Sarah Tooley's lecture, Richmond Athenaeum, Richmond (November, 1920)

This event in Richmond, one of many in Britain staged for the 300th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage in 1920, is an example of the importance of simply telling the story of the Pilgrim Fathers to audiences who did not necessarily have much acquaintance with it. Unlike American audiences, Britons had not always grown up with heroic stories of the Pilgrims or of their first “Thanksgiving” in Massachusetts, and so much effort was put into making the story more well-known, though with a gloss that made it clear why it was significant for Britain.

The Richmond Athenaeum organised a series of lectures, the first of which was given by Mrs Sarah A. Tooley. Sarah Tooley was a journalist, biographer, and historian. Her works included biographies of Harriet Beecher Stowe (an American author with wide popularity in Britain), Queen Victoria, and Florence Nightingale. Tooley would have been well-known to her audience.

Interesting, Tooley professed a degree of reluctance in regards to the talk she had prepared: she had written it before the tercentenary had got underway (and also delivered it at Bredon's Norton) and she was conscious of how much more well-informed her audience would be in light of the many Mayflower plays, pageants, books, and articles in circulation by the autumn of 1920. Nevertheless, she went on to give a detailed summary of the key historical and biographical facts of the story, much of which likely was new to the audience, despite the lecturer’s diffidence. Tooley’s lecture was illustrated with lantern slides, including a facsimile of the “Mayflower Compact”, the agreement signed by the Mayflower Pilgrims which many contemporary Americans believed presaged the freedoms enshrined in the later Bill of Rights.

Richmond Herald, “Richmond Athenaeum”, 20 November 1920.