Inter-war Britain was obsessed with historical pageants: mammoth theatrical events featuring historical re-enactments.
Many of the most successful were helmed by Gwen Lally, the ‘world’s pageant master,’ whose unorthodox gender presentation and meticulous work set her head and shoulders above the rest.
A ‘pageant master’ is a person who oversees the production of an entertainment pageant.
In the summer of 1938, Birmingham’s Aston Park became the backdrop for a historical pageant of epic proportions.
Across 5 days, some 10,000 people came to witness a dramatic re-enactment of Birmingham’s history. There were prehistoric dinosaur hunters, trudging across the park in their Stone Age garb. In a scene depicting the 1791 Priestley Riots, a building was built and then burnt.
Uproarious applause swept the crowd when an actress playing Queen Victoria stepped out to recreate the monarch’s famed visit of 1858.
A slight yet dapper woman sat perched above the audience throughout the mammoth production, meticulously directing hundreds of actors with just a megaphone. This was Gwen Lally, fast developing her reputation as ‘the world’s pageant master.’
Lally was charming, charismatic, and somewhat experienced by this point, with a handful of large-scale productions under her belt. Her refusal to call herself a pageant mistress was emblematic of her androgyny more broadly. Lally dressed in sharp, well-tailored suits, her white hair cropped short and wavy.
“She is tall, virile, with a perfectly classical silhouette,” summarised a write-up of the pageant, published in ‘The News’.
“[Lally] affects masculine modes, and has a perfect genius for infecting other people with her own vast enthusiasm.”
The review echoes other clippings, collated in Birmingham’s Cadbury Research Library, which describe her as well-liked and respected by peers and fans alike. After the grand climax of a pageant, it wasn’t uncommon for audience members to drape Lally in flowers and lift her atop their shoulders for a post-finale victory lap.
By all accounts, Lally is the first woman to achieve such enormous success in the field of historical pageantry, but it didn’t come overnight.
Born in 1882, Lally spent the earliest years of her life in West London before moving with her family to Bedford, a Warwickshire town where her father had been summoned to work as a reverend.
The oldest of 3 children, she was passionate about acting from a young age. In the early 1900s, against the advice of her family, she began training under Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, an esteemed actor and theatre manager.
Context is key here. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were the heyday of male impersonation, a period which saw some of the earliest iterations of what we’d describe as drag king performers today.
In music halls across Victorian England, stars like Annie Hindle and Vesta Tilley commanded huge crowds with their subversive performances and hilarious send-ups of old-school masculine archetypes.
These weren’t small, niche productions. At one point, Tilley was one of the highest-paid music hall performers in the world, regularly selling out shows not just in the United Kingdom but in the United States, too.
Like these women, Lally always took to the stage with masculine looks. In an often-cited quote, she “claimed the distinction of being the only actress who has never worn skirts on stage.”
The one time she did play a role written for a woman was in 1914, when she portrayed the aforementioned male impersonator, Vesta Tilley.
The First World War raged on between 1914 and 1918, but in its wake came a burgeoning industry: the historical pageant. These events were a cross between theatrical productions and historical re-enactments, split into several acts which recreated key moments in British history.
Initially, they were niche and predominantly viewed as middle-class entertainment. Before 1914, they had only ever been held to varying degrees of success in London and Liverpool. Only after the war did local councils across the UK form coalitions and incentivise the staging of historical pageants jointly.
Not only could these pageants draw huge crowds, but they also offered a way to promote and retell local histories, boosting the national economy. Sometimes, they even raised cash for charities along the way.
Pageant popularity blossomed throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and Lally wasted no time using her stage expertise to try her hand as a pageant master. Between 1924 and 1929 alone, she racked up master roles for 6 pageants, perfecting her craft as she went.
By 1930, Lally was presiding over enormous spectacles. The Great Warwick Pageant was a colourful, grandiose affair, themed largely around royalty and the works of Shakespeare. Reports estimate an audience of around 45,000, which smashed the county’s previous attendance record.
Lally continued her work as a pageant master for several decades, becoming a mainstay of the industry. In the Cadbury Research Library, there’s a Gwen Lally pamphlet filled with gushing testimonies, describing her as a “marvellous producer,” a “super-woman” and a “genius of the highest order.”
Although Lally’s professional achievements are well-documented, there’s comparatively little information on her personal life.
Increasingly, scholars are looking back on her life and achievements through a queer lens: no easy feat given the historical erasure of lesbians, whose stories haven’t survived in records of criminalisation like their gay male counterparts.
We know that Lally was a clear gender non-conformist and a story of triumph in an industry otherwise devoid of women. The official line is that Lally was unmarried and died a spinster, but there’s evidence to suggest otherwise.
In 1907, the distinctly sapphic poetry anthology ‘Behind the Veil’ collated a series of love poems written to a woman named only as Phyllis, whom Lally describes as having “the ecstasy of spring in [her] voice” and “the glory of the summer’s in [her] face.”
Researcher Deborah Sugg Ryan pursued this line of inquiry. In an English Heritage podcast, she offers proof that Lally spent much of her life in an intimate, same-sex relationship with actress Mabel Gibson, even staging a same-sex wedding with her partner in a pageant scene. When Lally died, she left Gibson her fortune.
The nuances of these stories are still being uncovered. Still, the figure of Gwen Lally, the accomplished and charismatic pageant master, is a beacon of light in queer and feminist histories.
We may never fully know what lay behind the veil, but increasingly, we know that there was more to the world’s pageant master than met the eye.
About the author
Jake Hall is a freelance journalist and author living in Sheffield, England. Jake’s first book, ‘The Art of Drag’, was an illustrated deep dive into the history of drag, published by NoBrow Press in 2020. Their upcoming book, ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’, is a history of queer solidarity movements over the last six decades; it’s scheduled to be published in May 2024 by Trapeze Books.
For years, Jake has been fascinated by everything from queer culture and histories to fashion, film and climate activism, and they’ve written for publications ranging from Dazed Digital and The Independent to Refinery29 and Cosmopolitan. They’re also a keen book fan and reviewer, publishing regular reviews on their Instagram.
Further reading
- 5 Historic Places that Mark LGBTQ+ Love and Pride
- Pioneers and Rebels: 7 LGBTQ+ People in History
- 7 Inspiring Writers’ Retreats
I jave two books reputedly with her signature in. They are not 8n good shape but I cant find a copy of her orig8nal signature to cimpare them.
A very interesting read.
Thanks to Jake Hall for an interesting piece, but not quite right to say ‘Before 1914, they had only ever been held to varying degrees of success in London and Liverpool’. See The Redress of The Past Historical Pageants In Britain website – https://historicalpageants.ac.uk/ to find that ‘the first modern pageant was held in the small Dorset town of Sherborne in June 1905 and featured 900 performers, at a time when the town’s population was only 6000. It attracted more than thirty thousand spectators’.
This is amazing!!!