The Death of Christian Britain

— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —
Religion textured nearly all his recollections: the chapel anniversaries with
ladies dishing out plates of boiled ham and tea from urns; and the temperance
club tea parties for youngsters with more boiled ham and tea: ‘boiled
ham seemed to come very much into the picture, doesn’t it. [Laughter] Tea
parties of this sort and little lectures on the evils of drink.’ But he adds
that these were not ‘a lot of horrible people, they were very nice people
who did these sort of things, but terribly narrow, but believed quite firmly
in what they were trying to do for us’. 18
Underlying the embittered narrative is the issue of his own piety. Ronald
Walker’s father had wanted him to become a Methodist preacher, and when
in his later teens he showed no interest in that, his father deflected his
expectation towards a substitute piety – medicine. Ronald had no choice
in this, and he was entered at Leeds University to train as a doctor, but
failed his first-year exams in part, at least, because of taking up interests
in competitive swimming and athletics. A mounting rift developed between
him and his father as he appeared to slide from both his faith in religion
and his father’s vocational expectations for him. ‘His children, my generation,
I’m afraid we were falling away from this sort of thing. We went to
chapel because we had to. I remember we didn’t have to, we went there
to please our parents, but I don’t think any of my sisters or myself had,
at that time, any – we were losing our childish convictions and hadn’t got
any others.’ 19 Yet revealingly, as the interview arrived at the end of the
narrative of Ronald’s own life, he returns to the end of his father’s life for
the conclusion:
I think they were very sincere in their beliefs. I don’t care to discuss
whether their beliefs were right or wrong, but they were very sincere
about it. All their lives they prayed together. Every night my father
read a portion of the Bible to my mother, late at night, and on his
deathbed [in the late 1920s] he sent for us all – typical of the time
. . . he knew he was dying and most embarrassingly he confessed
himself a great sinner before he died. He had a feeling this was the
sort of thing to get off his chest. 20
His father sought to conclude with the deathbed scene of evangelical
discourse. But his children were perplexed. They had undergone a ‘spiritual
turn’ from their father’s world. Bitterness and confusion over personal
values ooze from Ronald’s testimony. At one and the same time he was
rejecting and almost blaming the discursive world of his youth, whilst yet
still moving into that world, affirming how much he owed to it, and
returning again and again to discuss his father when the questions were
actually about himself.
That interview reveals the disjunction between the different discursive
worlds of interviewee and interviewer, and between those of an interviewee’s
own past and present. Such disjunction tends to be at its most
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