McCarthy (2010) The League of Nations, Public Ritual and National Identity in Britain, c.1919–56

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The League of Nations, Public Ritual and

National Identity in Britain, c.1919–56by Helen McCarthy

On the morning of Saturday 8 November 1919, the streets linking the his-

toric Guildhall in the City of London to the Royal Courts of Justice two

miles to the west began to fill with crowds drawn by the promise of a

dazzling visual spectacle. The occasion was the Lord Mayor’s Show, an

ancient ritual first performed in the thirteenth century to mark the installa-tion of a new occupant in London’s highest municipal office. The fortunes of

the annual procession had waxed and waned over the centuries, but by the

time of the First World War its status as one of the most eagerly anticipated

dates in the civic calendar was once more assured.1 As on previous occa-

sions, spectators lining the route in 1919 marvelled at the brilliant display of

civic and military pageantry, the mayor’s familiar gilded coach and the

eye-catching banners of the London livery companies interspersed with

marching bands and columns upon columns of smartly uniformed troops.

This year, however, the Lord Mayor’s Show unveiled a novel feature.Filling a large slot between the pipers of the Scots Guards and the

Worshipful Company of Musicians could be seen a lavish pageant dedicated

to the League of Nations, the supranational body created only months

before by the Allies at the Paris Peace Conference. At the head of the pa-

geant strode the Herald of Peace, followed by a horse-drawn wagon fes-

tooned with foliage and conveying five exotically attired women

representing the continents of the world. Appearing next, as the Times cor-

respondent described, was ‘a long cavalcade of women on horseback, per-

sonating the Allied States and neutral countries, all in the national costumes,and attended by ‘‘maids of honour’’, young girls in white with flowing veils

and bearing roses’.2 Onlookers feasted their eyes upon France wearing her

liberty cap and tricolour robe, Italy in green, red and white with a wreath of

grapes on her head, Japan, whose hair was garlanded with yellow chrysan-

themums, and beyond her the United States, clad in stars and stripes. The

dominions and the four nations of the United Kingdom followed on, with

the helmeted figure of Britannia bringing up the rear. It was, the Times

reporter gushed, ‘really one of the most wonderful sights of the kind ever

seen in the streets of London’.3

The League of Nations was to make a repeat appearance at the Lord

Mayor’s Show exactly a decade later in the shape of an intricately decorated

horse-drawn car occupied by a giant birthday cake, marking the tenth

History Workshop Journal Issue 70 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbq018

ß The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.


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anniversary of the signing of the Covenant in Paris.4 By then, however, such

sights were far from unusual in the streets of interwar Britain, having

become a stock-in-trade of the lively popular movement which had grown

up around the League, and they would not disappear until well after the

Second World War. This distinctly internationalist tradition of public ritualhas been almost wholly ignored by historians, despite an abundance of lit-

erature on popular peace activism and a rich historiography exploring the

complex relationship between national identity and the construction of

so-called ‘invented traditions’.5 The latter have been famously defined by

Eric Hobsbawm as practices ‘normally governed by overtly or tacitly ac-

cepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate

certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically

implies continuity with the past’.6 Under this broad conceptual banner his-

torians of modern Britain have analysed everything from civic centenariesand acts of remembrance to imperial pageantry and military tattoos.7

Although frequently disagreeing over the ideological effects of such trad-

itions, these scholars tend to concur with sociologists that public ritual, in

whatever form it takes, performs important identity work.8 Rituals draw

attention to certain objects of thought and feeling through symbolic acts and

thus, to quote Paul Connerton, ‘have the capacity to give value and meaning

to the life of those who perform them’.9

It is in this framework that this article explores the phenomenon of inter-

nationalist public ritual after 1918. The argument is essentially twofold.

First, the article aims to fill a notable gap in the existing literature on inter-

war peace activism by demonstrating how British supporters of the League

of Nations made extensive use of public ritual to communicate key

liberal-internationalist ideas concerning global interdependence, interna-

tional government and world citizenship to a mass electorate. Second, and

more ambitiously, it argues that through public ritual these ideas became

part of the symbolic resources available to British people as they sought to

make sense of their relationship to the imperial nation-state and to the

broader geopolitical transformations set in train by the war. By revealing

how League-themed ritual became embedded within existing civic traditions

across the political spectrum, the analysis shows how the belief that Britain

belonged to – and owed certain duties towards – an imagined international

community became more central to popular representations of national

identity than at any time previously.

In short, League activists created a new field of symbolic display which

both reflected and reinforced a wider shift in public understandings of na-

tionhood in the postwar world. These effects were at their strongest between

1920 and 1936; thereafter domestic controversies over foreign policy led to

the loss of much of the tradition’s ‘civic’ character and League-themed ritualbecame increasingly implicated in the oppositional political theatre of the

left. As the final section of the article shows, the internationalist tradition

experienced something of a revival immediately after the Second World

History Workshop Journal 110


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War, bolstered by the idealism surrounding the establishment of the United

Nations. Yet by the mid 1950s this tradition was once more displaying dis-

tinct signs of decay, a consequence of further shifts in the meaning of na-

tional identity brought about by the new global polarities of the Cold War.

* * *

The idea of international government naturally has a long intellectual pedi-

gree, but it makes sense to begin our story in the final days of the First

World War, when proposals for some kind of peace league in Britain had

reached an advanced stage. Emboldened by the endorsement of Woodrow

Wilson in his famous ‘Fourteen Points’ speech of January 1918, progressives

both inside and outside government stepped up their efforts to sell the

League to the British public.10 This campaign was co-ordinated after the

Armistice by the League of Nations Union (LNU), a non-partypressure-group which aimed, as stated in the first of its objects: ‘To secure

the whole-hearted acceptance by the British people of the ‘‘League of

Nations’’ as the Guardian of International Right, the organ of

International Co-operation, the final arbiter in International Differences,

and the supreme instrument for removing injustices which may threaten

the Peace of the World’.11 By pushing a moderate, centrist line and organiz-

ing on a broad, non-sectarian basis, the LNU became within a decade one of

Britain’s foremost voluntary associations, with a Royal Charter, a paid-up

membership of over 400,000 and thousands of organizational affiliates

comprising political parties, peace societies, religious institutions, youth

organizations, women’s associations and various other civic bodies.12

Furthermore, the LNU attracted some of the most distinguished political

and intellectual figures of the day: these included Tory aristocrat Robert

Cecil, Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray, the former Liberal Foreign

Secretary, Edward Grey, Liberal peer David Davies and Labour politician

Philip Noel Baker.

As this line-up suggests, the LNU accommodated a wide spectrum of

opinion; it included pacifists like Maude Royden and Clifford Allen –

who disavowed Article 16 of the Covenant concerning the use of military

sanctions – as well as champions of an international army under League

control, such as Davies. Its executive embraced those who viewed the

League as a useful but only secondary sphere of diplomatic influence,

such as the Tory elder statesman Austen Chamberlain, alongside others

who believed that British foreign policy should be conducted almost exclu-

sively through the collective system of the League, such as Cecil and

Murray. The LNU’s dominant ideology can, however, be described as es-

sentially liberal-internationalist in character, with the vast majority of its

membership committed to a set of core propositions which might be sum-marized as follows: first, a recognition of the conditions of global inter-

dependence wrought by the proliferation of social, cultural and economic

ties between states over the previous half-century; second, the desirability of

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international government as a substitute for the anarchic political relations

and unfettered nationalism prevailing before 1914; third, the need for or-

dinary Britons to promote friendly ties between nations, which, under the

influence of Wilsonian thought, were seen as the ‘natural’ unit of human

organization (at least for ‘civilized’ peoples); and fourth, the belief that theLeague was mutually compatible with, and indeed a guarantor of, Britain’s

status as a liberal imperial power.13 These ideas were frequently distilled in

LNU discourse into the notion of ‘enlightened patriotism’, a handy formula

which yoked man’s natural love of country to his wider loyalty to the inter-

national community. As the LNU’s General Secretary, Maxwell Garnett,

informed an audience of educators in 1926:

For the Englishman, for the Briton, for the citizen of the British

Commonwealth of nations, there can be no valid reason why the unionof nations and the building of larger loyalties out of present patriotisms

should not keep pace with the widening of individual human interests to

cover the whole shrinking world.14

Convinced that the war experience had stimulated a new-found interest in

foreign affairs amongst the public, the LNU pursued its aim of turning

Britons into ‘enlightened patriots’ through an array of propaganda tech-

niques. It issued pamphlets and educational tracts, hosted public meetings,

arranged deputations and wrote to the press; its greatest single success in

terms of publicizing the League took place in 1935, when the LNU per-

suaded almost twelve million Britons to vote in its famous ‘Peace Ballot’, an

unofficial referendum on the future of British foreign policy.15 These activ-

ities have received some attention from historians, but notably absent from

their accounts is any mention of the very extensive efforts made by the LNU

to frame its propaganda in a symbolic or ritual form: efforts which, as will

become clear, played a crucial role in embedding the League movement into

the civic mainstream.

This tendency was present from the very outset. In 1919, for example,

the LNU instigated the first ‘League of Nations Day’, scheduled for

11 November, the date of the signing of the Armistice the year before,

with a ‘League of Nations Sunday’ to be observed in churches two days

earlier.16 As a handbook designated for use by teachers revealed, the LNU

hoped that schools would mark the occasion with special assemblies com-

prising hymns, readings and dramatic tableaux depicting the enthronement

of Peace through the creation of the League.17 The LNU attempted a more

elaborate observance of League of Nations Day two years later with a huge

rally in Hyde Park, this time taking place on 25 June, to commemorate

the signing of the Covenant at Versailles. Eight separate processions con-verged on the park where they encountered massed choirs blasting

out Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’, dancers clad in national costume, girls in white

frocks selling silver doves of peace, and a grand pageant performed by the



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Guild of Citizenship.18 The impulse to commemorate was shared by the

LNU’s Welsh National Council, which marked the League’s tenth birthday

in January 1930 by planting a cherry tree in Cardiff’s Cathays Park and

arranging for the War Memorial nearby to be floodlit in the evening, a

practice repeated in subsequent years.19

League-themed ritual was not, however, confined to symbolically signifi-

cant dates. Pageantry was immensely popular amongst local branches, de-

livering the escapist pleasures of theatrical role-play and opportunities

for the more creatively inclined to demonstrate their artistic flair. With

such titles as ‘The Crowning of Peace’, ‘Earth and Her Children’ and

‘The Desire of All Nations’, these pageants visualized the LNU’s message

through a series of dramatic, often allegorical tableaux linked by music,

movement and dialogue. They typically depicted the figure of Peace or

Mother Earth weeping over the follies of mankind, followed by a scenein which the League proceeds to banish war and pestilence from the

world and a grand finale where the assembled nations swear solemnly to

live together peacefully under a common law.20 Often involving schoolchil-

dren as well as adults, these pageants were performed as stand-alone dra-

matic pieces, sometimes featuring in the programmes of LNU fetes or

garden parties.

Their key constituent element – the tableau vivant (or living picture) –

appeared in many other guises. In Rushden, Northamptonshire, for ex-

ample, local LNU activists organized an elaborate League Pageant in

October 1921 consisting of a colourful parade of walking tableaux and

decorated vehicles which wound its way through the town before congregat-

ing at the local park for a mass rally. The tableaux included ‘The Fruits of

Peace’ (a group of children carrying baskets filled with fruit and flowers),

‘Battleships or Houses?’, which vividly conveyed the crippling costs of arma-

ments, and ‘The League’s Attack Upon Typhus in Poland’, a depiction of

the League’s relief work in Eastern Europe.21 In a similar ‘Pageant of Ideals’

in Castleford (West Yorkshire) in May 1925 dozens of tableaux depicted the

various members of the League in national costume; one in Hull two years

later adopted a similar format. In all three cases, these were quasi-official

events, staged in co-operation with municipal authorities and drawing a

cross-section of local societies into their orbit; the Castleford pageant fea-

tured tableaux from the Boy Scouts, Women’s Co-operative Guild, a selec-

tion of working-men’s clubs and representatives of the churches and local

political parties, while the Mayor’s Rolls-Royce led a motorcade conveying

distinguished guests from neighbouring towns.22

This civic flavour extended through the League-themed tableaux which

made regular appearances at other kinds of community events. The

Plymouth branch, for instance, contributed a tableau entitled ‘The Templeof Peace’ to the annual carnival parade in July 1926, whilst in Salisbury

the following year a gaily-decorated LNU car was prominent in a proces-

sion marking the seven-hundredth anniversary of the city’s royal charter.23



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Some of the largest crowds to witness internationalist pageantry congre-

gated in Preston in 1922, where a League car assumed pride of place in

the famous Preston Guild celebrations (a ceremony dating back some

eight hundred years), and at the rather less venerable and altogether

more brash Blackpool Carnival of 1924, where an estimated 150,000turned out to view a prize-winning LNU float. This featured an Angel

of Peace surrounded by the figures of Seedtime and Harvest plus

fifty-four schoolgirls dressed in the costumes of the League member-states.

Boy Scouts and schoolboys flanked the float bearing the corresponding

national flags.24 This partiality for dressing up and flag-waving was

indulged through other kinds of events, too, reflecting the privileged

status of nationality as the dominant state form in the post-

Versailles world. The LNU’s Festival of Youth, for example, held at

the Crystal Palace in 1927, culminated in a Great Massed Gathering,in which, according to the LNU journal Headway, contingents of school-

children and youth groups filed ‘with national flags and in picturesque cos-

tume up the centre of the Hall, and the applause almost drowned the fine

rendering of the different national anthems by the band of the Scots

Guards’.25

This brief overview indicates the range of League-themed ritual practices

after 1918, but what of their prevalence and geographical reach? Given the

localized nature of these events, it is impossible to quantify League-themed

ritual with any precision, but it seems clear from LNU records that suchactivities were popular amongst the thousands of local branches (especially

in the summer months) and remained so throughout the period. In 1920, for

example, prizes were offered by headquarters for ‘best League pageant’,

implying that the practice was already well-established.26 Branch records

from Mere (Wiltshire) reveal repeated activities of this kind: a children’s

pageant planned for autumn 1922; a special set of tableaux performed by

local men in November 1926; a carnival car in 1932 and again in 1934; a

further set of tableaux in 1938.27 Similar reports of pageants, prize-winning

tableaux and costume balls regularly appeared in Headway into the late1930s, with events taking place in large cities, market towns and sleepy

villages in all parts of Great Britain.28 There exists, finally, a distinguished

literary source for League pageantry: Virginia Woolf’s final novel, Between

the Acts, published in 1941 but set shortly before the outbreak of the War.

The story famously centres on a village pageant, a feature which has at-

tracted some attention from literary scholars, but the appearance of the

League in one of the final scenes has apparently escaped their notice.29

Depicted in the form of a ‘black man in fuzzy wig’ and his ‘coffee-coloured’

colleague ‘in silver turban’, the League is portrayed helping to rebuild thewall of civilization. That Woolf saw fit to feature the League in this manner

suggests its inclusion in historical pageants may have had some wider cul-

tural resonance.



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* * *

After this attempt to convey some sense of the range and scale of

League-themed ritual, the knottier problem of interpreting its meaning

must now be confronted, starting with the wider field of symbolic display

in which these practices operated. In certain respects, the LNU built on the

traditions of the nineteenth-century peace movement: the Peace Society, for

example, established a ‘Peace Day’ in 1896, although the organized spectacle

of the later League version was largely missing from this annual event.30

Prewar peace activists also sought, like League supporters, to dignify their

cause through association with the ceremonial aspects of civic life, for ex-

ample inviting municipal worthies to preside at public meetings wearing

their chains of office.31 On the whole, though, postwar internationalist

ritual owed remarkably little to the earlier peace movement, whose primary

modes of persuasion had been the pamphlet, petition, public meeting andannual congress.32 Even the latter incorporated only minimal elements of

orchestrated pomp; the Universal Peace Congress held in London in July

1890 included a reception at the Mansion House and dinner at the National

Liberal Federation, but flag-waving, pageantry and tableaux were notably

absent in press reports.33

Postwar internationalist ritual did, however, owe an important debt to

other aspects of late Victorian and Edwardian culture. As components of

public ritual, pageantry and tableaux had a remarkably long history, dating

back to medieval liturgical drama, the Renaissance masque and the eclecticrepresentational traditions of carnival. Elements of these survived right into

the twentieth century and were occasionally revived by LNU branches, in,

for example, the form of League-themed ‘mystery plays’.34 A more imme-

diate point of reference for activists, however, was likely to have been the

Edwardian genre of historical pageantry, a phenomenon popularized by

Louis Parker and Frank Lascelles; the latter oversaw the spectacular

London Pageant performed at the Festival of Empire in 1911.35 These pa-

geants dramatized the history of a locality through a series of episodic scenes

performed by a large cast of volunteers, often starting with the Romans oralternatively King Arthur, almost always including a reconstruction of

Elizabethan ‘Merrie England’, and usually ending around the time of the

Glorious Revolution. More than forty pageants of this kind were staged

before 1914, and dozens more thereafter.

Where Parker laid the accent on historical accuracy and narrative,

Lascelles emphasized allegory and visual spectacle, but the creative influ-

ences of both were evident in League pageantry after the War; indeed it was

Parker who devised the League pageant at the Lord Mayor’s Show. The

distinctly historical sensibility nurtured by the new pageantry was present inthe event staged by League supporters in Ripon in 1935, which depicted the

evolution of law and order from Biblical times to the present day.36 One

episode showed the triumph of royal power over seditious nobles through a



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thirteenth-century court scene which was based on research in the archives

of the city of Norwich, whilst another portrayed the beneficial effects of the

Factory Acts in England and drew a parallel with the labour conventions of

the modern International Labour Organization (ILO). In keeping with the

rules of the genre, the pageant incorporated orchestral music, tumbling,burlesque ballet and poetic verse.37 Other League pageants and tableaux

adopted a more allegorical approach, producing aesthetic effects which sug-

gest the influence of Pre-Raphaelite art and the broader medievalism of the

Victorian era. For example, the ‘Italy’ contingent in the Castleford pageant

featured a tableau of Dante’s meeting with Beatrice, whilst Joan of Arc

figured repeatedly in League pageantry as a symbol of France.38 Again,

this reflected the enduring aesthetic purchase of medieval subjects beyond

1914, and perhaps also the popular success of Shaw’s play, St Joan, which

received its premiere in London in 1924.39

Internationalist public ritual also exhibited features reminiscent of the

exuberant electoral culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Although some have argued that popular politics was ‘tamed’ in this period

through the growth of professional party machines and the introduction of

the secret ballot, it is clear that many electoral rites survived or were recon-

figured by the advent of mass democracy.40 The fiercely-fought battles be-

tween free traders and tariff reformers, as Frank Trentmann has recently

shown, produced an orgy of visual propaganda in the decades before 1914,

blending elements of pageantry, music-hall and fairground into a colourful

and explosive mix.41 As Jon Lawrence has shown, this bracing theatre of

electoral politics lost much of its rowdy character amidst new norms

of non-violence following in the wake of the 1918 Fourth Reform Act.42

Yet the performative practices of Edwardian popular politics were not aban-

doned but refashioned after 1918, with the centrist, non-party LNU

amongst those wider forces facilitating the shift towards more orderly pol-

itical uses of public space.43

In this the League movement could draw also upon the mobilizing stra-

tegies evident in the new brand of ‘invented’ political tradition which

emerged in the late nineteenth century but continued to develop well

beyond 1914. These ranged from the choreographed fleet reviews inspired

by Anglo-German naval rivalry, to the ‘Empire Day’ celebrations pioneered

by Reginald Brabazon from 1904.44 They included the founding of the Boy

Scouts as a mass, uniformed youth movement promoting muscular

Christianity, patriotic manliness and character-training for children of all

classes, and encompassed the maturation of an ostentatious cult of mon-

archy, exemplified by the jubilees of 1887 and 1897 and the imperial Durbars

of British India.45 And finally, in the English provinces, the era of the in-

vented tradition witnessed a revival of civic ritual under the influence of urban liberalism, producing the rich public culture which, as we have seen,

the LNU was only too eager to appropriate after 1919.46 Indeed, the strength

of these existing traditions of municipal display must partially explain why



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League supporters were so successful at staging large-scale civic events in

such towns as Preston, Derby and Hull – events which, it might be said,

rather problematize notions of ‘civic decline’ after the First World War.47

Many historians have regarded these ritual practices as vehicles employed

by elites to legitimize the existing social and political order. Yet ritual couldwork in counter-hegemonic directions, too, as the invented tradition of

‘May Day’, founded by the International Socialist Congress in 1890, and

the extensive repertoire of symbolic practices developed by British suffra-

gists testify.48 The celebration of centenaries could embrace patriotic and

conservative themes, such as the Navy League’s commemoration of the

battle of Trafalgar in 1905, but also inspire events of a more radical char-

acter, such as the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth in 1864, and that of

Cromwell in 1899.49 These centenaries continued into the interwar period

and occasionally dovetailed with the activities of the LNU. In 1933 forinstance, a number of branches joined the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines

Protection Society in marking one hundred years since the abolition of slav-

ery in the British Empire, using the occasion to raise awareness of the

League’s work to eliminate the practice in the contemporary world.50

* * *

Thus these older traditions of political and civic ritual did not disappear

with the achievement of extended suffrage in 1918 and full enfranchisement

in 1928, although they were certainly reconfigured under the impact of new

technologies of mass communication and acquired new meanings in the light

of fascist techniques of mass psychology in the 1930s (a point to which our

analysis will return). Yet whilst politicians, monarchs and municipal autho-

rities were forced to adapt their practices in line with the new pressures of

mass democracy, internationalist public ritual was able to continue drawing

on a rich array of established symbolic practices with roots in the pre-1914

period. But, as may by now be clear, the League movement did not simply

emulate these existing forms. Rather, League supporters sought to publicize

their message more widely by embedding it in mainstream communityevents. It is true that in certain contexts internationalists adopted an oppos-

itional stance: namely, towards official ritual forms which appeared to le-

gitimize militarism and aggressive nationalism. Peace activists, including

some sections of the LNU rank and file, lodged vociferous protests, for

instance, against the gung-ho jingoism of the military tattoos and air-shows

which enjoyed increasing popularity amongst the interwar public.51 Yet this

anti-militarism, which was strongest among pacifist bodies and sections of

the radical left, was successfully contained by LNU leaders, who were anx-

ious to project a moderate, respectable public image at all times.52

Far more commonly expressed was the view that the movement’s core

message concerning Britain’s international obligations ought to be inte-

grated into existing ritual forms. One important example of this act of



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synthesis as yet unexplored concerned the highly emotive rites of remem-

brance. The LNU held thousands of public meetings and religious services

on or around Armistice Day, the aim being to bolt on to the collective

memory of the war-dead a shared faith that such sacrifice would never

again be necessary now that the League was here to stay.53

As with Leaguepageants, these were often quasi-official events; in Derby in 1923, for ex-

ample, the two-minute silence was followed in the afternoon by an LNU

procession and service, ‘one of the biggest and most representative ever

seen in Derby’, according to the local press.54 Meanwhile an LNU

Armistice meeting in Tottenham in 1927 was actually called by the municipal

authorities and billed as ‘A Great Town’s Peace Demonstration’.55 In many

places the LNU participated in the official wreath-laying ceremonies along-

side civic officials and war veterans.56 The Welsh National Council regularly

laid wreaths at the National War Memorial in Cardiff and the North WalesWar Memorial in Bangor, and from 1922 participated in an annual ceremony

at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey, placing a

wreath on behalf of the Welsh people.57 In some boroughs sympathetic

local education authorities (LEAs) encouraged teachers to make special men-

tion of the League during Armistice Day observations; the Smethwick autho-

rities decreed in 1925 that the date should be observed as a ‘Peace Day’, an

innovation which was warmly endorsed in a circular issued by the

Association of Education Committees in 1932 and sent to all LEAs.58

The parallel and growing trend for schools to recognize Britain’s obliga-

tions to the League as part of Empire Day festivities reveals how the LNU’s

integrative project also targeted the popular culture of imperialism.

Although this phenomenon has received little historical attention, by the

late 1920s no fewer than 164 LEAs in England and Wales were instructing

schools to make the League a regular feature of Empire Day as a result of

sustained lobbying by the LNU and of supranational initiatives emanating

from the League itself.59 That other symbol of Edwardian high imperialism,

the Scout Association, was also co-opted into League-themed ritual. Robert

Baden Powell’s movement underwent something of an internationalist turn

after 1918, establishing new branches outside the British Empire which

would meet periodically at International Jamborees.60 These gatherings,

which were often referred to in Scout discourse as representing a ‘junior’

League of Nations, laid great emphasis on the values of world brotherhood

and international goodwill and featured ‘pageants of the nations’ strikingly

similar in form and design to those of the LNU.61 At the Jamboree held at

Olympia in 1920, Robert Cecil stood beside Baden Powell for the march past

of the national contingents and later addressed the hall, remarking upon the

‘great connection between the Boy Scout movement and the League of

Nations. The principles of the two ideas were the same’, he observed:‘Candour, self-control, friendship and co-operation. These were the watch-

words of both the Scouts and the League’.62 Links with the Girl Guides were

also close, with LNU speakers granted special permission to address groups



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of Guides, and an ‘International Knowledge’ badge was introduced in 1927

for which girls were tested on League subjects.63 Although Scout and Guide

leaders never failed to promulgate to their charges the special bond of

empire, there was after 1918 an unmistakable tendency to link, in the

same manner as the LNU, the familial ties of Commonwealth to member-ship of a wider international community. Having himself become a

Vice-President of the LNU two years earlier, Baden Powell insisted that

the Empire Jamboree held in London in 1924 was but a warm-up for the

International Jamboree opening immediately afterwards in Denmark. The

former event, he argued, ‘big though it has been in its results and its possi-

bilities, was only a step in progression to the greater Rally, with its still more

far-reaching possibilities of the nations at Copenhagen’.64 In hosting both

gatherings in succession, the movement gained, the Chief Scout declared, ‘a

double step of magnitude in the expansion and strengthening of our Empirebrotherhood and of our fellowship with the oncoming generation of other

nations across the world’.65

The link between internationalist ritual and imperialist propaganda was

further strengthened through the presence of League pavilions at the Empire

Exhibitions of 1924 and 1938. Visitors to the LNU enclosure at Wembley

would have seen postage stamps from around the world, photographs of

famous Geneva personalities and colourful exhibits on the work of the

League.66 A more elaborate pavilion was constructed for the 1938 exhibition

in Glasgow, which incorporated a ‘garden of the good neighbour’ modelled

on the parkland established on the frontier between Canada and the USA.67

Its poignant centrepiece was a ‘Peace Cairn’ erected upon foundation stones

contributed by the Governor-General of Australia, the Aga Khan of India

and the King and Queen, who donated a piece of Balmoral granite whilst

visiting the pavilion in May.68

Given the monarch’s increasingly close identification as head of the im-

perial ‘family’ – facilitated by radio broadcasts and imperial set-pieces like

the 1935 Jubilee and 1937 Coronation – this choreographed royal appear-

ance further helped to bind the cause of the League visually and symbolic-

ally with empire.69 The LNU won a notable coup in 1930 by persuading the

Prince of Wales to address a grand banquet held in Guildhall in honour of

delegates attending the Imperial Conference. Speaking alongside Labour

Minister Jimmy Thomas, Austen Chamberlain and the Prime Minister of

Canada, the Prince paid tribute to the achievements of the LNU and

rehearsed the by then familiar line on the mutuality of Britain’s imperial

mission and her international obligations: ‘If one-fourth of the human race

can thus prove the practicability of a true League of united but independent

nations,’ he asked, ‘is it mere idealism to hope that the remaining

three-fourths will be able to tread the same path?’70

If the activities described thus far targeted the rituals of established au-

thority, LNU activists sought also to penetrate the more oppositional trad-

itions of the labour and trade union movement. To some extent,



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internationalism was second nature to labour activists, inherent in their

ideological commitment to proletarian solidarity across national borders

and visible in the universal symbolism of red flags and revolutionary

songs.71 Those on the radical left after 1918 tended to denounce the

League and its auxiliary, the ILO, as capitalist-imperialist enterprisesunder the control of the allied powers (although the paths of the radical

left and League movement, as we will see, would later converge through the

politics of anti-appeasement).72 Yet large sections of more moderate Labour

and trade-union opinion welcomed the collective system at Geneva as an

opportunity to replace militarism with co-operation and to improve condi-

tions for workers both in Britain and overseas.73 This translated into regular

participation in League-themed ritual; Labour activists in Heywood, for

example, contributed an impressive float to a LNU demonstration in 1924

which featured children dressed in white positioned amidst an arrestingdisplay of anti-war slogans and Biblical inscriptions.74 Furthermore, the

League movement became associated with a remarkable initiative by the

railway unions in January 1929, when the Chesterfield LNU branch

played host to a three-day visit by the ‘Railway Queen’. The ‘Queen’,

crowned a few months earlier at the annual Railwaymen’s Carnival in

Manchester and shortly to depart on an overseas tour to spread a message

of goodwill to trade unionists, was met by a welcoming committee at the

station before proceeding to a wreath-laying ceremony at the war memorial,

a public meeting at the Market Hall and an official tea with the Mayor.

75

* * *

The aim of League ritual thus was to synthesize and reframe existing sym-

bolic practices, not to fracture or displace them. This process of cultural

mainstreaming represented a means by which League supporters sought to

embed their movement in wider civil society and to reconfigure the narra-

tives of collective identity available to Britons, who were encouraged to see

themselves as members of an international community, as well as citizens of

an imperial nation-state. This reframing can be seen very clearly in oper-ation in the League pageant: where Britannia might, in the old Parkerian

version, be accompanied in the final scene by figures representing the do-

minions, in the League pageant the imperial grouping appeared flanked by

the other nations of the world, with patriotism put at last in its proper place.

The final chorus of Earth and Her Children expressed this point explicitly:

Oh, not enough, the Patriot’s deed;

We must not curse, we must not hate.

A life of active love to lead,That is the path of our New State.

We love the land that gave us birth,

We love her customs and her laws,



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But other nations have their worth;

Let us with them make common cause.

We love our hearth, our home, our kin,

Our great tradition and our name;

But other men a goal may win,

Diverse in form, in thought the same.76

Pageant processions communicated the same idea of nations possessing

distinct and historic personalities but united in their diversity. In Hull, the

grand pageant of 1927 was arranged in five sections, with England, Scotland

and Wales at the head, followed by the Dominions and then the other na-

tions of the world. Familiar figures such as Britannia and John Bull ap-

peared, but they did so as members of a wider international family which

included Italy, Norway, Sweden, France, Spain, Switzerland and many

others.77 Individual League tableaux necessarily had to compress these mes-

sages into a single, eye-catching float, but their presence in carnivals and

parades was intended to produce a similar effect, a performance of interna-

tional community juxtaposed with the alternative identities inscribed in the

marching bands, civic finery and novelty floats making up the rest of the

procession.

This, at least, was the intention, but there remains the problem of eval-

uating reception: how far did League ritual achieve its desired effect? Local

activists clearly believed that it did. Organizers in Hull expressed satisfactionwith the outcome of their efforts in 1927: ‘In brilliance of design, in charm-

ing effect, in the immense crowd of spectators, in the marvellous order and

precision of it all, it was indeed a glorious success’, they declared: ‘We are

assured that the cause of the League of Nations and of the Union has been

immensely strengthened in Hull’.78 Activists often secured generous cover-

age in the local press, which regularly printed photographs of League

tableaux accompanied by full, and usually very complimentary, reports.

According to the Blackpool Gazette, the LNU’s 1924 carnival car ‘touched

the responsive chord in the breasts of the scores of thousands of spectators.They caught the spirit of its message, and they cheered with heartfelt emo-

tion, for they realised that where there is bloodshed and ruin there can be no

joy’.79 The Rushden Echo heaped even greater praise upon the League pa-

geant of October 1921, whose method, the paper observed, had ‘solved one

of the most difficult of problems – how both to interest and to

educate . . . Thousands of people in Rushden learnt more about the League

of Nations – what it has already done for them materially and morally – in

15 minutes on Saturday afternoon than, possibly, they ever conceived of

before’.80

Not everyone concurred with this verdict on the educative power of

public ritual. The internationalist Alfred Zimmern, for example, was less

convinced by efforts to promote the League by, as he put it, ‘decking it



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out in romantic colours’ and expecting individuals to learn through empty

role-play and meaningless ceremony. ‘This fancy-dress internationalism’,

Zimmern argued, was no substitute for serious intellectual engagement of

the kind provided by his own Geneva School of International Studies.81 Yet

other educationists in the movement took a different view, believing suchactivities to constitute a powerful pedagogical tool particularly suited to the

young. For teachers running Junior LNU Branches in schools, Model

Assemblies, pageants and plays facilitated a kind of embodied learning

which served, as one infant schoolmistress put it, ‘to inculcate into the

minds of these little ones the principles for which the League stands, and

teach them to feel as they grow to boy and girlhood the unity of mankind’.82

There existed, more generally, a consensus within the movement in favour of

deploying a broad repertoire of techniques which combined print and speech

with visual and sensory forms of propaganda, recognizing the need to targetthe individual’s emotions as well as his or her rational faculties. ‘The un-

converted many’, as one member of the LNU’s fundraising committee

observed in 1929, ‘have shown that they are not to be influenced at present

either by the arguments of Logic or the consideration of the Rightness of

Things’. Rather, he argued, they would respond to ‘more or less ‘‘popular’’ ’

appeals, ‘entirely simple, picturesque, dramatic – addressed not so much to

the head as to the heart’.83

This argument gained momentum in the 1930s as internationalists eyed

with growing alarm the dramatic results achieved through techniques of

mass suggestion under fascist regimes. ‘However one may deplore the

aims and methods of the Nazis’, wrote a Headway correspondent recently

returned from Germany in 1933, ‘one cannot refrain from admiration for

their leaders as psychologists and organizers’.84 He went on to suggest that

League activists needed to emulate the skills deployed by the Third Reich to

rally the masses for nationalism if they were to stand even an outside chance

of mobilizing them for internationalism. ‘People are not moved by reason or

the calculation of their own interests,’ he argued:

but by the obscurer forces of instinct and emotion, operating largely

below the level of consciousness. Passion can only be overcome by a

stronger passion . . . When internationalism gives up relying on edifying

conferences of leaders and leisured people, and gets down to the masses,

it must not be too refined to use popular methods, too intellectual to

make contact with the basic impulses.85

This ‘fight fire with fire’ approach reflected the growing intellectual pur-

chase of the relatively young discipline of social psychology, pioneered

before 1914 in the work of William James, Gustav Le Bon and the NewLiberal thinker Graham Wallas.86 This notion that politics could involve

irrational, psychic processes of which individuals themselves might not be

fully aware was not only increasingly held by contemporaries, but formed



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the basis of a powerful and enduring sociological framework for interpreting

the meaning of ritual in modern societies. It was in 1915 that Emile

Durkheim published his classic reading of ritual as an instrument of social

integration, the means by which a society upheld and reaffirmed ‘the col-

lective sentiments and collective ideas which make its unity and its person-ality’.87 Like religion, he argued, ritual represented and dramatized social

realities, rendering the world intelligible through symbolic idiom: strategies

which, as more recent literature in the Durkheimian mould suggests, may be

deployed by those in authority to reinforce dominant and official models of

social structure, or by subordinate and oppositional groups to propagate

alternative myths which challenge the existing order.88

As previously mentioned, historians of modern Britain have found these

conceptual insights of great utility for calibrating the power of ‘invented

traditions’, particularly those pressed into the service of defining the collect-ivity of ‘nation’. The claim that the symbolic representations promulgated

by interwar internationalists had some influence in shaping popular under-

standings of national community – in ways which contemporaries might

themselves be unable to articulate – is therefore one which must be taken

seriously. Yet at the same time, it is equally plain that historians should be

ever sensitive to the multi-vocal nature of the ‘invented tradition’ and the

complexity of the semantic information it imparts, the meanings of which

were always susceptible to diverse, perhaps even contradictory, readings. In

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, representations of national

community habitually pointed in two directions – inwards and outwards –

finding its essence in the ‘Merrie England’ of maypoles, village greens and

stocky yeomanry, or, by contrast, appearing in the guise of the Mother

Country of a glorious global empire.89 After 1918, as the striking presence

of symbolic practices centred on the League suggests, this imagery pointed

outwards again, but this time beyond the bonds of empire to embrace an

even wider international community.

This is not to say that Europe or the extra-imperial world were absent in

representations of nationhood before the First World War. Britain’s rela-

tions with other nations were frequently rendered into symbolic or drama-

tized form through such international events as the Franco-British

Exhibition of 1908 or the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910.90 Going back

even further, one might trace continuities with the internationalist inflec-

tions of mid Victorian free-trade ideology; the Lord Mayor’s Show of 1850,

for example, featured human and animal incarnations of Europe, Asia,

Africa and America in honour of the Great Exhibition taking place the

following year, whose purpose was to remind spectators, as the Times cor-

respondent put it, of London’s global supremacy as ‘the great emporium

and mart of the whole world’.91

Yet these precedents, despite the apparentformal similarities with postwar League ritual, were not so much enactments

of international community as symbolic legitimizations of, in the first case,

Britain’s diplomatic ties in a period of Great Power rivalry, and, in the



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second, her once hegemonic economic status.92 The meaning of internation-

alist ritual after 1918 must be located in the new set of geopolitical realities

set in train by the Treaty of Versailles, when Britain faced a rising tide of

colonial nationalism, demands for greater autonomy in the white domin-

ions, the challenges of governing new territories in the Middle East, aEuropean continent fractured by the collapse of empires, the United

States retreating into isolationism and, finally, the loss of vital overseas

markets and (from 1929) economic depression.

Recent work by international historians has begun to reveal the various

ways in which Britain’s membership of the League shaped how these prob-

lems were conceptualized and tackled by policy elites. The result was that

complex but nevertheless very real modifications were made to the practice

of national sovereignty, evident, for example, in the realm of imperial gov-

ernance and the humanitarian and social-welfare sphere and in new ways of thinking about the co-ordination of economic activities across borders.93

These effects were always complex and in some cases actively resisted, es-

pecially on the diehard right where figures such as Leo Amery, Colonial

Secretary between 1924 and 1929, or Lord Lloyd, President of the Navy

League, fiercely opposed any measure with the merest hint of a diminution

of national sovereignty or the privileging of international obligations over

imperial interests.94 These individuals, however, were largely out of step

with more moderate centre-right opinion, which found room for the

League within a broadly liberal and reformist approach to empire and

tended to reproduce the LNU’s language of mutuality, albeit with somewhat

greater reserve and occasionally a rather heavy dose of scepticism: Austen

Chamberlain’s public and private statements on the League were exem-

plary in this regard.95 LNU activists sometimes accused Conservatives

of paying mere ‘lip-service’ to the League in their speeches; yet the very

fact that politicians on the right felt pressure to present their actions,

as Maurice Cowling perceptively put it, ‘in terms which the League of

Nations Union would approve’, signalled a wider shift in foreign policy

discourse which helps to explain, at least in part, why the values of ‘enlight-

ened patriotism’ were able to bed down in such a wide range of cultural

forms and institutional spaces during an era of predominantly Conservative

rule.96

The study of League-themed ritual thus represents a potential bridge

between the established literatures on interwar politics, diplomacy and the

cultural legacy of the Great War. It also reveals how Britain’s membership

of the League was not simply a preoccupation of policy elites or veteran

peace campaigners, but became a prominent theme in popular representa-

tions of the nation. We can never know for sure how far and in what ways

the messages of internationalist ritual were internalized by participants oronlookers; yet on the strength of the preceding analysis, with its extensive

efforts to describe, contextualize and interpret, it seems reasonable to sug-

gest that Britain’s membership of, and obligations towards, an imagined



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international community became more central to understandings of national

identity than at any time previously.

* * *

The story, however, cannot be left there. As suggested earlier, the phenom-enon of internationalist ritual enjoyed its heyday between the end of the

First World War and 1936, the year in which the League’s failure to apply

full sanctions against Italy following her illegal invasion of Abyssinia re-

sulted in a widespread loss of faith in collective security as a deterrent to

would-be aggressors.97 League pageantry, tableaux and commemoration

continued, but their character subtly shifted with the political fall-out of

the Abyssinian affair; many pacifists were prompted to defect to the

newly-founded Peace Pledge Union, while deep fractures emerged in the

rest of the movement between supporters and opponents of the NationalGovernment’s policy of appeasement.98 These new fault-lines were evident

in a fresh wave of internationalist ritual beginning in late 1936 which centred

upon the ‘Peace Weeks’ held in hundreds of cities and towns under the

auspices of the International Peace Campaign (IPC). Springing from the

initiative of various socialist and radical forces in continental Europe,

the IPC aimed to rally progressive opinion behind a four-point programme

based on the sanctity of treaty obligations, reduction and control of arma-

ments, collective security through the League, and the development of a

framework for peaceful change.99 To clear-eyed anti-appeasers on the

LNU Executive, such as Eleanor Rathbone, the twinning of disarmament

with collective sanctions was a contradictory and possibly dangerous

move.100 Yet many grass-roots activists, evidently untroubled by such ten-

sions, embraced the IPC as an opportunity to renew their propaganda ef-

forts, making full use once again of symbolic and ritual forms. In Bolton, for

example, in September 1936, permission was secured to erect a banner

across the facade of the town hall and floodlight the nearby war memorial,

whilst the mayor additionally agreed to host a civic reception followed by a

wreath-laying ceremony at the local cenotaph.101 Meanwhile Chingford’s

Peace Week in spring 1938 featured the ceremonial release of 400 balloons

bearing the IPC initials.102

One element notably absent from earlier phases of internationalist ritual

was a willingness on the part of many League activists to learn from their

counterparts on the continent. The French section of the IPC, which had

strong links to Leon Blum’s Popular Front government, was much admired

for its innovative practices. The Peace Pavilion at the Glasgow Exhibition

was modelled upon a similar enclosure designed by the French IPC for the

Paris Exhibition of 1937, which made bold use of cutting-edge technologies

including hidden microphones, moving images and dramatic lighting ef-fects.103 The French section was further lauded for its large-scale rallies

which entertained mass audiences with sporting competitions, musical ex-

travaganzas and spectacular light-shows; one such demonstration staged in



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Paris in August 1936 reportedly drew crowds of 400,000.104 The LNU’s

National Youth Executive (NYE) attempted to replicate this format on a

smaller scale in 1938 with a rally at the Empress Stadium in London, at

which a capacity crowd of 10,000 listened to music from the singer Paul

Robeson and addresses from Gabriel Carritt of the NYE, Ted Willis of theLabour League of Youth, Peter Blackman of the League of Coloured

Peoples and John Gollan of the Young Communist League.105

As this platform suggests, the LNU’s youth wing was, by this time, pos-

itioned firmly on the left of centre. The national leadership, by contrast,

continued to seek, and in many cases to win, broad-based, cross-party sup-

port for the movement’s activities. One striking initiative of this period was

the erection, following a gift from David Davies, of a ‘Temple of Peace’ in

Cardiff’s Cathays Park. Designed to house the offices of the LNU’s Welsh

National Council, the building was officially opened in November 1938 byseventy-two year-old Minnie James, who had lost three sons during the War,

with the support of a contingent of twenty-three similarly bereaved mothers

representing different nations. A religious ceremony followed after which

the assembled company proceeded to a civic luncheon at City Hall.106 The

event demonstrated that the LNU could still pull off consensus-building

rituals with a civic flavour, yet the mounting international crisis and

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s open disregard for the League

made such affairs increasingly rare in the later 1930s. In many towns

Peace Week activities were marred by political controversy, with organizing

committees dominated by pacifist, socialist and communist elements, which

prompted Conservatives and many non-party organizations to withdraw

their support.107 Amidst the polarized political climate of this period, inter-

nationalist ritual thus assumed a less integrative and more oppositional

character, and many League supporters, particularly those of the younger

generation, found themselves drawn to the colourful agit-prop of the left,

attracted by the prospect of a more full-blooded internationalism than the

one on offer at the LNU.108

These dynamics shifted once more with the outbreak of war in September

1939. With the League effectively in cold storage and the LNU’s member-

ship scattered or occupied with war work, it might be assumed that the

pageants, tableaux and League Days of old disappeared entirely. But

whilst branch activity was certainly much diminished, the tradition of inter-

nationalist public ritual not only survived but regained something of its

former centrist character by regrouping around wartime proposals for a

new international authority, which became known as the ‘United Nations’

from 1943. The LNU’s educational wing inaugurated the first ‘United

Nations Day’ in British schools the following year, whilst in 1947 the UN

Assembly itself decreed that 24 October, the date on which its Charter cameinto force, would henceforth be observed worldwide as United Nations

Day.109 As with the League version, this became an important focus for

internationalist public ritual, and the LNU, now renamed the United



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Nations Association (UNA), again took the lead. Thus the tableaux and

flag-waving returned; in the latter case the insignia of the various nations

was joined by the UN’s own dedicated flag, which was ceremonially hoisted

over more than four-hundred civic buildings in Britain in October 1949.110

Pageantry also made a come-back, with a UN-themed pageant episodetaking pride of place at a National Savings Rally at Earls Court in 1949,

during which the film actor Manning Whiley read out the Preamble to the

UN Charter.111 The recitation of the Preamble, in fact, became a regular

item in public meetings organized by the UNA, often combined with a flag

parade, community singing and an act of remembrance conducted by a

member of the clergy.112 This repertoire of symbolic practices was added

to in 1947 when, in a somewhat strange twist, the UNA took on responsi-

bility for the prewar tradition of crowning the Railway Queen and organiz-

ing her overseas goodwill tour. Meanwhile in Runcorn, Cheshire, thecoronation of a new ‘UNA Queen’ was established as the centrepiece of

an annual UN Festival.113

This latter event ran into the 1950s and shared many similarities with

earlier League-themed events: colourful tableaux, whole-community partici-

pation, municipal support, invocations of monarchy and Commonwealth

(in 1953 the Festival adopted a Coronation theme).114 But in 1955 the

Festival was massively downscaled and it was wholly abandoned the follow-

ing year; the UNA Queen was crowned at a series of much smaller events

until, in 1960, she disappeared completely from the pages of Runcorn

Guardian.115 UN-themed ritual declined more generally from the mid

1950s, a phenomenon for which the parallel downturn in civic ritual –

linked to the erosion of municipal collectivism in the face of increasing

state centralization and the changing social and economic make-up of pro-

vincial towns – must surely bear some responsibility.116 Yet, arguably, the

more fundamental factor in this decline was, as before, the altered geopol-

itical terrain: the bipolar realities of Cold War politics; the spectre of nuclear

war; Britain’s loss of great-power status following Suez and, perhaps most

importantly, the onward march of decolonization. These developments

made it very difficult for the UNA, whose membership was a mere fraction

of its prewar strength, to hold together as before those multiple images of

Britain as historic English nation, great imperial power and responsible

member of the international community. The movement was not aided in

this task by the fact that the General Assembly of the UN became an arena

in which Britain’s imperial record suffered a barrage of criticism.117 In short,

the model of international community which liberal internationalists had

dramatized so effectively through ritual between the wars rested on the as-

sumption of Britain’s premier status as a global power. This was a reason-

able enough assumption during the heyday of the League, where Britain wasthe leading power at the table. After 1945, however, the reality of declining

prestige led to an unravelling of the logic behind the LNU’s centrist ideology

and its integrative project. Nowhere was this signalled more poignantly than



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in the gradual fading away of the rich tradition of internationalist public

ritual in Britain.

Helen McCarthy is Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of

London. She gained her PhD from the Institute of Historical Research(University of London) in 2008 and held a Research Fellowship at

St John’s College, Cambridge, before taking up her post at Queen Mary.

Her research interests include popular internationalism, associational vol-

untarism, and the gendering of public life in twentieth-century Britain.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

For invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article the author thanks the editors of

History Workshop Journal , Paul Readman, Peter Mandler and participants at the ModernCultural History Seminar, University of Cambridge.

1 Robert Withington, English Pageantry: an Historical Outline, Cambridge MA, 1920,vol. 2, chap. 6.

2 The Times, 10 Nov. 1919, p. 9.3 The Times, 10 Nov. 1919, p. 9.4 The Times, 11 Nov. 1929, p. 9.5 For peace activism, see Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: the British Peace

Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945, Oxford, 2000; Keith Robbins, TheAbolition of War: the ‘Peace Movement’ in Britain, 1914–1919, Cardiff, 1976; Paul Laity, TheBritish Peace Movement 1870–1914, Oxford, 2001.

6 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed.

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983), Cambridge, 2007, p. 1.7 See for example David Cannadine, ‘The Transformation of Civic Ritual in Modern

Britain: the Colchester Oyster Feast’, Past and Present 94, 1982; Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919–1946, Oxford, 1994; J. A. Mangan, ‘ ‘‘The Grit of ourForefathers’’: Invented Traditions, Propaganda and Imperialism’, in Propaganda and Empire:the Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960, ed. John MacKenzie, Manchester, 1984;David Enrico Omissi, ‘The Hendon Air Pageant, 1920–1937’, in Popular Imperialism and theMilitary 1850–1950, ed. John MacKenzie, Manchester, 1992.

8 David A. Snow and Doug McAdam, ‘Identity Work Processes in the Context of SocialMovements: Clarifying the Identity/Movement Nexus’, in Self, Identity, and Social Movements,ed. Sheldon Stryker, Timothy J. Owens, and Robert W. White, London, 2000.

9 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge, 1989, p. 45.10 George W. Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations: Strategy,

Politics, and International Organization, 1914–1919, Chapel Hill, 1978.11 Donald Birn, The League of Nations Union 1918–1945, Oxford, 1981.12 In 1931, the LNU had 406,868 paid-up subscribers, 3,036 local branches and 3,529

organizational affiliates: Annual Report for 1931, London, 1932.13 For appraisals of interwar liberal internationalism, see Thinkers of the Twenty Years’

Crisis: Interwar Idealism Reassessed , ed. David Long and Peter Wilson, Oxford, 1995; JeanneMorefield, Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire, Princeton,2005. For the influence of psychological discourses on understandings of nationhood, seeGlenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1870–1919, Basingstoke,2006.

14 LNU, Patriotism, London, revised edn, 1934.15 Birn, League of Nations Union; Helen McCarthy, ‘The League of Nations Union and

Democratic Politics in Britain, c.1919–1939’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London,2008; for the Peace Ballot, see Helen McCarthy, ‘Democratising Foreign Policy: Rethinking thePeace Ballot, 1934–5’, Journal of British Studies 49: 2, April 2010; Martin Ceadel, ‘The firstBritish Referendum: the Peace Ballot, 1934–5’, English Historical Review 95: 377, 1980.

16 The Times, 22 Oct. 1919, p. 14.



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17 LNU, ‘The League of Nations Day in the Schools, Nov. 11, 1919’, 1919.18 ‘News of the Union’, Headway, June 1921, p. 86.19 Headway, Feb. 1930, p. ii; Feb. 1931, p. iv; and Feb. 1936, p. 38.20 See for example Fanny Johnson, Earth and her Children: a Pageant Play, Cambridge,

1928, and Lillian Martindale, The Dawn of Peace: a Pageant Play, Heswall, 1921.21 Rusden Echo, 7 Oct. 1921, p. 7.22 Pontefract and Castleford Express, 22 May 1925, p. 2.23 Western Independent, 25 July 1926, p. 2. Salisbury Times, 1 July 1927, p. 8.24 Preston Guardian, 2 Sept. 1922, p. 8; 9 Sept. 1922, p. 9; Alan Crosby, The History of

Preston Guild: 800 years of England’s Greatest Carnival , Preston, 1991; Blackpool Gazette,19 June 1924, pp. 4, 12.

25 Headway, July 1927, p. 136.26 Headway, Nov-Dec. 1920, pp. 61–4.27 See records of the Mere LNU branch, minutes for 18 March 1922, 20 Jan. 1927; 6 Oct.

1931; 9 Oct. 1934; 16 Nov. 1938: Wiltshire Record Office, Chippenham, 2776/37.28 See numerous references in Headway between 1920 and 1937 listed under ‘Branch

News’.29 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, London, 1941, p. 163; Ayako Yoshino, ‘Between the

Acts and Louis Napoleon Parker – the Creator of the Modern English Pageant’, Critical Survey15: 2, 2003, pp. 49–61. Joshua Esty, ‘Amnesia in the Fields: Late Modernism, Late Imperialismand the English Pageant-play’, ELH [English Literary History] 269, 2002.

30 See reports in Herald of Peace, no. 607, 1 March 1900, pp. 32–3; no. 679, 1 March 1906,p. 186; no. 737, 1 Sept. 1911, p. 209.

31 See for example the emphasis given by W. T. Stead to municipal participation in his‘Peace Crusade’ in the report of a Hastings public meeting published in War Against War, no. 9,10 March 1899, p. 132.

32 See for example the activities of the Peace Society as reported in its periodical,Herald of Peace (selected years: 1900, 1906, 1908, 1912), and those of the ‘InternationalPolity’ movement reported in War and Peace: a Norman Angell Monthly (selected years:1913, 1914, 1916).

33 See reports in Daily News, 14 and 18 July 1890; Pall Mall Gazette, 18 July 1890; LloydsWeekly Newspaper, 20 July 1890; The Times, 17 July 1890, p. 4.

34 See undated flyer, A ‘‘League of Nations’’ Mystery Pageant Play, presented by theCawthra LNU branch (Bradford): Bradford Archives, Bradford, DB34/23/17. See also pro-gramme of exhibition held at St Albans in November 1922, which included a pageant andmystery plays: Headway, Sept. 1922, p. 179.

35 Withington, English Pageantry, chap. 8; Deborah Ryan, ‘The Man Who Staged theEmpire: Remembering Frank Lascelles in Sibford Gower, 1875–2000’, in Material Memories,ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley, Oxford, 1999; Ryan,‘ ‘‘Pageantitis’’: Frank Lascelles’ 1907 Oxford Historical Pageant, Visual Spectacle andPopular Memory’, Visual Culture in Britain ed. Ryan, 2007; and ‘Staging the ImperialCity: the Pageant of London, 1911’, in Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, ed.Felix Driver and David Gilbert, Manchester, 1999.

36 For pageantry as a product of popular historical consciousness, see Paul Readman,‘The Place of the Past in English Culture, c.1890–1914’, Past and Present 186, 2005; and PeterMerrington, ‘Staging History, Inventing Heritage: the ‘‘New Pageantry’’ and British ImperialIdentity, 1905–35’, in Archaeologies of the British: Explorations of Identity in Great Britain and its Colonies 1600-1945, ed. Susan Lawrence, London, 2003.

37 J. M. Gibson, ‘The Value of Pageants’, Headway, Aug. 1935, p.149.38 Pontefract and Castleford Express, 22 May 1925, p. 2. In 1925 Joan of Arc figured in a

League Pageant at Warrington and in the Hull Pageant: Warrington Guardian, 3 Oct. 1925,pp. 7, 16; Daily Mail (Hull), 20 June 1927, p. 9.

39 Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940, Cambridge, 2007.

40 For ‘taming’ thesis, see James Vernon, Politics and the People: a Study in English

Political Culture, c.1815–1867 , Cambridge, 1993. For a more nuanced view, see JonLawrence, Electing Our Masters: the Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair,Oxford, 2009.

41 Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society inModern Britain, Oxford, 2008, p. 129.



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42 Jon Lawrence, ‘The Transformation of British Public Politics after the First WorldWar’, Past and Present 190, 2006.

43 McCarthy, ‘The League of Nations Union’.44 Jan Ru ¨ ger, The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire,

Cambridge, 2007; Jim English, ‘Empire Day in Britain, 1904–1958’, Historical Journal , 49: 1,2006; Mangan, ‘The Grit of our Forefathers’.

45 Allen Warren, ‘Citizens of the Empire: Baden-Powell, Scouts and Guides, and anImperial Ideal’, in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. MacKenzie; David Cannadine, ‘TheContext, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: the British Monarchy and the ‘‘Invention of Tradition’’ c.1820–1977’, in Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Ranger.

46 Cannadine, ‘Transformation of Civic Ritual’; Vernon, Politics and the People; andSimon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and theEnglish Industrial City, Manchester, 2000.

47 For classic ‘decline’ thesis, see William D. Rubinstein, ‘Wealth, Elites and the ClassStructure of Modern Britain’, Past and Present 76, 1977. For critique, see Richard Trainor,‘Neither Metropolitan nor Provincial: the Interwar Middle-class’, in The Making of the BritishMiddle Class? Studies of Regional and Cultural Diversity since the Eighteenth Century, ed. AlanKidd and David Nicholls, Stroud, 1998.

48 E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Birth of a Holiday: the First of May’, in On the Move: Essays inLabour and Transport History presented to Philip Bagwell , ed. Chris Wrigley and JohnShepherd, London, 1991; and ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914’, in Inventionof Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Ranger; Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of theSuffrage Campaign, 1907–1914, London, 1987.

49 Roland Quinault, ‘The Cult of the Centenary, 1784–1914’, Historical Research 71: 176,1998; Antony Taylor, ‘Shakespeare and Radicalism: the Uses and Abuses of Shakespeare inNineteenth-Century Popular Politics’, Historical Journal 45: 2, 2002.

50 The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society staged a special performanceof its centenary pageant for delegates attending the LNU Council in December 1932:Headway, Dec. 1932, p. iv. For branch activities, see Headway, July 1933, p. 146; Nov. 1933,p. 226.

51 Omissi, ‘Hendon Air Pageant, 1920-1937’; Alec Wilson, ‘Hendon: 1929’, Headway,Aug. 1929, pp. 146-7, and letters in response, Sept. 1929, p. 180.

52 See McCarthy, ‘The League of Nations Union’, chap. 4.53 This phenomenon is briefly discussed in Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in

Britain: the Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance, Oxford, 1998, pp. 202, 204, andK. S. Inglis, ‘The Homecoming: the War Memorial Movement in Cambridge, England’,

Journal of Contemporary History 27, 1992.54 Derby Daily Express, 10 Nov. 1923, p. 1. It was repeated in subsequent years; see

Headway, Dec. 1926, p. 237.55 Headway, Dec. 1927, p. iii.56 A deputation from the LNU was amongst those laying wreaths upon the Cenotaph on

11 November 1919 (The Times, 11 Nov. 1919, p. 14); and in 1929 the LNU organized an

Armistice Day service in St Paul’s Cathedral at which the Archbishop of Canterbury preached:The Times, 23 Oct. 1929, p. 16; Headway, Dec. 1929, p. ii.

57 The Times, 9 Nov. 1922, p. 9; Headway, Nov. 1927, p. iv. The LNU’s David Davies wasregularly invited to unveil war memorials in Wales. See Angela Gaffney, Aftermath:Remembering the Great War in Wales, Cardiff, 1998.

58 ‘The League in the Schools’, Headway, March 1922, p. 48; Headway, Nov. 1925, p. 219.See also the suggested outline of peace-themed activities for Armistice Day in schools inTeacher’s World , 30 Oct. 1935, p. 231. Circular dated 6 Nov. 1925: London MetropolitanArchives, records of London County Council, LCC/EO/GEN/1/96.

59 Education and the League of Nations: Report of the Joint Committee of Enquiry into theTeaching of the Aims and Achievements of the League of Nations, London, 1929, p. 15.

60 This internationalist turn is briefly noted in Warren, ‘Citizens of the Empire’, and is

given rather more attention by Tammy Proctor, On My Honour: Guides and Scouts in InterwarBritain, Philadelphia, 2002.

61 See for example The Scouter, June, 1929, p. 206 and Aug. 1937, p. 303. For interna-tional jamborees, see Boy Scouts International Bureau, The Jamboree Story: the Full Story of the Eight World Jamborees of the Boy Scout Movement, 1920–1955, London, 1957.



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62 The Times, 3 Aug. 1920, p. 11; Boy Scouts Association (Great Britain), The JamboreeBook, 1920 London, 1920, p. 102; Claude Fisher, The World Jamboree: the Quest of the GoldenArrow, London, 1929.

63 Minutes of the Educational Committee, 10 Jan. 1923: British Library of Political andEconomic Sciences (BLPES), London, Records of the League of Nations Union, LNU/5/23,f.83; Headway, May 1927, p. iii.

64 The Scouter, Sept. 1924, p. 310.65 The Scouter, Dec. 1924, p. 413.66 See Headway for April 1924, p. 72; May 1924, p. 95; June 1924, p. 108; and July 1924,

pp. 132–3.67 J. S. Buist, ‘Peace on Exhibition’, Headway, June 1938, p. 112; Empire Exhibition:

Official Guide, no place of publication, 1938, p. 214.68 The Times, 26 May 1938, p. 12.69 Cannadine, ‘Context, Performance and Meaning’; Philip Williamson, ‘The Monarchy

and Public Values 1900–1953’, in The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present, ed.Andrzej Olechnowicz, Cambridge, 2007.

70 The Times, 31 Oct. 1930, p. 16.71 Stephen Howe, ‘Labour and International Affairs’, in Labour’s First Century, ed.

Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane, and Nick Tiratsoo, Cambridge, 2000.72 For Marxist-inspired anti-war agitation, see Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists, and ‘The

First Communist ‘‘Peace Society’’: the British Anti-War Movement, 1932–1935’, TwentiethCentury British History 1: 1, 1990.

73 For the influence of liberal internationalism on the left, see Paul Bridgen, The LabourParty and the Politics of War and Peace, 1900-1924, Woodbridge, 2009.

74 See photograph in Heywood Advertiser, 29 Aug. 1924, p. 8.75 Derbyshire Times, 5 Jan. 1929, p. 12.76 Johnson, Earth and her Children.77 Daily Mail (Hull), 20 June 1927, p. 9.78 Daily Mail (Hull), 20 June 1927, p. 3.79 Blackpool Gazette, 19 June 1924, p. 2.

80 Rushden Echo, 7 Oct. 1921, p. 7. See also Ripon Gazette, 25 July 1935, p. 5, and 1 Aug.,p. 4.

81 Alfred Zimmern, ‘Education in International Relations: a Critical Survey’, in League of Nations Educational Survey 3: 1, 1932.

82 Amy Robinson, ‘The League and the Infants’ School’, in Teacher’s World , 5 Feb. 1926,p. 952. See also the classroom activities pioneered by Kathleen Gibberd in her girls’ school inPolitics on the Blackboard: an Autobiographical Essay, London, 1954.

83 Memo by Reverend G. Dickin filed in Appeals Sub-Committee Minutes, 29 Nov. 1929,BLPES, LNU/4/3, f.10. See also Edward Shillito, ‘Thinking is not Enough’, in Headway,March 1930, pp. 44-5.

84 Vivian Ogilvie, ‘Nazi Tactics and Mass Psychology’, Headway, Aug. 1933, p. 153.85 Vivian Ogilvie, ‘The Breakdown of Internationalism’, Headway, Dec. 1933, p. 233.86 D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated

Mind in Britain Between the Wars, Oxford, 1988.87 Cited in Steven Lukes, ‘Political Ritual and Social Integration’, Sociology 9, 1975,

p. 292.88 Steven Lukes, ‘Political Ritual and Social Integration’, Sociology 9, 1975, p. 291.89 For two contrasting readings of national identity in Edwardian pageantry see

Readman, ‘The Place of the Past’, and Ryan, ‘Staging the Imperial City’. For the widerliterature on ‘Englishness’ versus ‘Britishness’, see Krishnan Kumar, The Making of EnglishNational Identity, Cambridge, 2003; Peter Mandler, ‘Against Englishness: English Culture andthe Limits to Rural Nostalgia’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 7, 1997;Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939–1965, Oxford, 2005; Jed Esty, A ShrinkingIsland: Modernism and National Culture in England , Princeton, 2004.

90 Martyn Cornick, ‘Putting the Seal on the Entente: the Franco-British

Exhibition, London, May-October 1908’, in Franco-British Studies 35, 2004. For British-Japan Exhibition see MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, chap. 4.

91 The Times, 11 Nov. 1850, p. 6.92 The Lord Mayor’s Show featured floats depicting the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1902

and the Entente Cordiale in 1905. See Withington, English Pageantry, chap. 6.



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93 Susan Pedersen, ‘The Meaning of the Mandates System: an Argument’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32: 4, Oct.-Dec. 2006; Daniel Gorman, ‘Empire, Internationalism, and theCampaign against the Traffic in Women and Children in the 1920s’, Twentieth CenturyBritish History 19, 2008; Trentmann, Free Trade Nation and ‘After the Nation-State:Citizenship, Empire and Global Coordination in the New Internationalism, 1914–1930’, inBeyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c.1880–1950, ed. Kevin Grant,Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann, Basingstoke, 2007.

94 William Roger Louis, In the Name of God, Go! Leo Amery and the British Empire in theAge of Churchill , London, 1992. For the LNU’s tense relationship with the Navy League, seereport of Grand Council meeting, The Times, 14 May 1931, p. 10 and the LNU’s response inHeadway, June 1931, p. 103.

95 Richard Grayson, Austen Chamberlain and the Commitment to Europe: British ForeignPolicy, 1924-29, London, 1997.

96 Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy, 1933–40,London, 1975, p. 7.

97 Daniel Waley, British Public Opinion and the Abyssinian War, London, 1975.98 Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists, chap. 10.99 Cecil shared the joint presidency of the IPC with the French radical, Pierre Cot, and

the LNU housed the British Section at its headquarters in Grosvenor Crescent. See Birn,League of Nations Union, chaps 10-11.

100 Eleanor Rathbone, War Can Be Averted , London, 1938.101 ‘Memorandum concerning the organisation and results of Bolton Peace Week

Sep 21st-27th 1936’, by P. M. Harker: Churchill Archives Centre (CAC), Cambridge, Noel-Baker Papers, NBKR/5/55/2. For photograph of the floodlit town hall, see Bolton EveningNews, 22 Sept. 1936.

102 IPC Newsletter, no. 4, 18 May 1938, p. 3.103 ‘IPC’s Peace Pavilion at Paris International Exhibition’, IPC Monthly Bulletin, 10

April 1937, pp. 6–7. See also ‘Why a Peace Pavilion?’, IPC Monthly Bulletin, 10 June 1937,pp. 16–17’, and ‘What you will see on your visit to the Peace Pavilion’, IPC Monthly Bulletin,19 July 1937, pp. 6–7.

104 Circular from IPC secretariat dated 27 July 1937: CAC, NBKR/5/51/3. See W. ArnoldFoster, ‘France’s Great Demonstration’, IPC Monthly Bulletin, 10 Aug. 1937, p. 6, and‘Making Peace Demonstrations Public Holidays’, pp. 16–17. For the political theatre of theFrench Popular Front, see Jessica Waudlaugh, In the Pursuit of the People: Political Culture inFrance, 1934–9, Basingstoke, 2009.

105 IPC Newsletter, no. 6, 15 June 1938.106 Western Mail , 24 Nov. 1938, pp. 7, 9.107 See McCarthy, ‘The League of Nations Union’, chap. 7.108 For examples of leftist political ritual in the later 1930s, see Mick Wallis, ‘Pageantry

and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the ‘‘Thirties’’ ’, New Theatre Quarterly 10:38, 1994.

109 ‘Days of Promise and Opportunity’, Headway, July 1944, pp. 1–2; ‘United NationsDay 1948’, United Nations News, Sept.-Oct. 1948, pp. 13–4.

110 ‘Report on United Nations Day: UN Flags Fly from Cornwall to Scotland’,United Nations News, Jan.-Feb. 1950, pp. 16–17.

111 As previous note.112 See for example ‘Programme for a Demonstration in support of the United Nations in

Birmingham Town Hall on 28th May, 1946’, ‘Programme for a Great Public Demonstrationheld on 10th April 1946, at 7.15pm at the Civic Hall Wolverhampton’, and ‘Programme for aMeeting of Citizens, in the municipal hall, Keighley, on June 26th 1946’: West YorkshireArchive Service, Wakefield, papers of Ralph Sweeting, C596, Box 4.

113 United Nations News, Aug. 1947, p. 14; Runcorn Guardian, 12 Sept. 1947, p. 3.114 See Runcorn Guardian, 12 June 1953, p. 7.115 The last reference the author has been able to find was on 20 Feb. 1958, p. 8, where it

was reported that the UNA Queen was crowned at a ‘Children’s Ball’ attended by about 350.

116 Cannadine, ‘Transformation of Civic Ritual’; Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750, ed. R. J. Morris and Richard Trainor, Aldershot, 2000.

117 Geoffrey Goodwin, Britain and the United Nations, London, 1957; Adam Roberts,‘Britain and the Creation of the United Nations’, in Still More Adventures with Britannia:Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, ed. William Roger Louis, London, 2003.



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McCarthy (2010) The League of Nations, Public Ritual and National Identity in Britain, c.1919–56

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