Centenary celebration (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Centenary celebration

12:00pm Saturday 4th February 2012 in News

Devizes Carnival committee is pulling out all the stops to make sure its centenary festivities are worthy of its long history.

It is 100 years since doctors and nurses at Devizes Hospital dressed up and paraded through the town on decorated floats to raise money for health services.

While many other towns have lost their carnivals, Devizes has retained its celebrations, though the programme has changed a great deal through the years.

But the procession, on Saturday, September 1, will be the biggest seen for many years, if artistic director Dave Buxton and his team succeed in their plans.

Mr Buxton said: “We are writing to local companies, groups and pubs that have not taken part in recent years, or have never taken part, to try to get them involved this year.

“Carnival has been growing year by year, but we want to make a big push to get as many people in as possible to celebrate 100 years.”

The Portsmouth Batala samba band, which led off last year’s procession, is keen to return and bring its sister bands from London and Bristol.

Mr Buxton said: “The Batala movement has bands all over the world which learn the same rhythms so they can come together and play, even if they’ve never met before.

“So we could have as many as 250 Batala drummers leading off the procession.”

Mr Buxton is also hoping the owner of a steam traction engine, made by Devizes firm Brown and May, which took part in the first carnival parade in 1912, to bring the machine to the centenary.

The carnival street festival, which is now a nationally known event, will take place over two days, instead of the usual one. As well as filling the Market Place and Brittox with performance artists from all over the world on August Bank Holiday Monday, there will be entertainment on the Green the day before.

Square Peg Circus, based at the Roundhouse in London, are set to perform their new show based on Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, while Lost in Translation Circus’s show is based on the story of Cyrano de Bergerac.

Mr Buxton is also preparing a book on 100 years of Devizes Carnival and is appealing for pictures of the event in its early years.

He said: “There must have been photographs taken at the time. The Gazette & Herald devoted an entire broadsheet page to it, but there were no pictures in newspapers in those days.”

Emails can be sent to d.buxton@btinternet.com