The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
Bullock’s mining village in Yorkshire in the early twentieth century, ‘girls
wore frocks and pinafores, and their hair hung down in long curls, the
result of wrapping it in curling rags on Saturday night’. 64 A major reason
for this was romance. Church and religious organisations were the ‘singles
bars’ and dating agencies of their time. Molly Weir recalled:
All our romantic attachments were formed with those boys whom
we met through the church. All our religious observance, which
played so large a part in our lives, became more thrilling and exciting
when we could peep across at the lads under cover of our hymnsinging,
and later we joined up with them for a few delicious moments
on our demure walks over Crowhill Road after evening service. 65
Church, chapel, Sunday school and mission hall were important locations
for romance. Henry Elder’s mother met her husband, a piano finisher, in
Field Lane Mission in Rosebery Avenue in central London in the early
1890s where he preached and where his sister played the organ. 66
David Mitchell, born in 1899 to non-churchgoing parents, spent all his
life in Salvation Army organisations where he met his wife. 67 Percival
Chambers (born 1894) changed from going to the Church of England to
the Baptist Church because ‘there was a young lady I knew went . . . and
that enticed me and kept me there for a long time’. He then switched to
a presbyterian church because there was another lady he liked, and took a
short period back at the Church of England because of another young
woman. 68 Patricia Quigley (born 1906) met her husband at the Sunday
school of her Church of Scotland in Stirling: there was, she recalled,
‘a superintendent in the primary who prided herself in getting young
couples together, you know . . . And I was the pianist, in the primary
Sunday school, and she was a great one for making matches. And that
was where I met my husband when we were seventeen.’ 69 Sunday was not
only a day for dating but a day for consummating romance. In England,
Sunday became the most popular day of the week for church weddings.
Most English weddings took place in the Anglican Church (accounting
for between 80 and 94 per cent of all marriages in sample parishes in
Birmingham, Manchester and Blackburn), and Sunday was its leading day
by the late Victorian period. In Bristol Sunday was the leading day for
nuptials throughout 1790–1911 (with from 29 to 37 per cent of all marriages
taking place on that day). But in other cities it jumped in popularity: in
Birmingham Sunday weddings rose continuously from 18 per cent of all
marriages in 1791 to 51 per cent in 1911; in Manchester the figures rose
from 21 per cent in 1790 to 35 per cent in 1871, only to be stalled by an
apparent change of local clerical policy which pushed them on to Wednesdays,
whilst something similar appears to have happened in Blackburn in
the 1880s, when couples seem to have been directed to substitute Thursdays
or Saturdays for Sundays. 70
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