The Crow's Nest

Description:

During her time in Birmingham, Gwen Lally reportedly had a megaphone with the names engraved of all the previous pageants she had produced. The pageant was directed from the ‘Crow’s Nest’, perched on the roof of the grandstand, where Lally controlled a system of loud speakers operated by her microphone (most of the loudspeakers were buried in the ground so that the audience could not hear her). These methods clearly had the desired results – writing in the Birmingham Weekly Post during the pageant in July 1938, ‘The Looker-On’ observed that ‘everything seemed so orderly. There was a total absence of flurry, and each person knew to the minute when he or she was expected to go into the arena’.

In a series of articles which later appeared in the Weekly Post, Lally recounted an incident which reveals that she did indeed make use of the latest sound technologies, although sometimes to her detriment. In 1930, Lally produced the Warwick Pageant. There had already been some objections from members of the Town Council to the language occasionally used by Lally, but for her words were ‘a relief to the distracted mind’. It was during this production that Lally first used a microphone for direction; switches were connected to each of the assembly points but unfortunately Lally was not entirely familiar with the system, leading to a dress rehearsal audience, full of children, overhearing an outburst directed at an actor who had entered the stage in the wrong costume. Letters of complaint from the Mothers’ Union soon followed but the matter was quickly resolved after a sincere apology by Lally.