Looking back with Eric Leaver

DINERS at a Blackburn restaurant will be sitting down in fancy dress on June 27 to Australian kangaroo tail soup and other fare from parts of the globe that were once marked in red upon the map.

They will be marking the passing of an institution that once swelled British hearts with pride - The Empire.

But there must still be thousands of older readers who would chew on the choice of that date - and wonder why the occasion is not taking place next Saturday instead.

For May 24 used to be a red letter day in the calendar - of schools in particular - when across the world Empire Day was celebrated.

Yet if that proved too short notice for the end of the British Empire to be celebrated at Beetlestone's bistro, a date in December might be more historically apt, for it was in that month in 1958 that the sun finally set on empire.

Then, formal sanction was given to change the name to Commonwealth Day which, since 1949, had come into greater use after the running down of the Union Jack on the Indian subcontinent began the removal of the red bits from the map. Commonwealth Day, incidentally, was shuttled in 1967 to the Queen's official birthday on the second Saturday in June and 10 years later to the second Monday in March.

But if that day now passes with hardly any notice, it was not the case with Empire Day - at least not in the country's schools, especially before the last war.

It was an occasion for flag-waving, parade and pageant - though often in varying degree.

"We used to walk round the playground with Union Jacks," recalls 84-year-old Harry Child, of Mellor, of his days in the infants at Stoneyholme School in Burnley, which he left in 1920. "But I recall us also waving French and Belgian flags which, I suppose, must have been a hangover from the First World War, with them being our allies then."

Elsewhere, it was marked in schools with uplifting addresses to pupils by the teachers on the meaning of empire, with saluting the flag, singing patriotic "hymns" such as Land of Hope and Glory and sometimes with small tableaux.

In 1924 - the year of the great Empire Exhibition and the opening the Empire Stadium at Wembley - we find, for instance, the children of Spring Bank Council School in Darwen putting on a "fitting and unique" celebration of Empire Day in the form of an international exhibition of their own. Large maps of the different parts of the Empire were drawn by the pupils and fixed to the walls and "by ribbons attached there was an indication of the parts of the countries from which products on the many stalls had come."

Similarly, at Burnley in 1932, Coal Clough children held a patriotic pageant in the school yard while their classrooms were decorated to represent different parts of the Empire. Of course, many children remembered Empire Day not just with imperialistic pride and pomp but because they got a half-day holiday. A children's chant of the time was:

Empire Day, Empire Day,

If you don't give us a holiday

We'll all run away

In 1928, five million schoolchildren scooted home early after the flag-waving and singing and a few of them still might have one of the 36,000 Empire Day medals distributed throughout the country that year by the British Empire Union, mainly to children in hospital and convalescent homes and to schools in poorer districts.

The union had been founded by the Earl of Meath who, early in the century had begun the campaign to establish an official Empire Day. It was in 1902 that King Edward VII proposed that May 24, the birthday of his mother, Queen Victoria, should be honoured as Empire Day in order to record the help given "by the colonies to the mother country" during the then recently-ended Boer War.

Now, with "empire" gone and imperialism a dirty word, the era when little chests swelled with pride in playground parades is but a memory.

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