Introduction
Historical reenactment is a popular means of engaging with the past in the contemporary world: re-enactment is prevalent throughout popular culture, ranging from living history performances to museum exhibitions and television history programmes (de Groot 2009; Agnew 2004). In Theatres of Memory Raphael Samuel linked the popularity of historical re-enactment with the rise of local history ‘do-it-yourself’ projects and ‘railway preservation mania’ in the 1950s (1994: 175–176, 184). The close relationship between re-enactment and local history is important, however, the trajectory of the phenomenon can be traced further back than the 1950s. One medium through which to historicise re-enactment is historical pageantry. In historical pageants various communities and organisations perform episodes of their past that they understood as important. The high period of historical pageantry was the early decades of the twentieth century, but pageants remained a vibrant way for communities to engage with the past up to the 1950s, and even to the present. Historical pageantry became highly popular particularly in the Anglophone world, but was by no means limited to it. One of the largest interwar pageant spectacles was the Pageant of Empire, held at the Wembley Stadium in 1924 in London in association of the British Empire Exhibition.
This chapter has threefold aims. Firstly, as suggested previously, it argues that we should pay more attention to the historical trajectories of heritage and re-enactment. It thus concurs with David C. Harvey’s (2001: 320) notion that heritage should not only be seen as a product of recent postmodern economic and societal changes. Secondly, and because of the distinct localness involved in historical pageantry, the pageants have a lot to contribute to discussions concerning memory and place, and the relationship between various, intertwined scales of heritage and senses of belonging. Historical pageants of the twentieth century were staged both in cities and in the countryside. In my own research I have explored historical pageantry in the context of post-war urbanisation and modernisation in Finland, in particular with regard to the cities of Helsinki, the capital of the country since 1812, and Tampere, the major industrial city, founded in 1779. Both cities organised large-scale and popular historical pageants in association with city jubilees, in 1950 and 1954, respectively (Vahtikari 2017, 2019 [forthcoming]). Thirdly, by focusing on urban historical pageantry, this chapter sheds light on the urban variable as part of memory/heritagescapes. How did historical pageants – even though considered as passing events – work to anchor collective remembrance to the urban landscape?
Historical pageants: what, when, where and why?
Historical pageants were ‘paratheatrical events in which performers impersonate(d) figures from the past’ (Dean 2014: 1), and in which a community’s or an organisation’s history was presented in successive episodes. The ultimate high period of historical pageantry was the early twentieth century, a period that witnessed rapid societal change in the urbanising West. Recent scholarship has convincingly shown that historical pageants also remained popular and ambitious undertakings in the very different contexts of the inter-war period, pulling in ‘huge crowds of both performers and spectators, all in the name of civic publicity’ (Hulme 2017: 23) in both rural and urban locations. During the 1920s and 1930s, historical pageants also became an integral part of the commemorative culture of the First World War (Bartie et al. 2017). There was another high peak in historical pageantry during the immediate post-war period, which in Britain was associated with major events such as the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the coronation of Elisabeth II in 1953 (Freeman 2013).
The pageant form was used by a great variety of institutions and groups to commemorate a wide range of issues and events: to give a few examples, twentieth-century historical pageants were staged by city governments, historical societies, the co-operative movement, women’s organisations, or the British Communist Party, which organised a Communist Manifesto Centenary Pageant in Kensington in 1948. Many historical pageants were organised in association with centenary celebrations of cities. The mid-1950s by no means marked the end of the phenomenon, but, as large-scale events that mobilised a large part of the community, historical pageants seem to have given way to other forms of both popular entertainment and historical re-enactment (Freeman 2013). The decision to stage a historical pageant for the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, watched by a global TV audience of 900 million people, is an example of the enduring significance of historical pageantry as a form of historical re-enactment.
There were two main types of historical pageants. In static, theatre-like pageants a community’s or an organisation’s history was performed to an audience that remained seated in one place. Important elements of the performance were drama, dance, and music with minimal dialogue. There also existed what may be called ‘processional pageants,’ in which the historical scenes from the life of a community or an organisation, often staged on platforms of trucks or on horse-drawn carriages, were presented to an audience gathered along a pre-determined route. Viewing a processional pageant, thus, to a certain extent at least, resembled the experience of visiting a museum exhibition: the main difference being that while at a museum, the audience is expected to tour a chronologically ordered route, in a historical pageant the members of the audience would stay in one place, and the historical narrative would unfold in front of their eyes. Because of their arrangement in the form of floating parades, the processional pageants were able to include more scenes than their theatre-like counterparts.
Both pageant types employed pageant masters who were theatre professionals and involved a great number of professional and volunteer actors, using public space as a stage. Many pageants relied more on visual spectacle than on the spoken word and dramatic narrative (Ryan 2007: 78). Historical pageants were represented and mediated in popular culture in numerous visual ways: they were reproduced in the media, film, photographs, and postcards. These visual forms of representation were supplemented by a broad variety of textual representations, such as written programmes, academic and popular history books, and newspaper articles.
In addition to the tradition of dramatic performance, the processional pageants were also linked to another long-term tradition, namely that of urban processions and parades of various kinds, whether or not their roots might be religious, royal, civic, or working-class. The examples given in this chapter draw from historical pageants staged by democratic governments; however, pageants were equally organised by totalitarian regimes. For example, National Socialist Germany commemorated the 700th anniversary of Berlin with a processional historical pageant as part of the wider jubilee programme. The focus of historical representation, instead of being on the more recent metropolitan past, was on medieval Berlin and Germany (Thijs 2008).
Chronology, relationship to modernity, and nationhood
Chronology was the main ordering principle of the episodes in both pageant types. The historical pageant organised in Helsinki in 1950, for instance, followed this principle rather meticulously. The pageant began by introducing two important opening units – one depicting the area of the city prior to the formation of an urban settlement, and the other, the founding of the city. These two scenes grounded the historical narrative presented in the pageant in the local place and, by producing continuity, they legitimised the position and power of the present municipal government. But they also made explicit the striking modernity of the present city when compared to its rural origins. These remained underlying themes in many scenes that followed, which depicted key moments in the urban development (e.g. ‘Helsinki the fourth largest harbour in the country’), and a collection of ‘firsts,’ such as the unit presenting ‘The first car’ (1903). Several scenes made reference to former rulers, Swedish kings, and Russian emperors, as well as to the key figures of nineteenth-century Finnish nationalism. Equally many units presented the city’s involvement in and survival from wars and other disasters (one pageant unit even referred to the most recent conflict, the Finnish involvement in the Second World War), tying the pageant narrative to a wider memory culture of post-war survival. The last step in the chronology was represented by a unit forward-looking called ‘The Olympic youth.’ The final scenes of Helsinki’s pageant broke the chronology, as they presented different municipal institutions, such as the fire and police departments or social welfare institutions, in past-present comparisons. Nevertheless, these units co-produced the pageants’ overall message of civic progress and an inclusive urban community. How near to the present the historical narratives unfolded varied significantly between different pageants. The post-war Finnish urban processional pageants usually ended with scenes depicting the contemporary and the future city, thus becoming a medium through which to imagine the future of the community (Vahtikari 2017, 2019 [forthcoming]).
One theme arising from pageants’ commitment to chronology and to the narratives of progress has been their relationship with modernity. While historical pageants have been regarded as inherently anti-modern and antiquarian ventures (Glassberg 1990: 149–150), recent research has demonstrated the more nuanced relationship between modernity and anti-modernity involved in staging them. The modernity of early-twentieth-century pageants becomes clear when exploring their nature as modern mass-events, and their employment of modern visual techniques (Ryan 2007: 78). In addition, the research on historical pageantry of the twentieth century is necessarily a commentary on modernity’s relationship to the past. As Paul Readman (2005: 199) has noted, history-consciousness mediated through the early-twentieth-century historical pageantry ‘was not antithetical to contemporary engagement with “modernity,” rather a counterpart to it.’ There was a strong emphasis on continuity, which ‘was bound up with emphasis on progress’ (Readman 2005: 194). While post-war urban pageants were more inclined to make distinctions between the past, the present, and the future, the constructing of continuities, as well as a belief in the exemplary nature of the past, remained important features of them (Vahtikari 2019 [forthcoming]). The similar kind of active negotiation between continuity and discontinuity also characterised the nostalgic experiences that historical pageants facilitated, which involved more than just sentimental denial and longing for lost and idealised earlier times. There was also a utopian element in the pageant nostalgia (Vahtikari 2019 [forthcoming]; Hodge 2011: 120; Pickering & Keightley 2006: 921).
It has been debated with regard to historical pageants of the early twentieth century in England, to what extent their focus was on the narratives of the Empire versus a more locally grounded English nationhood (Readman 2005: 182–190; Ryan 1999). A link between historical pageantry and nationalism exists, and historical pageantry can be viewed as one medium that worked to localise national projects of identity and memory (in the Nordic context, see Aronsson et al. 2008). Historical pageants often included ‘hot’ signifiers of the nation, such as national flags, national anthems, or references to patriotic war narratives. Nationalism was also embedded in the programmes and practices of historical pageants in more subtle ways – e.g. in the language that was used – which in Michael Billig’s (1995) terms could be called ‘banal nationalism.’ However, the manner in which people taking part in pageants reacted to these symbols and messages obviously varied. In Helsinki, in 1950, two pageant units in particular aimed to evoke patriotic sentiments in spectators: the ‘Declaration of Independence in 1917,’ where men dressed in white carried national flags, and the ‘Year 1939,’ a unit depicting the Winter War by showing a nameless group of military reservists. Building these two units into a seamless entity highlighted the patriotic version of Finnish history, as underscored in the conservative newspaper Uusi Suomi (12 June 1950):
For certain, many spectators shared the patriotic enthusiasm of the Uusi Suomi newspaper. But there also existed very different kinds of descriptions of the same event. For example, the Social Democratic newspaper, Suomen sosiaalidemokraatti (12 June 1950) reported on the ‘Year 1939’ scene by simply stating, in the voice of one spectator, ‘that is how it was.’ Historical pageantry, thus, is an example of, in Rhys Jones and Peter Merriman’s (2009: 172) words, ‘the multiplicity of nationalist discourses and practices affecting, and affected by, individuals and groups within particular places at specific times.’ Meanings associated with national signifiers were sometimes contradictory (Jones & Merriman 2009; see also Jokela and Linkola 2013). Overall, it is important to note that while historical pageantry validated existing hierarchies (Woods 1999: 71), those who participated in pageants were much more than passive recipients in processes of heritage and memory (Vahtikari 2019 [forthcoming]; Freeman 2013; Ryan 2007, Readman 2005).
Beyond the nation and hegemonic narratives: historical pageant as experience
While it is essential to acknowledge the role of historical pageants in constructing the nation, and the empire, where it existed, it is equally important to acknowledge their parallel uses in creating senses of localism. On the one hand, this meant that the different conceptions of community and senses of belonging articulated in the context of historical pageants were not in any opposition to each other (Readman 2005: 178). On the other hand, the inter-war and post-war periods saw a more conscious turn to local community by means of historical pageants and the narrative themes of historical local self-government that they presented. This may be seen as a response to the contemporaneous tendencies towards national-level centralisation (Hulme 2017: 9; Freeman 2013: 427). The distinctive localness of historical pageants may also be seen in how they ‘played an important role in supporting local community identities in the aftermath of collective trauma’ of the First World War, thus becoming local ‘sites of mourning’ (Bartie et al. 2017). The same holds true of post–Second World War historical pageants, at least in the case of Finland, where urban pageants provided alternative arenas for the commemoration of the war, and for dealing with collective and individual traumas below the official state level of memory, which in the immediate war years was adapted to the realpolitik of Finnish-Soviet relations (Vahtikari 2017). The focus on the localism and voluntarism involved in historical pageants can also make visible social groups whose histories and experiences differed from nationally authorised heritage narratives.
Like research that deals with more recent heritage phenomena, studies on historical pageantry have often emphasised the representational side of pageants, and the messages they conveyed: which versions of the past were validated by official producers of heritage to the public. As with any memorial projects, historical pageants were equally about what was forgotten and deliberately disregarded as well as what was remembered. The pageant form as representation was necessarily selective: for example, the historical pageant organised in Helsinki in 1950 included 52 units, out of which some were ahistorical (Figure 32.1). In addition to these official, selective readings of the past and community that were put forward in the context of the pageants, there were co-existing private, vernacular, and class/gender-bound understandings that were not officially represented. Often, and not surprisingly, it was the difficult memories and the memories of minority groups that were marginalised as part of the public representation. The 1950 historical pageant in Helsinki, while otherwise keen on drawing survival lessons from previous wars and disasters, failed to mention the Civil War of 1918, which in the post-war period still represented a divisive experience within the Finnish society (Vahtikari 2017).
The level of spontaneity in the organisation of pageants varied in different settings. In Helsinki, the preparation of the pageant was fairly top-down. The city funded the whole event, except for the programme leaflet, which was paid for by local firms. The organisation was overseen by a city-government-appointed jubilee committee, including many prominent figures in culture and finance, as well as professional historians, and in particular by one of its 20 sub-committees. In addition, the city appointed two pageant masters, who both were theatre professionals, to write the script and to direct the pageant. Despite this organisation from above, Helsinki’s pageant also involved a fair amount of citizen participation and voluntarism. Around 800 people, including both professionals and amateurs, such as university students, gymnasts, and members of local societies, participated as actors. Some 100,000 people gathered on the city streets to follow the pageant, and an additional 40,000 participated in it at the Olympic Stadium, where the pageant became part of the city’s wider 400th jubilee. This was quite a large audience in a city containing fewer than 400,000 inhabitants at the time, and while historical pageants were firmly part of middle-class urban culture, their audience was wider than that. In their capacity to bring together people and groups from different social backgrounds and possessing different goals, pageants may be seen as expressions of civil society (Vahtikari 2019forthcoming). Historical pageants of the first part of the twentieth century were produced in the manner of huge theatre plays, but while adding elements of a very large and mostly amateur cast, interaction with public urban space, and drawing from competing local narratives of memory and history.
Source: Helsinki City Museum (Eino Heinonen).
As with any study on heritage, the research on historical pageants involves the risk of privileging representation and pageants’ symbolic functions in the construction of the nation, empire, or local community identity over interpreting pageants as bodily and emotional experiences, and how important these experiences were to an understanding of history. Framing historical pageantry in terms of heritage as practice and performance, and as something that is produced in ‘the embodied and creative uses of heritage generated by people’ (Haldrup & Bærenhold 2015; see also Crouch 2010), however, is important to our understanding of historical pageantry and its popularity. While history in pageants was represented, and subject to authorised heritage discourses, and the power/knowledge effects they created (Smith 2006), it was also felt, remembered, and lived ‘in the dimensional complexities of the experiences’ they created (Waterton & Watson 2015). Historical pageants were where the passage of time and the past-present-future continuities could be experienced (Vahtikari 2019 forthcoming).
The memorial landscape and pageant histories
Once constructed, memorials and urban memorial landscapes take on an apparent permanence, which masks the often conflicted conditions of their creation (Jordan 2006: 18; Dwyer & Alderman 2008: 168). Urban processional pageants were passing events, which traversed urban space, and lasted for only a few hours at a time. They did not produce any permanent memorials or sites of heritage. This notwithstanding, it may be argued that historical pageants became an integral part of urban memorial landscapes, which could be better seen, to borrow from Dwyer and Alderman (2008: 168), ‘as open-ended, conditionally malleable symbolic systems, ones that are fashioned here-and-now in order to influence a near-at-hand tomorrow.’ As they were staged to the very same city they represented, historical pageants provided physical linkage with the past and anchored collective remembrance to the urban landscape.
The historical pageant organised by the industrial city of Tampere in 1954 (Figure 32.2), serves as an example here. Not surprisingly, the industrial past of the city figured prominently in the pageant, and it included several units related to the history of the city’s largest employer, the Finlayson cotton factory. The route of the pageant also passed by the Finlayson factory, placing the pageant’s historical narrative in a relationship to the material city and its tangible heritage. As a result, a co-constructed experience of time and place, historical narrative and urban space was formed (Vahtikari 2019 [forthcoming]; Waterton & Watson 2015).
For those organising urban processional pageants, the route of the pageant in the public urban space, what was to be included and what was not, was a matter of as careful a consideration as that given to the building of the pageant programme. The route that was selected could reaffirm ‘the symbolic centrality of certain streets, squares and buildings’ (Gunn 2000: 181), and established sites of concentrated collective remembrance. In post-war Helsinki, this meant including key national and civic monuments on the pageant’s route, but also including, in conformity with the strong social-democratic presence in the post-war city government, sites of memory associated with the history of the moderate left (Vahtikari 2019forthcoming). In the process, some ordinary streets and urban spaces were also invested with a special meaning as part of the memorial landscape. The other side of the coin was the obscuring of undesirable urban areas from the public view, as was the case with the Ancoats area in the context of the Manchester Civic Week during the interwar period (Hulme 2013: 89). Much of the literature that discusses historical pageantry points out its nature as a form of civic education. That historical pageants took place in the public urban space and offered a way to associate these civic lessons with the material city.
Source: Museum Centre Vapriikki, Tampere.
As authenticity was one of the key concerns of historical pageantry, it was often the spatial design and the urban spaces in which pageants took place that served to authenticate the historical narratives included in the pageant programmes. Performing collective remembrance of the urban community through historical pageantry did not only shape and re-conceptualise time but also place and memoryscape (Dwyer & Alderman 2008: 173–174; Ryan 2007: 72). Professional historians often had an advisory role in deciding on which episodes should be included in historical pageants, and in this capacity they were able to control – at least to some extent – the overall narrative presented. Even though the degree of realism of pageants’ programmes varied (Bartie et al. 2017), there was usually an endeavor to present historically authentic interpretations of the past. Historical pageantry provided professional historians with a means to spread up-to-date historical knowledge to wider audiences. As with many other elements of ‘exhibitionary complex’ (Bennett 1995), in historical pageants the two objectives of education and entertainment intertwined, and professional historians sometimes voiced concerns about authenticity (Vahtikari 2017). As Jeremy De Groot notes (2009: 105), when discussing contemporary re-enactment as a collectivised experience, it ‘is defiantly outside mainstream professional ways of thinking about the past.’ While professional historians in the post-war period were often involved in staging historical pageants, the realisation that control over historical interpretation was slipping out of their hands may have been part of their authenticity concerns. However, it is important to note that like many contemporary reenactors (Agnew 2004: 330), people taking part in historical pageants took their history seriously, and in fact shared the academic historians’ concern regarding authenticity.
Conclusion: an early form of historical re-enactment
Even though there are some differences between contemporary historical re-enactments and historical pageants of the first half of the twentieth century, historical pageantry fits well within the framework of historical re-enactment, consisting of different history-themed genres ‘linked by common methodologies, modes of representation, and choice of subject matter’ (Agnew 2004: 327). Historical pageantry of the first half of the twentieth century and many contemporary historical re-enactments ‘raise similar questions about the ways in which the past is represented, and “experienced” ’ (Freeman 2013: 425). While usually concerned with authenticity, they all involve imaginative and outside-the-mainstream ways of historical representation. An ambiguous relationship with academic history also characterises both contemporary historical re-enactments and the historical pageantry of the first half of the twentieth century.
Historical pageants, with their participatory nature, which allowed many groups coming from different societal backgrounds to take part and a large group of volunteers to be involved, served to democratise historical knowledge, even though the main narratives – which and whose pasts were to be included or excluded – often remained controlled from above. For those who participated, it was always possible to ignore the pageant messages, or at least to interpret them differently from how they were conceived by the organisers. Vanessa Agnew (2004: 327) distinguishes the ‘winning combination of imaginative play, self-improvement, intellectual enrichment, and sociality’ behind the contemporary popularity of reenactment. When adding a strong emphasis on local community to the equation, the same list of attributes could be easily adjusted to describe the earlier historical pageants. They were at the same time about learning history and entertainment, and about pursuing authenticity and possibilities for play, escapism, and fantasy. Some pageant performers even continued to wear their costumes weeks after the event had ended, ‘producing a blurring of reality and fiction’ (Ryan 2007: 75).
In Britain, historical pageantry was closely associated with the emerging urban preservationist moment, as often the same people contributed to both (Freeman 2013: 436). The connection between historical pageantry and tangible heritage would certainly warrant more research in other contexts as well. In post-war Finland, historical pageantry and urban conservation, albeit the latter mentioned still modest in the early-1950s, were both responses to urban transformation and modernity: both were concerned about the past and offered ways to negotiate the relationship to modernity. While place had a distinctive role in historical pageantry, pageant heritage was and is what scholars today would call intangible heritage. Historical pageants thus encourage us to ask, not only how they relate to historical re-enactment, but also how urban intangible heritage was understood before the more recent accelerating professional and academic interest in it arose.
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