Letters
PAGEANT PRAISE
In the June issue I greatly enjoyed Paul Readman’s account of 20th-century pageants, not least the wonderful images. My interest stems both from my role as a school archivist and from my own family history. At Lord Williams’s School, Thame, the archives contain only one photo of a pageant, dating from 1913, black and white and an altogether more modest affair than Sherborne’s grand show, but at that time it was just a small boys’ grammar school in a very quiet market town.
Whereas ‘Lord Bill’s’ involvement was slow and modest, my mother was a pioneer, actively and deeply involved in pageantry, though not until after the Second World War. I have no reason to doubt the statement in Paul’s excellent survey that nationally the heyday of pageants was over by the 1950s and 1960s, but in Northamptonshire they were just getting going and remained popular throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.
My mother wrote the script for
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