Description:On the 2nd February 1938, the Birmingham Mail announced that Miss Gwen Lally (1882-1963) would direct the Birmingham Pageant to celebrate the centenary of the Charter of Incorporation, to be held in July at Aston Park. Described as the ‘only woman pageant master in the world’, Lally began her career as an actress, appearing mainly in Shakespearean plays. She later went on produce plays, along with lecture on the theatre and write poetry. The Times remarked in her obituary that ‘it was an age of megaphones not microphones and Gwen Lally owed as much to her powerful personality and striking figure as to her knowledge and flair’.
Lally’s reminiscences about her time in Birmingham appeared in the Birmingham Weekly Post in March and April 1939. These are particularly revealing about her personality and methods of working. She describes how ‘it took every moment of the three months allotted to the production, to get Birmingham to become “pageant-minded” . . . work had to be very intensive to get the results I was determined to achieve’. She faced difficulties winning over parts of the city, most notably Edgbaston, while Yardley residents threatened a boycott over the city council’s ‘despoilment’ of its amenities. She also explains that she rejected a purely processional form in favour of ‘stylising’ the participants in a modified ballet form. In recounting the episode which re-enacted the Priestley Riots, Lally describes herself as ‘a super-lunatic perched precariously on the roof of a motor-car, yelling at the shrieking crowd through a megaphone’.
Text and research by Dr Nicola Gauld