'A Gypsy's Revenge' was the title of this melodramatic young people's tableau moving slowly down Victoria Road in a 1930s Keighley Gala procession. The bystanders provide an unselfconscious survey of pre-war fashions, with most of the men wearing hats or caps.
Tableaux had been introduced to Keighley in 1902, when local Sunday Schools had commemorated Edward VII's Coronation with some thirty horse-drawn wagons representing scenes from British history. "Anyone who has ridden upright on an ordinary wagon," the 'Keighley News' commented at the time, "will be able to appreciate the task of the riders."
Keighley's Gala Committee took up the idea, and by 1907 - tempted by the offer of a first prize of £7 - six tableaux enjoyed "an excellent reception all along the line".
Early tableaux tended to be spectacular and topical. In 1910, for example, Alice Street Sunday School depicted "a group of Old Age Pensioners celebrating together their first pension day, by having tea together at one of their homes", while St Barnabas Church in 1913 enacted "Captain Scott and his gallant comrades raising the Union Jack at the South Pole".
Over the years, however, tableaux subjects became generally less exacting, as here.
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