The Death of Christian Britain

— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —
The same structure was evident in the searing testimony of Arthur
Turner from Lancashire, interviewed in around 1970 while living alone in
deep poverty in Manchester. He was born in 1894 into a very poor family
in Hankey Park, his father a blacksmith striker and his mother a weaver
before she married. They were so poor that their food was of extremely
low quality (their special Sunday lunch being ‘lips and lugs’, the lips and
ears left over from the butchers). He went to school in bare feet (with clogs
reserved for Sundays), and attended ragged schools to get free ‘soup and
stuff at night time’. Though ‘nearly everyone in street went to church
Sundays’, neither his parents nor he ever went, not even to Sunday school.
Yet, he wore clogs and ‘a little sailor suit’ specially on Sundays. He had a
brutal upbringing, being beaten heavily by his father and harassed by the
police for innocent games. Arthur became a young man torn by resentment
at unfair treatment, developing in his teens as a street fighter, and at
the age of sixteen he did seven days in Strangeways Prison for loitering
with intent. He became repeatedly arrested for the same offence – on every
occasion, as far as he was concerned, trumped-up charges by policemen
who didn’t like him. He joined the Royal Navy where he was birched, and
ended up in his twenties as a chimney sweep. But this brutal, alienated and
characteristically ‘rough’ youth changed in 1923 when he married. Arthur
had three children who went to Sunday school, and he and his wife took
them regularly to an Anglican Church. They said grace at meals and he
taught his children family prayers. He gave up smoking and drinking,
but though he and his family remained poor, he recalled his marriage was
much happier than that of his parents. But things gradually changed again.
By the late 1960s his wife and most of his children had predeceased him
and he entered a lonely and impoverished old age. His narrative had become
a circular route through life: from brutal childhood and early manhood
in the navy, through happy but poor marriage with a family, to lonely
and poverty-stricken old age. It was also a moral circular tour: from
unchurched, unhappy childhood and early manhood, through a ‘moral’,
teetotal, churchgoing and Christianised family life, to an old-age solitude
devoid of relatives, friends and comfort. In his poverty and declining years,
religiosity and morality had no context, no place and no purpose; they were
located in memories of marriage. Finding the interviewee living alone in
the front room of a dirty and very cold flat, surviving on dry bread and
tea (a diet as bad as that of his tender years in the 1890s), the interviewer
was deeply shocked. She wrote to the oral-history co-ordinator: ‘The
complete and utter emptiness of the lives of these people is quite horrifying
to contemplate.’ 24
The counterpointing of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the narratives of the
poor also infected a modulation between religion and male-induced poverty.
A common characteristic of many interviewees, though especially those
from poor backgrounds, is to override the interviewer’s scheduled ‘slot’ for
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