The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —<br />
However, once married, the woman <strong>of</strong> the working classes usually<br />
changed her relationship with Sunday churchgoing. Sunday was a highly<br />
gendered day for parents. Characteristically, in households without<br />
domestic servants, mothers remained at home in the morning to look after<br />
young children and prepare Sunday lunch, whilst older children and the<br />
father went to church, chapel or Sunday school. A man from Essex recalled<br />
in the first two decades <strong>of</strong> the twentieth century how in the morning the<br />
children ‘went to the Sunday school, and then from Sunday school into<br />
chapel. Father went Sunday morning in the morning, Mother stopped at<br />
home to cook the meal.’ <strong>The</strong> children went back to Sunday school again<br />
in the afternoon, and after tea at home went back to chapel, this time with<br />
Mother. 71 Tom Willis’ mother said to him in around 1930:<br />
‘You don’t have to go to church, do you? I mean you can live a<br />
decent life without all the rigmarole, can’t you? Strikes me that half<br />
the people who go to church are humbugs anyway, Sunday<br />
<strong>Christian</strong>s.’ She smiled. ‘No, I don’t think He’ll hold it against me.<br />
When I get to the pearly gates He won’t hold it against me, I’m sure<br />
<strong>of</strong> that. And if He does, I’ll tell Him straight. I was too busy on<br />
Sundays getting dinner and tea for you bloody lot to have time to sit<br />
on my arse in church.’ 72<br />
Domestic ideology expected women to cook meals, and the most important<br />
meal <strong>of</strong> the week in virtually all households in nineteenth- and early<br />
twentieth-century <strong>Britain</strong> was that at Sunday lunchtime. Even for poor and<br />
working-class families it was the day for meat, the best that could be<br />
afforded. In Barrow in Lancashire one interviewee recalled: ‘We always had<br />
a big joint which used to do Monday as well <strong>of</strong> course, but we always had<br />
cold meat for supper on Sunday night, always. We had all the trimmings<br />
<strong>of</strong> course with Yorkshire pudding. Yorkshire pudding first and then you’d<br />
have your joint after and always a pudding after that if you wanted it, milk<br />
pudding after that.’ 73 Such meals took time to prepare, and for Protestants<br />
without domestic servants this meant in almost all cases the woman <strong>of</strong> the<br />
household missed Sunday morning worship, which in most churches was<br />
timed at a single service starting at 11 am and finishing at anytime between<br />
12.30 pm and 1.30 pm. This meant that women’s attendance at morning<br />
worship was dramatically reduced – an issue we explore in statistical detail<br />
in the next chapter. Even in Scotland, Sunday lunch was, by the start <strong>of</strong><br />
the twentieth century, an important ritual in most families. In the interwar<br />
period one woman recalled that ‘my mother wouldn’t have thought<br />
Sunday was Sunday without a joint <strong>of</strong> meat’, whilst the mother <strong>of</strong> another<br />
couldn’t afford proper ‘butcher’ meat but still laid out ‘a wee bit meat and<br />
maybe our soup and tatties’. 74 If the family was strictly sabbatarian, then<br />
the food would be cooked on Saturday night and reheated. 75 Arrangements<br />
in the Catholic Church were different. <strong>The</strong>re were multiple morning masses<br />
133