Description
This celebration in the Primitive Methodist Church at Ellesmere is another example of the innumerable small-scale local celebrations organised across towns and villages in Britain under the auspices of the Free Church Council. The Council was hugely important to the entire tercentenary initiative, doing everything from organising pageant volunteers in London to providing lecture content to speakers across the country. In this case, music, speeches, and prayer were all part of the proceedings at Ellesmere.
The breadth and depth of involvement by the churches, often hand-in-hand with civic and local government (indeed, there would have been extensive overlap in personnel across the sectors), is quite different from later commemorative activities in 1970, which tended to be heavily based on local, often commercial, interests.