The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
of our research period in 1800). Chapter 8 tackles discourse change itself,
but the present chapter looks at the evangelical narrative within personal
testimony.
THE EVANGELICAL NARRATIVE
STRUCTURE
Ronald Walker 9 was born in Leeds in 1902 before moving to Harrogate.
His father was a prosperous director of Hepworth’s, a wholesale clothiers,
and of at least two other Leeds firms. With four live-in servants and
a nanny, he was born into an upper-middle-class household of some
substance. The family was Methodist, belonging to the richest of
Harrogate’s three Wesleyan chapels. For all the material comfort of his
upbringing, this man’s recollections were dominated by issues of religiosity
and morality. Religious conceptions entered unsolicited into wide areas of
the interviewee’s recollections, but they were located within a highly
charged critique. In an articulate testimony, Ronald Walker had clearly
dwelt for many decades on the psychological legacy of his youth. Early in
the interview, he was asked whether his mother gave any moral guidance
to her staff:
Yes, she insisted – and this is strange in the context of 1970, but she
insisted that they went to chapel on Sunday nights, because they
couldn’t go on Sunday mornings because they had to work. But she
was very keen that they should go on Sunday nights and she was –
mind you, I was brought up in a Nonconformist teetotal atmosphere,
and she was keen on abstinence from alcohol in the servants and was
always telling them the dangers of that sort of thing. And on one
famous occasion we had a very good cook who, for 12 months at a
time would be a very good cook, then for 12 months she’d break out
on gin and we’d find her flat on the kitchen floor. Mother used to
search her room and find hidden bottles of gin in her wardrobe, and
she with great ceremony poured this down the sink, and we put up
with this, and so forth. Poor Sarah, they called her, she finished up
in an inebriate’s home I’m afraid to say. 10
This passage set the thematic tone and the narrative structure for the rest
of Ronald’s lengthy interview. In it he posits a number of oppositions:
employer–employee (or ‘upstairs–downstairs’), loyalty–disobedience,
sober–drunk and teetotalism–drinking. These are value-types, engrossed
within an overarching moral opposition which is immediate and universal,
and drawn from evangelical discourse. The moral opposition is used to
define the atmosphere of the household, constituting a discursive framework
of puritan chapel-going nonconformity and its values. Within it is
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