sort of to the present, I suppose, you know, I still think of 2012 as recent. Um, you know, where did, so, I suppose, why do you think we were the, we were also sort of ready to receive that kind of that lengthy telling of history, which Danny Boyle tried to do in this opening ceremony? Where do you see that sitting with, as you just said, those kind of public attitudes towards history? I don't know it. I did try and contact Danny Boyle to ask him. This publicist sent me an email saying, well, Danny's on holiday right now. He'll get back to you. He never did. So I don't, I don't know how Danny Boyle's mind worked. I think there was an attempt to find something that felt British in a way, and, but also to reinvent that. And I think, you know, Danny Boyle did a brilliant job in that sense. You know, it did tell the history of Britain in a way that I think, you know, people are perhaps more conserved about history did understand and appreciate to a degree. There were some challenges as well. You know, there were some challenges about the ethnic diversity in the cast is not representing Britain. But, you know, on the other hand, he reinvented, he did reinvent that for a new audience as well. So bringing the pageant into the present, you know, by having this story of the founding of the NHS, for example. It's probably worth saying that the, you know, the kind of slightly more conservative historical pageant survives elsewhere as well. There's Kinran in Durham, which puts this on this portrayal of a long version of history as well. So, you know, I shouldn't say it's totally declined. You know, it is still attractive to some audiences. Well, that's wonderful. Thank you so much. I've just realized we've got to I had another question, but I'm going to hold it. And just to say thank you so much once again. And for anybody who would would like to come along next week, we have the final talk in our trio of talks, I'm just going to put the details in the in the chat. It's the talk, I think is going to focus most specifically on the 1920 tercentenary. And so I know we had a couple of questions about that as a really interesting historical moment. And I know Martha's talk has some really fascinating and completely batty elements to it. So I think I think everyone really enjoyed that. And also to share that there's a there's a little survey monkey that the project that Tom's been been organizing would like you to fill in if you have a moment. So my colleagues have just popped that in the survey monkey link. If you wouldn't mind they, it helps tell the funders how lovely and marvelous everything has been, which I hope you will agree. So if you wouldn't mind just joining me and thanking Tom obviously Tom the problem with this is is that it's just you and me talking to each other so you can't hear the rapturous applause from the audience so I'm going to do it for them. And to say thank you so much everybody and I hope you have a lovely afternoon. Thanks very much Tom.