The playwright and theatrical impresario Louis Napoleon Parker staged a historical pageant in the small town of Sherborne, Dorset, in June 1905. A former music master at Sherborne School, Parker was a charismatic and hugely energetic showman, with a genius for publicity. His pageant caused a sensation. Over the next few years, Britain succumbed to what the press described as “pageant fever” or “pageantitis”. Hundreds of thousands of people caught the bug. The fever spread quickly across southern England, taking firm hold in places such as St Albans, Bury St Edmunds and Winchester. But it soon spread to the Midlands and the North (Liverpool held a large pageant in 1907), into Wales and Scotland, and overseas to America and the British Empire. At parties, men and women were frequently asked, “Do you padge?”

BRINGING HISTORY TO LIFE

What were these historical pageants that our ancestors got so excited about?