Project explores town’s pageant
New research into Scarborough’s major five-day historical pageant in 1912 featuring 1,000 residents
A major historical research project is looking for stories about a spectacular pageant in Scarborough more than 100 years ago.
The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain is an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project examining historical pageants in 20th century Britain.
The project is teaming up with Scarborough Museums Trust to unearth the story of a huge and ambitious five-day long pageant in Scarborough in 1912, during which over 1,000 local residents held re-enactments of the town’s history on Castle Hill.
Redress of the Past team members Mark Freeman, an historian of education at the Institute of Education, and Dr Charlotte Tupman, project research associate at King’s College London, are travelling to Scarborough on Monday April 13 to give an evening talk entitled Historical Pageants in Twentieth-Century Britain to Scarborough Archaeological and Historical Society.
In the afternoon, they’ll be at Scarborough Library from 2pm to 5pm, and hope members of the public will come along with stories, objects, pictures or family memories of the Scarborough pageant.
Museums Trust staff then aim to work with local schools to produce their own pageant in late 2016, followed by an exhibition at Scarborough Art Gallery.
Scarborough Museums Trust collections assistant Julie Baxter, who is leading on the project, said: “The Scarborough Pageant of 1912 was a huge and spectacular event which involved the whole community – and yet very few people in the town know about it. We’d like to change that, and hope to create our own pageant recreating some of the events of that week.”
For more information on The Redress of the Past visit www.historicalpageants.ac.uk