Hugh Parry's Mayflower Pageant, Horticultural Hall, London (September-October 1920)

The performance of Hugh Parry’s Mayflower pageant (which you can read more about here) was the biggest Mayflower event in London, and possibly in the country. The performances took place at the large Royal Horticultural Hall, Westminster, which was normally used for exhibitions and for showing pedigree cats and dogs. It was not the ideal venue for a pageant of 1,000 performers, many of them recruited from churches, and a choir of 750 voices. Even so, the pageant was a success and it went on to be performed over 25 nights. Recruitment for the pageant, including for an addition 300 stewards, was all done through community volunteering, organised in this case by the Central Mayflower Council, which asked every Free Church to appoint a Mayflower secretary to communicate with the central Council and to superintend volunteers locally.

Lady Astor, the American-born British MP for Plymouth Sutton, who had been one of the pageant’s powerful supporters, attended one of the evening performances, which provided an opportunity to reflect on Anglo-American relations. The author, Rev. Hugh Parry, thanked Astor for her support and praised her as “a true descendent of the Mayflower Pilgrims” and a representative of the “Pilgrim Mothers” who, Parry pointed out, they did not hear nearly enough about. Astor’s own remarks focused on the ethnic Anglo-Saxonism that she and many others at the time believed bound together the English and many people in America – not, of course, including the Irish or, oddly, the Germans. This kind of rhetoric was rarely, if ever, employed in the small-scale celebrations that took place in churches or Sunday schools; these tended to identify the religious convictions of the Pilgrims with that of the modern Free Churches, and often to connect this with notions of liberty and democracy. But despite the purely civic nature of the London celebration, Astor nevertheless embraced the ideals of the Pilgrim Fathers as she saw them: “faith, courage, purity, and goodness, the willingness to live, and if need be die, for religion.”

Methodist Times, 10 September 1920.

Daily News, “Mayflower pageant”,  13 October 1920.

Western Morning News, “Mayflower ideals”, 30 October 1920.