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