The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
— <strong>The</strong> <strong>Death</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> <strong>Britain</strong> —<br />
Bullock’s mining village in Yorkshire in the early twentieth century, ‘girls<br />
wore frocks and pinafores, and their hair hung down in long curls, the<br />
result <strong>of</strong> wrapping it in curling rags on Saturday night’. 64 A major reason<br />
for this was romance. Church and religious organisations were the ‘singles<br />
bars’ and dating agencies <strong>of</strong> their time. Molly Weir recalled:<br />
All our romantic attachments were formed with those boys whom<br />
we met through the church. All our religious observance, which<br />
played so large a part in our lives, became more thrilling and exciting<br />
when we could peep across at the lads under cover <strong>of</strong> our hymnsinging,<br />
and later we joined up with them for a few delicious moments<br />
on our demure walks over Crowhill Road after evening service. 65<br />
Church, chapel, Sunday school and mission hall were important locations<br />
for romance. Henry Elder’s mother met her husband, a piano finisher, in<br />
Field Lane Mission in Rosebery Avenue in central London in the early<br />
1890s where he preached and where his sister played the organ. 66<br />
David Mitchell, born in 1899 to non-churchgoing parents, spent all his<br />
life in Salvation Army organisations where he met his wife. 67 Percival<br />
Chambers (born 1894) changed from going to the Church <strong>of</strong> England to<br />
the Baptist Church because ‘there was a young lady I knew went . . . and<br />
that enticed me and kept me there for a long time’. He then switched to<br />
a presbyterian church because there was another lady he liked, and took a<br />
short period back at the Church <strong>of</strong> England because <strong>of</strong> another young<br />
woman. 68 Patricia Quigley (born 1906) met her husband at the Sunday<br />
school <strong>of</strong> her Church <strong>of</strong> Scotland in Stirling: there was, she recalled,<br />
‘a superintendent in the primary who prided herself in getting young<br />
couples together, you know . . . And I was the pianist, in the primary<br />
Sunday school, and she was a great one for making matches. And that<br />
was where I met my husband when we were seventeen.’ 69 Sunday was not<br />
only a day for dating but a day for consummating romance. In England,<br />
Sunday became the most popular day <strong>of</strong> the week for church weddings.<br />
Most English weddings took place in the Anglican Church (accounting<br />
for between 80 and 94 per cent <strong>of</strong> all marriages in sample parishes in<br />
Birmingham, Manchester and Blackburn), and Sunday was its leading day<br />
by the late Victorian period. In Bristol Sunday was the leading day for<br />
nuptials throughout 1790–1911 (with from 29 to 37 per cent <strong>of</strong> all marriages<br />
taking place on that day). But in other cities it jumped in popularity: in<br />
Birmingham Sunday weddings rose continuously from 18 per cent <strong>of</strong> all<br />
marriages in 1791 to 51 per cent in 1911; in Manchester the figures rose<br />
from 21 per cent in 1790 to 35 per cent in 1871, only to be stalled by an<br />
apparent change <strong>of</strong> local clerical policy which pushed them on to Wednesdays,<br />
whilst something similar appears to have happened in Blackburn in<br />
the 1880s, when couples seem to have been directed to substitute Thursdays<br />
or Saturdays for Sundays. 70<br />
132