The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
when I came home from that I kept on my clothes because I was
going to the Sunday school, and then we went to Bible class at night.
And the reason I went to all that was because I got wearing my
Sunday clothes. As soon as I was finished from the Bible class you’d
to take them off, hang them up and put on your ordinary clothes.
You weren’t allowed to wear your Sunday best for playing with. So
the one [day] I looked forward to is a Sunday just for that – to keep
my Sunday clothes on. 52
Hetty Beck born in 1879 in London recalled the special Sunday dresses
she wore as either white or very pale, used for church and Sunday school
anniversaries and for Sunday evening walks with friends, in stark contrast
to the black she wore after funerals during the long mourning time. 53 It
was the same for young Catholic girls. ‘Sunday-best’ dresses were bought
annually, usually in spring, as Maria Nolan (born in 1910) recalled:
First Sunday in May, that’s when you got your summer clothes
bought.... And all you did was, she [mother] did was, to go down to
the village shop; they were Baptist folk, and very nice people . . . Mrs
Bingham would get the order and she would go to the Glasgow warehouse,
and just exactly, she just took a tape and measured us, and she
brought back the beautifulest clothes. It was the talk of the village.
‘I wonder what the Nolan girls will have this May?’ Sometimes be
shepherd’s tartan with velvet; another time it would be green velvet. 54
The dresses are remembered with great clarity: the parade to church in ‘our
button boots and our parasols . . . black button boots we had on, and eh
a black dress. It was awfy fancy made with frills, puff sleeves and everything.’
55 One woman recalled being taken for a new Sunday-best outfit,
but after making a scene in the draper’s shop about dress colour (she wanted
green), her mother threatened her with the very real punishment of not
going to church. 56
Sunday-best dress was a signifier of both feminine and religious apprenticeship.
Churches were privileging women’s and girls’ sense of their own
identity. But they were also privileging women as vulnerable. The Band of
Hope’s magic lantern stories of female victims of male drink were widely
recalled in first-hand testimony:
You would see the mother would probably be in bed, and she’d either
just had an addition to her family or she was ill with tuberculosis.
And you usually saw the father who had been drunk, and it was
always perhaps the eldest sister was looking after, you know, a big
family. And this was brought home to you about, you know, drink,
you know, how it was the downfall of your eh – So, with the result
that when you would go to these things, you know, you’d sometimes
come away with your face all tear-stained. ... 57
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