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Whitsuntide Processions at Clitheroe (1913)
Local Churches join together to celebrate a religious festival with parades and pageantry.
Overview
Whit Monday was a public holiday in 1913 and there were concerns that a mass exodus would leave few participants for Clitheroe's traditional church festivities. The large crowds and the number of beautifully decorated banners suggest those fears were groundless. The presence of a film camera may have helped. Shown a few days later, the film was accompanied live by the Borough brass band.
Interestingly, part of Clitheroe's Coronation procession in 1911 was filmed by Mitchell & Kenyon from an almost identical camera position near the railway line at Bawdlands, and many of the costumes and religious banners appear in both films. It's possible that some Whitsuntide sequences have been incorrectly labelled as being part of the Coronation film: certainly, the lack of festive bunting and the solemnity with which the children process through the streets in the Coronation film lend weight to this interpretation.
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