In 1927 Bridgwater held a magnificent pageant. 1,000 people in costume paraded from Penel Orlieu to Sydenham Manor in costume depicting scenes from the towns history with songs, dances, comedy, acrobatics and even cavalry charges. Half the town turned out to watch them and the other half sat in the pubs saying ‘Nothing ever happens in this town’…
It does of course. It did, it does, and it will. But they didn’t have social media back then to make sure everybody knew that nothing was ever worth doing ever.
But the pageant was definitely worth doing. If something in Bridgwater gets peoples interest it’s our history. The Mayor Walter Deacon, a pharmacist by day, had the idea, T Bruce Dilks, a historian and writer, pulled it together and some of the big names of the town had leading roles. I’d say maybe out of character on purpose. Jim Boltz, leader of the town’s biggest union the T&GWU, for instance, played Bad King John. Well, bad to many, until all those over powerful Barons held him to account, but to Bridgwater, well, he gave us out Charter!
(Watch the Pageant here)
Good History
By the 1980s I was writing plays and musicals with my own take on Bridgwater history but by then the class war was at its height and the Tory Chair of Sedgemoor had no problem playing the role of Judge Jeffries, at the Battle of Sedgemoor ‘after party’ while fiery dockers union leader Ben Tillett was obviously played by fiery postal workers union leader Dave Chapple in our mega 1986 production of ‘Brickyard strike’, which famously featured Mayor Pollard reading the riot act from the balcony of the town hall before unleashing hell on the strikers in the High Street in the form of ordering the Gloucestershire regiment to disperse them with fixed bayonets. A scene only slightly spoiled as the actors false moustache detached itself and floated down from the art centre balcony as the crowd followed its process and a sad trombone parped in the background.
But no worry. Recreating Bridgwater’s history is what Bridgwater people have done since time immemorial. Which law students will know is actually the fixed date of 1189. (That’s the date Henry II died, as sometimes history needs a date). And,by the way, everything does have a date. The world was created on October 23rd (good maths, Irish theologian James Ussher writing in 1650, although he did also date the year as 4004BC. Mind you, Isaac Newton agreed with him and people would say he wasn’t bonkers) and will end on April 17th, so we’ll just miss Easter.
So, while we probably haven’t got time to get a 21st century Bridgwater pageant together before the apocalypse, it’s definitely something we should be thinking about.
I spent much of my playwriting days finding radical and positive things in Bridgwater history to write about. The struggles of the industrial working class and the fight for union rights and fair pay, the fight for democracy and equality by the Levellers, resistance to the rise of fascism in the 1930s and leading the worlds rejection of the Slave Trade in the 1790s.
Bad History
But maybe I was wrong. Today maybe the Facebook miseries have a point and everything is as miserable as they think. Maybe we need to find the negatives in our history and make people realise there really is no point in anything ever.
Pageant 25
Scene 1 -The Monmouth Rebels return from the battlefield having fought against a return to absolutism.
Scene 2 – King James’ redcoats turn up and hang them all.
Scene 3 – Bridgwater’s radical preachers set up free independent churches and preach the gospels as they see fit
Scene 4 Lord Stawell turns up with his militia, smashes the churches and takes a couple of dissenters back to Cothelstone manor where he hangs them from the archway
Scene 5 -Thomas Paynes book the ‘Rights of Man’ celebrating the natural rights of the people to rise up against tyrannical rulers. The people (who can read) read it
Scene 6 A Bridgwater mob grabs every last copy and burns them on a big bonfire in the town centre.
Scene 7 Vernon Bartlett is carried on the shoulders of jubilant towns people after winning the anti-fascist Bridgwater by election of 1938
Scene 8 Hitler wins the second world war
No no of course that last ones far too far-fetched. This is 2025. Fascism is dead and buried along with (most of) Hitler. That’s all History.
Now then, lets see whats in the papers today…………oh ……oh dear…..