PAGEANT OF OLD ENGLAND.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 16639, 7 August 1930, Page 4

PAGEANT OF OLD ENGLAND.

OPENING NIGHT AT ALDERSHOT. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, June 18. All the Empire and his wife revelled in the pageantry of Aldershot Searchlight Tattoo, for one entire block of the grandstand was occupied by 200 delegates from the Empire Press Conference. Those who saw the daylight rehearsal of the Tattoo realised that night, that darkness is needed to bring out its full significance. Fine as the daylight presentation was, compared with that of the night, it was as water unto wine. Those who had not seen it will gain more than a glimmering of the reality, when they learn that the evolutions of the 5000 soldiers participating were illuminated by searchlights equivalent to 17,000,000,000 candle-power.

The spell of twilight passed, the last burst of community singing died away, when above the whispering trees of Rushmoor, there came through the dusk a shrill bugle call heralding the drama of a nation’s victory told in scarlet. Then silence! For behind the curtain of night, the Aldershot Tattoo was in the making. More than 35,000 people sat tense, expectant, watching and waiting. In the Royal box were Princess Helena Victoria and Princess Marie Louise, with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, FieldMarshal Sir George Milne, Lieut.General Sir David Campbell, and the members of the Executive Committee.

More bugles, and then on the night air came the sound of drums, sweeping across 'the arena louded and louder, and the searchlights revealed the brilliant uniforms of the thousand musicians of the massed bands, who marched towards the audience from Rushmoor Woods, and changing to flashing diamonds the brass instruments as they came under the flaming beams. The first of the marvels in store came when the massed bands marched through the bugles and drums. The marching and counter-marching of the Whole force, to inspiring music, evoked rapturous cheers.

But more impressive and more eloquent than the applause that broke out from time to time up to midnight, was the absolute stillness which mostly held the crowd. Silence was a more appropriate tribute to the wonders of the rapidly-succeeding tableaux. What but silence could lend its praise when each force of military, having played its part In a dazzling sea of light, made its exit in darkness. Gradually they vanished into the woods. Here and there a light flickered amid the trees —sentinels, so they seemed, on the fringe of Valhalla. The mystic thrall of receding music seized the enraptured listeners.

A fanfare dissipated the stillness, and light cavalry entered. The horse now began to divide the honours with the soldier. The perfection of its training was shown in the evolutions of modern Hussars, in the guise of Light Dragoons, with the dress and equipment of the middle of the eighteenth century.

Then out of the shadows came the past. The audience was projected into the days of the Roundhead and Cavalier, in the staging of the episode in which Monck’s Coldstream Regiment, transfers its allegiance to the restored monarchy. The quaint equipment, the gleaming pikes and ancient matchlocks, roused intense interest. The deep blue jerkins of the pikemen, with burnished cuirass, and the musketeers in their uniform of entire red formed a striking old world picture. They leave the reek of powder and a fully charged echo as they fire their muskets and finally declare allegiance to Charles 11. The disappearance of these pikemen and musketeers, to the accompaniment of a recurrent haunting old time march, was one of the charming events in the programme. They vanished, these picturesque figures of Old England, into the mistiness whence they emerged; and the strains of the “Pikemen’s March” remained with the hearer. The same observation applied to the exit of the massed Pipe Bands, at a much later hour of the night. Many people, especially those with the blood of Caledonia stern and wild in their veins and hearts, voted this the most vivid recollection of all. The skirl of the 500 pipes had scarcely died away, before there was depicted a vignette of Sir Francis Drake playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe, saying “Play out the game, and then go out and beat the Spaniards.” Then in an astonishingly variegated tableau, came Queen Elizabeth surrounded by regal splendour, in a golden robe on a white charger to visit the Armada camp at Tilbury. The death or glory battle of the Armada sounds in the distance. Elizabeth reviews her Army, and then received news of the defeat of the Armada, amid cheers. That was the finest picture presented at any Tattoo.

After that colourful spectacle came darkness, in which the wandering torches settled down into a gigantic lighted Victoria Cross, whilst there rose against the black skyline another V.C. with the appropriate ribbon, and under it in vivid letters of fire, the Prince of Wales’s words, “ That most enviable order.” At the same moment, a boyish treble sang in a voice that could be heard all over the enclosures: “O Valiant Hearts, Who to Your Came.” It was explained afterwards that this was an amplified gramophone record made specially for the Tattoo, by Harold Langston, a 13 years old member of the Temple Choir. However, that hymn entranced thousands and brought with it the exaltation which allowed the great assembly of actors and spectators to sing “Abide With Me,” as it has been sung at all previous Tattoos, and sent Aldershot guests away with the consciousness that they had assisted at something more ennobling than a spectacular entertainment. Mingling with the vast crowd that dispersed a little after midnight, one realised the spell that had been cast over the witnesses of the Tattoo. The Aldershot Command had evolved a wondrous poem. It had invested the dry records of history with a living fire. To witness the Monck’s regiment incident, to see Drake’s game of bowls at Plymouth, to listen to Queen Elizabeth addressing her troops at Tilbury, to live through the battle of Dettingen, to have projected in the black distance the blazing of the Spanish Armada —these thrills conveyed, in a couple of wonderful hours, more than months of reading of dusty tomes could impart. Right until the last echoes of “God Save the King” died in the woods, the vast audience sat spellbound. They had not come in vain, nor had they waited unrewarded since the setting of the sun, for here a moonlight pageant of romance and history was unfolded beneath the swaying silver beeches silhoutted against the distant sky.