Ramsgate marked St George’s Day on Sunday afternoon with a parade led by a 30-foot figure of St George rolling on wheels down the high street, while a separate church service at 11am drew only the 90 most dedicated worshippers. The procession brought together nymphs, dignitaries, fairies, worthies, Miss Ramsgate and three rival Ramsgate princesses, with a green dragon carried by three lads in backpack harnesses and just two St George’s Crosses counted in the parade.
The St George figure wore a long red tunic, a grey helmet and a furry red plume, and a square of drummers followed behind beating tambourines, skins and claves. For some onlookers, the pageant was hard to place. One little man in a peasant costume thought the white figure was meant to be Jesus. Another woman said it looked like something to do with a spring festival. A man dressed as a tree called it the Ukrainian St George, while Nadia cut through the confusion with a blunt line: it was not St George.
The scene stood in contrast to the newer, more assertive version of English nationalism that has shown up in recent months on mini-roundabouts in places such as Bexley and Romford, in online policing of Rishi Sunak’s ethnicity and in housing estates robed with red crosses. Three years ago, the Economist described English nationalism as “a conspiracy of male writers, desperate to combine their love of football with a degree in English literature,” and Ramsgate’s parade still carried that older, more playful strain, even as the symbols around it grew louder elsewhere.
Inside St George, the Martyr, the service was modernized in its own way. Reverend Paul Worledge used a microphone and a PowerPoint presentation, while the nave was hung with prints from a local artist, including a fearsome Viking knight. Some of the hymns were recent compositions, among them lines that ran: “My Lord is faster than a rocket/Can see more than a telescope/Is bigger than the universe as well.” If the parade was crowded with pageantry and uncertainty, the service was smaller, steadier and more certain of its place — a St George’s Day that still survives, but mainly in the hands of the faithful few who turned up at 11am and the town that still makes room for the old rituals to roll on.
