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A cartoon picture of a mounted knight going head-to-head with a smiley purple dragon may have been the first inkling many people had that Thursday was St George’s Day.

With election fever taking hold, no national newspaper front page mentioned that it was the memorial day of England’s patron saint, although Google’s homepage doodle links to a list of online news stories about the legend of the dragon slayer.

However, #StGeorgesDay was trending on Twitter from about 6am, and in the 24 hours to 11.30am more than 47,000 Tweets had included the hashtag, according to the social media analytics website Topsy.

The difference shows disconnect between the priorities of the country’s biggest media and the surge of British nationalism which has begun to accompany St George’s Day in recent years.

Celebrations are planned for the weekend in London and Manchester, with Birmingham having held its the Sunday before, but there are campaigners who will be satisfied only when 23 April is made the basis of a national holiday.

The UK Independence party has chosen the day with a press conference setting out its cultural agenda. Its leader, Nigel Farage, will use the event to repeat the party’s call for a bank holiday for St George.

By 8am, Labour’s Ed Miliband and Tom Watson, and even Nicola Sturgeon of the the Scottish National party, had wished a Happy St George’s Day to Twitter users who cared. David Cameron’s Twitter account mentioned nothing of the day, however. His top tweet instead issued a warning of the “heavy price” of any prospective Labour-SNP political deal.

Report The Leopard • April 23, 2015 12:23 PM BST

Nigel Farage, Ukip leader, had not got around to marking the day on the micro-blogging platform, either, despite his party’s special briefing to mark the day.

The nationalist street movement Britain First was taking no chances: it got its St George’s Day message in at 11.22pm on Wednesday – 38 minutes early – with an ad for its own Lionheart clothing brand for “patriots”. The far-right British National party was more restrained, getting its message in just after 7am.

The St George's Day Parade in the City of London. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
The St George’s Day Parade in the City of London. Photograph: Jane Sweeney/JAI/Corbis
According to religious tradition, St George, a Palestinian of Greek origin who became an officer in the Roman army, was executed on the order of the Roman emperor Diocletian on 23 April AD303 after refusing to renounce his Christian faith.

He has been regarded as patron saint of England at least since Agincourt, after his story was brought back to Britain, first by Roman occupiers and then by Crusaders who returned from the Holy Land with the legend of St George and the dragon.

He is also patron saint of the Hungarian police and the Portuguese army, as well as of Moscow and Georgia.

The Daily Express publishes a picture of St George every day as part of its masthead, but it had no words to mark Thursday’s memorial, so technically every day is St George’s Day for that paper; or its editors decided there was more important news to cover.