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The British Empire Exhibition began at 11:45 am on April 23, 1924. And then, approximately eighty seconds later, it really began. The stuttered start to the Empire Exhibition at Wembley was recorded in the newspapers as a "marvel of modern science," but all that the 100,000 visitors packed into the Empire Stadium witnessed was a strange yet perhaps thrilling mingling of ancient pageantry and modern technology ("Flashed").1 A few minutes after the King declared the exhibition officially open, a telegraph boy strode into the stadium carrying a large white envelope. The band was playing as the King read the seventy-odd letters typed on the enclosed Eastern Telegram form reporting that the sovereign's proclamation had just circled the globe in merely one minute and twenty seconds. This technological stunt was a fitting beginning to an exhibition devoted to monumentalizing images of imperial unity and demonstrating the British Empire's global reach.
The history of the Empire Exhibition is punctuated by similar events that were staged at the 214-acre park in suburban London.2 During the two seasons that the park was open in 1924 and 1925, more than 27 million people made the pilgrimage to see the empire "reproduced in miniature" (British Empire). Yet on Thursday, May 29, 1924, just as Wembley entered its second month of operation, storm clouds on the horizon forecast bad weather for the huge outdoor exhibition. Amid the simulacral display of opulence and luxury, amid the pavilions representing each colony, dominion, and mandated territory, one visitor wandered the grounds of Wembley contemplating its destruction. It was Virginia Woolf who saw the ominous sky above the exhibition and imagined a force more powerful than empire, a force that would cause it all to tumble down. As she would write in the essay "Thunder at Wembley,"
Dust swirls down the avenues, hisses and hurries like erected cobras round the corners. Pagodas are dissolving in dust. Ferro-concrete is fallible. Colonies are perishing and dispersing in a spray of inconceivable beauty and terror which some malignant power illuminates. Ash and violet are the colours of its decay. From every quarter human beings come flying-clergymen, school children, invalids in bath-chairs. They fly with outstretched arms, and a vast sound of wailing rolls before them, but there is neither...