Description
This celebration for the 300th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage took the simplest form: a service at the Congregational Church which was located on the Green at Ossett. As at similar events elsewhere, speakers took the floor to reflect on the Mayflower and its meaning for contemporary audiences. Mr F.W. Ridgeway spoke about “Puritan” as a much-decried name, but it was one in which he professed to glory. And while the Puritans’ zeal may at times have led them to make mistakes (Mr Ridgeway provided no specific examples, but we can assume he meant the systematic mistreatment of anyone who was not a Puritan), but that it was by their first efforts that the liberties of the present day had been secured. Following this rather conventional statement, the Rev. W. Charter Piggott discussed his own experience of crossing the Atlantic on an ocean liner: quite different from the Mayflower, which was no bigger than the liner’s lifeboats. However, he did not want to make too much of the adventuring spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers. They were not adventurers, he said, but simple people who loved their own countryside and who overcame their intense reluctance to leave their homeland only because of their ardent desire to worship in peace.
Thus Piggott’s talk developed on a theme that was occasionally latent in the tercentenary celebrations, namely the notion of the Pilgrim Fathers as more English than the English. The implication was that the Pilgrim Fathers sacrificed their lives and homes in England in order to uphold the perceived principles of Englishness in an unknown land.