Birmingham Centenary Pageant 1938

Local news coverage of the wonderful (and very weird) parades and performances staged in Brum to celebrate 100 years since incorporation.

This local news film captures the extraordinary scale of the wonderful (and very weird) parades and performances staged in Birmingham to celebrate the 100th anniversary of municipal incorporation. Some 10,000 performers took part in the zany 'historical' re-enactments - which brought a cavalcade of dinosaur-hunting troglodytes, virgin-sacrificing druids and medieval knights to Aston Park.

The film was commissioned by the Tatler News Theatre, a local cinema operated by Birmingham entrepreneur Joseph Cohen. Sadly this incomplete section of the film is all that survives in the BFI National Archive. The cinema, however, is still running today under its original name - the Electric.