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