Bath in the early 20th century was a shadow of its Georgian heyday. In an effort to re-establish the city as a tourist destination a Bath Historical Pageant was organised, which involved collaboration with Baths all over the world, says Andrew Swift
Joe Lycett’s latest stunt – an International Day of Birmingham to boost the city’s profile – has attracted widespread publicity, perhaps not surprising given the dearth of other upbeat news at the moment. The celebration, held on 24 September, marked the historic alliance between Lycett’s hometown and the 18 Birminghams across North America.
Media coverage was so positive, there seems every chance that other cities will be tempted to try something similar. Bath would be an ideal candidate for such a celebration as there are at least 14 towns in North America which bear the city’s name. In fact it’s already been done, way back in 1909, and, while Lycett’s Birmingham venture lasted a day, Bath’s lasted a week.
In the early 20th century, historical pageants were all the rage. The first, at Sherborne in Dorset in 1905, was so successful that towns and cities across the land were soon rushing to stage their own. They followed a tried-and-tested format – a series of historical tableaux commemorating events from each town or city’s past, scripted by local antiquarians or clergymen and involving large numbers of participants re-enacting parades, ceremonies, battles and the like.
The organisers in Bath, while they kept to the basic formula, wanted to give their pageant an international dimension. At a meeting to drum up support, the head of the organising committee, T Sturge Cotterell, announced that he wanted to involve towns in North America that were called Bath.
This was not so much an attempt to foster international understanding as a hard-headed business plan. Bath had been trying for decades to revive its fortunes as a fading spa, without much success. As a result, certain far-sighted individuals had decided that it would be more worthwhile trying to establish the city as a heritage destination, along the lines of Stratford-upon-Avon or Oxford, both already popular with American visitors.
Bath had not only the Roman Baths, opened 12 years earlier, but also a wealth of Georgian architecture, which was just beginning to be appreciated. The Victorians had had little time for 18th-century buildings, and the reason so many survived in Bath was because of the city’s precipitous decline in popularity. Had it continued to prosper as a spa throughout the 19th century, much of it would have been rebuilt along the lines of the Empire Hotel.
It is no coincidence that 1909 saw Bath’s first major conservation battle – the fight to save the redevelopment of the north side of Bath Street – which saw the birth of the Old Bath Preservation Society.
So the chance to get loads of Americans over to show them that Bath was not just a run-down spa but an architectural showpiece with a fantastic history was too good to pass up. That said, the way they went about it is not something that would be likely to cut much ice today.
The pageant was to be performed daily, from Monday 19 July to the following Saturday, in Royal Victoria Park. The sequence of historical tableaux would be followed by a Grand Finale, in which ‘fair maidens’ from the Baths across the sea would pay homage to Mother Bath, a personification of the city. With bugles blowing, bells ringing, cannons booming, Mother Bath would be showered with roses, and doves would be released to the strains of O God our help in ages past.
The problem with all this, as far as raising the city’s profile was concerned, was that none of the transatlantic Baths was a bustling metropolis. Even the biggest of them, such as Bath, Maine, a shipbuilding town on the Kennebec River, and Bath, New York, founded by William Pulteney around the time he was redeveloping Bathwick, only had populations of around 10,000. Some were hardly villages: Bath, North Carolina had around 400 residents, while Bath, Illinois had 330. Bath, South Dakota, established when the railroad passed through in 1881, had less than a hundred.
Bath’s organising committee had a trump card up its sleeve, however, in the person of Lady de Blaquiere, who lived in the Circus. An inspirational figure who galvanised public meetings with her call of ‘Wake up, Bath’, she had the organisational flair to set up enough working parties to produce the thousands of costumes vital to the project’s success. Even more crucially, she had contacts. Her father was a Canadian printer who had owned a newspaper in New York. So it was that the Mother Bath episode was scripted not by some local worthy but by Katrina Trask, a New York author and philanthropist, whose husband was chairman of the New York Times.
With lavish media coverage thus assured, the size of the towns represented at the pageant was unimportant. As word of what was brewing in Bath spread, visitors from across North America set off for Bath to join in the festivities. On 25 July, the New York Times reported that ‘the Americans have made themselves extremely popular among the citizens of Bath and are being showered with entertainments… Several thousand Americans visited Bath during the week, and a large number are remaining throughout the pageant.’
After the final performance on Saturday afternoon, there was a civic banquet in honour of the North American representatives, followed by a grand parade and a ‘battle of the flowers’ and firework display in Sydney Gardens, witnessed by around 12,000 people. It had all, despite the weather – which was generally unsettled – been a great success.
Heritage tourism would have come to Bath without the Pageant, but it is by no means certain it would have become as central to the city’s economy – or that Bath would be so firmly on the international tourist trail – if the Pageant had not kick-started the process a century ago. The open-top buses that trundle round the streets today are a direct consequence of that initiative, which prepared the way for a fundamental shift from Bath as health resort to Bath as tourist Mecca. Even so, it is ironic that the 21st century has witnessed something the worthies of 1909 had written off as impossible – the revival of spa culture in the city.
The full story of the Bath Pageant and of Bath in 1909 is told in The Year of the Pageant by Andrew Swift & Kirsten Elliott, published by Akeman Press; akemanpress.com