The Death of Christian Britain

— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —
within a series of signs and symbols located in church and faith. Oral and
autobiographical testimony comes alive when women recall late Victorian
and early twentieth-century religious events. The theatricality of the
revivalist preacher, and of the call to the saved to come forward, appears
frequently. Molly Weir speaks of the attraction of Jock Troup’s tent
preaching in Springburn in Glasgow between the wars. He was such ‘great
value’ that he could ‘make the flames of hell so real, we felt them licking
round our feet, and the prospect of heaven so alluring we often stood up
to be saved several times during the week’; once home, she re-enacted the
service to her Grannie. 47 Margaret Penn in Lancashire and Flora Thompson
in Oxfordshire, like many children of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, attended services or Sunday schools of different
denominations, but favoured Methodist worship over Anglican for its evangelical
excitement. 48 Aesthetic sensibility features powerfully in elderly
women’s testimony of remembrance of Sunday school and church services
when they were young girls. Henrietta Isleworth from Preston recalled:
‘I always remember we got white silk dresses on for Good Friday, they
must have been lovely, and they took us for a long walk’. 49 Isabelle Jones
(born 1900) from the same town went to a Methodist Church four times
every Sunday as a child; ‘We never thought – we thought it was lovely,
we never thought anything about it. We would be dressed in our best, you
know.’ 50 At the teetotal meetings of the Band of Hope in the 1910s, Jean
Kennedy recalled:
We would meet in the Band of Hope. There was an old Church stood
in the middle of the Brae and it was a lovely, beautiful Church and
the velvet where the – preacher stood was just – oh, it wasnae much
broader than that cabinet and it was red velvet, I can mind. And we
had cantatas and things like that. ... Peggy and I used to sing – oh
what was it? ‘Count your blessings’, and we’d stand as proud as be.
And we had white frocks and because I thought I was the king – the
queen of everything. Mine was lacy and Peggy’s was plain. Oh, we
used to rival in good fun. 51
Religious worship was a vital venue for young working-class girls to
express their femininity. Their testimony sparkles when discussing the
‘Sunday best’ dresses. Kate Langholm born in 1914 recalled:
Well, Sunday was my day because Sunday I was up and I was born,
I mean brought up a Protestant, but on a Sunday morning I got
dressed – you had a Sunday outfit you see, you only wore it on a
Sunday, no other day except a Sunday. Well I went to my two pals,
they went to the Catholic Church, so I went with them to mass on
a Sunday morning so’s I’d have my Sunday clothes on. When I came
home I’d go to the [Protestant] church with my mother and then
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