The Army Pageant held at Fulham Palace, London in the summer of 1910 continues to yield revelations for this blog.
Witnessed by around 100,000 spectators, the event featured what the Historical Pageants in Britain website describes as “a disparate selection of episodes that illustrated the development of military conflict and the British armed forces.”
Regular readers will be aware that it was an assignment covered by pioneering Fleet Street press photographer James Edward Ellam (1857-1920).
Working for the recently-launched London News Agency Photos Ltd. (L.N.A.), he supplied prints taken from his 3D images that were published as halftones, notably by the Illustrated London News.
By contrast, The Graphic, one of the ILN’s long-standing competitors, used the work of artists rather than press photos to convey the drama and spectacle on view.
The costumes supplied to those participating in the pageant’s various episodes were particularly eye-catching as demonstrated by the cover of its Summer Number.
Closer examination of the coverage inside revealed a detail I had previously missed.
It concerned Fulham outfitter Stanley Cave, one of the event’s organisers and the subject of an earlier Pressphotoman blogpost.
Mr. Cave’s skills handling horses were alluded to in this photographic postcard that initially prompted the post, portraying him as a ‘Roman Charioteer’.
But in a scene from the pageant featuring ‘Ancient Britons’, an uncredited artist with The Graphic placed Mr. Cave at the heart of a full-page drawing, adding a full beard to his distinctive facial features.
At this point in press history, the battle between art and photography as competing illustrative media was still in full swing.
It maybe that the Graphic artist used a photograph as the basis for his version, perhaps even one supplied by James Edward Ellam of L.N.A.
However, in this example with its vivid portrayal of a bearded Mr. Cave and his spectacular horse-drawn chariot, artistic licence could be argued to have won out over factual accuracy.
Pressphotoman 
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